1) The year is 2/3′s over, so it’s nice to see my hotel stays and airline mileage are 2/3′s of what I need for the year to requalify. Bitchin’.
2) Hong Kong’s coming up in 50 something days and my birthday’s in 17. I’m more excited about HK since my birthdays generally suck. All I want is an email from a certain someone – and a $1700 camera lens.
3) Mom donated two nights at the Hong Kong Disneyland resort for me as a birthday present. At least this is only 6 weeks post birthday, as opposed to the 6+ month late dinosaur, which I have yet to hack to make evil. However, this makes 3 different hotels in 8 days, and I like to stay put once I get somewhere. No big deal, though. Free is awesome.
4) I think I’m going to go back to Egypt in late January with Robert Hicks’ bday bonanza. I’m trying to drag the Literary Queen along, but she’ll be like “No Nick, you can’t get me drunk on the flights over” and then end up doing just that.
5) I’ve got to get cracking on my Arabic (it sucks) and Russian (I know about 10 words). I’ve been spending the last few weeks with the Russian version of Rosetta Stone, and it hurts. I’m more confused than I was to start with.
6) I’m going to see the movie Transsiberian, mainly because the only way to get excited about adventures is to watch mystery movies about it. Plus it has the ever-so-lovely Emily Mortimer in it.
7) I get to do Flat Stanley again this year – and I’ll try to take movies in hi-def to share with the kiddos. That’s me, king of the kids.
August, 2008
29
Aug 08
The Hawkins 7: Travel Lightly
24
Aug 08
Photowalk in Lincoln Park
Yesterday I participated in Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photowalk by hanging out with 50 fellow shooters in Lincoln Park. Despite the humidity, we kept shooting. I went nuts and brought both bodies (the Canon 40D and 30D), lensed up (24-105L and 100-400L) and went crazy. I did wish I had a 70-200 f2.8 IS L lens instead of the 100-400L, but I need another job to afford my gear.
18
Aug 08
Best spam of the day
Aliens Are Gay Says Astronaut
Former Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell – a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission – claims aliens are gay and that they are responsible for many of the earth’s ills including global warming, war, disease and The View.
14
Aug 08
Adventures with HD
I spent pretty much all Wednesday night ripping Blu-ray and HD movies for playback while I’m on the road. It’s time consuming and a major pain in the ass. The time consuming portion of it is not ripping the movie off of the disc, but to re-encode it in a smaller format. I ripped 300 at 1080p and was able to convert it to a standalone file, on the order of 16gb. After 8 hours of conversion to Quicktime H.264 at 720p, it weighed in at 4.5gb or so. Casino Royale’s rip came to 26gb, with the 720p Quicktime h.264 file at 7gb. Naturally, I’m going to need more hard drive space to add to the pile.
On another note, I got an angry comment saying that I pushed a girl over playing soccer last night and am an asshole for that. Unless I did that from my comfy chair at home while holding a Heineken, it wasn’t me. We all know that soccer leads to injury for me, and that my job is to sit and drink beer and heckle. Sorry anonymous person, you got the wrong guy.
12
Aug 08
Is it worth staying somewhere just for the name?
Not that I’m trying to be a cheapass when it comes to being in Moscow, but I can’t swallow $500+ a night for the Sheraton. I admit, I’m a cheapass. So when looking at hostels (yes, I know, this is painful for me), I found one called the Godzilla Hostel that doesn’t look *that* bad. But I just want to stay there for the name. Is that so bad?
10
Aug 08
Twittering
I’ve decided I will be twittering on future trips. Make sure you follow me for the minute by minute updates. Prepare for even more boring!
7
Aug 08
Russian Railways Virtual Tour
This is pretty cool – a flash virtual tour of the Trans-Siberian Railway. March can’t come soon enough. The sad thing is that I will be in a half a dozen countries before this (it’s getting bad.)
6
Aug 08
The Re-org
I’ve decided that the time has come where I need to separate my this psuedo personal/travel blog into just a travel blog, and keep the personal one elsewhere. While it’s rather cathartic to talk about things that are bothering me or share fun anecdotes, I need to be more careful about what I say and discuss. Most likely it’ll be a whitelist blog, so you’ll have to ask if you want to read the thoughts of my elephant brain.
So in the next week or so, I’m going to clean up and move old posts to my personal blog and keep Where Is Hawkins? all about travel.
Edit: It’s at Who is Hawkins? (I’m fairly clever!)
2
Aug 08
Dating while Conservative
Generally I live a life of quiet boredom intermixed with seemingly funny stories and travels – and it was just one of those weekends.
Friday I had a date in an effort not to feel like a social shutin. However, it led to unintentional hilarity after politics came up, and me describing Obama as “an empty suit in the tradition of Chicago politicians.” Well, the look of aghast might have been less if I vividly describe a story involving a sex act, midgets, farm animals, Tijuana and white slavery. It went from a nice date until that came along, and she was firmly convinced that the EVIL REPUBLICANS would overturn Roe v Wade after McCain got elected for starters.
(side track for a moment: The logic in this is sort of flawed. This was the same excuse I heard in ’00 with Bush vs Gore and how if Bush was elected, he’d drown puppies and run over children in a SUV after stacking the Supreme Court with justices that would overturn Roe v Wade. While I can’t speak for the children or puppies in this case, SCOTUS hasn’t moved on Roe v Wade and wouldn’t. For the record, I’m pro-choice, which is sometimes confused by morons as “pro Abortion.”)
After a small squabble where I realized I actually knew more about Obama’s platform and what botehered me about it than she did, I got stuck with the check and headed back downtown and got sidetracked by the Literary Queen and ended up getting drinks with her and her two friends, which turned into a more amusing evening. Evidentally my hearing is going too – we left the Shanghai Terrace at the Peninsula to go find another bar and came across a horsedrawn carriage filled with drunk early twentysomething girls wearing skimpy outfits and their douchebag boyfriends (high class guys, I tell you.) So, the LQ’s cool friend screamed “I want to go see the horse!” and ran towards the carriage and I go “JFC Renee! THEY CAN HEAR YOU!!!” (confusing horse and whores, oops.) I think we also decided that the TV show “The Bachelorette” would be made infinitely more fun if they had a cougar. Must-see TV, that is.
Nothing like good friends after a lame week and a more lame date.
I did go to Hot Doug’s for lunch today, so I’m sufficiently satiated for some time with encased meats. It was about a 45 minute wait again, but it was well worth it. There’s something to be said about anticipation of a quality meal in a place that’s awesome.