July 21, 2005, was way, way up there.

A trip deep into a secret world, nesting grounds, alternately lush and desolate landscape dotted with dessicated corpses, yet somehow teeming with life too.

Scaled things, feathered things, things with flippers, things with no backbones, things with fins. Frigatebirds stealing food from blue-footed booby chicks. Herons fishing. Brown noddies stealing food from pelicans. Tropicbirds wheeling overhead.

North Seymour Island, and South Plaza. My last day on Las Islas Encantadas, the Galapagos Islands.

Everybody finding a mate, building a nest, or feeding their young. Skyline of Daphne major and Daphne minor. Exquisite. At least 15 of my all-time best and favorite photographs are from that day.

Life, death, rebirth. Millions of years worth of it. Everything they tell you about nature, all the stuff Darwin wrote about. So much more than you could ever hope to understand, but you can see it. All of it, in just one day. Just a day there changes you forever – we got to spend an entire week.

No matter what else I accomplish, or experience, that day in July will remain one of the Best Days of My Life. It was the kind of day that blows the scale. The kind of day that helps molds you into the kind of person that you’d always hoped you would one day be lucky enough to be.

Welcome back, Noah!

If you haven’t heard about this movie already, you will shortly start hearing about it everywhere. The back story goes like this: In the 1980′s, three kids in Mississippi decided to film their own take on Raiders of the Lost Ark, scene by scene, on home video (betamax!). That’s not the unusual part.

The unusual part is that they actually did it. The entire film. Including the car fight / chase scene, the bar on fire scene, the boulder scene, and even the melting Nazis. They didn’t have desktop computers. It took them seven years to complete.

The sound is horrible. The picture quality is horrible. In a few scenes, the kids age years right before your eyes. But the movie – the movie is fantastic. The creativity and the resourcefulness of these kids was really inspiring.

See, we grow up and we get old and we get told NO a lot. Eventually we just stop trying, learn to lower our expectations, stop trying so hard to reach a dream. We believe in No. After all, it’s a lot of work, and failure sucks, and hey, that desk job drains my soul but it pays the bills… and this is how the world works, anyway, people don’t follow their dreams- that’s why they’re called dreams, stupid.

Chasing your dreams costs money. It will cause you to lose sleep. It might wreck your credit, break your heart. You might fail. People might laugh at you. And along the way, there’s temptation: give in, give up – there are a thousand easier choices to make. Chasing a dream is hard work. But when you’re 10 years old, you don’t really know about that part, so you dive right in with all the optimism and innocence in the world. The thing is, sometimes, you succeed.

Go download the trailer.

Lots of rumors, lots of rumors. I like the nanopods, and while video is awesome and everything, I’m really hoping Apple will be announcing their brand new ipod line will also be coming in pantone colors.

yup yup. that would be too good for words.

As if I’m ordering cable, now…

WordPress has already earned my devotion for allowing me to categorize posts, and to create Pages, historic documents that exist out of time, rather than the normal blog-style chronological ephemera. Notably missing is painfully easy photo support, but I guess I can’t have everything for free.