Word went out on Friday that storm conditions in the Pacific Ocean were going to create monstrous waves this weekend down at Pillar Point (a half hour south of San Francisco). And so, the annual Maverick’s Surf contest was organized on 24 hours notice. The winner of the contest took on waves that were 40 feet high at the end of the day. Insane!

Not to be outdone by Maverick’s, a few friends and I got together and we headed northward to Bolinas Beach to catch some waves (granted, these waves were 1/10 the size of Maverick’s). It was a perfect January day in the Bay Area. Photos were taken of course.

Read on to see more…

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Being employed in the environmental remediation industry tends to make one more interested in news items and current events about that industry. This article in the Tri-City Herald is about a remediation project that is about to begin near Hanford, Washington (which doesn’t exist anymore according to Wikipedia) that will clean up a burial ground for nuclear waste.

From the article:

Hanford workers are preparing to start next week digging up radioactive and chemical waste that could spontaneously catch fire when exposed to air.

[…]

Workers will be bringing up the barrels one at a time from behind blast shields and wearing full radiation protection gear and supplied air respirators. They’ll also expose no more than four drums at a time during the excavation to limit any potential fire.

Reading that definitely makes me appreciate my job more. The worst we usually have to deal with is particulate matter containing arsenic or lead. Radiation? No thanks!

Wired Magazine has a fantastic article on the history and development of the iPhone. I’m nothing short of amazed with mine and think it’s a fantastic piece of technology. I was hooked the moment I went to an Apple Store and picked it up.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

(Image is my previously hacked iPhone with original firmware v.1.0.2)

[Via Wired Magazine]

Doing some house cleaning, figured I’d post some photos from the Angie Mattson show at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco on December 13th.

Check out some of her music on MySpace or iTunes.

More pictures posted below…

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Last month, I wrote a small and fun little article breaking down the cost of a Sony Playstation 3. You can read the article here.

A small excerpt:

If you go to a movie theater to see the latest and greatest action movie, let’s say you pay ~$15 for a 90 minutes movie. So that breaks down to about $0.17 per minute for your enjoyment.

That’s a good baseline to use to begin comparing things.

At this point, I think I’m finally below $0.20/min. 😉

2007 was a pretty interesting year for the rockbandit.net domain. Despite not doing too much with the website this past year, I still managed to rack up quite a lot of readers. For a small blog, I’m pretty happy:

~60K unique visitors
~450K pages served
~1.1M hits
~33GB of bandwidth used

Crazy!

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Wow. It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly a year since I last posted! Thanks to graduating from college, getting a real job and figuring out how life works in the real world, I’ve sort of neglected my poor webpage. Perhaps 2008 will be a time to change that.

2007 was an absolutely amazing year though. How do I even begin to catch people up on what has gone on? Perhaps the best way at the moment is through Flickr.

Click on through, as I take you on a photographic journey of the last 12 months…

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