So the past two weeks have blown buy in a rush. Ever had one of those periods where you feel like you were so busy, but afterwards you don’t have much to show for the business? In some ways that’s how I feel. I didn’t even have much time for blogging!

Well, today my wife and I are heading up to Mendocino for the weekend. We need a weekend away together (for a change). Of course, that doesn’t mean I will leave the camera behind. A few years back we did our mini-honeymoon (the weekend after the wedding) in Mendocino. I took a bunch of wonderful photos during that trip…which were all lost in the great “Thanksgiving Crash of 2004”.

I had a hard drive failure around Thanksgiving of 2004. The hard drive that I stored all my photos on failed…and I learned afterwards, from the hard drive recovery place, that Western Digital drives are known to have head crashes and then ruin the platters becuase the arm will retract back in and scrape the platters in the process. The net net was that all my images were lost, couldn’t be recovered even after paying $2400 to have a company disassemble the hard drive and try to “scrape” the data off the platters. That is the last Western Digital hard drive I have ever bought (or will ever buy…customer loyalty is fickle).

Oh, yeah. And there were no backups! So backup often! Even if you have a RAID NAS system, backup off site somehow! This will save you from having to learn an experience like mine.

So, I hope to recapture some of that work this weekend. And since this round of the LPS competition is “Surf or Turf”, I hope to capture a submission as well. And, for the hat trick, I recently discovered the PhotoCast Network. A list of photography related pod casts from various authors. I have downloaded a number of them and hope to have time to sample them during the drive.

Next week I’ll have photos and reviews for you…