Here are some of the photos I took during the trip that I’m most proud of. All of these photos were taken and edited entirely on an iPhone 4 with no fancy DSLR or Photoshop tricks.

We stayed at the Rio hotel, and the room was most excellent. Huge suite, nice bed, big dressing room, the works. Friday night we ate at the Village Seafood Buffet — all you can eat seafood was delish. Only mild gripe is that there was a lot more cold seafood than hot, but it is a buffet, they’ve gotta keep it fresh. I ate oysters, crab legs, lobster tail, shrimp, scallops and sashimi. Then we went to see “Ka”  - the Cirque du Soleil martial arts themed show. It was spectacular, as all Cirque shows are, the stage and lighting were marvelous feats of engineering and the time flew faster than anticipated.

Saturday was Chuck’s birthday, and we started celebrating by having brunch at the Carnival World Buffet in the Rio hotel. He was happy that he could get omelets and sushi at the same time. I ate everything BUT breakfast food. Oh – except for that piece of bacon. Bacon Rule: Never walk by bacon and not take a piece.

Then we headed over to the Stratosphere and rode all three rides at the very top of the observation deck. I’m a thrill ride connoisseur but I admit to feeling some apprehension about being dangled off the side of the hotel at 900 feet. Once on the rides though, I enjoyed it immensely and screamed my head off in delight.

What’s funny is how our perception has changed since becoming balloon pilots (in training). We stood peering over the edge of the observation deck at 900 feet, practically scoffing at the height because it isn’t even a “legal” minimum height for a balloon flight (which is 1000ft)! Neither of us were thrilled at heights in the past, but since ballooning, the fear of heights seems to have been extinguished.

Here’s a YouTube video I made — I’m just learning to edit videos, and this is one of my first attempts at iMovie. The transitions aren’t as smooth as I’d like, but that’s why you practice, right?

Our evening ended with Chuck’s birthday dinner at one of the best Thai restaurants in the US called Lotus of Siam. By far the best thai food I’ve ever eaten, and possibly the best food of any genre that I’ve ever eaten. We ate nam kao tod, squid larb, and drunken prawns. The scent of basil, lemon grass, and spices were enough to make me drool even before our dinner got to the table. WONDERFUL restaurant, just be sure to make reservations before visiting. We made reservations a week in advance and they were quite booked up the night we got there, but they had our table ready for us immediately.

After that, we went back to the hotel and went to the Voodoo Lounge on the roof of the Rio. The lights of the Las Vegas strip glittered and the music was a lot of fun. It was great just sharing a corner with my sweetheart and enjoying the beautiful view.

All in all, wonderful trip to Vegas, it was hard to come back to “real life” again.

Definitely made my year! Looking forward to the Vegas trip to celebrate Chuck’s birthday. We’re planning to indulge at the Carnival World Buffet, the Village Seafood Buffet, the Lotus of Siam Thai Restaurant, and take in the Cirque du Soleil show, Ka.

I’m not bringing a laptop at all, but I am bringing along the iPhone 4, Flip camera, and a borrowed-from-work iPad. Hoping to take some similar video clips between the iPhone 4 and the Flip camera (non-HD model) that we have and see which video reigns supreme. (“Which video reigns supreme” doesn’t sound as good as “which cuisine reigns supreme,” huh? Oops, pardon the Iron Chef reference.) Add to the weekend some crazy roller coaster action on top of the Stratosphere hotel and maybe a visit to the pawn shop that’s featured in Pawn Stars and we’re talking fun in Vegas!

I’m usually listening to an audiobook on my iPhone 4, which means I always have a camera at the ready for anything interesting that might pop up. One of my favorites is a cactus a few streets over that’s planted in a front yard. Here’s a pic Chuck took yesterday morning.

I see this particular cactus blossom only a few times a year, and the bloom only seems to last for maybe two to three days before it wilts and falls off. When it does blossom, it’s absolutely beautiful to behold. I was looking forward to seeing it on our evening walk last night, so I made sure to take a similar walking route so we’d pass the same cactus.  Apparently our walk was still a little bit early, because the night blooming flower was still closed up and hadn’t opened for the night. Here’s the pic that I took with my iPhone:

Being the Curious George that I am, I enjoyed pulling the pics up on the MacBook Pro and using my Google-Fu to figure out exactly what kind of cactus this is. I believe this might be called Cactus Echinopsis based on my Google-Fu result here. There are apparently over 100 varieties in the cactus echinopsis family, so I’m not sure *exactly* which one it is. But I suspect it is Echinopsis eyriesii. If someone else knows that I’m wrong, please let me know — I was a bit overwhelmed by this Wikipedia page that had every form of Echinopsis listed.

I’m going to walk by it again, maybe a little later this time tonight, and see if I can catch it with the bloom open again. Stop to enjoy the little things. Pay attention to life’s tiny details. Sometimes the most beautiful parts of life are the easiest to rush by and ignore.

Here’s a pic I snapped while walking our dog after dinner the other night. My husband has been teasing me about my cloud photos lately, as that seems to be the subject I’ve been snapping the most. I defended my kabillion cloud pics by saying, “Hey, it’s monsoon season! The rest of the year there’s hardly a cloud in the sky!”

But it’s a start. I need to take at least half the time I use consuming and turn it into creating. Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as I’m producing content. iPhone app, blog posts, photos, video editing, maybe even tracking a few songs in Garage Band. A little less Jabba-the-Hut-style gorging on RSS feeds and a little more creative time.

That new Mashable post can probably wait. Even the daily New York Times crossword. (Hmm… well maybe not that).

The cloud pics were taken around 6:30am last Saturday when we were at the dog park. The pho noodles were taken at home that night — Chuck made homemade pho that was delicious.  I do admit, on the noodles pic, I pulled it into Photoshop, but only to add the text layer. The border, levels, and contrast are all stock from Camera+. I’m loving this new app!

When creating drop-down navigation, here’s a pro tip. Don’t add a tooltip! First of all, this navigation unnecessarily uses images as text for each of the main elements, while the sub-elements are all proper text. There is no valid reason for using images in this navigation scheme — in the end, everything is text and can all be easily achieved with javascript, CSS, and plain text.

Click image to enlarge

They created a bad user experience by making those primary nav elements as images. Why? They put alt tags on the images. Alt tags are great, should be used for accessibility reasons, etc, but not in this case. In this case the alt tags entirely obliterate one of the subnav elements. Every single main nav element here is using an alt tag on their image.

Quick Fix Solution:

The fastest fix is to just remove the alt tags from the images in the navigation.

Best Fix Solution:

The best way to solve this UI issue is to rework the navigation to not use images at all. Any javascript whiz could bang this out for the site in ten minutes flat.

The old 4-ton unit had a long life, and lived to the ripe old age of 13 years. He has been replaced temporarily by the strange contraption you see in the photo above. Tomorrow he will be completely replaced by a brand new 5-ton, 16 “SEER” unit that should save us quite a bit on electricity bills. One more day of heat in the house and tomorrow I will finally get to enjoy a 78 degree house when I sleep.

RIP 4-Ton Unit 1997 – 2010.

Objective-C takes me back to my “olden days” of learning C and C++ in college. I had to smile the first time I saw a .h (header) file using XCode. Good times. Oh yeah, pointers are back, baby!

I’m starting up with Head First iPhone Development by O’Reilly Press. If you’ve never picked up a Head First book and you’re a techie, give it a shot. You have to have a sense of humor, but it’s a completely fun learning experience. Especially if you’re like me and get into puzzles and games. The books are full of excellent examples and you manage to learn solid skills while having fun reading. Definitely not your usual dry geek technology tome!

So this summer it’s coding, graphic design, and maybe reformatting my novel from NaNoWriMo 2009 and working on it in Scrivener. That and the occasional weekend 6am hike before the temperature is broiling. And of course, pool time. Swimming, that is!

It’s smokin’ fast, and I have it dual booting OS X and Windows 7 as well as able to access Windows 7 in Parallels from within OS X also. I’m excited to start working on some iPhone development with it, as well as having just an awesome code box for Ruby, Python, .NET, and anything else I feel like throwing at it!

I haven’t been keeping up on this blog as much as I should — every weekend has been about ballooning lately, so if you want to read about our balloon adventures, hop on over to http://sonoranstar.com. With the new Macbook Pro, hopefully I’ll get back to writing and blogging more, so that’s good. Plus with summer coming on, ballooning season goes quiet because of the heat — I should be writing a lot more.

This will allow us to continue gaining flight hours towards our private pilot certificate, but we’ll be learning on our balloon, so hopefully it’ll give us a bit more confidence when we go to take our FAA check ride. Way too many pictures to follow, I’m sure. And then of course, we have to make the balloon cards (they look like baseball cards, with your balloon’s pic on the front and its stats on the back). Then we need to make pins, a few shirts, maybe a couple of ballcaps. I can already hear my husband going, “Oh boy, here it comes.”