(We tried submitting this to FAIL Blog, but unfortunately it failed to meet their high standards.)

You may notice a new “Gallery” tab at the top of the Seansense main page. I’ve installed Gallery on the Seansense website, which is an open-source web-based photo album. It integrates nicely with WordPress and will be used in the future for all of my photos. You can access the gallery using the aforementioned tab or by navigating to gallery.seansense.net.

I’ve finished migrating all of the albums referenced in posts on this site to the new gallery. I still have more older galleries to migrate over from the MobileMe (formerly .Mac) Web Gallery and other places.

In the interest of saving $99/year I decided not to renew my MobileMe account. The main thing I used it for was the gallery; I never used the e-mail, syncing, or web-based stuff. The 20GB online storage is nice as it’s well integrated with OS X, but my web host gives me 600GB disk space. I’d like to make my domains, web hosting, and ISP the only things I spend money on for internet, because with these things I can do just about anything I want to. All the extra paid internet services are just money down the drain.

I’m also looking at various other ways to save and consolidate. Mel is starting an unpaid internship this fall so we’re going to be on one income for a while. More on that later.

Melanie and I save up all year to take one annual “big vacation”, and this year we decided to go to the Big Island of Hawaii for a week. This was our third trip to Hawaii together (we’ve also been to Kauai and Maui). What can I say? The place is addictive! The fact that we had a free ticket thanks to frequent flier miles sealed the deal.

We stayed in an awesome condo at the Fairway Villas in the Waikoloa Resort area north of Kailua-Kona. This turned out to be an excellent location, as just 20 miles south in Kona the weather was not nearly as nice and suffered more from the vog. The area also had some awesome beaches, our favorite being Waialea Bay just up the road. The sand was nice, the water calm, and the snorkeling excellent. We liked it so much we’d get up early in the morning just to be among the first to arrive. One morning we had it all to ourselves for a while. Paradise!

We also went on a helicopter ride from Hilo over the volcano. We opted for the “doors off” flight, which was wonderful if not a little windy and cold. It made for some excellent photos and video and was quite exhilarating.

The big island certainly is big; it’s over 220 miles to drive all the way around. We did a lot of driving and saw a lot while we were there, but really we just scratched the surface. There was a ton of stuff we didn’t do, and we had such a nice time there that I wouldn’t hesitate to go back and do the rest.

Click the image above for the photo gallery.

A video is coming soon!

Last week I turned 30. I’d think of something clever to say about this milestone, but now that I’m so old such extravagances are out of the question. I get tired just stirring my Metamucil. Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging… You can look forward to such exciting posts as “All this progress — phooey!”, “By gum! 2nd BM this week!”, “An Open Letter To The Dog Who Shat On My Lawn”, and “Has Anyone Seen My Reading Glasses?”

Last week was also Melanie’s birthday, so to celebrate our mutual birthday week we headed out to Vegas. Figuring that it was a somewhat major birthday milestone, we decided to live it up and stay a night at the Bellagio and a night at Mandalay Bay. The Bellagio was awesome, great room, great service, nice atmosphere. The pools were great too. The Mandalay Bay had a great room but it was way too busy and crowded… We got to the pool at 9:30 AM and couldn’t find a single chair. Blah. But we got to see Penn & Teller, eat good food, and gawk at the ridiculousness that is Vegas. Good times.

Click on the image above to see the gallery.