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Random Links for February 5

dustin — 2008-02-05T07:00:02-05:00

Photos of Dustin Sacks

Dustin Sacks bookmarks on del.icio.us

Dustin Sacks on the BarCamp Wiki

Dustin Sacks Profile on Flickr

Dustin Sacks on LinkedIn

Dustin Photos

dustin — 2007-04-08T20:59:11-04:00

My brother published his photos from our tripping. He has a bunch of nice ones, check them out. Seeing how it's my blog here, I'm going to point out the best ones with ME in them!

There's me jumping in the air, guarding an orchid, as a big hunk, in the rain, and looking all scientific on the side ->

West Coast pictures

dustin — 2007-04-06T18:00:40-04:00

I put up my west coast USA trip photos, 124 in total. My favorites are this tunnel, a shell, my brother, a clover field, an old truck, and this picture of flowers on the coast.

Vancouver and Okanagan pictures

dustin — 2007-03-30T20:46:24-04:00

I published 68 Vancouver and Okanagan photos. My favorites are the library roof, bedazzled, mountains,
snow trees, and this funky aeroplane.

West Coast USA Trip

dustin — 2007-03-29T02:20:58-04:00

Trip 2 with my brother was a longer road trip down the west coast from Vancouver to San Francisco. On the way we spent nights in Seattle, Eugene, Arcata, and the Jughandle Creek Farm/Hostel near Mendocino.

Google measures the drive at 1,651 kilometers. We actually headed over to the winding coastal highway 1 right after Eugene, so in reality it was longer then that. We were driving in a rented Toyota Corolla and measured our actual mileage at between 34 and 38 miles per gallon.

Our first 2 nights we found free lodging care of cool people on CouchSurfing.com. The name pretty much explains it, and the service worked out great for us. The next 2 nights we were in smaller towns and stayed in a motel and hostel/farmhouse. We stumbled onto some crazy adventures in both though. By the end the running joke was that we were taking a hippy-granola tour of the west coast ;-).

In the San Fran Bay area we crashed at a friend's house and later met up with Luxers Hoodie and STM for some food and drinks. I knew them from over the internet, and it was cool to meet in person. I've now met 7 Luxers in 3 different cities. It's a fun perk of running an internet-wide community. I expect photoshopped pictures of us to appear on the Lux Forums shortly...

Okanagan BC Trip

dustin — 2007-03-29T01:44:41-04:00

My brother came out west and we did some travelling together. Here's a map of trip number 1, from Vancouver into the BC Okanagan Valley. We stayed in Oliver with some relatives, went skiing at Apex, and then flew back to Van from Kelowna.

My cousin who grew up in the valley has a website about Okanagan Wine, which is one of the big things the region is known for. We got to do a little bit of tasting at dinner.

Miniature Art in the Vancouver Petri Dish

dustin — 2007-01-06T22:13:43-05:00

My cousin Melanie is having her very first art show. I went to the opening last night, and it was packed. Granted it's quite a small gallery. The Petri Dish bills itself as "small works by local artists". The gallery is aptly named: in science a petri dish serves as an incubator for young organisms (artists) to grow bigger.

I took a few photos, but didn't capture a lot of it unfortunately. Check it out in person if you're near Main and Broadway.

All The Small Things
miniatures by Melanie Coles
January 5th - February 14th
Showing at The Petri Dish
2406 Main Street @ 8th

Holiday photos

dustin — 2006-12-29T17:58:50-05:00

I posted a set of 115 pictures from my trip. Unfortunately, I left my camera on the boat when we went into Belize, so I have no pictures from there. Honduras comes out nicely though. Here are some that I like:

Chrtistmas Cruising

dustin — 2006-12-28T21:12:14-05:00

Here's a map showing where I went on Christmas holidays with my family:

We were on the Costa Magica cruise ship, with the route:

I had never been to Central America before, so it was a great experience going down there. Belize City fits my image of an old British Empire outpost, except it has been somewhat taken over by rastafarians. Roatan is an island that's part of Honduras, and it's beautiful. Lush greenery covering hills dominate the land. We visited the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences and were able to get up close to some dolphins in the water. All in all it was an excellent holiday.

In checking out the route, I have discovered that Yahoo Maps has much better city/road information then Google Maps about Central America. Props to Yahoo! for that.

The Travel Files

dustin — 2004-09-21T21:00:38-04:00

During the course of creating my mom's website I wrote a couple of scripts to take Microsoft Word documents, translate them into a text only format and then dump them into a database. I did this because my mom has tons of old stories sitting around doing nothing. I figured they might as well be put onto the wen. So I did so at The Travel Files.

It has yet to be indexed by google, so the search function doesn't work, but there are lots of cool travel articles there for you to peruse. You may notice that there are some ads on the story pages as well. It's using google's adsense program, which matches ads to the content of the page. So a story about Bermuda will get ads for Bermuda hotels and stuff popping up. Anyhow, I make a little bit of money every time somebody clicks on an ad...

Family Travel Writer

dustin — 2004-09-21T20:53:07-04:00

For many a moon have I been working on a website for my mom. Finally we have put together something that she is happy with. You can find it at Family Travel Ink. In case you do not know, my mom is a freelance travel journalist specializing in family travel with kids (including me!).

The Passing of Mary Pocock

dustin — 2004-09-19T05:16:55-04:00

On September 3rd, 2004 my aunt Mary passed on from this life. She was an incredible person, and the world is a lesser place in her absence. Her funeral was very touching. A celebration of her life, just as she wanted.

Before the actual ceremony there was a viewing room decorated with myriad Mary things. Her casket was a simple plain pine box, and art materials were provided for everyone to help decorate it. My cousin Emily took some nice photos.

Mary was an incredibly great person. The funeral made me very sad that she is gone, but it served as a good marking. I will forever remember all the great things that Mary was.

Mary's Epitaph

If I were to lift the poetry
from your heart
it would read like a Bach cantata,
where before it would have
syncopated and howled.

Where has the howling gone?

If I were to pick
flowers from your heart
they would echo
a meadow of silver, white yellow and green
with odd patches of red, blue and violet
in no fixed pattern (whatsoever)

If I were to sing
the song of our heart,
what would it say
about life everlasting?

Mary Pocock �

August 12, 1952 � September 3, 2004

Balmain

dustin — 2004-08-24T21:09:34-04:00

I just happened to check out my brother's website and saw that he put up some new pictures from his Australian sojourn. My favorite is this crazy ass sunrise!

dustin

dustin — 2004-06-24T21:32:06-04:00

I did a little update to the page of dustin. I still had "I work for Airborne Entertainment" on there.

Choice Hotels Award of Excellence in Travel Journalism

dustin — 2004-03-07T15:35:01-05:00

My mother Kate Pocock just got back from the 2004 Travel Media Association of Canada (TMAC) Conference.

She has become one of Canada's big guns travel writers, and came home with 2 awards, including Best International Story. And I quote:

"Congratulations on winning the 2004 Choice Award for Best International Story for your article �Girls Getaway: Chasing Winter Blues on a Fascinating Turquoise Sea� published in Cruise Lifestyles magazine. The goal of the awards is to encourage and recognize high standards of travel writing. Your article took our judges on a fun and interesting escapade and instilled the desire in many of us to follow in your footsteps!"

She also won the Starwood Hotels & Resorts Award for Best Article or Broadcast Emphasizing a Hotel or Resort

"And now, onto Best Travel Article. The winning entry is described as an intriguing shopping list of some of the best deals and adventures around the globe. The article, �12 Great Travel Deals� published in Moneysense magazine, was very well researched and the style was newsy while being informative. The photos that accompanied the article pulled the reader in. As the judges summed it up - the writers knew their stuff. By now you know the award is going to a team of writers. Congratulations Anita Draycott and Kate Pocock."

My brother is gone on exchange to Australia

dustin — 2004-03-04T00:50:34-05:00

My brother Will left to go to university in Sydney for a year. He stopped in Japan (mostly Tokyo) on the way. I like his pictures

my new project

dustin — 2003-09-30T05:31:44-04:00

While thinking about my mom's website I was struck with an epiphany. You see, she has been a writer for a good number of years now. She has built up a large collection of published stories. Right now these stories are sitting on her computer (in microsoft word documents) doing nobody any good.

So I have started work on an automated archival system to take her old stories and webify them. The real killer opportunity here lies in the possibility that once finished I could offer this archival system to other writers in the same situation. An easy way to put your entire body of work onto the net seems like a pretty good service to sell.

I have a prototype working. Hopefully a working system will go up soon for mom. It still has to be run by the boss and everything. The worst thing about this new project is that it's pulling time away from the windows version of Lux. In fact this whole thing is probably just a way of me procrastinating.

Solar cars

dustin — 2003-08-11T23:11:30-04:00

Solar cars, eh? My good ole brother happens to work with McGill Solar Car. (His official title is 'Sponsorship and Operations Manager' as I just found out). They just completed a solar car race across north america. They placed pretty well and won a bunch of awards and stuff. I meant to post this a while ago, while the race was happening, but I forgot. Recent mentioning of solar cars made me bring it up.

mother dearest

dustin — 2003-06-20T00:46:07-04:00

My mom has now gone online (although she tries to write online as on-line (and email as e-mail)). She's a travel writer who specializes on family and/or canada. You can find out more at katepocock.com or familytravelink.com (they both have the same content). It's still a first draft; there are sections that need work. But me posting the link should introduce some search engines to the site. The goal is to eventually climb the google rank for travel writing.