New Posters Available from Duke on Zazzle

I'm beginning to create some posters from the photos I've taken and put on this blog. Right now I have a Poster of the Statue at Hoover Dam and the Buddha at Kamakura available for sale at Zazzle. So if you really like any of these photos and would like a poster print of them. Now you can! You will even save 10% off if you use the link below. Check it out!

Here's the link: zazzle.com/dtruong*

Shameless Promotion: New Technology Blog

Hi, I wanted to take a moment to shamelessly promote my new blog I started that spotlights new consumer technologies and gadgets. I added the link to it under my links heading to the right of this page. Or you can just click here: http://newtechnews.blogspot.com/

For example, find out what this new cool gadget is:

Southwest Trip Part 3: Las Vegas

Distance: 26 miles
ETA: 26 minutes
Seeing a black-out in Las Vegas: Priceless.

From Hoover Dam (around Boulder City) we headed to Vegas... because when you're this close to Vegas, you gotta go. We ended up staying a couple days here and had a nice overall tour of the Vegas Strip. We were exhausted from walking miles and miles in the summer heat. I think it was still around 90 degrees at night. We had an unforgetable experience there the first night. A crazy lightning storm rolled in out of nowhere and while we were getting our room at the Stardust, the storm caused a blackout for a few seconds. It was so weird to see the Casino completely dark and everyone fell silent in the hotel. I looked outside the entrance door window and saw that the lights of the strip itself were dark too. Then all the power came back up after a few seconds. Minutes later, it happened again... but this time the Stardust remained dark. It seemed like this time that only the Stardust was affected. Since darkness and crime go hand in hand, we decided to jump into our rental car (a Mazda 3) to check out the lights of the strip. It was raining hard by now, so the lights looked really beautiful mirrored by the water on the wet road. When we arrived back at the Hotel, there were a few police cars in the parking lot and we saw a few guys get arrested. Like I said, darkness and crime go hand in hand. Sorry, I didn't take any photos of the rain and lights... I was driving. But I did take some typical tourist photos of Vegas. So here ya go:

Hoover Dam Statue

The Statues at Hoover Dam are as beautiful as I remember them from the last time I was here. I saw an opportunity here to take perhaps the most "patriotic" photo I've ever taken. I'm glad that the flag was actually fluttering in the wind. I dedicate this photo to all the brave souls that risked their lives building the great engineering feat that is the "Hoover Dam"!

Southwest Trip Part 2: Hoover Dam

Grand Canyon to Hoover Dam: 5 hours
Distance: 250 miles

We stopped at Hoover Dam on our way through to Las Vegas. And although it was nearly 6pm (as you can see if you look closely in the second image of the clock), the temperature was still over 100 Degrees. The hot wind blowing in our faces did not improve matters. Due to the heat, I think my Canon Elph S410 overheated and actually corrupted a lot of photos on my compact flash card. Therefore, there really aren't many photos of Hoover Dam to show. I'm really glad we weren't there during the mid-day, or we would've been toast.