One of the stops during vacation last week was the island of St. Maarten. St. Maarten is a tiny island, roughly 36 square miles in area, that is split between France and the Dutch. The Dutch side is called St. Maarten while the French side is called St. Martin.

Legend states that the founders of the island, one Dutch and one French, decided to walk in opposite directions until they met again. At that point, the island would be split down an imaginary line and whoever walked the furthest got the most land. Well, something happened (rum, maybe?) and the French ended up with something like 21 of the 36 miles. Regardless of ownership, St. Maarten is a beautiful island and I got the opportunity to spend a few hours there with family.

As an aviation enthusiast, I love watching airplanes take off, land, turn, or whatever else it is they do. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of airplanes landing in St. Maarten, so when I found out that the cruise would be making a stop there, I was immediately salivating to go to this airport. Lucky for me, things worked out. The day was absolutely beautiful, the beach was postcard perfect, and the airplanes were coming in and going out. I couldn’t really have thought of a more entertaining way to get suntan, spend quality time with family, and spot airplanes all at the same time.

Although we didn’t see any huge 747’s come in, we did get to see a lot of private jets, some bigger commercial airliners (American Airlines, etc…), and smaller planes come in to the airport. One of us even managed to get blow INTO THE OCEAN by a bigger airplane’s jet blast! Fortunately she wasn’t hurt, but it was very funny to watch!!

Unfortunately, I did not have my camcorder at the time, but luckily my tiny little Casio Exilim EX-Z70 takes some nice videos. I took this video of a little Twin Otter aircraft coming in to land over our heads.

For those of you not yet using FireFox, here’s the link to the video.

Growing up I was a pretty geeky kid. I must have beat Super Mario Brothers about a hundred times before I got sick of that game. Later on came Command and Conquer. Now that was also a sweet game. I used to stay up all night at my friend Randy’s place playing networked C&C until 4am many times! Hey, there’s more than one way to stay out of trouble!

One of my favorite weapons in C&C was the venerable Tesla Coil. If there’s anyone who doesn’t know what a Tesla Coil is, raise your hands and we’ll all laugh and point at you. Just kidding. Seriously though, you don’t know what a Telsa Coil is?! In that game, a Tesla Coil was a weapon that sent out a bolt of lightning to kill the enemies as they approached your base. The awesome thing about the coil is the way the lightning came out and how powerful it was against opponents!

Many years later, it seems as though the Super Mario Brothers fans and the Command and Conquer fans can all hang out peacefully and be amazed at what these people have done. This is, by far, one of the coolest videos I’ve seen on YouTube this year.

Sit back and enjoy the show!

Direct link for those having problems viewing it.

290s.com has a funny snippet about young people in China getting tattoos in English that don’t make any sense.  You know what I’m talking about…I’ve met lots of people who have tats written in Chinese and only after meeting someone from China or someone who speaks Chinese do they realize that the tattoo means absolutely nothing.  True story, I work with this girl who wore a shirt to a party with some writing in Chinese and one of our co-workers, who is Chinese looked at her, then her shirt, then kind of tilted his head to the side as far as it would go and just laughed because the writing on the shirt was upside down!  And he said it made no sense.  We all had a good laugh about that one.

Hi everybody, I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving break!

After eating like a king and sleeping like a cat, I am now back home after a stop at the Foodie Wonderland known as Jungle Jim’s near Cincinnati Ohio. Jungle Jim’s is an amusement park for anyone interested in the consumption of food items. If you like food, you know you’ve come to the right place as soon as you get to the parking lot. There is an amusement park atmosphere at JJ’s and they even have a small section of the old monorail from Disney World.

We stopped at JJ’s with 3 of our friends and we all went a little crazy…which I guess is par for the course at JJ’s for anyone that does not live near it. The thing about Junge Jim’s is that you can find just about anything from just about anywhere in the world. They have foods divided by country or region, so you can go and shop to your heart’s delight and find the foods you love from different parts of the world. JJ’s isn’t only for adults as they have some fun things to keep the kids entertained while the grown ups are at play. Things like this Robot Lion Elvis that comes on once every 15 minutes and The Big Cheese are great to keep the kids mouth agape with awe.

One of my favorite sections, however, is the hot sauce section.

They have hundreds if not thousands of different brands and flavors all designed to knock your socks off. I used to be a much bigger fan of pure heat, but now that my taste buds have evolved I’m a much bigger fan of flavor. That’s why I like the Iguana sauces. They’re all natural and although hot, have a delicious flavor!

So, now I’m back home and ready to analyze my websites and optimize them for possible “end of the year” campaigns.  I’m going to focus on health related products, especially the week between Christmas and New Years, but will also work on a few ideas for the Christmas season.  I’m going to look at what I think will the hot gifts of the year and promote my sites that offer these products.  Once they’re done (which they almost are), I will advertise and attempt drive mad traffic to them so that I can have a cash-stuffed stocking this year!

Let’s get to work!

If I were to look at these and not know anything about Mike Tyson, I would guess that he is a sensitive macho man. I think that it’s pretty funny that he’d wear pink socks on his way to jail…don’t you? It’s not just the socks…check out the pink handcuffs too! Isn’t that just adorable?

Now I mean no disrespect to MT…that is, I don’t want him to come chase me down b/c I’m pretty sure that he could still break most of my bones with just three fingers, but I think these socks are pretty ridiculous. Good luck w/ that jail thing there, buddy, and make sure not to drop the soap.