Again, the hot Santa Anna winds are blowing West from the mountains. And again, these hot winds are causing a summer's worth of dry foliage to catch fire. And again the sun is occluded by the smoke.

- Omar Z.

*Muslims Establishing Community in America

The view was amazing! You have to see it. I took the photo from this spot

- Omar Z.

So I was driving from Thousand Oaks down to Long Beach for the weekend and I decided to take the scenic route. It was such a beautiful drive that I actually had to stop twice and get out of the car to take pictures of what I was seeing.

At the first spot, I took the following photos:

And at the second spot, I took the following photos:

- Omar Z.

*Muslims Establishing Community in America

Photos from the event:

And the after party:

- Omar Z.

I can finally capture the sunsets out here. I took the following shots:

And voilà!

- Omar Z.

Check this out! You take the same picture at several different exposure levels:

And then run them through Photoshop together to get a composite image with all the different portions of the photo at a good exposure level :D

- Omar Z.

Ever heard of the Ilyushin-76TD "Waterbomber"? Neither had I until I read this article.

It's an 11,000-gallon tanker plane; that's almost 4 times bigger than the American Forest Service's piddly 3,000 gallon tanker planes. Hmmm, Definitely could have been useful this past week. In fact, it still could be!

Obviously it's politics that's preventing this Russian built plane from showing up in the US to save lives and prevent property damage.

*Flash-Memory is used in many hand held audio/video devices, USB memory keys, next generation laptop hard drives, cell phones, etc...

I'm getting my tech dose over at Engadget when I come across an article about SanDisk suing 25 companies for patent infringement!?!?!

So it's ashing outside on the job site right now. Don't know what that is? Well I'll tell you what that is ... It's like snow, but with little bits of burnt stuff instead.

Below is a satellite image of the current state of the smoke plumes from some of the fires raging in Southern California right now. I've added a little black dot to indicate where I am.

DOH!

- Omar Z.

[snooty accent start] Yeeeeeaaas, I simply hopped on a plane and winged my way to delightful Toronto to attend a private gala event this weekend. MUCH better than that oh-so-common Toronto International Film Festival that's going on there. [snooty accent end]

Ok, ok, all joking aside, I had a BLAST this weekend! I guess it was a combination of being back in my home town with all my friends there. It was sad to leave. I took oodles of photos (that have been posted ;).