shahine.com/omar/

Wow, what a phenomenal trip all thanks to Harold Pietschmann, a very capable off-road instructor.

Here is a map of our three day journey:

View the entire gallery.

Death Valley Day 1

We started out in Trona California and made it to Beatty Nevada by the end of the day. This was the most driving we did the whole trip, and were glad that the G 500 has such a large gas tank. We started by driving through Panamint Valley, then through Goler Wash passing by Barker Ranch (Hideout of the infamous Manson family). We then went through Mengel Pass will followed by. Striped Bute. We then passed through Warm Springs Canyon which took us into Death Valley. The final 90 miles were on pavement, traveling pretty fast (no cops around), we arrived at the Exchange Club Motel in Beatty and had steak. It was a great first day, and we thought we had done a lot, but little did we know all the incredible terrain we'd see in the coming days.

Death Valley Day 2

We left Beatty, Nevada early in the morning and traveled through the stunning Titus Canyon. We saw Ubehebe Crater, which was magnificent. However, it was blowing about 40 mph and we almost got blown away. We then proceeded to drive along some bumpy washboard till we reached "The Racetrack" and saw the moving rocks. It was very interesting, and I snapped some good pics. After eating lunch at the racetrack we took the very bumpy Lippencott Mine Road down to Saline Valley, which was also stunning. We camped in Saline Valley, right in the sand dunes. When we arrived it was pretty windy which made for difficult tent setup and Jimmy and I ate quite a bit of sand. We spend a beautiful evening out in the Desert where I saw my first Moon Rise.

Death Valley Day 3

In the morning we traversed the salt flats of Saline Valley and the Indian Hot Springs where we saw some naked people. They weren't the best looking naked people in the world, and they seemed a bit surprised to see us! We then parked and hiked for an hour to the Indian Petroglyphs (ancient Indian rock paintings). After we hiked back down we ate some lunch and traveled up to Steele Pass, which was very rocky and slow. We saw marble bath, and then had the most incredible descent down passing Eureka Sand Dunes. Getting down posed the most technical part of the trip and made for quite a few amazing pictures. The ML cars had a bit of difficulty but the G made it down quite easily.

I got Simon Fell's Word to Radio Macros working with Mac Word X and Mac OS 10.1. I mainly did this because some one posted that they were sad that this was a Windows only solution. Well I made Simon's work by putting together some AppleScript and Visual Basic. I used XML-RPC instead of SOAP because I wasted 6 hours trying to figure out why the SOAP version didn't work. I then realized this was because one of the params for the API is "password" and guess what? Password is a reserved keyword in AppleScript and I saw no way to fix that. Oh well.

There are four steps to setting this up.

1. Install the Word Macro. Download the following file. Open it and select all and copy the text. Launch Mac Word X and select Tools->Macro->Visual Basic Editor. Select Normal in the Project Window and select Insert->Module in the file menu. Paste the text that you just copied to the clipboard. Now select the name field in the Properties Window and name it "WordRadio". It is very important that you do this or the AppleScript will fail. Now you are done with Word. Click the "W" button in the top left toolbar and your back in Word.
2. Get the Script Menu for Mac OS 10.1. This menu will allow you to run AppleScripts from the Finder. After you install it select Open Scripts Folder in the Script Menu.
3. Download the Word To Radio AppleScript and place it in the folder that you opened at the end of Step 2. Make sure to open the AppleScript and add the necessary info if you have a username and password for your Radio Server. Also if you want to post to a remote radio server you can enter that info as well (note: proxy servers are not supported because Apple's software doesn't support them).
4. Configure Radio to allow posting via the Blogger API. You do this by going to prefs page and make sure that XML-RPC & SOAP are enabled, and that the Blogger API is enabled.

That's it for now. Go type some stuff in a Word doc, select "Word To Radio" in the new Script Menu and your post should make it's way to your Blog (note if your menu bar is running out of space, the script menu may not display. If that is the case, switch to the finder first).

There are some things that can be better such as:

• better install process
• ability to update a post
• better error checking
• support for paragraphs

but that should be good for now as I've run out of free time for now. Enjoy!

Jeffrey Zeldman released his new book, Taking Your Talent to the Web: Making the Transition from Graphic Design to Web Design. If you are interested in Web Design at all, I would highly recommend this book. And while you are at it, head over to his web site.

I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, mostly in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC.

I am currently a Senior Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Hotmail team. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics