State in Emergency

Amazing and hard to believe, but global warming has the strangest effects in the islands. The papers are full of stories about the storms that have been hitting Oahu in the past week, all mentioning how nobody has ever seen this kind of weather. More and more blame it on the ability of winter storms to reach farther down to the tropics, and consequently to the islands. Fortunately things are calming down, and we are enjoying a gorgeous Hamakua day around here. Continue reading

April Visit

{moszoomimglink:Brad}Latest update, end of March. A tough month, already over a month into the extension. Here is the latest list of things to do (green: HAPPENING; grey: DONE): Wall to the master bedroom and MBR closet All swinging doors (14, plus closets) Fixed doors to the kitchen Drywalls and mud Painting Electrical (rough-in) Electrical (finish) Plumbing (finish) Bathroom and kitchen tiles Honoka`a bedroom Garage Upstairs bathroom tile Brad says he’ll be done by the 16th. Continue reading

Rain, Rain, Rain

Back in Ninole, where life is good. I finally have Internet connectivity (thanks to a Verizon card), which helps a lot. Still no kitchen, though, or potable water, so I still drive to Hilo in the morning. Work on the house is slower even than feared. There are a few drywalls in, the staircase down is closer to final, and the inspector had only three things to complain about: The bannisters of the main lanai were spaced too far apart (but he’s essentially complaining that the building code is too lax in the matter) The master bathroom has no ventilation (which then turned into not enough ventilation) The windows of the master bedroom are too low and it’s too easy to fall out. Continue reading

Business Hosted Services

The Internet was awash with application service providers that would allow consumers and businesses to perform tasks, even in the very early days of the commercial web. After a few years and a burst of the Bubble, most of the companies that provided online services disappeared, leaving only a very few winners. This was true across horizontals, where only a few of the many related companies survived, and verticals, where only a few types of solutions did. Continue reading

Snow in the Bay Area

Who would have believed? The snow that fell on Saturday is still covering Mt. Ham in the South Bay! I am tempted to go and take my snowboard there, to experience a unique thrill. I would take a picture, but the mountain is too far from the house and all I see is a white dot in the landscape.

Switched to Joomla

A new era for content management on this site: I switched from Mambo to Joomla, the new open-managed fork of the old CMS of choice. (I like the *open-managed* moniker.) The transition was neither hard nor easy. I decided to try the copy instructions: copy the site to a new location, copy Joomla on top of it, then deal with all the problems. Mostly, I had to retrieve files I had changed (like sef. Continue reading

IM Virus and Yahoo! ID harvesting

I got to work in the morning and found an IM from a colleague with a link in it. It went to a geocities page that requested my Yahoo! account information, and in the morning daze, I entered my information. As it didn’t proceed anywhere, I realized someone was spoofing my information. A panicked run to my Yahoo! account information page, change password several times (to make sure it still worked), sigh a worried sigh of relief. Continue reading

Steaming, smoking, hot

JP’s class this morning. The usual hard workout, high speed, high intensity, lotsa sweat. I was put in the front row (JP wants me there), with the sun shining from the back and the windows open. I sweat, I run, I chase, I sweat. It’s time to stretch and slow down, and then the unexpected happens: steam starts rising from my body. The sun plays with it, and the whole class stares at me, the steaming, smoking hot man in red bib short…

Jumping!

Given that we have plenty snow-crazy people, we decided to have an offsite in SLT last weekend. Eight of us went, including three pretty good boarders, and we had a blast! The snow was not all it was said to be – no 11" on Saturday, for instance, but at most 5" – but who’s complaining? All of us improved our skills, the beginners, intermediate, and advanced snowmen and women, and we had fun with each other. Continue reading

Record time

The Hawaiian flight from Honolulu to San Francisco made it in record time: 4h 19m! This was due to a generous jet stream that gave us an excellent tail wind. How unfortunate that said tail wind and jet stream were causing a major storm in San Francisco that forced a shutdown of the airport… In the end, the whole flight took 5 hours, as usual, and I made it home in time to be deprived of sleep by the wind. Continue reading