...Lets go surfing now, everybody's learning how...

Yup still learning...


This surfing thing is a little harder than I thought it would be. This waiting for waves thing kinda sucks, at least with snowboarding you just go when you are ready; with surfing thing you have to wait for the earth to be ready for you.

Fred, Ashley and I joined the "dawn patrol" at Pohoiki this weekend, we left Hilo on Saturday night and camped for the night just off the surf. Being our veteran, Fred got us up at 5:30am, we cleaned up the camp site and headed to the water. Pohoiki is considered to be a more difficult spot that others in the Hilo area, Ashley and I were perhaps a little outside our experience, but all good.

Ashley started in 1st Bay, a little less difficult area. Fred and I started in 2nd Bay with the rest of the Dawn Patrol. After being swamped a couple of times a headed over to 1st Bay to join Ashley, and caught a couple of waves there.

they day flattened out, so we decided to leave and headed back to the hippie beach for a couple of hours.

Me, the ocean, and Pohoiki...

How many engineers does it take to change a tire?

Two weeks ago we had to take two consulting engineers to the JCMT so they make take measurements for a structural modification to the JCMT's A-Frame. In preparation for the arrival of SCUBA2 many modifications for the JCMT will be made.

SCUBA2 is the second generation of the recently decommissioned SCUBA (sub millimeter common user bolometer array) apparently one of the most revolutionary earth based ratio telescope instruments, used for looking at gas clouds and forming galaxies.

SCUBA2 is promised to do everything that SCUBA did, but 1000x faster, and with 10x more resolution; said to be comparable in scientific advancement as Hubble. It also weighs four tons, and the JCMT isn't really strong enough to support it.


And we got a flat tire...








PS... The answer is 4.

The $40 Notebook, sort of...

I do like my toys, Back at the beginning of the year my roommate Lorne was complaining that his notebook would not boot reliably and was crashing. I has a look at it and determined that the hard disk has failed. I told him I would be happy to help him repair it. Well some weeks back I asked him if he ever got his notebook fixed; and it turns out rather than repair the notebook, he had bought a new one.

I immediately asked him if he would be interested in selling it, he was, and I did.
I bought his notebook carcass for $40. I bought a hot little Toshiba replacement hard disk for it and a wireless network card; In the end I got a slick little notebook for about 170$

Again, specs. For those that care:

Toshiba Satellite 1800

Celeron III-1100 MHz
512 Mb RAM
16 Mb Video
- new - 60GB 16Mb 5400RPM HDD
14in LCD
integrated sound, lan, DVD/CD-rom etc.





** update on the lappy **

Apparently Toshiba is the worst company is existence...
They built the satellite notebooks as budget models, how did they make them cheaper?
well they used desktop processors. Sounds okay, right? Not really. The heat production in a desktop processor is about 50% more than that of a "mobile" processor.

How did Toshiba decide to fix it? Well they wrote a BIOS patch to throttle the CPU, to an acceptable level of heat production. (this version of the BIOS had already been installed by the time of my purchase, oh and they deleted all the old BIOS version from the web site)

Anyway, so I do have a pretty nice lappy, except that my 1100mhz Celeron runs at 734mhz. Not quite fast enough to decode a DVD :(

There is currently a class-action suit against Toshiba for this misleading advertising of system performance.

4th of July, the happy story...

After our hotel experience, trying to figure out what we had done to deserve that, we decided the rest of the weekend could only get better.

Our friend Gabe was visiting his sister on that side of the island, we collected Gabe and headed to the Mauna Kea resort beach. (if you are interested you can search for the web site, I don't really feel like putting the link here) The Mauna Kea resort is a "post-card" Hawaii tourist trap, big long nice beach, nice water, bar on the beach stuff like that. Hawaiian state law prohibits privately owned beaches, so the Mauna Kea resort cannot actually restrict non-guest access to the beach, but they can however control it though parking, Hawaiian law does allow you to own your own parking lot.

Gabe's brother in-law is a tennis pro at one of the other resorts, so having a little bit of inside information we told the gate-girl that we were playing tennis with Jim, none of knowing who Jim actually was. And we got to park in the staff lot, hehe were soooo bad.

There was a new development being built along the beach, we decided to go have a look at one nearing completion that caught my eye. Some impressive steel work and lethal amount of teak. Very nice.

After the beach we had supper at Tres Hombres, pretty good Mexican joint and headed home. After eating at few Mexican places that were supposed to be authentic, here on Hawaii, Sr. Froggies back in good old Kamloops could give any of these places a run for there money!

Monday afternoon we were invited to a house party at a VERY nice house just outside of Hilo. The party was hosted by the houses care taker... Sounds like a good job to me.
There was a BBQ and Drink and Music and Fun and Fireworks.

Hardy, in the water...



a great big thumb on the beach... and Gabe is back the somewhere...



Ashely, in the water...



the beach is... that way...



a pool, on the beach...



the side of a very large, very nice house, on the beach...



the front patio of a very large, very nice house, on the beach...











a very heavey door constructed from 3/16in. steel plate triangles...




a back yard view I wouldn't mind...



interesting roof profile, on an otherwise square house...



yes, the this inlay example is the garage door?!?!



fireworks...

WTF?!?!

Hokay,

Well this is first unpleasant story from my Hawaii adventure... Last weekend we decided to pop over to Kona for the July 4th long weekend. We booked the same hotel that we had for the memorial day weekends, a little more money than the budget, budget places but quite nice.

We got away a little late, and checked in after hours at the hotel, no biggie, right... Not quite..

We were greeted by the security guards as all the management staff had gone home for the evening, that's fine, they got us our key and told us where the room was. We merrily walked down the path to find our room, dump the bags and get to the beach. When we arrived at the room, much to our dismay, a security hasp had been placed around the door knob!?!? Alright...

No panic, well just find the security guard and find out what is going on... Well it turns out that the security guards don't really do much there, they don't have keys or pretty much any ability to do anything. The security guard called the manager and explained the situation. The manager send this dizzy little girl (DLG) to let us in, problem solved... Not quite. DLG was suprised to find that there has been a hasp placed on the door knob and didn't quite know what do to do. DLG called her manager back to re-explain the situation, they decided that the best thing to do was to get us a different room, problem solved... Not quite...

the new room what obviously in a state of repair, removed base-boards, boxes of ceramic tiles in the floor etc. Now would be good time mention that she let us in with a skeleton key, and not our room key. Anxious to get to the beach, we parked our gear and were delivered our room key buy the security guard. We skipped off the to beach to salvage the evening. After some time hanging out at the beach we returned to the hotel to crash for the night, so we could get up early and get some beaching done. Straight forward right... Not quite...

When we returned to the hotel room we found, much to our shigrin, that they keys that we had been given for a new room didn't work in the door... WTF? Again we enlisted the help of our now good friend the security guard. Who again contacted the manager, whom at this time was not answering the phone, WTF?

The manager was not able to be contacted, good fried the security guard wasn't much help due to the above mentioned lack of keys and general usefulness; we actually ended up sleeping the night in the lobby, WTF?

In the morning we found a manager, not the one that manages the hotel part of the hotel mind you? She did not have the ability to do anything but was able to find a member of the cleaning staff that was able to let us back into our room.

After a brief snooze we has a chat with our good friend DLG and another person at the hotel desk. We got a new room (which, ironically was the exact room we had some weeks back) got the first night free, of course. We also attempted to get the second night gratis, straight forward... I think you know the answer by now...

We contacted the refund manager and are still awaiting the results of her investigation. She well get another phone call this weekend.

South of Hilo...

I haven't been super good about keeping up with these blog entries, and I have been hearing about it... So here goes...

A couple of weeks ago, we went for a small trip south of Hilo, to see what we could see. We found a nice little point somewhat appropriately named named, paradise Park. It was actually a impromptu stop while we searching for Red Road, a scenic drive on the south point of the big island.

We didn't actually end up finding the road, although research after the fact revealed that we were on the right track but missed a turn, or turned when we shouldn't have, or something like that. We didn't find a red road but we did find a beach, a beach filled with hippies, hippies without clothes (some of them), drumming on hippie drums (you know the ones that I,m talking about), and rocking out, and smoking (not cigarettes), we hung out and played in the water (with our clothes on)... Much fun.

enjoy...