Rand Wacker

Pictures from our recent trip to Oahu are up. I took the waterproof camera (FILM?!?) and had to wait for Costco/Kodak to scan the negatives and burn the CD, but it was definitely worth it. We spent our week there hanging out with Alexis’s best friend from high school, which was great since she’s going to school over there and we got to party with grad students all week, as well as plenty of scuba diving, surfing, eating, and general site seeing.

So yes, Oahu is overdeveloped and overcrowded, but it’s still absolutely gorgeous, and we had a blast. If you’re in Oahu for more than the normal layover that everyone has, you should:

• Take surfing lessons. Plenty of drop-in places on the beach, but we had great luck with the one closest to the police station at the north end (they give you a free hour rental whenever you want after the lesson). The lesson on it’s own is fantastic cause you ride a really long (so really stable) board and they give you a helper push in front of the wave. Got right up on the first try, and I was hooked!
• Do a wreck dive. Oahu has some of the best wreck diving in the world. I went out with AAA Diving, and they really had their stuff together. Don’t overbook too many dives though, because the second dive of the day is a usually a reef dive, and they’re all dead. I’ve heard there’s an airplane wreck on the other side of the island which would be worth investigating.
• Take your snorkel gear with you when you go to different beaches. You never know what you’re gonna find on the side of the road.
• Eat, eat, eat. Favorites were Sensei (off the strip) for fantastic Japanese/Hawaiian food, Kua’Ina burgers (gotta find the one in Tokyo), and L&L BBQ for lunch plates (two scoop rice).
• Go to Pearl Harbor. Important for everyone to see and understand. They do a very good presentation at the Arizona memorial. We got a bonus in that we ran in to my good friend Pete from High School in line there.
• Eat/drink at Duke’s. I forget what hotel it’s in, but it’s an institution with great food and an amazing view.

Also on the same role were pictures from Rob and my hike up Mount Dickerman in Seattle last month:

A recent conversation reminded me of a clip before the movies I saw recently where a set painter was talking about the movies he’s worked on and then he tangented off on piracy affects the average Joe working on films. The clip ended with the URL respectcopyrights.org and the tagline “Movies, They’re Worth It”

This was S.W.A.T. and Tomb Raider II, they weren’t worth it.

Not that I condone or believe in piracy at all, but Hollywood’s high horse about it’s IP self-importance really gets to me. They even went so far as to recently blame the explosion of text messaging on the poor box office returns of this summer’s movies. Maybe it’s because the movies suck. Hollywood Reporter has a good article about re-thinking movie marketing.

Man, I don’t think I’ve seen one decent film in theaters this summer.

After writing my diatribe on mobile mail solutions I decided to mail Micro Innovations asking about support for the T. Here’s the response I got:

From: Hector Ruiz
To: ‘Rand’
Subject: RE: Palm Tungsten T Tumbboard?

As of right now we are not planning to make that model keyboard
compatible with your PDA. There might be some future plans to make our
Wireless Link Keyboard compatible but as of right now we do not have any
products compatible with your PDA.

Bummer. It would be an ideal solution. I guess this is why I still haven’t been able to bring myself to re-sell my barely used Zaurus on eBay.

aaron keeps coming up with some good links over the past few days. Check out the links in this post and watch the video of Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly at BookExpo.

I will say one thing though, unless Al Franken has some more supporting arguments for why Bill O’Reilly is a right-wing condescending prick (and I have no doubts that he is), I feel he does “the left” a disservice by harping over and over on one item. Yes, as “a journalist”, O’Reilly should know the difference between and Peabody and a Poke (isn’t that a fish dish in Hawaii?), but we have to come up with multiple examples not just one.

And I’m going to be extremeley pissed if Al’s new book ends up just hitting one or two minor points on lots of people, and if his facts are at all wrong. I still can’t stomach Michael Moore anymore for the extreme exagerations he printed in Stupid White Men without any supporting evidence (things which were easy to disprove with minimal Googling).

If “the left” continues to let political satirists be their primary pop culture spokespersons, then they better hold them to as high a standard as they want to hold the right too.

So back to O’Reilly, here’s another good one. Read through this article for the transcript at the end where O’Reilly berated a son of a 9/11 casualty. I would love to see actual tape of that.

aaron walled a link to this article on The Costs of Dissent. It appears that “un-named” White House staffers have been dealing out their own form of retribution on people who criticize the President:

A week after the July 6 publication of a New York Times commentary in which former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson 4th questioned the administration’s dubious intelligence on Iraq, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a piece naming Wilson’s wife and identifying her as a CIA operative. He said “two senior administration officials” volunteered the information, which cast aspersions on Wilson’s competence and expertise and may have put his wife’s contacts in jeopardy.

As aaron said, something like that smacks of TREASON

Excellent quote at the end:

In the spring of 1918, with American troops overseas fighting in World War I, former President Theodore Roosevelt penned a commentary for the Kansas City Star about President Woodrow Wilson’s attempts to stifle dissent.

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants,” Roosevelt wrote. “It is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts. . . . To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

My friend aaron (who works at Google) has been blushing over their new calculator feature for the past few days:

Boredcast Message from soda!aaron (ttyD7) at 12:16 …

i love that i can type “8076 in hex” into google and get an answer

yay us

This is a pretty frickin’ cool feature. Makes life so easy, for example, when trying to figure out a metric century really is.

Again, go Google!

myHTPC - Home - The best Home Theater PC frontend

iTunes-LAME Encoder 2.0.3 - VersionTracker:

As my vacation got closer and closer this week I came to the realization that it was probably a good idea for me to be able to check in on work email while on the road (timing for this trip was unfortunate because of some very high priority projects at work, but in reality most of the projects I seem to work on are very high priority).

Not wanting to take my full laptop (although compared to the amount of scuba gear I’ve got this thing is nothin’), I looked into the possibility of doing mail from my Palm Tungsten T. I know there are a couple of good email clients out there: PalmSoft’s own VersaMail and SnapperMail from a company down in New Zealand.

First order of business was a thumbboard. Grafiti is great for little notes, but untenable for longer messages. When I was wandering around Fry’s with shac I picked up the TKB160P Micro Datapad from Micro Innovations. It’s exactly the form-factor I want, and connects to the Palm Universal connector. Unfortunately, the driver doesn’t work with my T running PalmOS 5.0. I’m not sure I would want it to anyways, since it requires you to manually enable/disable the driver whenever you connect/disconnect the device. Come on, can’t we do better than that! (I’ve mailed Micro to see if they have anything to say, we’ll see what comes back). Possible backup is the Palm Ultra-Thin Keyboard, which is about the size of a Tungsten W or C when closed but folds out to full size. It’s a nice device, but it’s a hundred bucks and I think a full-size keyboard w/ a Palm on it looks as silly as the old typewriter I had with a full keyboard and a 20-character readout…

Second step [would have been] to get connectivity. I see a clear path for this one, get a phone with Bluetooth and a reasonable data plan (T-Mobile now offers unlimited GPRS data on top of your voice plan for $20/month). In lieu of getting the phone (I’ve still got a few months on my AT&T plan, which puts me right at the cut-off for number portability), I could have picked up the Palm Modem, which is actually bigger than the T itself, runs on it’s own set of batteries, and has all the drawbacks of a normal modem connection (it’s almost impossible to get a dial-up connection in airports these days, and hotels cost you at least a dollar per call).

Why am I bothering with all this? Well, first off, work won’t just get us Blackberry’s (and their software isn’t necessarily all that compatible with our systems or security model), that would be one simple choice. Why not get a Palm Tungsten W (I think that’s the AT&T version) or a Treo? I like to have different levels of portability, and the all-in-one devices are just too big. Being able to carry just a tiny phone is most portable, followed by phone+Palm for light-duty connectivity, and thumbboard for even more capabilities without adding a lot of size.

Besides, with Bluetooth built in to my laptop, I’ll be able to use a phone as the internet gateway for laptop or Palm, whichever I happen to have with me.

Double bonus is that my Palm acts as a really good MP3 player. Although I’m kinda wishing for a small digital camera on the phone as well. (Nokia 3650 perhaps?) The Treo 600 will, of course, change the game, and I look forward to it’s release with great anticipation.

On a side-note, using NetNewsWire’s offline editor, I’m convinced that moblogging or just a decent little thumbboard that I can dump random thoughts into a MT-posted email will be a killer app. I wonder if there is an RSS aggregator for the Palm yet?

Wireless has come to SeaTac airport, by way of the Intel/Centrino/Wayport co-marketing deal. Apparently Wayport also runs the networks in Oakland and San Jose Airports, as well as the new McDonald’s hotspots (ick). Now why can’t they combine w/ T-Mobile’s hotspot service?

And goody, we’re making a 6-hour over-Pacific flight on a DC-10. As shac said, “they still fly those!?!” Most cramped plane I can remember being on in a long time.