In an earlier post I called TV news a joke. I’m pretty sure that’s not a radical opinion. But if anybody needs an example, behold this coverage of “whistle tips”. It has everything. Loud cars. Crazy stereotypes. The best Supra driving I’ve ever seen.
When I was little, I was really into airplanes. I was also really into the extremes: the biggest, the deepest, the highest. I knew that the Boeing 747 was the biggest commercial airplane at the time (it had a second level!) and that the Pacific Ocean was the largest ocean in the world. When I asked my parents if we could ever go on a trip where we rode in a 747, they told me that those were only used on long trips to places like Hawaii. This was perfect, because I could ride the biggest plane in the world into the middle of the biggest ocean in the world.
About a year ago our friend Kevin moved to Hawaii where he watches Chinese soap operas for a living. He told us that we had to come out and visit him. With my decades-long desire to visit the islands, and Heidi’s desire to go some place tropical, it wasn’t a hard sell. Heidi and I looked at dates and hemmed and hawed, but finally we picked a time to go. We bought our tickets and everything was great. Until we found out that there was some sort of miscommunication between Heidi and Kevin, and that Kevin would not be around for the week that we would be in Hawaii. Lesson: always call your friends before you buy the tickets, even if you thought that they said they would be around all month.
We flew into Oahu, where we were met by our friend Becky. Becky has the good fortune of studying things that live in tropical places, so she’s staying on Gilligan’s Island, which is a privately owned island where the University of Hawaii Oceanography and Marine Biology and Research has people doing research. Actually, the day we met up with Becky and one of her coworkers was the first day they had off in weeks. It would probably suck to be so close to paradise, working 12-16 hours per day.
Our schedule is something like this:
Today is our second day in Kauai. Here’s a quick summary of the trip so far:
We flew out of San Francisco at 8:30 in the morning. (If you are leaving SFO at this time, i would recommend a cab in stead of the BART. I would also recommend that you double-check to make sure that you have all of your bags before you leave your apartment, because spending $120 on cabs in the town you live in before 8:00 AM is not pleasant.) Landed in Oahu a little after noon. I learned that they do not, in fact, give you leis when you get off the plane. That’s some serious Hollywood crap. They will, however, sell you a lei. Aparently that’s the real spirit of “Aloha”. Becky picked us up and took us to Waikiki Beach. We walked over to Duke’s for a drink. Time from landing to first drink: about two hours. We walked around Waikiki for a little while, and then Becky drove us around showing us some of the areas along the south shore. After stopping off at our hotel, we ended up grabbing some dinner with the Kaiser Telemetry team at Don Ho’s. OK, we didn’t actually eat with them, but we got to watch them have a rather depressing party in the room next to us. Hey Kaiser, thanks for harshing our paradise. After that, we went back to our hotel and crashed.
On Sunday we hiked Diamond Head. You basically follow a trail and walk up a bunch of steps that take you from the bottom to the rim of a volcanic crater. At the top of the rim is a naval observation post. Back before radar the idea was that they could triangulate distances of enemy ships by taking readings at Diamond Head and another fixed point and send that information to the gunners at a third point. The gunners would then use 1337 math skillz and gunpowder to turn a floating piece of metal into a sinking piece of metal. These days, the place is a magnet for tourists like us. Well, not entirely like us. The observation post is something like 800 feet above sea level. The bus (actually, The Bus) drops you off near the entrance, which is already a few hundred feet up. But you still have to walk quite a way, in the baking heat. And some folks just aren’t ready for that. Oh, they think they are. But they aren’t. So if you want to go to Diamond Head, ask yourself, “Am I willing to walk up to the top of a 50 storie buidling?” If the answer is “no”, the stay down at Waikiki, have a Mai Tai, and don’t block the steps. Actually, I was pretty impressed by the number of people who did make it to the top. And the view is stunning. I’ll try to get some pictures when I have a chance. Because, you know, I’m sure my pictures are so much better than any of the other billions of pictures that people have taken from the top of Diamond Head.
We walked back down, got some shave ice, and decided to walk back to town. The lesson for today: never try to break in your new sandals (or the sandals you haven’t worn in years) on a long walk. By the time we made it back to Waikiki, or feet were pretty sore. I had a blister on my heel, but it wasn’t a big deal. Heidi, on the other hand, had a few pretty painful-looking blisters on her toes. But we trudged on back to the hotel with a stop by the beach to check out the surf lesson situation, and a stop for some food. Then we went back to the beach for our surf lesson.
Becky and Andrew taught us to surf when we visited them in San Diego last year. I was actually able to catch a wave using one of Andrew’s boards. Surfing in Waikiki was a bit different. Karen, our instructor, gave us a very brief lesson on how to paddle and how to get up. They don’t teach you how to turn. I’m not sure if this is because they don’t actually expect you to get up, or they figure that once you’re up you’ll fall down again quickly. Or maybe it would just take too much of the one hour that you’ve purchased. In any event, turning would have been a nice skill to have acquired, because the water is FULL OF PEOPLE. So you paddle out. Karen (or whoever your instructor happens to be) screams at you to stand up (or something, it’s tough to hear over the other shouts and the sound of the water), so you stand up, and then you look forward and there’s some guy dead ahead looking all goofy like he wonders what’s for breakfast. Since you can’t turn, you can either
I always opted for jumping off. Karen told me I should just run them over. Karen, dear, you are far tougher than I am. Karen was a pretty good teacher. She was rough around the edges, but that’s good. I think she wanted her students to actually get up and ride a few waves and not just dilly dally in the water for an hour. Of course, getting your students to catch a few waves means being able to sell them pictures of themselves riding a few waves. I had noticed a guy manning a camera with a massive lens. It turns out he was taking pictures of people who were taking surf lessons. You could then buy a CD-ROM of these pictures for $60, or you could buy individual pictures for $20. They had a lot of pictures of me, but not many of Heidi, which seemed silly since she caught about as many waves as I did. There was nothing there that really made me think the pictures were worth $60, so we passed. I’m sure Karen would have gotten a cut, so I feel kind of bad, especially because we paid the group lesson rate but nobody else showed up so it was only us.
We go cleaned up and ate dinner at what was billed as “the best Thai restaurant in Honolulu”. I think the place was called Singha. I had a pineapple curry that was quite good. The place was filled with sculptures and paintings that had pricetags. I guess some people come for the art and stay for dinner. Or the other way around. Most of the paintings were pretty bland, and the sculptures looked like knock-offs of traditional european stuff. I can’t imagine being in Hawaii and deciding to pick up something like that to bring home, but to each his own. My short review would read, “Tasty food, tasteless art.”
We had talked about wandering around and checking out the night-life, but we ended up passing out in the room instead. I can’t quite seem to get on “Island Time”.
Oh, one other thing. We had breakfast at a place called Eggs and Things. They have a $4.99 Early Riser Special. Two eggs, three pancakes. They also have lots of different types of waffles. Purely from a cost-benefit (calories-per-dollar) standpoint, I would recommend the Early Riser Special. I paid almost twice as much for one small (but tasty) waffle and two eggs.
OK, I’ll write more later. The plan for today is hiking and snorkling.
The nuclear loby is being careful, but “there should be no Denkverbot [thought embargo]“, says Bernd Arts of the Atomforum in Berlin.
This was from the Economist.
Two things to notice here.
The Germans should be put in charge of language from this point on. The English-speakers have had defacto control for too long.
I finally got the blog integrated into the site. Special thanks goes out to Jonathan Wold for his tutorial on integrating Wordpress with your existing website. Next up, more content. Oh yeah, and cleaning up some of this code. And sleep.
For a while now, this question has been abstract. My old TV more or less works, as long as you don’t mind turning it off and on again every few minutes until it gets warmed up, and you don’t mind the green hue of the picture. Every once in a while I would wander over to Fry’s and look at the shinny newness on display. But events have transpired that have pushed this question into the realm of the concrete.
First, let me say that I don’t watch much TV. I don’t watch sports. I think TV news is a joke. I have exactly one television show that I follow. I like to watch movies, but I have so much trouble finding time to do it that I ended up canceling my Netfilx account about a year ago. So my TV’s shortcomings are relatively easy to overlook due to the fact that I interact with it so infrequently, and when I do interact with it I am rewarded with a picture that allows me to distinguish between major characters. In short, I could easily convince myself that I don’t need a new TV.
But now I’m getting sucked into the seductive promise of the PS3. On New Years day, my mother called me and asked me if I wanted “a Playstation.” I asked them if they meant an old Playstation (I have a PS1 gathering dust on a shelf). “No,” they said, “one of the new ones.” I don’t play video games, and I don’t have tons of free time, so I told them no. There was some muffled talking, and then my mom asked if they should take it back. The options:
I told them that they didn’t need to do that, that I would love to have a PS3. I tried to think of when I would find time to do anything with it. I have about three free hours per day during the week, tops.
I had them send the PS3 to my office. I figured maybe my officemates would enjoy playing with it on lunch breaks, or in the evening. And we have a 52-inch HDTV, so I thought it would be fun to see how games looked in HD. (Some people may find it ironic that we have a nice TV like that at work. I just think it’s funny.) A few of the guys have been working their way through Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, but I could never get into it. I figured the PS3 would stay at work, much to my girlfriend’s alarm. “What,” she asked, “you didn’t think I would want to try it out?”
Then I picked up Katamari Damacy. Oh lord. Too much fun. Far too much fun. Crazy addictive fun. Back in college I played Tony Hawk on the original Playstation. My friends and I got pretty hooked, so much so that I probably would have lost my girlfriend if not for the fact that she was one of the addicts. Sid and Nancy, eat your heart out. I thought I had put those days behind me. Like the AA member who has been clean for years and then tastes a G&T, it all came back. The glorious highs! The terrifying lows! The creamy middles! And on that enormous TV.
I brought the PS3 home for the long weekend so that my girlfriend could see it and play some Katamari. (If anyone tells you that you should not take your PS3 home on a bike, you should listen to them. Not because it cannot be done, but because it shouldn’t, and when you do successfully pull it off you will be forever haunted by the thought that you have made some sort of deal with the Devil and he will eventually get his due. I had the same feeling when I rode home with my new laptop on the back of the bike.) I hooked thing up to our TV and we played. It was good, but not the same. I now need the big screen. This is how it happens. You’re going along fine with the life you have, and then something new comes along and suddenly you have to have it. Blah. Screw that. But no. I need it. No, I can live without it. I don’t want to be that person. I am that person.
I’m torn here. On the one hand, I realize that I was perfectly happy with a life that was several hundred dollars richer and one big TV poorer. I know that the TV won’t make me happy or improve my life in any sort of long term way. In fact, it will probably make it worse, since I will play more video games at the expense of the other things I like to do.
I found the TV on CraigsList this morning. In the end I passed on it. I have lots of reasons. There are lots of things I could do with that kind of money. Rumor has it that the lamps on that particular model are prone to going out prematurely. I don’t need a new TV. But oh the though of a two foot wide Katamari.
OK, I’ve got a blog on this site now. That was pretty easy, I guess. Good job, WordPress. Now I guess I need to work on making the blog match the rest of the site. I should probably put more things on the site, too. But I think I’ve done enough for tonight.
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