News

I'm at the airport again. I'm on my way to Kona for the weekend. Mom has the timeshare and Aunt Judy is with her so I'm flying over to visit.


Work has been going well. We finally got the design signed off, which is good since we're only a week and a half from finishing the development work. It looks like we'll finish on schedule.


Outside of work things have mostly been quiet. Last weekend Mom, Paupau, and Mary flew in. I took Friday off and we went up to the Pali Lookout and Kaneohe. It's an area Mom hadn't explored, so we had a good time. We spent the rest of the weekend at the Hilton there in Waikiki.


I tried a standup paddleboard on Sunday. I fell into the lagoon a couple of times and never did get properly standing. Still I had fun and will try it again sometime. Perhaps when I'm able to get a lesson or at least some pointers. That hour also reminded me how much I enjoyed kayaking last time I had the chance.


I'm still getting out about every other weekend. On the downside I'm way behind my goal for the month, so I'm not going to make it to 10k words.

News

It has been about three weeks since I wrote my last news post.  Life has mostly been fairly quiet for me.

At work the application we deployed is working well and the performance is acceptable to the users, though I would like it to be faster.  They like the app well enough that the next project adds a feature to it.  We've got six weeks to do all of the development and unit test the new feature.  Then it will go into system test for two weeks.

Camp NaNo is running this month.  I saw a set of prompts shortly before the first and decided I'd like to write a bunch of short pieces using them.  I'll call it a success if I can write 10k words, but I'd like to finish all 100 prompts.  Doing that will take a little more than 25k words.  The writer's group I connected with in November isn't running write in's this month, which I know will make it a more challenging month than last November.  I'm a couple hundred words behind for the 10k at the moment and I'll try to catch up tonight and tomorrow.

I've been getting out every other weekend.  The writer's group usually gets together at a cafe on second Saturdays.  This Saturday was a miss, but I went and did some writing.  When I left the cafe I passed a used book and games store.  The book section wasn't well organized, but I found several good books at a really good value.  After lunch I heard the sound of bagpipes coming from the park.

It turns out the 35th Annual Hawaiian Scottish Festival and Highland Games is today and tomorrow.  I saw a hammer throw and a caber toss.  The caber toss is the event where they toss a log end over end.  It turns out the log only needs to go end over end once and then the toss is scored based on how straight the log is after it lands compared to the direction it was tossed.

News - delayed post from ~3/14

I'm about to go do laundry and put together a news post.  Then I discovered that I hadn't posted this news when I put it together about three weeks ago.  I'm off to watch the laundry and I intend to publish whatever I write while waiting later this evening.

Robert.

Since I last wrote I’ve mostly been doing well.  There was a weekend when I caught a nasty cold.  I came down with it on a Friday.  The same Friday the project we were working on was scheduled to go live.  Between my going home sick at lunch and some unexpected security questions that afternoon it was a rough rollout.  Since then the app is getting positive reviews from the users and we haven’t had any bug reports.  We have seen a question about an enhancement and one action is just slow enough that we might be asked to look into optimizing it.  This would be a little tricky since we already know that a major contributor are 3^rd party webservices.

The weather here in Honolulu is as pleasant as ever.  We have had two cold fronts come through.  The firsts was a month or two ago.  It pushed the temperature down into the mid 60s for most of a week.  Then last week the second pushed the temperature down into the low 70s.  It is slowly returning to the normal low to mid 80s.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on Facebook that the Eddie was on.  This is a surf contest that is only held when the waves in Waimea Bay come in clean and consistently 40ft tall or more.  I heard that the tallest wave was something like 55ft tall.  For those that have seen Ecolab’s Naperville building, imagine a wave about as tall as the building with lifeguards on jet skis coming in ahead of it telling everyone to move away from the beach and the stream.  It is a competition that hasn’t been held since 2009, so a bunch of people took the day off from work to go up to the North Shore to see it.  It is probably just as well.  The city had lane closures on the North Shore on account of the surf coming over the highway.

That reminds me, one thing I hadn’t noticed before moving to Hawaii is that Honolulu has a consolidated city/county government like Indianapolis.  The entire island of Oahu is Honolulu but, like Indy, the neighborhoods all have their own names.  I live in Makiki.  The office is in Ala Moana.  Manoa is just over the ridge from where I live.  Downtown and Chinatown are both west of me.  Ala Moana and at least the part of Makiki I live in are both part of the old Korea moku, think Korea town.  Each of the neighborhoods has its own personality.  The neighborhoods don’t necessarily have their own unique climates, but it varies considerably in a short distance.

In the year I’ve lived here it seems that Makiki doesn’t get much in the way of rain.  There have been a handful of times I’ve wanted an umbrella and only once have I wanted a car on account of the weather.  Manoa is only a mile or two from where I live and I’ve noticed that Manoa gets rain much more regularly.  When Makiki gets rain Ala Moana generally seems to get at least some of the rain, though it is often lighter.  The other nice thing about the weather is that unless the wind is from the south it is basically always sunny even when it rains and the rain seldom lasts long.  The sun and rain mix means I’ve seen dozens of rainbows.  Twice, I even saw rainbows that looked like they came down to the ground near me.  Once the end of the rainbow was just up the street at a corner.  The other time it came down in the local park where people often walk their dogs.

For the New Year’s resolutions, writing daily isn’t happening and writing weekly has been a struggle.  The key challenge is taking the computer where I will want to write rather than leave it on the desk where I play video games.  Getting out on the weekends has gone better.  Last weekend I joined a writer’s group that meets monthly to socialize.