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.

News Update

I know it has been a couple of months since I last posted.  I could try blaming it on being busy or say that it feels like nothing much noteworthy has been happening.  Neither would really be true.  The truth is when I get home and sit down at my computer I generally start reading or playing computer games rather than write a post.

Since my last post I've done a number of things.  On my trip to the big island I ended up going to Volcano twice.  Once at night and then again the next day.  We also went to the vanilla farm and a chocolate farm as I recall.

After that things picked up with a startup that I'd been talking to.  The concept was to provide a platform for individuals and companies to provide scholarships so that when a student put in an application they would be available to all the registered scholarships.  This helped resolve the problem many small scholarships have with getting applicants.  By the end of September it was clear that it wasn't going to fly.  It turns out students in Hawaii mostly go through their high school college and career councilors.  The councilors each have their own "common" application which they send out to whichever scholarships they think the students qualify for.  They viewed our common application as a threat and insisted on conditions that meant we wouldn't be able to pay salaries for two years and would need to put in 40+ hours a week of developer time.

As some of you know I traveled back to Chicago the first week of October for my brother's wedding.  I had a good time visiting with family.  I was also able to take an evening to visit with Pat and the Naperville folks.  We had a good time at the sushi restaurant.  I was surprised at how much I remembered of the Ecosure applications when I was able to answer a question Pat had about the McD playground app.

Work has been going well.  We finished the project I was on and rolled it out successfully.  We're most of the way through a second website and working on requirements for another project.  This project is fairly complicated since it needs to provide a consolidated interface for three independent systems.  It will also need to be able to take a single command from the user and update each of those systems appropriately.  This will manage the contracts associated with providers in the Medicare, Medicaid, and private business systems.  I had fun drawing out the basic architecture for the application already.  I presented it at a meeting with the architect for the project and he is willing for us to go down this path.

I went to a hackathon focused on the Uber API.  Initially none of the pitches caught my attention and the API is properly focused on hailing and managing an Uber ride so I didn't have any ideas of my own.  I ended up on a team that was trying to put together an app that would allow users to setup a series of "waypoints" so that a tourist could easily setup an itinerary ahead of time and call an Uber ride from one place to the next.

A couple of weeks ago I went to another Startup Weekend - Honolulu.  I pitched a piece of one of my crazy ideas.  I call the full project "Project Encyclopedia" and the idea is to create a system that can provide a good education to anyone, anywhere, on any topic without using grad students or professors to teach or grade the work.  This goes beyond what MOOCs provide now.  They can provide static quiz's and lectures.  So far, they can't respond to the students without using people. The piece I pitched was the basic application.  I didn't end up attracting enough votes to start a team, but I wasn't expecting to since the idea is much too big to get done in a weekend.

I ended up joining a team that was also working on an education project.  It was on the edge of being permissible since the leader of the team has been working on the idea for the last 15 or 16 years.  She has created a line of educational songs and music videos that teachers can use to teach kids from kindergarten through third or fourth grade.  The ideas we hit on to make it work were games and an independent distribution system.  On that basis we won third place.  The leader decided she didn't want to continue after the weekend.  The rest of the team did want to continue, at least to participate in Global Startup Battle.  We quickly learned that the reason she had chosen not to continue was because she had come to Startup Weekend looking for potential employees rather than looking for possible partners.  Apparently it hurt her feelings that the rest of the team preferred joining a startup as partners over becoming regular employees.  The drama from that worked itself out over the course of a week or two.

Also in November, I participated in NaNoWriMo.  For those that don't know what that is, it is a challenge to see whether you can write a set amount of words in November.  You can get the details at NaNoWriMo.org.  I signed up thinking it was like the Camp NaNoWriMo I'd checked out earlier in the year in that I could pick my target.  I learned that in November the target is set at 50k words for everyone.  After a little thinking I decided to participate anyway and just aim at an unofficial 10k word count.  I managed to hit my goal by attending almost all of the write-ins and struggling outside of those to get myself to write.  I did pass my goal on the 30th.  By the end of the month I learned one trick that worked.  Take the laptop away from the desk.  When I'm at the desk in my apartment I quickly get distracted either with the internet or with games.

December was busy at work.  We got a complicated project two weeks before Christmas.  The users want a way to pull data about providers from all five of the systems that hold providers.  This will allow them to more quickly research where applications of some sort need to go for processing.

Christmas was quiet and rainy so I stayed in for the long weekend.  I got some books from Dad, Leibniz, Locke, and Spinoza.  I've started on the Leibniz book already and I'm enjoying it.  One thing that hadn't registered with me before is that all three are contemporaries.  The introduction of the Leibniz book mentions that he cancelled the publication of a work responding to Locke when Locke died and the first work by in the book includes an aside responding to one of Spinoza's arguments.

On New Years Eve I stayed in and had pizza delivered.  I stayed up and played on the computer until midnight, which was just as well.  Some of my neighbors set off strings of firecrackers in the 45 minutes leading up to midnight.

With the new year I decided to set two goals for the year.  I want to go out on the weekend more than the once a month I was doing.  I also want to create a habit of doing at least a little writing each day.  It is too soon to say how the first is going to go, but it is clear that the second is going to be quite difficult.

News update

I know it has been a couple of weeks since I last posted. I made the mistake of starting a reread of the Spearfishlake Tales on my main computer. They're engaging enough that I find it hard to stop reading them. Since 38 of the novels have been published online, the 39th starts Monday, it takes a while to work through them.


Three weeks ago Wednesday I went to a networking event called Wetware Wednesday. There was a celebration for the dozen or so graduates of the Dev Bootcamp. There was also an announcement from Datawarehouse that they have formed a new parent company called ike. Datawarehouse will continue providing consulting services while ike will work more like an incubator. They also had the man that is running their first startup talk about his business which involves monitoring the elderly in nursing homes.


Three weekends ago on Saturday was Pascha (Easter) and I went to the 11 pm service at the Greek Orthodox church. Earlier that day I went for a hike with the idea of taking a nap before service. I found a group of trails, the Honolulu Mauka trails iirc, and walked one of them. Then I walked to a state park with an overlook on Mt Tantalus near there. The walk to the park was a bit more tiring than I expected for a 3 mile walk up the mountain.


The week after that I started my reread and it was a quiet week.


Then a week ago last Tuesday I went to the Hawaii Student Entrepreneurs Showcase. They had several presentations by the students.


In the presentation for Scholar Sponser the gentleman presenting mentioned that he was looking for a technical person. He did a great job with the presentation so I introduced myself. We had a nice getting to know you talk and agreed to talk earlier this week. That conversation was pretty high level though we did talk in a very general way about what sort of conditions he'd need to meet for me to join his team. It is quite clear that he's running a nonprofit startup and doesn't have any money to pay a developer. So, if I do work with him it will be nights and weekends work. We'll be meeting again next week to talk in more detail.


Mom flew into Honolulu a week ago Thursday. She joined me for dinner Thursday and Friday. On Saturday we went to the North Shore and hiked in Waimea Valley.


This last week was quiet though I'm joining Mom and Paupau on the Big Island this weekend.

News from last week 4/6/15

Here’s the news from Oahu for last week.  Only a day or so later than I meant to get it out.  I spent Saturday and Sunday sleeping off a cold that I caught.

Early in the week there was rain in the afternoons and evenings.  From my desk I can look out through an empty office to see the weather coming down the slope above my apartment.  One day I saw that the roads were terribly backed up while I walked home.  I learned the next day that the machine that was supposed to switch the direction of the express lanes had broken down.  This effectively closed two of lanes on the H1, which resulted in long delays for the folks driving home.

Other than that it was a quiet week with not much special going on.  This week looks to be busier with events in the evening Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

News from last week

Work continues to get more interesting.  We’re heading into crunch time with one of the applications I’m helping with.  Another, where I’ll be the developer supporting the other team, has had several meetings.  I've learned how the initial developer has the work put together, but I’m also learning about the political situation in the office.

The picnic I went to last Sunday was fun, though there isn't anything to report from that.  On Thursday I went to a different event.  It was a get together put on by a company in Chinatown that just opened a coworking location.  I figured I’m not going to need it anytime soon, but many of the folks meeting there were well worth the trip.  I talked to several developers about mobile development and a website consultant about his business a little.  I also spent some time talking to a young man that is a senior at UH Manoa.  He co-founded an entrepreneur club there.  We spent some time talking about the differences in office culture between Hawaii and the mainland.  We also talked about the differences between the way developers see the world and the way business people see the world.  Particularly in the context of an event his club is involved with.  Start-up Weekend is what I remember him calling it.

The weather has warmed up and we've had a little bit of rain in my area of Honolulu.  I went to the Ala Moana beach on Saturday.  I went into the water briefly, but only part way up my shins.  I did spend a couple of hours working on getting a more even tan.  The farmer’s tan I got hiking up Diamond Head was pretty pronounced.  While I was at the beach I saw a rainbow over the Ala Moana Center.  I've seen a couple of rains like that since I arrived.  Mostly they don’t last very long and it never gets all the way overcast.  Generally, the sun is shining while the rain falls.

This next week is going to be quieter.  I might go to an art event at the local art museum Friday, but maybe not.  Then on Saturday the cable internet will finally be setup so I can stop tethering to my phone for internet.

Looking it over I've got a whole lot of posts that are part way done that I should finish since this is going to be a quite week.  I’ll give a quick list with one liner comments.

Zaratez Mexicatessen – This is a lunch place with pretty good burritos.  I've been twice.

La Pizza Rina – Italian food.  Don’t bother with the pizza.  I've heard better things about their lasagna and sandwiches.

Pho Bistro – Tasty Pho and decent service on a somewhat run down corner.

Yogur Story - Pretty good food with an odd mix of sandwiches and breakfast food.

Sorabol – A Korean restaurant with tasty food.

Teddy’s Bigger Burgers – A pretty good burger joint more or less across from Don Quijote.

There’s also a Vietnamese place just mauka from the Ala Moana Center that was quite good, though the name escapes me.

A tiny shop with no dedicated seating selling Korean food along with fish and chips further mauka on Ke'eaumoku St. 

A little unnamed stall in the food court at Don Quijote selling really good gyros.

Don Quijote – it’s like a guy that owned a general store heard about Walmart and Sam’s Club and decided he could do that in a shop selling lots of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese goods in a one story building that fills the block.  It’s kind of remarkable really.

Airbnb – It worked well for me and Skye, the lady renting the room, was great.  Could be a better price than the local hotels, but probably less reliable on quality and less able to handle unexpected changes.

TheBus – Honolulu’s bus system.  It works pretty well and at $2.50 one way it’s also very reasonably priced, though it doesn't compete on ETA when compared to a car.  I should see if Uber or a car-share app is available in my area.

Hopefully, I’ll make the time to put together more detailed reviews and commentary on these, but no bets.  I've been getting out exploring the area, which feels weird compared to my tendency to stay in when I was in Chicago or Indianapolis.

News of last week

I’m mostly done settling in at my new apartment.  At work the settling in process continues.  I’ve been able to contribute some while I wait for the permissions I need to be granted.  We’ve been occasionally going out to lunch together.

The weather last week warmed up a little, but didn’t get into the 80s.  Next week looks like it will be a little bit warmer, though probably just into the mid-80s.  The office, on the other hand, was downright chilly.  Especially Friday when the blower by my desk was going full tilt.  It’s cool enough that I’m wearing the exact same clothes to the office that I wore in Naperville.

I’ve started going to events through meetup.com.  The first one was Thursday.  A get together at Dave & Buster’s for the happy hour.  I met a couple of interesting people there.  There is another with a different group this Sunday afternoon.

Today I walked up Diamond Head.  I’ve got enough pictures that I’m planning on doing two posts on that in the next few days.  Looking at myself in the mirror it’s clear I got quite a bit of sun

Hawaii – News 3/8/2015

I got an apartment and moved in last Sunday.  I’m at 1710 Makiki St for at least the next year.  It’s about a 20 minute walk to work each day.  I’ve got almost everything sorted out now.  The internet will be over a cable modem when that gets set up on the 28^th.  Until then I’m using the “internet sharing” feature on my phone 5 GB a month should cover my needs if I’m careful to do stuff on the phone that can be done on the phone.  It’s an older one bedroom that came fully furnished even including some cleaning supplies.  It doesn’t have a lanai, but the way it is oriented I can open the windows in front and back and get excellent cross breezes more or less all day.  It also comes with a small potted plant on the front porch that I’m to keep watered.  Fortunately, I’ve been told it doesn’t need much water.

I’ve found a grocery store in walking distance and there are two farmers markets nearby on different days.  One is outside my new office on Friday around lunch time.  The other is an all afternoon affair just down the street in the parking lot of the Episcopal Church at the corner.  Below is a picture of that farmers market and a picture of the sign for the church.

I’ve been attending church at Ss. Constantine & Helen Greek Orthodox.  It has been interesting so far.  The priest is of Asian descent and comes from California.  He’s assisted by a priest that is a Navy Chaplain associated with the Pacific Command.  I spoke to him after church today and he spent a little time talking about writing doctrine for the Navy and assisting our allies with developing shipboard chaplaincies.  Church is about 25 minute walk from my apartment and maybe a 15 or 20 minute walk from work.

Work is going well so far.  It’s a large insurance company so they’re picky about security and require reams of paperwork for change management, which makes sense.  The people are hardworking and their attitude on matters that don’t relate to security are surprisingly laid back.  I’m finding ways to contribute while all the permissions issues are sorted out.  They’re talking about a crunch time towards the end of the month and I expect I’ll be fully up to speed with my required permissions by then.

One brief comment on the weather; I had the windows closed today as it has been a touch chilly the last few days with lows in the low-60s and highs only in the mid-70s, Fahrenheit.  This next week looks better as the highs are projected to be 80 all week with lows in the upper-60s or low-70s.

I’ve got three other random pictures I took while wandering around Honolulu.  The first is a view down the canal towards the sea.  If you look closely you can see the masts of a marina holding a bunch of small boats.

This second is of Ala Moana beach.  It is right next to the Ala Moana shopping mall and not far from Waikiki, though it is much less crowded.

The third is a picture I took because I was asked for a pic with palm trees.  This one is on Ala Moana Blvd in Waikiki not far from the bridge to the Ala Moana neighborhood.

I'm working on a couple of other posts still.  One on what it was like renting a place in Hawaii, another as a review for the place I stayed through Airbnb, and a couple of restaurant reviews.  I'll try to keep posting regularly.

Moving to Hawaii series

I recently got a job in Hawaii and several people have asked that I put together some posts on the move and the activities there.


All of the series will be tagged Hawai'i whatever activities I talk about will be tagged with the island as well.