Almost Paradise

Two great tastes that taste great together? Uhh. I dunno about that.

Chili manapua?

The observant reader may notice that the text in this blog now looks rather more crowded than it did before. This is not an accident — but it is a kludge. (A detailed explanation follows after the jump. It’s geeky and tedious. You have been warned.)

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The other week I went to Hanauma Bay with Rick. He brought along the GigaPan camera mount that he’s been beta-testing and let me play with it. I shot a panorama of the Bay which turned out pretty well considering that my camera doesn’t allow manual exposure controls.

For the last 10+ years, I have used a standalone Windows-based PIM called Time & Chaos on my work PC to track my work and personal contact and calendar data. About 5 years ago, I picked up a Palm and got it synced with my PIM. All was well with the world. Then, a year or two ago I got a Mac. And I got a Razr V3. I learned the joys of Bluetooth address book syncing between the Razr and iCal. Life was pretty good. And then my office started using Outlook, and I realized that I really needed to have my contact and calendar data there too (the work-related stuff, at least).

So now if I have a work-related entry, I enter it twice — once into my old PIM, and once into Outlook. (If it’s a personal entry, I don’t want to put it into Outlook because our Outlook data can be shared and I don’t know enough yet about Outlook to assure myself that my personal stuff won’t get shown all over the office network.) If I get new contact data for someone, I may be punching it in three times: once into my cell phone, once into my Palm or my old PIM, and once into Outlook.

I would love to make better use of Google Calendars and my Mac’s Address Book and iCal, too, but it feels like I’m in too deep already. I am drowning in contact and calendar apps.

Hasn’t somebody come up with a way to get all this stuff to work together yet? I would love to simplify things so that I have my contact and calendar data on: (1) Outlook on my work Windows PC, (2) iCal/Address Book on my home Mac, and (3) whatever my mobile device uses, so that work and home and mobile all get synced.

Speaking of mobile devices… my Razr has served me well but the 2-year contract is almost up. And my Palm is nice and solid, but Palm the company seems like a sinking ship these days. I have been thinking hard about jumping to a phone with PDA features as well. The Treo used to hold my attention, but now the iPhone’s siren song calls! My only reservations are (1) the cost, (2) the cost, (3) the cost, and (4) the certainty that I will need to look stuff up while I am on the phone, and how the hell do you do that anyway if you’ve only got one device?

Maybe Google Calendars is the glue that I need to hold all this stuff together. Web 2.0, take me away from all this!

I’ve been busy, not dead. With luck, I’ll have time to catch up on blogging about the last year’s worth of cool hikes. Since I’m so behind, I am trying to decide whether I should backdate the entries to the actual hike dates, or just post them using the current date even though the hike being written about occurred months earlier.

Vista has expanded the Times New Roman character set so that it can support Hawaiian typography. It’s now finally possible to correctly type a Hawaiian word like “Kāneʻohe” in the default font of the default word processor. No more excuses!

Scott McCloud, comic book creator and theorist, was in the islands this week for the Hawaiʻi leg of the McCloud family’s year-long Making Comics 50 State Tour.

He spoke at the Academy of Arts Theatre to a distinctly bimodal crowd: on the one hand, comic book fans (young and geeky), who knew McCloud’s work and came to hear the man; and on the other, the Academy Theatre regulars (elderly and haole), who were probably clueless about comics but trusting in the Academy’s judgment that they’d hear an interesting lecture in any case.

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Hurricane on the way.

Image courtesy of the University of Hawaiʻi Meteorology Department.

Farley, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and Rusty, our Tibetan Spaniel, are usually best buddies and playmates. But this time Rusty wasn’t in the mood to play… so Farley sat on his head. Carefully and deliberately. What cracked me up was that Rusty let him do it.

I made this clip fooling around with iMovie. I can see how this kind of thing could be a huge time sink… as if I didn’t have enough to do already…