Almost Paradise

Just busy. Very busy. Hadn’t biked to work in ages. This morning was the first time in about three months (!). It felt good. And as a bonus, there was a night-blooming cereus along the way.

I don’t usually post links to other people’s stuff, but this one is worth clicking on.

These guys climbed up to the Koʻolau ridgeline… and then climbed DOWN the waterfalls at Sacred Falls. Oh lord! There’s a good reason why the valley was closed in 1999 after eight hikers were killed at the base of the falls by falling boulders; it’s just too dangerous to risk allowing people in now that we know that the rock is unstable. These photos are gorgeous and terrifying and utterly insane.

http://www.merman.us/cgi-bin/photos.cgi?s=3&dt=07/2

Easter eggs, Easter eggs!

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“You haven’t posted new dog photos for a while,” Judy told me. “Farley’s grown a lot bigger in two months.” She’s right. Here are a few shots that Judy took recently:

Rusty and Kirby, perched on the rim of the main turtle pen

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Roger, Diane, and I hiked the Lanipō Trail yesterday. It’s really my favorite of the East Honolulu Koʻolau ridge trails. Here’s a Google Map showing the beginning and the ending of the trail.

It was a cloudy, breezy day — great hiking weather. I didn’t take as many photos as I usually do, partly because we kept up a pretty constant conversation as we walked, and partly… well, you’ll see.

“So, where exactly are we heading?” Diane asked. I squinted and pointed. “Over there.” About half an hour later, I realized I’d made a mistake — our target wasn’t a couple of peaks to the right of the KHPR transmitter, it was a couple of peaks to the left. Here’s where I should have been pointing. The peak is about 3 miles away in this photo.

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Rassa frassa @#$^%!&…

Tommy asked me to set up the Wifi connection on his new Nintendo DS Lite so that he could play Animal Crossing over the net using our home Wifi network.

No problem — a year or two ago I’d helped set Chris up so he could play Mario Kart over IP on his DS. So I opened the DS Lite setup screen and tapped in our WEP key — and got an error message. Huh. I tried it again, with the same result. After several careful tries, I ruled out data entry errors and knew I had to do some research. Why wasn’t it working now, when it worked fine a year ago? When I found out, the answer was truly annoying.

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I recently had a blinding flash of insight: even though external USB 2.5″ hard disk drives can get their power from a USB port without needing a separate adapter, all USB ports are not equal. Some have enough power, and others don’t.

When I bought an external enclosure for an old 2.5″ notebook HDD a while ago, I puzzled over the odd USB cable that came with it. The cable had a mini-B plug on the end that plugged into the enclosure… but on the other end, it forked into two standard-A plugs. Huh? I didn’t get it. Was it supposed to be so you could use two USB devices off of one port? But if that was the purpose, then on one end it should have had a standard-A to go into the PC, and on the other end it should have forked into two plugs, the mini-B and maybe a standard-A. Now I get it — this cable is actually supposed to take up two USB ports on your computer, in order to draw enough juice to spin the HDD.

I had been mystified by the iffy startup behavior of this HDD for a few weeks — sometimes it’d start up OK and sometimes it’d repeatedly spasm, trying to spin up — but the power thing makes it all clear now. The (probably too long) USB cable I’ve been trying to use with the HDD isn’t giving it enough juice. As it happens, my computer has another USB cable that I’ve been using for years to hotsync my Palm. Since the Palm has its own power cable connected to a dedicated power adapter, it uses USB only for data, not for power. So I tried switching devices, so that the HDD uses the formerly-for-the-Palm cable, and the Palm uses the not-enough-juice-for-the-HDD cable. Now both gadgets are happy. Problem solved.

Y’know, you’d think I would have figured this out a long time ago. D’oh!

I try to spell Hawaiian words correctly whenever I can, which among other things means using kahakō and ʻokina correctly. I’m not fluent in Hawaiian, so I rely on dictionaries for my spelling. Ulukau, the Hawaiian Electronic Library, offers an excellent set of online dictionaries. Four major Hawaiian-language references are rolled into one search engine.

What I really like is that if I set the Ulukau search engine to “All Dictionaries”, “other characters”, and “find regular spelling”, I can enter an American-style no-accent-marks version of a Hawaiian word and get the correctly accented spelling; e.g. if I type in “Kaneohe”, I get “Kāneʻohe”. And if I type in “pau”, I get all four possible words: “pau”, “paʻu”, “paʻū”, and “pāʻū”.

I also like Firefox. Great browser, lots of very useful add-ons. I found a Taiwanese Firefox add-on called OpenSearchFox that lets me add the Ulukau search engine (or any web site’s search engine, for that matter) to the Firefox Search bar. So now my Hawaiian language dictionary is at my fingertips. Very, very cool. Is this what they mean when they talk about Web 2.0?

The other weekend we had a party. Folks were having a good time. Then Tommy ran up to me, all excited. “Mom needs you out in the yard,” he blurted out. Oh? I headed to the kitchen. “What’s wrong, hon?” I called through the window above the sink. Judy looked up at me from the main turtle pen, squinting in the sunlight.

“There’s a bufo,” she said, the disgust unmistakable in her voice.

Uh oh. It was Toad Patrol time.

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What happens if I backdate a WordPress blog entry?