How much is that doggie in the window?

Was funny seeing this dog with his arm (leg? paw?) hanging out the passenger window waiting for the owner/driver to return. The dog looked like your typical passenger, arm out, tapping the side of the car, looking into the post office waiting.

Cruzin' in Kona

Carly had a voucher for a whale watching cruise for four on the Body Glove, apparently a previous cruise had no whales and since they guarantee it she got a voucher for a free cruise. So she invited Andrea and myself, we ran into Pancho on the way to the pier and he came along for the the afternoon cruise. I started work very early covering Easter Sunrise services so I was off early enough to go on the cruise.


Carly takes a photo of Andrea and Pancho as we lounge on the top deck. No whales sighted.


An oceanside view of Laaloa Beach Park (aka. Magic Sands, White Sands, Disappearing Sands). We headed about nine miles south down the coast to Keauhou before turning around.


Andrea and Carly cool their feet and get some sun along front rail of the Body Glove boat.


Andrea and Carly's view out the front of the Body Gove.

Birthday Girl

Birthday girl Andrea as we celebrate at Durty Jakes. Hard to believe it's been a year as we hoist a few to celebrate her 22nd Bday.


The hoisting with Andrea and Travis.


More hoisters with Carly's gang of family and friends visiting from the mainland.


Ron prays for beer.


Carly showers us with confetti and pop-pop thingies.


Andrea calling in her American Idol vote.


Andrea, Jaymes, Brian and Carly at Durty Jakes.

Shameless sales promotion

My Spring Cleaning garage sale has started on eBay. I've got too much stuff, good stuff really, around the apartment doing nothing as I've stopped using them due to upgrades (downgrades?) and the like. If you want to bid on any of this stuff, just click on the photos.


I've got this iBook/PowerBook power supply lying around the apartment, I used it with my G3 iBook, but I sold that to Maile and it's underpowered for my power-hog PowerBook G4. Yeah, it can recharge my new laptop's battery, but only if the laptop is off or asleep since it's only 45W. So off it goes to eBay.

Next is my Palm Tungsten|T (why Palm put that upright bar in the name is a mystery to me). I even created an animated GIF image for eBay so it can be seen opened and closed. A good little unit but because I started to use memory-hogging applications I needed a PDA with more memory. Actually this was because applications during this time weren't written so they could access a memory card slot. Current apps can be run off a memory card so this is unit much more useful now than when it was released.

I currently use a Garmin iQue 3600 which isn't for sale, not for sale yet anyway. I must admit that the Garmin is a much better GPS than it is a PDA. The Palm Tungsten|T outperforms the Garmin which is always crappy at Graffitti 2 recognition. I'll have to write an Epinions review and diss the Garmin a bit as it just can't keep up with my writing notes. I had to buy an application Jot to speed-up the recognition. (Hint for Garmin iQue 3600 owners, if you download and use the demo version of Jot the demo never times-out, though I bought it with Word Complete which is really handy).

Keep watching here as a few more things are going to hit eBay in the next week: A GPS unit, Palm Tungsten|T3 and various other goodies. I've come very close to going back to the T3 as it's probably the best pda PalmOne has ever produced. It's fast, beautiful, got a great screen, lots of memory and more. But I've found the built-in GPS of the Garmin much too handy when on assignment so I can identify areas I'm photographing.

Okay, shamless sales plug over. Back to your regularly scheduled blog reading.

Due to technical difficulties'cross your fingers and try again....'

You gotta find some humor in Google's Gmail status message today for an outage.

NSFW (Not Safe For Work) Music

This one's a freebie. Heard Nina Gordon, formerly of Veruca Salt, doing a cover of an NWA song Straight Outta Compton mentioned on Adam Curry's podcast. There's something about an angelic, folksy sounding girl singing gangsta-rap.

Straight Outta Compton by NWA covered by Nina Gordon

You can find more of her cover songs here. You'll also find some of her Veruca Salt stuff like Volcano Girls and Seether.

Her last album Tonight And The Rest Of My Life was recorded on Maui at Bob Rock's Plantation Studio.

Oh yeah, and my car is fixed and running fine now with a new starter.

Irish Car Bombs...they're magically delicious

Robin works the controls of Mike's Canon PowerShot s70 at Mixx Bistro Bar on St. Patrick's Day. We headed over there since they had live Irish music. Almost too popular that night as they ran out of Guinness beer. We later saw a case of Guinness slide across the bar as someone went out to buy more supplies. The place is part of Kona Wine Market so although they've got plenty of wine on hand they weren't prepared for the crush of people wanting to drink Guinness.


A tradition started last year with Travis is having Irish Car Bomb drinks on St. Patrick's Day. Here are the parts, a shot glass with 1/2 Irish Whiskey, 1/2 Bailey's Irish Creme and a glass of Guinness. Tastes like chocolate milk.


Click on the above image for a video (5MB) of some bomb dropping and music by Kona Celtic Connection.


Mike and Robin later at Quinn's resturant where they were serving green beer and corned beef & cabbage made for dinner


Robin via a green beer gel. No pinching.

Playing Possum

My car at the auto shop, on the left, my rental on the right. Dropped by the shop today, hopped into my car and of course it started right up. The starter motor is failing and has an intermittent problem doing so. So far I've been lucky enough not to be someplace like on the summit and not have it start up but I've been rolling the dice, so I'm driving the rental one more day as a new starter is put into my car. I should be good to go after that. So it was like the car was playing dead yesterday, only to work like nothing's wrong today.

I must admit, the rental is a pretty cushy ride.

Car Woes...the sequel

Here's my rental car, mine had to be towed to the shop when it wouldn't start. I think it's the starter motor or a loose wire as it had done this before and fixed itself without any intervention. The battery seems okay and the engine wouldn't crank even with jumper cables.

I was prepared this time though. A few months ago I joined AAA so I got the car towed and this Honda CR-V rental car for a day for free. Well, not for free as I paid my membership dues a few months ago, but I didn't have to worry about the costs as it was taken care of. I'll probably have to pay for a few days of rental car myself while my car is in the shop, not too long hopefully. But with AAA I get a discount on the rental which is reasonable. I kind of thought something like this would happen which is why I joined and it looks like it paid off.

New Music

I'm trying something new, adding some Amazon.com ads about stuff mentioned on the blog. In this post you can easily find a couple of CDs mentioned. On the sidebar on the right you can find links to The Curse of Lono book I mentioned earlier (I think the new one is sold out) and the cappuccino machine I use.

Actually the coffee machine is a newer model from what I have and I'm not sure why some folks gave it bad reviews, I think they aren't using it right. You gotta clean these fancy coffee machines after you use them, they ain't your grandfather's Mr. Coffee machine. Cleaning it takes less than a minute of flushing water through the steam nozzle. I give it a thumbs-up.

Been listening to some new music I bought online from a group called Kasabian, good stuff. Check out the songs Club Foot and Butcher Blues which I really like. I was able to get Club Foot for free via the iTunes Music Store but since it was one of their freebie of the week songs it can't be burned onto an audio CD. Butcher Blues has a cool bass line in the song.

The Kills are another group I've been listening to. Good Ones, Love is a Deserter and Cat Claws (which is on an older CD) are standout songs. The Kills are kind of like The White Stripes, a duo, guy on guitar & vocals with girl on vocals. Though Meg usually just plays drums while Jack sings in TWS. In The Kills Jamie Hince (aka. Hotel) and Alison Mosshart (aka. VV) tear it up with a similar stripped-down sound.

The Kills Good Ones QuickTime video (broadband)

For those on dial-up a 3MB version of the QuickTime video you really gotta get broadband :^)

Chicken Soup correction, not celery...ginger

Spoke with my mom who views this blog, Hi Mom!, and she corrected my faulty memory about her wicked chicken soup for colds recipe that I mentioned back in December when I had a nasty cold.

Wicked Chicken Soup
Chicken parts (the kind of with the bones)
Lots of fresh ginger slices
Water to cover the it all
Mushrooms and/or carrots (I don't really recall that being in there but she said they were optional)
The Hard Stuff (whiskey, or whatever your poison is to drink)

Toss all that stuff, except the booze, into a pot and cook on the stove top until the chicken is cooked through and you get a nice broth from all that water in there. Turn-off the heat and put the booze in. She doesn't have any exact measurements for the ingredients but if you're comfortable in the kitchen cooking it would be hard to go wrong.

Chris Rock can keep his Robitussin, this soup will sprout hair on the bottom of your feet! I think the ginger really kick it up a number of notches along with the booze.

Oh, and my mom and dad caught a cold recently after a trip to Las Vegas and she made this soup. I believe she used the same Seagrams Whiskey she used when I was a kid. I told her it must be toxic by now, but I think the toxicity was enough to kill her cold germs as she's okay now.

Rain and mud

Offshore rain headed towards me at lunch today. I just can't seem to get a break from the rain. I got soaked on Saturday at the Brewers Festival and today it poured in Kohala where I was on assignment. I forgot one of my photos of the huge mud puddles I had to drive through to get to my assignment, I'll update later. Even this post is late.


Here's the mud puddles I had to drive through. I really wanted to blast through here but figured I had better not, else I get stuck or something.

Equinox in one week

Exactly one week until the March Equinox, some folks would call it the Spring Equinox but it isn't exactly spring in Australia. A number of years ago I was involved in a world-wide project call Wrinkle in Time where photographers around the world would shoot a QuickTime VR at the same time so we would see this slice of time everywhere. I might shoot one this year after having not shot one in the past four years.

Here are a some of my past Wrinkle QuickTime VRs

• My first Wrinkle QTVR. This image actually appeared on CNN broadcast TV and on their website when they did a story about the event, little did we know we'd get the publicity.
  
• Wrinkle 2 had us shooting three images, so here's #1
  
• Wrinkle 2, #2
  
• Wrinkle 2, #3
  

There's another one I shot but it's no longer online. This year the Equinox is at 2:33am in Hawaii so we'll see if I drag myself out for a photo, got to find somewhere suitable that early in the morning. I finally updated the Wrinkle Clocks here after years of neglect. Stay tuned.

Rainy Days

A baseball game was cancelled due to heavy rains and fog therefore my photo assignment was cancelled too. I actually went out into this mess to take photos but then it really started pouring rain, they called the game that was going on and the next game I was assigned to shoot. Here's the view from my car back to the field beyond the tennis courts, you can't even see the field area due to the fog.

Also got soaked in heavy rains and winds at the Kona Brewers Festival in town, see another cellphone photo, this time of Brian's beer mug in the cellphone photos on the right. Camera bag got soaked, camera gear soaked, PDA soaked, clothes soaked, me soaked. What happened to the blue skies of a day or two ago?

Kiss the sky

On my way up north the blue sky was filled with these beautiful feathery clouds, they looked like feathery wisps of hair or maybe gigantic snowflakes. There were other thicker clouds lower than these and even more dense nimbus clouds that I could see like an arm around Mauna Kea summit.

Up in Waimea it was rainy off and on and very windy.


After an assignment at HPA I got back into my car, out of the usual sideways rain and very windy weather to be treated to a double rainbow over a field.


Another photo a bit more zoomed-in.

The weather is all over the place here, rain, wind, still have some snow/ice on the summits, clear blue skies in Kona. I think it's the lack of trade winds that gave us the hot sticky weather but blew the vog away. And now it's cooler and breezier than the past two days which is nice.

Remember, wear sunscreen

Obviously this guy hasn't heard The Sunscreen Song which was popular six years ago based upon a mock graduation speech.

Was busy at work driving to and fro shooting assignments so I got a short break having lunch in my car during the first couple of innings of the baseball game I needed to shoot (it was a double-header and I had already got some shots of the first game). And this guy was sitting in the cheap-seats, outside the centerfield fence watching the game for free. Maybe he came over with the team from Florida but looks like Mr. Sun did a number on him.

More free Gmail accounts

Gmail just gave me another 50 Gmail invites to give away. If anyone wants a free Gmail account just email me, I've got about 100 invites to give away now.

Why switch to Gmail? 1GB of storage space, keyboard shortcuts (no need to take your hands away from the keyboard to mess with the mouse), great spam protection, it's free.

Some folks just use it as a back-up area for files, they just archive and email their files to their Gmail accounts for safe-keeping. Or you could email a bookmark file of URL links to yourself there to keep in case you need to find your bookmarks online away from your home computer. The uses are endless.

I have given some invites away but Gmail keeps giving me more to give away.

Steve Fossett in Hawaii, maybe Kona?

Steve Fossett in Virgin Atlantic's GlobalFlyer is trying to fly around the world but might run out of fuel. It's possible he might land in Hawaii, I think it's also possible he will land in Kona.

Kona International Airport is the back-up emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle if it can't land at Honolulu International Airport. Honolulu is always busy with local and international flights along with Hickam Air Force Base that shares the airspace. It seems natural to me that Kona would be the choice of Fossett to land at if he aborts his flight back to the mainland. Stay tuned and check on his progress on his website.

Personally I find this whole flying around on one engine, solo business a bit of a waste. Another billionaire with too much money and time on his hands.

*UPDATE: 0717 UTC* Fossett is going for it, has passed Hawaii and is headed for the mainland. Unless he takes a serious U-Turn he ain't gonna land in Hawaii.

Macro World

Testing out my macro lens out in the yard. A break from too many word posts.


Bird of Paradise growing in the yard.


Fern leaf.


A tiny spider, my finger in there for size reference.


A bigger spider in the backyard.

We'll have to wait for the movie?

The Curse of Lono was supposed to be republished in hardcover with a run of 1,000 books that are supposedly numbered and hand-signed by HST and Ralph Steadman with a special forward by Sean Penn. It's not the same paperback, it's a larger version. Will the books be signed since HST is dead? I've seen seen how they do these special runs like this before, they just have the signatures done on a blank page that's later built into the book, the people don't actually sign the finished book so it is possible that HST's signature will be in the book. Only $300 for a copy, or you could just buy a ticket, fly out to Kona and experience it for yourself.

From HST himself on Feb. 2, 2004:
Sean Penn called at halftime to say he was feeling disillusioned about Hollywood and wanted to take a year off to concentrate entirely on becoming an expert surfer on Oahu's intimidating North Shore. I had planned to study with him out there, but this huge, dirty, 40-pound cast on my left leg won't work on a surfboard. So I have devoted my "spare time" to writing the screenplay for a movie based on my long-lost, super-strange novel called "The Curse of Lono," which will start shooting in Hawaii before the end of this year.

Yes sir, I am a little too busy for my own good these days, and my boys are doing pretty well in the movie business. Johnny Depp is the Sexiest Man in the World. Benicio is a new Oscar winner. And Sean is about to nail a huge Academy Award for Best Dramatic Actor. Josh Hartnett was with me at the savage Honolulu Marathon. John Cusack made a scandalous movie about how it feels to catch syphilis in Norway, and Naomi Watts has a major roll in "The Curse of Lono."

Will the screenplay ever be finished?