The ride home

The sunset on the way home after work in Waimea. A beautiful sunset but a blurry photo.

Mirror, Mirror

On my drive to Waimea I snapped this out the window hoping not to drop my camera. It may not be framed perfectly but what do expect since I was driving and not looking in the viewfinder. This is a few miles out of Waimea town as I headed there for work.

I had bought the little round mirror to stick onto the photo desk monitor at work since we faced away from everyone else in the office towards a wall. This way we could see folks sneaking up behind us with knife, hatchets or assignment sheets. So what you're seeing here in the little round mirror stuck onto my normal side mirror. So you're looking at where I had been.

Sub in tow

The shuttle boat Kalia tows in the Atlantis submarine back to Honokohau Harbor on a grey afternoon near the harbor entrance. The weather has been quite rainy and grey and Kona.

One more for the road (or plane)

One more chance for Colleen to have a fresh Kona Brew before heading back to the mainland. Jim just got in from Europe so it was a good excuse to make it to Bew Pub one more time. My day started out with some iced coffee and ended with iced tea (at the Brew Pub).

Thursday the Kona Brew Pub debuts some kind of Paddler's Ale then Friday is the start of beer month (send your favorite brewer some flowers I'm sure) and they debut a Vanilla Porter.

Although I’m not a big beer drinker I have had the Kona Coffee Beer at Kona Brew Pub when it was their seasonal beer and it looks like according to the Rate Beer Website it’s one of the top Hawaii beers.

Podcasts go mainstream

Apple has really done it up slick with their new iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting enabled. A very easy to use program, nice directory and tons of content for free. Click on the logo on the left and head on over to Apple who has released both the Mac and Windows versions of their Podcast aggregator for free via iTunes. Don't you just love free stuff?

An update will come later today which will be back-dated with photos from yesterday so stay tuned. In the meantime, go get some free Podcasts.

*UPDATE: I'm back to using iPodderX as my Podcast aggregator. iTunes, though slick and cool, doesn't multi-task the podcatching that well, doesn't allow Bit-Torrent downloads of podcasts and hey, I paid for iPodderX so I might as well use it. Plus it messed up an Audio Hijack Pro session I had going on when it turned-on its podcatching.

Old hangout, old friends

Our ex-WHT reporter Colleen visited the island for a day and it was one of Carly's last days in Hawaii before moving to Las Vegas for a new job at the RJ where I'm sure many of us will get a chance to see her via our Vegas junkets. Click on the image above for a gallery of images from the low-key get-together at Durty Jakes.

Colleen in Kona

Colleen
Originally uploaded by MediaBaron.

A quick cameraphone snap of Colleen (my cameraphone hasn't been working right as of late), our ex-reporter who now calls Maine home. She's here back in Kona for a quick visit before heading back. Of course she has already been in Honolulu for a week for the wedding of the year between Starr and Chris. I couldn't make the wedding, someone here has to work, but I wish them all the best.

Wild Turkey

I could hear them out there through the fog of my sleep, the gobble, gobble sound. Looked out my window and spied 14 turkeys feasting away on the much too long lawn grass that has gone to seed. Lucky for them it's far from Thanksgiving and I don't think my shotgun would be welcomed being fired in the neighborhood. So off they went, like so many sparrows in a park, munching away, leaving when they were done.

More Mashups

Is it good or is it just wrong to combine Snoop Dogg and Led Zepplin? Listen to Drop It Like It's A Whole Lotta Love

Or how about Gorillaz vs. Cake? Never Feel Good

Lots of good mashups in Party Ben's mashup downloads.

Flying Manta Rays

Earlier this year on Feb. 20th I had some photos and talked about Terry Taube's artwork at Kona Coast Shopping Center. Back then it wasn't finished as there was just a plain pole sticking out of the center of a circle of Honu. Well, Terry dropped by the shopping center this morning and finished much of the installation with the addition of three steel Manta Rays overhead. So the scene is supposed to be like you are underwater. Pretty cool artwork. It might not be finished as it looks like the post may still need some finishing.

I assume the Manta Rays are secure up there as I can see their wings moving in the breeze like they're swimming which is a nice effect. As I had predicted I have seen kids playing on the honu at times.

A Hui Hou (Until We Meet Again)

Abbie and Johnnie on their last night in Hawaii before jetting off to the mainland and eventually getting to Arizona. I didn't take many photos as there were too many drinks, food and talking-story to busy ourselves.


Melinda imparting a few words of wisdom for Abbie or maybe she was just explaining how to make deviled eggs.


Another photo of Johnnie and Abbie. Didn't manage to get photos of Sophie or Matt as they socialized around Patti's house. They were here just a year but they will definitely be missed by everyone.


Here's Sophie's version of the rain outside as drawn on my Palm PDA. Originally we were supposed to be all relaxing on the lawn but the rain changed plans a bit.


Then Sophie and I both drew cats on the PDA. Any guesses as to who drew what? I think she said her cat is named Ralph and of course my cat is Dominator (or Dom for short).


Okay, Melinda proved me wrong, she did figure-out how to use my Nikon CoolPix camera. Actually I meant that I didn't think she would figure-out how to delete photos taken as my Nikon is a much more complicated than it needs to be camera.

My Half-Baked Idea

Here's some of the contents of a geocache I placed in Waimea today. It's called the Half-Baked Hide and the title is a clue to the geocache. Also because in my own half-baked way I changed the name of the cache at the last moment in the pouring rain. It had been a toss-up between this name and another which is still written in the logbook of the cache.


One of the weird things you'll see if you're headed to the Half-Baked Hide.

There was another purpose for the geocache. As a going away present I gave Abbie two Travel Bugs with their mission to make it back to the Big Island from Arizona. I'm putting two Travel Bugs in Hawaii with their mission to get near Flagstaff, Arizona where Abbie is going to. So it's a race to see which bugs make it to their destinations first.

Finding all the marbles

One of my favorite podcasts is Accident Hash and C.C. Chapman played a tune by Manda And The Marbles. Some folks might think they're 10+ years too late as they sound like they're straight out of the 80s-90s music pop-alternative scene but I liked their music enough to buy their CD. For the stupid record labels that think having podcasts program music to be downloaded for free will hurt sales I say hogwash. I would have never heard of the group or bought their CD without Accident Hash (link on the right).

Handwritten on the back of the envelope that held the CD said it all. Viva La Podcast! Visit their MySpace page and listen to Ode To Rock, that's good stuff.

Geocaching the Kona Coast

As I promised the kids we went on another hunt for a geocache. The night before we went through a list of nearby geocaches, most of them seemingly too difficult for the kids tastes so I found one I knew would be easy. Foxy Roxy is an easy to find cache on fairly easy terrain. I hadn't been to this one before so there were no real hints I could give the kids. They scrambled over the old lava fields and couldn't find it. So I decoded the hint and that helped a bit and after a bit of guidance from me they found it.


This time I was a big more prepared and had stuff to put in here, thank goodness it had a big jar as I put one of my birthday present robots into the cache along with a buck. For that I took the Lost Cheesehead Travel Bug (the thing that looks like a ladybug attached to a dog tag. I'm going to put that in a new geocache I'm planning to set soon.

The kids kept saying that was too easy and I was prepared with some printouts of several more geocaches we could possibly go to. With time for one more geocache before the airport we headed into Kona for the Kealakehe Hide.


Kyler with my Garmin iQue 3600 GPS unit trekking along the shoreline to the Kealakehe Hide.


Alyssa with my Garmin eTrex Vista GPS heading for the Geocache. I was surprised how fast they learned how to use these things well.


After a bit of poking around near the cache but in the wrong place Kyler found it. It's a pretty easy cache to find and I'm sure folks stumble across it by accident without a GPS. I put my other birthday robot/doll by leaving a Darth Vader type character in there.

A fun time and I'm sure if I had shown them geocaching on the first day of their vacation they would have had us going all over the place looking for them. Now I've got to hide my geocache, stay tuned for an update on that.

FTGC'ers (First Time Geocachers)

Took my sister's tribe in search of the Petroglyphs Geocache in Puako. This would be their first geocaching adventure and, of course, the kids had thoughts of buried treasure on thier minds.


I had been here before so I tried to stay out of the way, only lending guidance how to work the two GPS units I let them use. My niece found a hint at the site, my brother in-law actually found the geocache first and my nephew unearthed the cache itself. It's really not that hard to find but you'd never find it without first having a GPS.


A look inside the geocache. I had my niece and nephew pick out a couple of nice keychains up in Waimea at the Parker Ranch Store so they could trade if they found something they wanted in the Geocache. The usual rule is that if you take something you need to leave something.

My niece took a nice Geocache Coin and left her keychain. My nephew prized the keychain I bought him more than the stuff in the Geocache, I wouldn't let them take the Travel Bugs which they really wanted.


Here I am giving my nephew precise directions on where to go next. All in all a great adventure for the kids. I think I got them hooked. The kids voted to go Geocaching again tomorrow in lieu of swimming in the Hilton pool which was surprising. More Geocaching adventures. We checked the Geocaching website for another cache near their hotel and most of the caches are kinda tough for the kids but we finally found an easy one. Expect an update tomorrow.

Misty Mountain Hop

I dug around in my closet to find whatever warm clothes I could find for my nephew, niece, sister and brother in-law as we took a trip up to the Mauna Kea Visitor's Center for a night celestrial exploration. I think the clothes are a bit too big for the kids.


Kyler and Alyssa out in the cold wind with me posing for a photo by my sister. Temperature gauge up there said 43F but it was probably colder as I never saw it budge much, it might have been broken, plus that doesn't account for wind-chill.


That's a little more like it inside the heated visitor's center watching a video presentation before a lecture about the night sky. My sister Cheryl along with Kyler and Alyssa.


Instead of inside I was out in the cold rain trying to get a decent photo of this rainbow. They just have all of these smaller telescopes out in the rain. I was crossing my fingers that the rain and clouds would go away for our celestrial viewing.


The start of the lecture, more like an informal question and answer talk as things are pretty relaxed up there. I didn't get this fellow's name but he was great explaining everything. And yes, the skies did clear-up, beautiful view of the stars and planets and this guy used a laser pointer to show us all the different objects in the sky. We also saw a few satellites whiz by. In some of the bigger telescopes you could easily see sharp images of the rings around Saturn and Jupiter with its moons. A pretty successful night of viewing I'd recommend it to everyone.

Well, call me a monkey's uncle

It's true Apple IS switching to Intel x86 based chips. Like I said below, this will be great as it will allow us to run both Mac apps and Windows apps at full speed. Looks like my next new computer won't be purchased for another two years and it will be Intel based.

The sure sign that Apple would switch chips making PowerPC Macs obsolete was probably the newspaper giving me a new G4 PowerBook 15" laptop last week to work on. Now that's the bleeding edge of technology.

So in one fell-swoop Steve Jobs has made both my PowerPC PowerBook (which will be replaced with Intel PowerBooks in the future) and my Dell laptop (which won't be needed if Windows can run at full speed on a future Intel PowerBook) obsolete. Thanks Steve.

TWAT OD

Something has been driving me nuts the past few weeks. I've been itching like crazy, like hives, like I've walked into Newman's flea-ridden apartment on Seinfield. My hands would itch so I'd wash them in anti-bacterial hand soap, dry them and do it all over again as they'd be itchy again. It was hard to sleep too. I re-washed all my bedding, re-anti-fleaed my cat, bug bombed the apartment but I still itched. And like I said it was worst on my hands, but also on my back and sometimes my feet. I know it's mosquito season but there can't be this many mosquitos.

Then the light-bulb went off and I figured out why the itch. I changed laundry detergent. I had switched to Tide With A Touch Of Downy (TWATOD). I figured why not? Built-in fabric softener and I had always used Downy on my bedding and stuff without problems. But it turns out I had an allergic reaction to it.

Read all about it here in my Epinions review.

Apple on Intel?

The weekend has been buzzing with websites saying Apple is going to switch to Intel (as in Pentium type) chips away from PowerPC chips. Many, many websites are saying the annoucement will come tomorrow at Steve Jobs' keynote speech at the World Wide Developer's Conference.

Here's what I think and posted on the Engadget website last month:

39. Posted May 23, 2005, 1:39 PM ET by Baron
There's no way Apple is going to switch to Intel Pentium based chips.

What the meeting is probably about is having Intel manufacture PowerPC chips. Think about it, the PowerPC architecture is great but IBM is having manufacturing problems to get the yields of the faster chips up. I think PPC is a three-way deal between Apple, IBM and Motorola, it's not solely IBM's ballgame to call. Maybe Intel can buy Motorola's PPC assets and manufacture the chips. This would make Apple happy and Microsoft happy (due to Xbox 360). IBM would be pissed but all this talk might be the kick in the arse to get their Fishkill plant into gear.

Now some other websites today seem to think the same thing. That switching to Intel doesn't mean a switch away from the PPC chip.

If Apple did decide to switch to Pentium type chips this would be a headache for developers but would actually be good for consumers if prices are kept down. Think about being able to run VirtualPC on your Macintosh at full speed. More Windows users than ever would switch if they could have the best of both worlds and Microsoft would sell even more copies of Windows.

Pizza, pizza

My sis, her husband and their two kids are visiting this week. Here's my niece Alyssa dwarfed by our dual combo Captain Cook/Ka`u Pesto pizza at Kona Brew Pub.


Brother in-law Keith and son Kyler getting a piece of pizza pie. Didn't get a photo of my sister or myself this time as we were too busy eating.

Maybe it doesn't taste like chicken

In an earlier blog post I hinted that a Canadian pig farmer-serial murderer caught by the authorities may have been disposing of bodies by feeding them to the pigs.

It may be worse than that. Seems he actually did meat processing at his farm and may have processed some people along with the pigs. The Associated Press has the story on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website. Gives new meaning to the phrase 'mystery meat.'

Heeeeer's Johnnie!

Here's Johnnie...Matt and Abbie's baby, Sophie's little bro. He was pretty interested in my camera and at one year old I actually had him take a photo or two, just had to point at the shutter button and he went to town. A natural photographer.

Friday night was prep night for the big yard sale Saturday morning. Everything must go as Matt and Abbie's family prepares to leave for Arizona. Whatever hasn't sold this Saturday will make a repeat performance at another yard sale next Saturday.


Kaleo, Johnnie and Abbie enjoying some playtime in the living room. Kaleo writes a botony column in North Hawaii News. The entertainment center and TV in the background are for sale, maybe they're sold already. I was thinking about the TV as mine has a busted tuner but still works via my VCR. The shoji screen in the back left went to Melinda who was also there trying to make some order out of this prep night.


Another photo of Johnnie and Abbie in the soon to be empty living room.

What's your car's sexuality?

I have a couple of friends that are thinking about buying a new/used car or SUV. Sure there's Edmunds.com and The Institute for Highway Safety and their crash tests.

But should they also factor in the Car Talk radio show's list of ultimate gay and lesbian cars.

Or maybe their lists of guy or chick cars?

Actually my car, a Chevy Tracker, made the list at #6 for lesbians. But I do know of someone who drives a Jeep Wrangler, in red, which made both lists....

Lucky none of the cars on their Worst Cars are currently in production. Face it, the 70s were a bad decade to buy a car.

Smell the case

Only three more hours left on my eBay auction of a Vaja i-volution T-65 case for the Treo 650 smartphone. These cases are beautiful but very expensive and take at least a month to be delivered since they're handmade in Argentina.

Why am I selling the case? Because I wanted one, why settle for anything less than the best, for a Treo 650 smartphone I plan to purchase in the future. So I bought a couple of extras to offset some the cost of my case by selling the extras on eBay. This is the last one I have for sale and it has that new leather smell, kind of like that new car smell but for fine leather products.

I had done some research over a month ago as to which color would sell best and everyone wants a plain black case. There's someone else selling one of these cases on eBay but their case is in bright orange. Not exactlly what most high powered executives want to be seen with talking into an orange brick.

So if you have a Treo 650, wanted the best case but can't wait a month your time is short, the auction ends in less than three hours now.

*UPDATE* Sold!