Tsaiberspace

We are staying at the Ala Moana Hotel for a few days for a conference. Many things we read about this place were rather negative, but the hotel is undergoing renovation, so perhaps they completed the renovations just in time for our stay. Our room and the grounds are great: new and clean. The whole hotel is non-smoking; there are little signs in the rooms that say there will be a $200 room-cleaning charge for smoking.

The rooms are all very modernly-furnished and laid out, with lots of right-angled furniture and artwork everywhere. Each unit has a private lanai (we can see the ocean if we lean out over the railing), a dorm-room refrigerator, and free cabled internet access (WiFi is handled by BlueSocket and costs $10/day):

This is our first trip to Honolulu, and in a short time we learned and saw some new things:

• Honolulu does not use Daylight Saving Time (timezone abbreviation is HST). This caused my auto-synchronizing atomic-clock timezone watch to get confused.
• Ala Moana is not in the middle of things at Waikiki. We are right next to the Hawaii Convention Center, and adjacent to the Ala Moana Shopping Center (an upscale-but-not-quite-high-end mega-mall). It is within walking distance to Waikiki (a hike), and a few blocks away from the Ala Moana Park and its beach.
• We saw many red-crested cardinals at Ala Moana Park (apparently, a.k.a. “Brazilian Cardinal” - an imported species).

More photos from New York:

Is New York really able to enforce “No Honking Zones”?

Sadly, the romantic gift shop is closed. And this really is on “Mott” Street; not an Engrish spelling of “Most Romantic”.

A first visit to New York cannot be complete without a visit to the Empire State Building.

Billboards and signs as far as the eye can see. And in New York, last call is at 4am, not 2am like all those other wussy cities …

It’s been less than 12 hours and we’ve already spent over $100 in taxi fares. Ugh.

JetBlue used to be my domestic airline of choice. They’ve got decent seats, each-to-their-own LCD screens, and all-you-can-eat snacks, including blue-corn chips.

But Richard Branson has got David Neeleman beat, hands down. On our first Virgin America flight, we experienced every cliché you could possibly imagine:

• Techno music to greet us upon boarding, and to see us off upon landing.
• Lots of neon blue and neon red ambient lighting to match the mood music.
• Obligatory metrosexual Asian steward and exotic Asian stewardess, and in general, flight attendants under the age of 60 whom you don’t have to feel bad for every time you see them walk by.
• High-five greeting upon exiting the plane, instead of the David Spade “buh-bye”.
• They fly out of SFO; no more trips to Oakland.

There was also some heavy-duty geek-friendly stuff going on:

• A/C power to each seat. My MBP’s legendary 4-hr battery-life prowess was not required for this 5-hr flight. When I was finished marveling at the presence of A/C power in coach class, I simply plugged in and recharged.
• The in-flight media entertainment has much to offer (movies, TV shows, music, games), and on top of all that, seems to be Linux-based to boot. I didn’t bother asking the flight staff any questions about it, but with game selections like “Penguin Command” and “Circus Linux!”, and with a distinct X-like hourglass cursor appearing every now and then, I had no doubt.

Virgin America, my new favorite domestic carrier. The bonus on top of all that, in this day and age of $4/gallon gasoline, was their relatively-bargain $389 round-trip price for SFO-JFK on the same weekend His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI was visiting New York.

Finally, the first nice weekend of spring:

I can’t remember ever being disappointed by a heist movie. The formula is so simple, how could anyone mess it up? The Bank Job is no exception:

• Planning.
• Execution.
• Aftermath (possibly with more executions, tee-hee).

The Bank Job joins my list of entertaining heist movies:

• Inside Man
• The Italian Job
• Heat
• Snatch
• Ocean’s 11

The Bank Job is different from some of the rest in that some rather bad things happen to some decent people (most bank heist movies don’t really involve people getting hurt).

Samurai Boogie by Peter Tasker is essentially an anime graphic novel in book form. The story itself is fun, something one might expect to read in a graphic novel or see in an action movie. The reader essentially follows around an old grizzled private eye as he deals with Yakuza gangsters, rich and powerful politicians, and other assorted characters.

When 24 the TV show first came out, it had a novel gimmick: the show would cut to a split screen format and show events simultaneously unfold in different parts of the story in “real time”. Over time, that gimmick went away; it remains only in the teaser leading and ending clips just before and after commercial breaks.

Samurai Boogie has a gimmick of its own. The text for the first few pages reads like the text of a graphic novel: short terse semi-sentences, leaving the reader free to draw the frame in his mind:

At the top of the stairs, a logn corridor. At the end, a sliding door with panels of translucent paper. Behind it, a hunched silhouette. Human, male.

Mori takes a half-step backwards. A floorboard groans. The silhouette stays motionless. So does Mori. Stillness. The only soudn the patter of the rain.

Go forward or back? Mori’s instincts decide. He moves down the corridor like a cat, slow motion, rolling his weight over each step forward. At the sliding door, he waits a lifetime. Then his fingernails open a millimetre of light; he lines his eye to the crack.

The gimmick is fun for a chapter or two, but Tasker thankfully backs off and allows the story to tell itself without gimmicky narration.

The entire movie is available for watching here. My thoughts:

• I think we watched an 80-minute Ford commercial. Kind of like watching 24.
• Extremely short on plot and character development. So short that Patrika wouldn’t stop bugging me about “why didn’t they explain this?” “why don’t they explain that?” “I don’t understand …”. NBC needs to understand that certain segments of their audience can’t just watch a movie about a car and be happy. So they need to write in some plot to pacify that segment so the rest of us can just enjoy the movie.

Whatever. One signs up for all that when they decide to watch a movie based on a 25-year-old TV show.

The one unforgiveable flaw was that this movie about a CAR didn’t highlight the CAR. There were a few nice sequences of self-healing nano-technology (what back in the day would have just been a bulletproof car) and some other low-budget special effects, but NBC promised a super-advanced “weapons system”. Even the old K2000 had a grappling hook (which was removed from the K3000).

Instead, we get a lot of scenes shot inside the car with the two leads talking to each other. Meh.

I like to buy used books for $3 or less. For every few stinkers like W.E.B. Griffin Special Ops, I get a gem like Doppelganger by David Stahler, Jr.

The fact that it was $3 should have been a good signal that it would be good. As a counter-example, I await with trepidation a 1066-page $1 copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth.

Doppelganger is a short 258-page read; I finished this book in one week of Muni time. I can’t say much about the plot without spoiling it since the story is very very tight, but the story contains what I would expect a good book noir to contain:

• Enough to make me disappointed that Muni is running on time, for once. For comparison, there were days when I’d rather stand amidst a horde of zombie commuters than work my way through another chapter of Special Ops.
• A nice, tight noir plot, with a complementary completely unresolved ending. Good book noir is everything that formulaic weekly television is not: no episodic stories that are neatly resolved within a neat 30- or 60-minute time slot.

I suppose Doppelganger’s story could be described as putting Smeagol into a John Cusack story, in book form.

Sausalito is your typical waterfront community; Bridgeway (the main drag) is lined with boutique art galleries and kitschy tourist shopping. There is a stretch where there is nothing but a walkway next to the water; it reminds me of a similar walkway near the Newport Mansions in Rhode Island.

Patrika succumbed to the tourist shopping and bought a puffy white coat for $20:

If you have nothing else to do and it’s nice and sunny outside, it’s worth a trip.