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:

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.

Winning a Super Bowl requires dedication, teamwork, and 110% from every player involved. We are speaking, of course, about the Newcastle Brown, 2007 champions of the Armchair Generalz Fantasy Football League, and winner of the coveted El Guapo trophy (nice job, Commissioner!):

El Guapo stats:

• Height: 5½”
• Weight: ½ lb.
• Base: marble
• Noggin: bobble

The secrets to success this year:

• Key double-up-combo big weeks of Big Ben to Hines Ward.
• A big-play go-big-or-go-home San Diego Chargers defense.
• Reliable TDs from Chris Cooley in our peculiar TE-favoring scoring system.
• T.J. Houshmanzadeh.

Busts this year:

• Frank Gore.
• Ronnie Brown and the ineffective Jesse Chatman handcuff.

But that’s not all. Winning El Guapo was only half the battle. Bringing El Guapo home required Sisyphusian effort as well. The trophy was sent to my home address (ask me for my work address next year, please), which resulted in a “We Deliver For You!” slip left at the door and a 5-day delay to wait for the weekend to get a chance to go to the post office for pickup.

I’m sure that the USPS, FedEx, DHL, UPS, Airborne Express, etc., all have similar hub systems where packages go to some processing center before final delivery to its final destination. There ought to be a way for recipients to somehow register with these delivery services so that:

• I register with USPS or FedEx or UPS or whomever.
• If someone sends me a package, the delivery service sends me an e-mail telling me something is coming my way.
• I go to their website or something and provide instructions on what to do: continue delivery, deliver to alternate address (e.g., my office, where I am every day), or hold because I’m on vacation for three weeks and won’t be around.
• Everybody wins: the recipient doesn’t have to make a pickup run, the delivery service doesn’t have to make a wasted delivery run, and the planet wins because of less wasted gas and traffic.

Hyde St. Pier is actually part of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. The highlights for me:

• Enough for locals to see, if you like looking at beaches and boats and national historical park kinds of stuff.
• Enough for tourists to see (it’s very close to Ghirardelli Square).
• Not as crowded as Fisherman’s Wharf.

In unrelated news, I’m migrating my photos over to use Gallery. I’m not very happy about it, but I think it’s inevitable. The main reason for going to Gallery is that I want to get some kind of commenting system in place for the photos. But everything else that made me like QuickyPix still makes me sad:

• Gallery: 1810 files, 307599 lines of PHP and “smarty” template code. QuickyPix: 10 files, 2500 lines of Python.
• Database backend is required for Gallery, but that’s not a big deal since I’m running WordPress anyway.
• Gallery themeing looks like it will be a huge pain. I’m already thinking I’m giving up on getting the photos to look integrated with the rest of the website.

On the other hand, I gain:

• Comments.
• Lots of other nice little features that I don’t necessarily care about that much, but are neat: random rotating photo, and a few WordPress-related plugins that I might check out someday (I’m pessimistic about my prospects here).
• Addressability of single photos: individual photos can be linked to; my QuickyPix setup only allowed addressability of whole albums.

My first Macworld Expo. I didn’t go to the Keynote speech; I just got a free exhibits-only pass, and went on Wednesday after all the Mac fanatics got their fix.

This is also my first trade-show that was not one geared towards enterprise infrastructure. It was immediately apparent on the exhibit floor:

• At an enterprise-vendor trade show, everyone pays (albeit employers usually pay), so both the exhibitors and the attendees seem to be more “serious” about the exhibit floor, and everyone is more engaged. It is relatively easy to get into the Macworld exhibit halls for free, so you have lots of “non-serious” browsers. In return, the exhibitors aren’t necessarily as aggressive about tracking down people who are just idly standing around; they figure you’re just a gawker.
• At an enterprise-vendor trade show, the product is generally available for display, but people aren’t actually selling the product right then and there, since the purchase cycle usually goes through some million-dollar purchasing process, and requires racking some pizza-box machine into a cabinet. At Macworld, there were *so* many vendors of laptop cases, sleeves, iPod skins, headphone accessories, it almost looked like a flea market or some street bazaar. Presumably they are there to sell to retailers (Best Buy, Target, etc.) who would be presumably paying some employees to go check out what is new this year. Although, of the consumer products available for sale, most had an “expo” rate that was up to 50% off their list price.

The one cool thing was some actual space where the new products were being demonstrated - iPhones, iPods, and of course, the new MacBook Air:

I was kind of underwhelmed:

• Heavier than expected. It’s still pretty light as far as laptops and portables go, and it is certainly thin and stylish, but I think calling it “Air” is a bit premature.
• I’m not a fan of the chiclet-style MacBook-like keyboard. I prefer the MacBook Pro keyboard.

But it is kind of neat to be able to provide a first-person description of it without having to wait two months to see one in an Apple store :).

Am I glad I went? Sure. Will I go again? Sure, there is enough to see to keep any computer geek happy (even a non-Machead like myself). Would I line up at 5am in the morning? No way.

The parents came to visit us in SF for a change (usually we fly to see them); we took them to Golden Gate Park, Land’s End, the V.A. Medical Center, and Ocean Beach.

I did notice two quirks of Mac behavior that were inferior to my former Windows digital-photo workflow:

• The Canon PowerShot SD800IS provides the proper EXIF orientation information in its photos, but the embedded thumbnails are incorrect (or at least, the Mac Finder gets it wrong and shows all thumbnails in landscape orientation).
• When importing photos from the camera, iPhoto generates filesystem timestamps using the time of import rather than with the time the photo was taken (the SD card filesystem timestamp of the image is not preserved).

I discovered the joy that is jhead, conveniently available as a MacPort:

• Fix thumbnail orientation: jhead -autorot *
• Fix filesystem timestamps to match EXIF information: jhead -ft *

jhead isn’t truly nerdcore: instead of linking with the jpegtran library, it assumes a pre-existing installation of the jpegtran programs and just calls system(3). Kind of lame, but whatever; it gets the job done.