Hawaii, so far...

 I landed in Hawaii at 8pm Sunday. At 6:30am Monday, I was at base in town, waiting to head up to the work site.  Worked all day Monday.  Spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday paying bills, getting back in touch with friends, and getting a little less jet-lagged and sleep-deprived.  Worked all day again Friday.  Now I've got about an hour before I drive to the airport to drop off the rental car.  (I figured 1 week of rental car would be enough for me to settle in and get things done.)

I was surprised to have the 3 days off in mid-week; I had hoped to get more hours.  But I may pick some up next week since it was too windy today to finish a thing or two.  I've got a lot of other stuff scheduled in the remainder of my time here, involving at least 3 of my different part-time jobs.

Right now, I feel totally drained (not uncommon after a 10-hour shift up and down) and a little queasy (to be expected after being in the back seat for the winding 13700' descent).  I'll find something minor to eat, maybe a few ounces of peanuts, go home, rest for a few minutes, then go to the airport and either bike or walk back, maybe stopping for dinner along the way if I feel up to it.

I'm not setting any alarms for tomorrow morning.  I'm looking forward to a weekend that doesn't involve work or travel!

I'm also looking forward to next Wednesday, when they tell me I will once again have DSL. I've been coming to the office on my days off just to check my email and stuff.  It'll be nice to stop doing that. :)

Still got plenty of stuff to do around the house, too.  At least the dishes I washed before I left in January didn't magically become dirty again!  But I have to tidy up in general.

Old-School Aluminizing on Mauna Kea

This week, the 88-inch primary mirror in the University of Hawaii's telescope on Mauna Kea got re-coated with aluminum. This involved a whole lot of steps, not much in the way of automation because the whole thing was built before I was born, and healthy application of brute force.

 

Happy Birthday, George Carlin

 Happy 70th Birthday to George Carlin, the man who brought us such wisdom as:

"So far, this is the oldest I've been."

"If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?"

"I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed."

and the blessing:

"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house."

Maybe, just maybe, oil folks shouldn't run everything?

Back in the early days of this millennium, with Iraq about as much of a pariah on the international scene as it tended to be, the UN implemented an "oil-for-food" program under which Iraq was able to sell a limited amount of oil in exchange for food aid.

Of course, as is often the case with international aid, the folks in charge (i.e. Saddam Hussein and friends) ended up with more of the aid than the folks on the bottom. Unsurprisingly, there was quite a scandal over all this, which led to many conservatives rightly calling for an investigation.

An investigation or two duly occurred, and revealed (among other things) that the Hussein regime had imposed special "taxes" on the oil that was sold... which meant that from 2000-2002, cold, hard cash was going from American oil companies to Saddam Hussein and company, who cheerily spent it on weapons and influence, instead of food.

In one case, the investigation found out that when the practice started in the summer of 2000, the public policy committee of Chevron's board of directors had every reason to be aware of what was going on, and that the company participated in the kickbacks anyway, not even stopping after Chevron's president pointed out the illegality of it in late January of 2001.

Of course, that observation came just days after the chair of that committee left Chevron, after 10 years on its board, to accept a position as National Security Advisor in the Bush administration.

Yep, Condoleeza Rice, who's now Secretary of State.

They say, "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer," but I'm a little unclear on how it's a good thing to appoint someone National Security Advisor, let alone Secretary of State, whose most recent resumé entry involved overseeing (or knowingly overlooking) the payment of millions in illegal kickbacks to a rogue dictator.

Chicken chicken chicken

Doug Zongker's PowerPoint talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, demonstrating how important presentation style and digrams can be when, as is often the case, one is presenting information that is utterly without meaning.

If you have difficulty seeing any of the illustrations in the video, you can download a PDF of the "paper" from Doug's site.

My Day Wasn't Like Yours

And your day wasn't like mine.

I can say this without even having the slightest idea what your day was like. I can say it with a reasonably high level of certainty. And I can also say with a reasonably high degree of certainty that you should be glad your day wasn't like mine.

My day started somewhere around 7 due to various alarm clocks going off. I rolled over, checked my email, did some work-related stuff, eventually got up, showered, dressed, and wandered over to the United Nations somewhere around 9 since the day's negotiating would begin at 10.

The morning was fairly typical - well, by my definition of typical. I took a bunch of pictures of diplomats generally not agreeing about anything, got in touch with teammates in Los Angeles and Nairobi to make sure they had flights to Germany next week (one of them will even be on a flight with me!), and stuff like that.

I came back from the cafeteria during lunch with a fruit salad... and found two instant messages waiting for me, both saying to call another teammate who's a retired diplomat from Asia. I called and found out that he hadn't been allowed onto the first of 3 flights he was going to take to get to Africa, because his itinerary involved 2 stops in European countries that are parties to the Schengen visa agreement, and an obscure rule none of us had ever heard of says that if he was flying through the Schengen area, he needed some kind of transit visa - arranged in advance - to make more than one stop.

It took me less than an hour to get him a new routing by way of New York and Atlanta. Fortunately, he has a visa for the US! It took another hour to get his original tickets canceled and refunded, during which I got to miss an hour of diplomats disagreeing (the high point of my day, to be sure). Then it was back into the meeting for more photos and all that.

The main meeting sessions went until 5 or 6, then there were some contact groups. I processed photos, wandered around taking more, and so on and so forth. I had the day's web page ready for proofreading by around 9 PM, headed back to the office around 10, set up and configured a network storage device that had been delivered, made some tweaks to the web page, published it, and desktop-published the day's bulletin for distribution tomorrow morning, helping with some editing of the text in the process.

Oh, and lest you think I forgot to mention dinner - no, that happened after work. Around half past 1 in the morning.

Better still, Friday will be the final day of the conference - so there's no telling how late things might go!

Whee.

MacBook Wi-Fi Disconnect Problem - Solved!

For the last eight months, my MacBook exhibited the undesirable behavior that affects some members of the species. Namely:

1. It will randomly lose track of the Internet, despite still showing full Wi-Fi signal strength in the menu bar.
2. After #1 occurs, turning Airport off and on won't result in it actually finding things again.
3. After #1 occurs and the machine is rebooted, it may completely forget that it even has an Airport card.

I googled fairly extensively, and have narrowed it down to one of the following:

1. The Airport card isn't seated correctly
2. The Airport antenna isn't connected to the card correctly
3. There's something wrong with the card's firmware
4. There's something wrong with our Netgear wireless router's firmware
5. There's something wrong with the software

In other words, I didn't really narrow it down at all. It was either hardware, firmware, or software. The only thing I knew it wasn't was human error. :) Of course, given that another MacBook purchased at the same time wasn't exhibiting the same behavior (knock on black polycarbonate), and given that the firmware and software on the two machines should be identical... hmm.

Anyway, I wound up in New York for a few weeks for some meetings, and made it down to south Jersey to visit my folks for the weekend. Dad and I went over to the Apple Store at Sagemore in Marlton/Evesham on Saturday, but their next available Genius Bar appointment was 1:40 PM on Sunday, so I took that one.

We got there about 1:30 PM, went to the Genius Bar. Chris came out from the back, looked at the laptop, booted it off their network server (cool trick!) and tried some diagnostics, none of which helped. He checked and confirmed that they did have a replacement AirPort card in stock (they have spare parts for repairs) and took less than a half-hour to swap it in... so I'm back on wireless!

It's still a wee bit wonky here and there - it'll show me a network as being available, but then say there was a problem joining it, but then join it just fine if I pick "other" and tell it the name, but then fall off a minute later, but then join it from the available-networks menu. ;) But that may just be some lingering confusion on its part from having just undergone WiFi-transplant surgery!