Zibblog

Recently, Leslie and I took a quick trip to the big island of Hawaii. I had never been to Hawaii, but I’ve heard to not necessarily judge Hawaii by the big island. For the most part, it was pretty much what I expected. We were staying in a time share near Kona, so we were only about a 45 minute drive from the airport. We felt like it might be nice to have something with four wheel drive if we wanted to see waterfalls and such, so we ended up with the Jeep in the picture.

We left late afternoon on a Thursday, which got us there with enough time for dinner and sleep. The place that we were staying at included a kitchen and living room, so we didn’t have to go out for breakfast. On Friday, we decided to stay close since we were going on a dinner luau cruise. The cruise was about what you would expect. They had a live band along with dancers that would dance around the isles and on the tables. I didn’t have the heart to tell Leslie that the wine I brought back from the bar was box wine, but she probably had her suspicions when I told her that the bartender had suggested I bring back some ice for the wine since it was warm. After all of the food had been taken away, everyone was invited to dance on the tables to the sort of stuff you’ll find played at weddings when they want everyone to dance. My personal highlight was when Leslie and one of the dancers started doing the electric slide. The rest of us around that table will a little intimidated at the quality of the dancing, so I decided to just take pictures.

In an effort to pack in as much as possible, much of Saturday was spent driving to various parts of the island seeing the volcanoes and waterfalls. The best waterfall we saw was a triple waterfall at one of the botanical gardens. We drove around the volcano park, which was pretty impressive for someone that had never been to a volcano in person. Most of Sunday was spent shopping before we flew back Sunday night. If you want to see some more pictures, I put some of the more interesting ones in a flick photoset. I’ll admit that it wasn’t the most exciting trip that I’ve ever had, but Kona is a great place to go if you want the kind of vacation where you just wander around and chill out most of the time.

I decided the other day that since I finally have much of my condo cleaned up, organized, and otherwise fixed (at least until more plumbing issues rear their ugly hair), I should start getting more productive again. One thing that means is starting to get back into the swing of blog posting. If for no other reason than to organize my thoughts. This week should bring more content to the zibblog, but I won’t promise that the content will actually be good.

The other day, I felt like I’d gotten to the point on my windows pc where there was simply too much clutter. Too many old registry entries, half uninstalled applications, etc., so I figured that I’d reinstall windows. At this point, I put in the install CD, started up the machine, and watched it try and find a driver for my SATA hard drive. Alas, it was unsuccessful. I then remembered that when I first installed windows, I was installing onto an IDE drive which I’d replaced with the 10k rpm drive. After some searching, I found some drivers and a floppy disc image, so I figured I was all set.

If you’ve ever seen my shuttle pc, you’d know that it doesn’t have a floppy drive. This is why I keep around a floppy drive that I can connect to the motherboard in case I have to do this sort of thing. After connecting up the floppy drive, it found the correct drive, but windows still had some issues doing the install. A few google searches later, I found out about “slipstreaming” a windows installer (this is where all of my windows using friends think “duh, why didn’t you think of that in the first place”). It turns out that there are programs like nLite that will allow you to take an existing windows installer and modify it to include other drivers, service packs, etc. I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to point nLite at the drivers I had found, create a CD with the drivers included, and do the full windows installation from CD.

Today, I went with JB and Chris to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo fairgrounds. JB had reminded me that I had originally intended to go because it was one of those events that was so close that I couldn’t in good conscience not go. All in all, it was pretty fun. It was really geeky, but geeky in an all over the place kind of way. There were the random renaissance fair booths scattered all over, but a lot of the booths were individuals that had put together cool pieces of art/tech. Of the corporate booths, Yahoo and Microsoft probably had the biggest presence there. None of us were convinced to go out an buy an Oragami device even after playing with them in the Microsoft area. SixApart was there (mostly promoting Live Journal it seemed), but I kept myself from talking trash. There was a fairly large train set involving many, many legos that was really fun to watch.

The highpoint of the day was watching Segway Polo on a really small field. We started watching a game and I turned to JB and asked, “Is that Woz playing?” A short while later Woz said something and JB and I agreed that it must be Woz. I started thinking that it was too bad that I didn’t have my camera, but then I figured that because of the sort of event that it was, I should be able to find a photo on flickr.

I’d recommend the event to most people if they’re thinking about trying it next year. I bet that it will probably be slightly bigger and better in the future.

While my car is in the shop, I’m driving a rental car. For some reason, I decided that I needed to make a new mix for listening to in the rental car. The mix is presented below in all its glory. It was limited by the amount of space on a single CD so great songs like Dust in the Wind and Breakfast at Tiffany’s didn’t quite make the cut. Before you ask, I do believe that I own a legal copy of everything in the playlist. I’m sure that some of you will chuckle at some of the songs, and I can only think of about 3 people who read my blog that have probably ever heard of Larry Gatlin.

1. If You’re Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows) – Rodney Atkins
2. Something More – Sugarland
3. These Words – Natasha Bedingfield
4. Nothin’ to Lose – Josh Gracin
5. You’re Beautiful – James Blunt
6. Sophmore Slump or Comeback of the Year – Fall Out Boy
7. Did You Get My Message? – Jason Mraz
8. All the Gold in California – Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers
9. Some Beach – Blake Shelton
10. It’s For The Best – Straylight Run
11. Change – Sons of the Desert
12. I Know I Know I Know – Tegan and Sara
13. Don’t Ever – Missy Higgins
14. Numb – Linkin Park
15. Where Does the Good Go? – Tegan and Sara
16. Bubble Pop Electric Feat Joh – Gwen Stefani
17. Geek In The Pink – Jason Mraz
18. Come By Me – Harry Connick, Jr.
19. Scar – Missy Higgins
20. Small Town – John Mellencamp
21. White Kids Love Hip Hop – MC Chris
22. If Your Gonna – Natasha Bedingfield

If you use iTunes, I recommend finding any listening to the first track as an example that you can have a song about how much life can suck and still have it be upbeat and catchy.

Update: Scott suggested that I make an iTunes iMix out of it and since I put it together in iTunes anyway, I went ahead and published the iMix here. The odd thing is the songs that aren’t on iTunes like Numb by Linkin Park.

Yesterday, I was listening to the Science Friday Podcast and they had an interesting segment on how scientists believe they have discovered a gene that help predict likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes. It seems to be very common on my mother’s side of the family (my mother, uncle, and multiple cousins have it), which I didn’t really know about until my mom was diagnosed. I originally thought it would be nice if you could have a test in a few years and get a basic percentage of how likely it was, but I now wonder if I would just turn into a hypochondriac if they started finding genes for all sorts of diseases.