Statrix Redux

A new laptop was the verdict, on the house! Thanks to an excellent Apple Store employee, Bobby P. at the Ala Moana store, I have a new Macbook.
I’ve written before about how much I like my Macbook and about how big a lemon the particular one I had was. I have friends who haven’t had a lick of trouble with theirs and my desktop has had a lot less trouble so I’m not indicting the Macbook, just the one I had. In between trouble, it was great. Now it’s gone.
Not only did I get a new one, but I got the top of the line Macbook – black with a 250GB drive and 2.4Ghz processor. Sweet.

Bobby told me that he’d looked through my service record and came the conclusion that I should have my computer replaced with a new one. He went to his manager and said, “I want to give this guy a new computer.” Apparently the manager agreed because I got a phone call asking if it was okay to go ahead with the swap. Ummm…I had to think about that one for…uh…I don’t know, may be a half a second – just long enough for it to register on my cortex.
I hadn’t asked for a new one. I hadn’t even suggested it. Indeed I just said I hoped I could get it last another year. So I really, really, really wasn’t expecting this. I would have been happy with just a repair, even though it was going to take 7-10 days (my experience shows it be closer to 7 than 10).
Bobby, you are the the MAN! Apple, you are tops.
I’ve been recommending Apple, and this particular laptop, in spite of the troubles I’ve had so all I can say is, Apple come through!
Aloha!
I’m officially a

Here in Hawaii we’ve always had high gas prices compared to other places. I recall that in the early 70’s when my family moved to Milwaukee during the height of the “73 oil crisis” the price of gas got up to the same price we’d already been paying in Honolulu, or so it seemed.
I’ve been back in Honolulu for 25 years and have yet to own a car. But I feel the crunch when it comes to airline fares. You see, just to visit my mom I have to fly to another island.
What’s the point of all this? I’ve been booking trips.
The first is, not coincidentally, a trip to visit my folks on Father’s Day weekend. That trip is costing me about 30% more than the same flight (Honolulu-Hilo) did back in April when I visited. Sigh.
Next up is a trip to Mexico DF. Which reminds me, I love TripAdvisor. It helped me pick my hotel for this trip and what a deal it is. I’ll have more on that later.
This trip was actually a bargain. If you’ll recall I went to Alaska back in March. Alaska Airlines flies non-stop from Honolulu to Anchorage and that’s how I booked my flight. A couple of weeks before my trip they called and said they’d overbooked my return. I was welcome to stay on the flight, but if I took a different flight they’d give me a free round trip ticket from Honolulu to anywhere they fly. They fly to Mexcio. 🙂
I had to book the ticket at the airport instead of online because I had to physically present the certificate they sent me which meant I had to “pay” the added cost of doing business with a live human being. I checked the price of the flights I’d need to take online and it came to about $1500. When I went to the airport with my certificate the same flights cost $1900.
Mind you, I only paid $60 in taxes for the flight, but I was shocked that there would have been a $400 difference based on where I booked my flight.
Finally, and back to the price of fuel, I booked a flight to Oakland CA for a conference next March. I’m actually flying in and out of SFO (where I always get the soup at the San Francisco Soup Company). Why book so early?
Well I had just enough United Airlines miles to get the trip for free (well $5 actually). From Hawaii that is 35,000 miles. I was afraid, perhaps wrongly, that if the price of fuel keeps rising, United (and, to be fair, other airlines) might raise the mileage requirement for an award ticket. Since I’m going anyway, no point in waiting.
On the whole I think I’ve done rather well during this fuel crisis. Combined my flights to Mexico and Oakand are costing me less than visiting my folks for a weekend on an island that’s about half an hour away by air. Go figure. 🙂
Aloha!

Sunset in Waikiki
Just playing with my new camcorder!
Aloha

Get back to work

Originally uploaded by StatrixBob

Again it’s been a while since I’ve worked on this blog. Well maybe I’m back. 🙂 The image is from the temple next door to my workplace and certainly looks like a bad boss “encouraging” compliance.

In any case, everything around here has been upgraded. WP 2.5.1 and the newest K2 theme. Good stuff.

Aloha!

It’s been a long time. I did Alaska – it would be nicer in the summer I’m sure. I will say the folks are really nice though.
Then I got sick. I was out for 2 weeks and had no energy to do anything.
Then I went to the Big Island for a bit.
So basically I haven’t been around. Now I’m trying to upgrade this WordPress to 2.5 and running into all the problems one can with k2. Ouch. I’ve deactivated k2 for a bit, so hopefully things will settle down and I can figure out what to do. Sigh.
it’s always something.
Okay, so far so good…let’s see how long it lasts.
This is important because I’m going to have to upgrade that other site sooner or later too and I’ve been putting it off.
Aloha!

Here’s the view from my hotel room in Anchorage!

All good things must come to pass I guess. Or perhaps I should just get a portable DVD burner.
The problem…
After getting my Eee up and running with the Sierra 881U card I find that now I’m getting a segmentation fault pretty much every time I boot up. I’m not sure why it would cease to work, but it has.
It’s not dead, and seems to work fine on my other laptops running Fedora 8 and OS X Leopard respectively, but on the Eee something goes horribly awry at boot time. The fix seems to be to F9 at boot up and factory restore the whole machine, then reload the driver, the scripts, so on and so forth. It’s a pain.
I’m looking around for an answer, but I’m coming around the idea that I may have to permanently go with a different OS. I like Eeedora and suspect I could get it to work eventually, but I’m taking off next week and had hoped to have it with me. Sigh.
The best thing I can think of doing at this point is getting a portable DVD burner/reader and starting fresh from the factory DVD (CD?). Or, if that doesn’t work, putting XP on it (gasp) until I get back from Alaska.
At least, and it’s no small thing, at least I’m learning a lot.
Aloha!

I generally listen to a fairly narrow range of music at any one time. I’m not quite as bad as a friend of mine who more or less plays one CD over and over until she’s done with it, but I can get close. That’s why I was so pleased to find www.pandora.com.
Essentially it’s a site that lets you pick song or artists as the basis for constructing your own music “station.” That is, putting in an artist will play that artist, as well as other artisits who have been judged to be similar.
For instance my Lucinda Williams station has been playing Neko Case, Wilco, Cowboy Junkies, as well as some artists I hadn’t heard of like Brandi Carlile and Lucy Kaplansky.
The whole thing is part of the Music Genome Project which, frankly, I’d never heard of before, but there you go. Essentially it measures music by a number of attributes, then finds other music with similar attributes. It seems to work pretty well.
It’s been around for a couple of years it seems, so I’m once again quite behind the times. Ah me. 🙂
In a completely different vein my list draft for this years MLB Fantasy Baseball came through. Here they are in no particular order.
Players

• Mike Napoli (C , LAA)
• Mark Teixeira (1B , ATL)
• Dan Uggla (2B , FLA)
• Alex Rodriguez (3B , NYY)
• Edgar Renteria (SS , DET)
• Shane Victorino (OF , PHI)
• Nick Markakis (OF , BAL)
• Bobby Abreu (OF , NYY)
• Ramon Hernandez (C , BAL)
• Jason Bartlett (SS , TB)
• Brendan Harris (2B,SS , MIN)
• Ty Wigginton (1B,2B,3B , HOU)
• Michael Cuddyer (OF , MIN)

Pitching Staffs

• San Francisco Giants (P , SF)
• New York Mets (P , NYM)

Aloha!

This past weekend was our first weekend of games in the “new” four game format with a doubleheader on Saturday. I went to the game Friday, as documented on this blog. On Saturday I had to miss the first game as I had some meetings to attend and I’m sorry I missed that game as it was the last we were to win over the weekend.
The game I saw on Saturday was not a good outing. We lost 6-5 which sounds closer than it was. Our 5 came from a late rally that wasn’t quite enough. While exciting, most of the game belonged to the Dons. You can read about it on UH’s site.
Sunday was worse. The only thing that seemed to be working for the Bows was the new Domo Turf which was playable in the continual misting and rain for the first several innings. It cleared up late in the game and turned into a lovely day, but about all that can be said of this game was that it was better than no baseball at all. Here’s the recap from UH. I’ve no scoresheets for this one because the rain made it too difficult to handle and umbrella and a pencil. Sigh.

The Rainbow bats came alive last night when we beat the SF Dons 10 to 4. It wasn’t always pretty, Matt Daly had a bad inning or two, but the job got done with 17 hits spread out nicely.
Dons

Rainbows