Aloha Airlines, one of the more important carriers to Hawai'i, entered bankruptcy a few weeks ago and this morning announced the grounding of their passenger fleet effective tomorrow.

We have a friend in town who's stranded. We love having her, but she appears a little stressed. She doesn't drink, either, so I can't ease her mind with a mai tai.

This photo was taken by Ron Dahlquist yesterday off Maui.

Personally, I got up early to go for a swim in a whale-rich bay this morning and the surf was up and I forgot to shave so my mask kept flooding. It sucked (for sufficiently small values of "sucked").

The seas are filled with humpbacks, both breeding and nursing. If you go in the water, you can hear them a little if you're on the surface, but if you can swim down 5' or so, it can be unbelievable.

Yesterday, we were at Kekaha Kai and a whale swam by about 50 yards away (did I see it underwater? No, I did not. Darn.). They were breaching and slapping tails all over.

Plus, we get surf, but it's very user-friendly (maybe 2-3'). So tall enough to ride, but small enough to swim through very safely. Kekaha Kai is a hot place to go boogie-boarding and I was actually swimming around inside the waves, watching people take off.

Which was cool until my camera flooded. It was just a cheap submersible disposable from Longs, but still, what a rip. Good thing that whale didn't swim by!

This is a photo by Wayne Levin, an incredible photographer who stars in a new video for Hawaiian tourism

While I'm at it, this is one Wayne took of Tina, bluewater freediving near a fish-aggregating buoy:

A year ago I said that HDTV didn't make sense for me. But with the arrival of Tivo HD, the dollar weakening and making dramatic price drops less likely, and the Red Sox making the playoffs, I decided to make the jump and bought a Philips 42".

The biggest problem is that once you see high-definition channels in your own home side-by-side with standard definition, the standard definition channels look horrible. We actually had the TV for a couple days before I got the HD cable package and we were like "OK, definitely more noticeable compression and blurriness on the bigger screen, but that's fine." And then I got the set-top box and saw how much better the pictures look.

Then, all the trouble started. I chose to stick with Oceanic Time-Warner Cable rather than satellites because to receive HD satellite programming in Hawaii, you have to place two 2.5m dishes in your yard! Our neighbors have them and they're huge and ugly -- a non-starter for us. Plus, my Tivo HD was winging its way island-ward. All I would do is order some CableCards and life would be good.

Well.

Oceanic TWC no longer provides CableCards for HD. You can get a CableCard for SD channels, but if you want HD, you have to use one of their set-top boxes or DVRs. I was a little stunned, but I figured "OK, Tivo had this figured out from the start. So I'll take the set-top box, hook it into Tivo, and use Tivo's magic IR blasters to control the set-top box."

Well.

Turns out that Tivo HD has no facility for inputting HD other than CableCards. (And, just to make it complicated, some people are saying that Oceanic TWC can not legally convert-to-incompatible-form the HD streams of the networks, which provide the majority of the HD content I'd be looking to Tivo (at least until Battlestar Galactica restarts).) (If you thought that forbidding just this kind of practice was the whole point of CableCards, join the crowd.)

So I left my Tivo HD in the box and set up my old Tivo to control the set-top box with IR blasters. "If I need to watch HD, I'll watch it live." Which ticked me off no end. Not only is watching live TV unthinkable after you've gotten used to a DVR, watching live sports in Hawai'i is difficult due to the 3 hour time shift.

Even worse, the picture quality on shows recorded via the set-top box is noticeably worse than shows from the previous week, when they were recorded straight off our previous non-digital cable service. I suspect this has to do with double-compression: we had been recording analog and applying Tivo's compression to it; now we have a digitally-compressed stream decoded by the set-top box, sent to the Tivo and recompressed, naturally resulting in many more artifacts and general degradation of quality.

So to summarize:

• HD picture quality is mind-blowing, but we only get about a dozen channels in HD (networks, TBS and TNT, Discovery, and National Geographic, and then two showcase/movie channels).
• If I want to time-shift HD, I have to use Oceanic's DVR, which if it's anything like their set-top box interface, will be hideous
• I can use Tivo, but only on SD channels.
• I can use Tivo HD, which will probably record SD channels better, but I'll still have to keep the set-top box near the TV in case I want to watch HD. Plus, Tivo HD has a monthly fee.
• I can use my old Tivo, in which case
• Picture quality via the set-top box is hideous, or
• I can go back to basic cable and never be able to see HD broadcasting
• Oh, and then when I went to watch a rented HD DVD movie last night, I ran afoul of what smells tremendously like some form of DRM .

I'm definitely going to live with the status quo through the playoffs (or at least through the Red Sox run). Manny Ramirez' homerun last night looked awesome in HD.

But after that, I have no idea what I'm going to do.

In the past 96 hours, I've been exposed to:

• meteors,
• an earthquake,
• a hurricane,
• a tsunami watch,
• annoying frogs (which, while not exactly toads, are still amphibians), and
• annoying crickets (which, while not exactly locusts, are still Orthopterids).

I feel like I should return that tiki to the cave...

We stayed over Tom & Lana Plum's house last night, hoping to take advantage of their very dark skies to see the Perseids. Slept on the porch on thin mattresses, beautiful milky way / Sagittarius / Scorpio in the evening hours. Saw a couple nice earth-skimmers around midnight, and then dozed fitfully until 4AM for the "big show." Unfortunately, large portions of the sky were overcast so that only 1st magnitude stars shone through, and there was only a keyhole near Orion that gave a glimpse of a few meteors.

 Drove home early to talk to our wall construction guys and I now see that Hurricane Flossie is projected to remain a Category 3 as it passes by and if it's north of the projected track at all, it will hit the Big Island. We should get significant protection from Mauna Loa and Hualalai mountains as long as the eye stays south of us and we're hit by the East-to-West portion. If the eye tracks north and we get West-to-East, that could potentially suck.

Since I blogged the pause and restart of Pu'u O'o, for completeness I will report that the eruption on The Big Island of Hawai'i has not only returned, it's in probably the most visually exciting phase it's been in in years. After the Father's Day earthquake swarm, the lava being fed to the surface has apparently moved "downrift" of the Pu'u O'o crater and in the past week has found the surface in what's called a "fissure eruption."

 This morning's update speaks of a 100M-wide flow of lava (the picture is of a flow that was apparently around 10M across). If you want to see lava, you should know:

• The hundreds-of-feet tall lava fountains in the advertisements happened for a few days twenty-four years ago,
• From a distance of more than a few dozen yards, during daylight hours, flowing lava doesn't look spectacular (the surface rock's heat-related red component is very largely overwhelmed by the ambient light of the tropics). (Hmmm.... if your camcorder / digital camera has an infrared "night-shot" mode ... )
• Within a few dozen yards, it's about the third-most amazing thing you'll ever see
• At night, even from a distance, flowing lava is probably the second-most amazing thing you'll ever see. The visible red light from the heat is visible from many miles away.
• Being within a few dozen yards of lava entering the ocean at night is the single most amazing thing you'll ever see.

Right now, apparently the fissure eruption is throwing up some 2M high fountains. My guess is that this is among the best stuff you'll ever see from a helicopter.

In summary, as of 7/28/2007:

• Eruption's back on and vog has returned (bummer)
• You probably can't see any of this from land at the moment, but the lava will very likely eventually find its way off the ridge its on and be visible, at night, from a distance
• There are no legal hikes with a vantage point of the current eruption
• A helicopter tour of the fissure eruption might give you a once-in-a-decade view

All of this will probably change within a week or so. If you're planning on being a lava tourist, absolutely check out the daily eruption report.

Lava has reemerged at Pu'u O'o vent, creating a vast, slowly circulating lake of lava, as captured from the USGS cams at dawn on 7/8/07. During the day, it doesn't look like much, but try the live Pu'u O'o Webcams around dusk (7-9 Hawaiian) or before dawn (~5:30 AM Hawaiian) and you should see a rare sight.

(Click image for 1920 x 480 version)

After Pele rolled over, she's gone into a deeper slumber and the Big Island is experiencing the lowest level of volcanic activity since 1983. Such pauses have happened twice before during the current 24-year-long eruption and previously lasted just a few weeks.

The effect on the Kona (leeward) side of the island is dramatic. For the whole time I've known this island, the 14,000' Mauna Loa creates a huge atmospheric eddy in which the volcanic aerosols are transformed into "vog" (volcanic smog). This makes Kona "normally" hazy, with an indistinct horizon and, for some, noticeable effects when exercising. A few times per year, when the winds shift, and the sky becomes blue, it's literally like a scrim being lifted. It's been like that every day for the past couple weeks.

No one expects this pause to be long-lasting, but for the moment, it's marvelous.

A few weeks ago, Scottevest Cargo Shorts were on sale. I've never owned a Scottevest product before, but they're well-reviewed, and if there's one piece of clothing a Hawaiian geek requires, it's capacious cargo shorts.

They're quite good looking and can handle a full load of iPod, wallet, digital camera, and phone. However, they have a critical flaw, of which I'm surprised given the company's clear understanding of their audience: there is no pocket that accommodates a Moleskine Reporter Notebook (or the slightly smaller and more casual Sherbert Notes 7"x5"). The "big" pockets on the Cargo Shorts are cut with an angled entry that writing-sized notebooks can't negotiate (see photo).

Of course the shorts can handle notecards or memo pads, which are sufficient for to-do lists and Hipster PDAs, but have you ever tried to record a non-trivial thought on a memo pad? Doesn't work.

Perhaps the next release will solve this critical bug.

A big earthquake swarm on the SE side of the island is "consistent with a shallow intrusion of magma" at Kilauea / Pu'u O'o. They don't predict eruptions, but I have a feeling that Pele might be restless. Luckily, that's 60 miles away and on the other side of a 13,000 foot mountain.

I know people love Skype, but my experience using it from Hawai'i has always been terrible -- horrid echo, constant break up -- and on my recent trip to Panama, it was equally useless for calling to Hawai'i. That's all I have to say about that.

My friend Doug has apparently gotten his converted Karmann Ghia onto the road...

Just back from a 4-day mini-vacation in Kauai, hiker's paradise (well, if your idea of paradise is a hike in the rain to the world's highest swamp along knife-edge ridges with 3,000' drops...) Looks like I missed lots of interesting goings-on and Mix is going to generate tons of posts, so back to work. In the meantime, you can check out some photos at Flickr.

The weekend box office receipts aren't yet published, but if Makalapua Cinemas in Kailua Kona are any benchmark of the American viewing population (and they aren't), I predict that 300 will either set or approach record revenues.

We actually saw Zodiac, which was excellent (it's ending challenges you to consider the gap between "preponderance of evidence" and "beyond a reasonable doubt," and does so not from an authorially introduced ambiguity, but from the question of human obsession projecting patterns into mountains of circumstantial evidence), but there were huge lines for the multiple screens showing 300.

But the real joy was two boys in line locked in combat on the battleground of Thermopylae. 

Now, it may be that the history of the Greco-Persian wars are taught in some crusty ivy-shrouded prep school in Connecticut, but I'm quite certain that it's not in any curriculum in Hawai'i. And, let's be honest, it's not in that category of "things a curious teenager might be expected to know." That there was a city-state called Sparta -- sure. That they were famous warriors -- okay. Other than that, I insist that everything I heard was either made up on the spot or gleaned from Wikipedia in anticipation of the movie.

Which is fine. That's how I learned about the battle of Thermopylae. But what was classic was that these two young men were trying to impress several lovely young women and, locked in intellectual battle, carried themselves well beyond their depth. And, having misremembered vital details of the Wikipedia article they found themselves not only (wrongly) explaining the outcome of the battle, they were asked by the young ladies what happened next in the war. Which they didn't know. The one lad's courage failed and he stammered something "Well, watch the movie," while the other, bold warrior, took the chance and won the battle-for-fair-hearts by saying that the Persians retreated. And then, sadly, I had to go get my bucket of popcorn.

 Human drama. It never changes. He was a smart kid and I hope that he finesses his way out of his problem. He'd done the critical thing: getting the girls interested. Enthusiasm, confidence, a good story: Well done. But, my boy, you have to know "what happens next?"

 Okay, this is pure gloating, but I get paid (or, at least, can justify time spent on...) to think about things as diverse as quantum computing, Ruby IDEs, and trustworthy Trackbacks. Even better, when Tina heard the humpback songstream she invoked a 'We live in Hawaii' break and we went up to freedive Puako Bay, where the whales sounded so close we kept expecting to see them appear in the distance (of course, they were actually about half-a-mile away).

So much better than having a nice car...

Sexy cetacean sounds... oh yeah, baby ...

My house is built on a bit of a ridge between two gullies (well, two collapsed lava tubes -- I do live on the side of an active volcano, after all). Grand plans include decks and terraces, but I can't envision them without a plan. Of course, I could hire surveyors to come in and map the place, but I have a GPS (actually, and I wonder if this is significant, I have two GPSes). What I want / wondering if it exists / wondering if I could code it is an application that takes a GPS track and creates a surface. Anyone know?

Why I wonder if having two GPSes is significant is because I would be very happy to leave one GPS sitting, perfectly motionless, while walking around with the other. While the GPS signal is salted with random imprecision, if that imprecision is the same for two different GPS devices, I would think that I could subtract the "jitter" of the stationary GPS from the track of the mobile GPS, perhaps providing me with the vaunted precision of "differential GPS." ... 5 minutes later ... Hmm, not an encouraging experiment. Perhaps the GPS have to lock on to the same satellites?

Ooh, this is tough; I've received a couple one-a-day challenges that are on things that I really do need to do. Jimmy Norton invited me into the Flickr Project 365 challenge, which is to post an image a day for a year. I am always dismayed to realize how little I photograph Hawai'i, which is an incredibly beautiful place undergoing profound changes. Plus, if I did more photography, I'd have an excuse to buy a digital SLR.

Worse, Dan Ciruli called me out for his pushup challenge, which is "do 1 pushup and 1 crunch on day 1, 2 on day 2, 3 on day 3, etc." I hurt my back for the first time in my life a few months ago and know that the lesson is that I have to strengthen my core (#1 way to help your back: strengthen your gut). Plus, although I'm pretty fit aerobically, I have very little upper-body strength, so pushups are good for me, too.

I wonder if I should counter-challenge: "On day 1, swim a distance of 1' underwater..."

(Photo is me on the bottom at ~80')