It’s time for me to branch my blogging: one for personal stuff, one for work related technical stuff. I’ve never really wanted my personal blog to be big on search results for my name, even if I have a way of keeping my personal posts mostly personal. However, it’s always bothered me a little that searching for “Matt Robinson” I don’t even register on the first 5 pages (I quit looking after that). So I’ve nabbed a sweet new domain: mattrobinson.net. Both .com and .org had been taken, and honestly I’m surprised this one hadn’t with all the matt robinsons there are. Now I can write technical, nerdy stuff and get recognized for it. Potential employers will Google me and find stuff that looks good for a job app instead of my vacations and movie reviews that I post here at mmrobins.com.
Anyway, hopefully anyone who actually reads this isn’t upset about possibly subscribing to two RSS feeds, but then most people who read this don’t even know what RSS is, so they definitely won’t miss my tech writing, of which there should be a lot more now on the other site.
(I had this 90% written for the last few months and am just now finishing it. This happens right after The Big Island at the end of October 2006 to early November) Kim and I flew into Lihue, got our rental car, and got out. However, first we tried to find camp stove fuel that would fit my pocket rocket stove. As far as we could tell, the only place on the whole island that sells this kind of fuel is Pedal N Paddle in Hanalei. Fortunately, we were heading that way. We camped the first night at Kokee State Park, and in the morning sat around waiting for Pedal N Paddle to open so that we would have fuel for our hike into Na Pali.
We hiked all the way in to Kalalau in one day. That was a hard hike. It’s only 11 miles, but it’s all up and down, often along steep, very tall cliffs. It was a beautiful hike. The trail isn’t nearly as well maintained after the 6 mile mark, which has the last pit toilet before Kalalau. We thought about camping there, but we got there early and the camp spots aren’t that cool. At one point we followed a bad side trail, and were about to turn around and go back to find the right one when some crazy guy hiking in barefoot told us we were on the right path. Turns out he was wrong, but he lives out at Kalalau and didn’t seem to mind leading us up crazy streams to get back onto the trail.
We got into Kalalau right at sunset, and didn’t get to see everything before the sun went down. There is no way I would ever want to hike that trail in the dark, even with big head lampst. We setup camp and ate. We were both exhausted and a little beat up. I found the waterfall at the end of the beach to wash up. This waterfall is probably the best part of the camp. It’s refreshing, fresh, beautiful water that’s perfect for a shower. There’s even pipes people have modified to make nice showerheads. Kim waited until morning.
The next day we setup the hammock and just lounged on the beach all morning. It was heavenly. I wish we had budgeted more time, because we decided that we needed to start the hike out that day to avoid doing the whole thing in a day again. It was a smart choice, but if I ever go back I’m spending at least a few days at Kalalau. We hiked to the 6 mile camp, Hanakoa, setup the tent, and took the valley trail to see the waterfall. The path to the waterfall is okay to follow with daylight, but you’ll get easily lost if you try to do it at night. We almost did since we were hiking back right as the sun was going down. We were within 300 ft of the camp and totally lost in the dark. Kim suddenly developed amazing navigational skills and got us back. We cooked in our tent because the bugs were pretty bad.
The next day we did another side hike to Hanakapi’ai falls, which turned out to be one of the most enjoyable waterfalls of the trip. We could swim under the waterfall and behind it. We got there and were the only ones there since we hiked through a torrential rain storm while others took shelter. We were already soaked so figured why bother. After enjoying the secluded spot for a little while, a few dozen people showed up and took over. We then left.
It felt sooooo good to get off the trail after 3 days of hard hiking. Especially since we knew we had a timeshare in Poipu for the next week where we could live civilized for a little while. On the way down we stopped at the Taro festival in Hanalei as it was ending. We discovered that Poi could be very tasty if prepared well, and that we wanted more Kava.
We checked in to the Lawai Beach Resort, which we got a screaming deal on thanks to Kim’s parents time share membership. We got a week with our own small apartment for $300! We could cook our own food, sleep in a bed, shower regularly. Ahhhh. It rained very heavily the first few days, so we took it easy. We drove around the area, and went to a few timeshare presentations. By going to these silly presentations we got screaming deals on later events.
One of those events was a boat tour on a Zodiak boat. We got right next to a group of spinner dolphins, including a baby. We beached on some remote beach and had lunch and snorkeled. We took the boat in a sea cave and it was a beautiful day the whole time, which was great because it had poured like crazy the days before.
We also went to a luau. It was at one of the upscale hotels, I forget which one. It was fun to be all you could eat and drink, but the entertainment wasn’t that amazing. I think I liked the fire dancers best.
We spent a day exploring the Waimea Canyon area. It was overcast and drizzly most of the day, but very pretty. We didn’t hike down into it because of the weather and how slippery the trails were.
Another benefit of our time share time was a half off helicopter tour. It was pretty amazing. Kim had never been in a helicopter before, and I hadn’t been since Alaska. It was sweet to see all the places that we had been by land and sea, now by air. When we went up it was crystal clear too. The pilot said it was the clearest he had seen in probably 3 or 4 months. The only downside to this is that at the end of the ride there’s a place where if it’s raining there’s waterfalls all around you on the rainiest spot on earth. No rain that day.
After about 10 days on the island we checked out of our timeshare and headed back to Oahu for one more day in Hawaii before home.
I really do want to do this every day, and I’ve been doing a good job recently. I’ve been motivated by listening to The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young. I got it off Audible and it’s pretty good. It has some nice guided meditations as well as quite a bit of explanation.
Anyway, I seem to be close to integrating this as a habit, but it’s not there yet.
I have been trying to figure this one out forever. I have an array of objects, usually hashes, and want to sort them. Thing is I want to sort them by their values, not their keys. Regular old sort for arrays is powerless here since it doesn’t know how to compare complex objects, let alone reach down inside them and sort by that value. I found sort_by finally, but still couldn’t get it to do what I wanted often because sometimes the objects I was sorting could have a nil value, and the sort function doesn’t know how to sort nil. Here’s an example: I have an array of Employees, and each employee has an employee_number. Actually not every employee has a number, since some are temporary. So if I try to sort by employee_number bad things happen.
Here’s how I finally made it work.
array.sort_by { |employee| employee.number.nil? : 0 : employee.number }
It basically says if the employee number is nil or null or whatever you want to call it, pretend we’re sorting by the value 0, otherwise sort by the employee number. Hooray!
Moving is a real pain, but it has some good points. The best I can think of right now is that it forces me to get rid of lots of things that I don’t need. Pulling things out of storage closets that I haven’t used in years makes me realize that getting rid of them is a lot better than moving them. Thank goodness for craigslist. I don’t know how people got rid of things they didn’t need before without throwing them away. Now you can sell things you don’t need for money, and people will show up to take the stuff!
I spent New Year’s Eve with Laura and April and some friends of Laura’s. We hung out at Laura’s house for a while and ate and drank and then we met up with Brian and Bridgid at a bar in Ballard. It was good to finally see them again even if they were going to bed at 10:30 or something. Afterwards we went down to see the space needle fireworks and I found Kim a little after midnight since she was working at Kaspars. The night was pretty uneventful from there.
The big news though is that Jacob and Jesse both got engaged this past week! Not to each other though. To Waleska and Deborah respectively. It makes me very happy to know this. Weddings make such fun parties and I’m looking forward to theirs.
Kim and my first holiday hosting experience was a great success! It was pretty easy with only my parents and brother here. Too bad more family couldn’t have made it over, but maybe someday Kim and I will have a house that we can get a ton of family to come to. Maybe a bed and breakfast. Anyway, for Christmas we made a tree out of construction paper and decorated with cutout ornaments. It was a lot of fun actually and a nice change from killing a live tree and dealing with everything that goes along with that.
Christmas Eve we went to dinner where Kim was working. Kaspar’s isn’t normally open as a restaurant, but they host fancy occasions there and we were supposed to get half price meals since we were family of Kim. Somehow they ended up covering all but $9 of the meal. We didn’t want to ask why they didn’t cover the last $9 when we were already getting such a great deal, but it is strange.
We played cards and my dad helped me work on the roof. I gave the family copies of the photos that I had scanned so far. On Tuesday Kim and I went back to work and the family departed.
For Christmas I took my family to see Bodies: The Exhibition in downtown Seattle. Seemed a little odd to go look at dead people for Christmas, but it really was amazing. I think we spent close to four hours there looking at everything. We didn’t do the audio tour. There’s plenty to do without it.
The bodies are all very well preserved and sliced in very interesting ways. One really interesting display showed the skeletal system of a man looking at the muscular system from the same man. There was a section where all the nerves were separated and laid out. The circulatory section had just the arteries and veins with everything else stripped away, so you could still see the basic shape of the body.
One of my only complaints is that some things weren’t labeled as well as they could have been. A lot of the descriptions talked about parts that weren’t obvious in the accompanying body section. You could usually figure it out if you had some basic anatomy knowledge. Overall though, it was an amazing display that a lot time and effort has gone into.
I finally got an electrician out here from Boyer Electric to take a look at some of the funky wiring in this house. It turned out to be well worth it, despite the high hourly rates all electricians charge. He figured out a 3-way switch wiring that he called “California style” in the first half hour, and I had spent 3 or 4 hours trying to get right. Everything he did he made look easy and did way faster then I could have even if I had known for sure what I was doing. It’s always nice to watch someone work who is really knowledgeable in their field.
The storm last night did a number on our roof by knocking the neighbors tree onto it. We were in bed and about to fall asleep, when just at midnight we heard a very loud sound. I’m amazed at how strong the wind was. I didn’t feel safe even being out to look at the damage since there were other trees that could just have easily have blown down nearby. The only real damage was a small hole in the roof and the rain gutter got thrashed. Could have been a lot worse. I saw other places in Seattle that had been smashed by multiple trees and flooded.
