The MacDeskBlog

Michelle and I returned from our honeymoon last night. We spent five days in Cabo San Lucas. Hurricane John missed the area by about 80 miles three days before we got there. It looked like many people cancelled their trips because of the hurricane, which worked out well for us. The hotel was extremely quiet for the first few days, and was still pretty quiet this past weekend. A pleasant light rain fell from time to time on Tuesday through Friday. For the most part, we enjoyed partly sunny to mostly sunny skies, with Florida-like high-90s for both temperature and humidity. By Saturday morning, the clouds had vanished.

We both were ready for a rest. As a result, we didn’t venture very far from the pool and hence didn’t take many pictures on this trip.

Our wedding last Sunday was splendid. Michelle looked stunning in her gown. Her cousin did a great job performing the ceremony. A traditional sit-down, multi-course dinner reception totally is not our style. Instead, we opted for a cocktail party reception, which worked out great. Michelle kept people out on the dance floor all night. She insists that she’s not much of a dancer, but definitely showed otherwise, cutting the rug for nearly four hours.

On Monday, August 28th, the network which hosts the MacDesktops page server went offline. I didn’t think it would be a big problem, since the Mac Mini server hosting MacDesktops was on the same network as the company servers which provided the Mac Mini for me. “How long would they let their own servers remain offline?” “Not long,” I thought. Well, here it is two weeks later. I haven’t been able to make contact with them (emails, phone calls, YM messages all unreturned), and the servers are all still offline. I can only guess that they went belly-up.

There is never a good time for a server crash. I know this first hand a few times over now. That Monday when the server went offline, I was in the process of queuing up pictures to get the site through the wedding and honeymoon. I didn’t get very far. That Tuesday, I finally returned to work after three months of disability leave. That Thursday was my bachelor party. Friday, I picked up Michelle’s cousin at the airport and drove us down to Carmel, stopping to pick up tuxedos in Salinas along the way. Saturday, shockingly, between the rehearsal in the afternoon and the rehearsal dinner in the evening, I managed to find three hours to convert my development server, which resides on our home DSL line over to production usage, and queue up pictures to get through last week and part of this week. Sunday was the wedding. Monday – traveling back home and repacking. Tuesday morning – off to Cabo, leaving the PowerBook at home.

I didn’t plan on even taking the PowerBook to Carmel with me. Something changed my mind at the last minute, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. Grudgingly, I took it along, and ended up having just enough free time to get the site back online. Whatever the reason was which made me cave must not have been very important, because I didn’t use the PowerBook for any else during the weekend.

It’s time to go back to the grind. I hope site performance over DSL is acceptable for a while. I think it will be weeks before I get a new MySQL/PHP server online. My PayPal account looks like it will be able to handle it. My work schedule, on the other hand, is jam packed and getting jammier.

My employer gave everyone in my department one of these spiffy Victorinox watches a couple of years ago. Most things people get from work are pretty ho-hum, along the lines of t-shirts, pens and other mundane items that you already have a ton of. Every now and then, though, work surprises you with something that you really like. For me, this has happened thrice in a bit over a decade. Sure, I kept all of the t-shirts that I get, and I even wear most of them. I also received a really nice jacket from work last year, which I wear almost daily and really appreciate. But, even the jacket doesn’t click with me like a particular sweatshirt did back in 1997, or a duffle bag that same year, or like this watch did. The duffle bag was the first non-shirt item given by a tiny consulting firm I worked for. I can’t really put my finger on why the sweatshirt and the watch reside on a different plane of appreciation from the rest of the stuff. Obviously, it’s not about the monetary value of the objects, since the sweatshirt wasn’t very expensive, and the jacket is more valuable than the watch. I think there was something intangible in the receipt of each item which made it more special. The surprise I felt in getting the item is somehow embedded in the item itself now.

I do know one of the reasons that I liked the watch so much immediately. I had just gone scuba diving for the first time shortly before work gave me the watch, and I had decided to get certified to dive. I was thrilled when I flipped over the watch and saw the words “WATER RESISTANT 100 METERS” on the back. It instantly became my dive watch in addition to being my everyday watch. I hadn’t actually worn a watch every day for many years with the exception of about a year when I wore a Nike watch that Tracey gave me (I lost it, I think at the gym). I wore this watch in Maui when I dove there a couple of years ago. I wore it diving in Bonaire and Key West last year. And of course I wore it diving in Maui last week.

I don’t know what changed in Maui this time, but my Victorinox is longer water tight. I went on more dives and deeper dives in Bonaire last year, so it’s not like the diving should have done it in. I noticed a little bit of fog on the screen by mid-week last week, and it got a little worse with each dive after that. Mind you, it is a quality Swiss time piece, so it is still keeping time. I’m just having trouble telling what time that is. Okay, that’s not quite true, since the hands are plenty big, telling the time isn’t really a problem. I just don’t enjoy reading the time off of it now, through all of the condensation inside. And, the date counter is really hard to read now.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that Victorinox gives lifetime warranties on most or all of their products. I’m hoping to get it repaired or replaced under warranty. In the meantime, I’m just wearing it with the sweat inside, silly as that is. If I stop wearing it just because it’s flawed right now, I think I’ll diminish the attachment I have to it. It’s not like I need to wear a watch at all. For years, I just used my pager as my watch, and now I carry a Blackberry around all the time anyway. But I like to wear this watch.

Rational people don’t always behave rationally. This is just one of those times for me. Come to think of it, there are other irrational things that I’m doing these days too. Not all of them innocuous. Time for some introspection induced by a faulty watch. Go figure.

We made it back to the airport this morning. The shuttle bus was allegedly rescheduled from 8:30 to 9:15, though the courtesy telephone message we were promised in the event of a schedule change did not happen. The bus arrived at 8:50 and left before 9, so it turned out that neither time was correct. When we got to the ticket counter, North American moved rapidly up to the top of my Shit List. Michelle got “randomly selected” for strip searching by the TSA, so the ticket agent had to retrieve her bag which had already been sent down the conveyor belt, and deliver it back to TSA for yet another hand check. That made three hand checks for the bag including the standard ones yesterday and today, and then the special one this morning. Meanwhile, a second ticket agent tried to tell us that our seats from yesterday were not available today, but when I insisted, amazingly they actually were available. We spent at least ten minutes standing at the ticket counter waiting for the bag to get back. Finally released, we went to the security checkpoint where we discovered that Michelle’s selection carries all the way through our journey today. Her carry-on bag went through the x-ray and then over for special hand check while she was just thrilled to hear the words “I’m going to have to wand you between your thighs, do you have a problem with that?”

But where’s the iPodliness and the happiness? Stepping back between the bus and the ticket counter, while we waited in line for the ticket counter, the airline returned my iPod to me. Now that we’re sitting at the gate, I plugged it into my AlBook and sure enough, it’s mine! Yeah!

Our flight back is now routed through Honolulu instead of direct, with a 90-120 minute layover for “cleaning and maintenance.” Somehow that phrase does not instill me with a tremendous sense of confidence.

North American Airlines tells passengers to get to Kahului Airport three hours prior to departure. We arrived at 10AM for our 1PM flight. At 5PM, we were finally on a bus taking us to the Kaanapali Beach Hotel for the night. Somehow, staying an extra day in Hawaii just isn’t as much fun when it’s spent in the airport. I just can’t place why that would be …

On a brighter note, an iPod was turned in last weekend. I should find out in the morning if it’s mine. I hope the Bostonian gets his hat and glasses back.

Michelle and I have spent the last eight days in paradise. We don’t want to leave. Our flight leaves in a bit less than 12 hours, and I have insomnia. It’s probably because of the Coke I had with dinner, trying to chase a headache away. Though, it might be I don’t want to leave, or because I still have some packing to do before we head for the airport, or any of a half dozen other things. It’s silly to be awake now, since Maui is completely dead at night, and I’m just cutting into or reducing the quality of the remaining time I’ll have in the morning. But insomnia is like that. Completely illogical and entirely counterproductive. Unfortunately, I’m all too familiar with it, but I’m not going there today.

We made it to Maui one week ago yesterday, in the morning. It was warm and sunny. Our bags were waiting at the carousel for us, and I was first in line for the rental car. The condo was available for early check-in. We signed up for two boat diving trips: one to Molokini Crater and another to Lanai.

Molokini Crater

Over the course of the week, we got in four boat dives (two on each trip), five shore dives and one snorkel. The Molokini trip usually goes to Turtle Town in Makena for its second dive. However, the water at Molokini was so calm, and the crater was so deserted after our first dive, that we decided to just move the boat from the west end of the crater to the east end and do our second dive there. At the west end, we saw bunches of eels, including the endemic garden eels as well as the common moray eels. At the east end, we saw endemic and rare fish.

Lanai

On the two Lanai dives, we saw octopi, lobsters, and white tip reef sharks. In one cave, there were two white tips, one of which was content to nap. The other got agitated by having half a dozen divers staring at it and pointing a flashlight at it. It swam around anxiously within the cave until enough of the divers had cleared away from the entrance, then it bolted out into open water. It’s amazing how quickly sharks accelerate. We also saw too many Crown of Thorns sea stars (an invasive species which eats coral) and one Tritons Trumpet (picture a big Conch or a massive snail) which was dining a big Crown of Thorns.

Ulua Beach

Green turtles were the theme for all of our shore dives. We started off at Black Rock in Kaanapali, where we saw “only” a couple of turtles, as well as a few eels (a zebra eel and a couple of morays) and plenty of fish. We snorkeled at Olowalu, where we spotted a large green turtle, though it sunk under a ledge too low for us to get a good look. Our dive at Kamaole Park III was pretty forgettable. We had tanks to use before our Molokini boat left, and Kam III is right in front of the condo complex where we’re staying, so we used the tanks there not realizing how shallow it is (only got down to 15′ on the entire dive). We did two dives at Ulua Beach, finding a turtle colony of 16!! Finally, we tried to do a shark dive at Makena Landing on Saturday morning. The surge was so strong, though, that we had to stay away from the cliff face and therefore from the shark caves. We ended up out at Turtle Town, where we had a very close encounter with one big turtle. It swam right up to me, and would have bumped into me had I not floated up out of his way. Undeterred, he turned right around and swam up to Michelle, scrounging at the cummerbund of her BC for a quarter or half a minute until she wiggled out of his way. We saw six more turtles in Turtle Town, some hanging out at the bottom and other swimming up to get air or back down afterward.

The other recurring theme of our dives were equipment failures. Michelle brought a reusable underwater camera along with her, which she got through her incentive compensation program from her employer. It was brand new, and it started to leak on the very first dive. We kept using it anyway though. Until brown water poured out of the actual camera on the third roll of film. We couldn’t tell whether it was the emulsion or just battery acid, but the film wouldn’t rewind on fresh batteries, so it really didn’t matter. So, we ended up with no pictures of Lanai. We switched to a new camera for the Ulua dive. Unfortunately, Michelle was not familiar with the camera and wrecked it while trying to rewind the film. So, we got another one and did the same dive again. We swapped film in the camera before the Makena Landing dive, but inadvertently closed the shutter before putting it back into the underwater casing. So, we ended up with no pictures from that dive too. Michelle’s BC also decided to start filling itself on this trip. It just needs some minor servicing, fortunately.

The big bummer was losing my iPod, presumably on the plane. I noticed it missing on Sunday morning, and couldn’t remember putting it in my backpack on the plane after the battery died. My hope of recovering it is fading quickly. I am dismayed by how few people turn in found items these days. On the Makena dive, I found a mesh snorkel bag with a Red Sox cap and a pair of sunglasses in it. I couldn’t believe that everyone I talked to in my quest to return the bag to the Sox fan was of the mind that I should just keep it, or amazed that I was trying to return it. I hope that whoever found/finds my iPod will turn it in to North American Airlines, and that they, in turn, will follow through and get it back to me.

So, the plane takes off in barely more than ten hours. I’ll get to see how my house looks late tonight, and start to think again about when we’ll be able to move in. And back to work tomorrow. I should try again to sleep.

I don’t want to leave paradise.

UPDATE: Still can’t sleep two hours later. So, I guess I’m just pulling an all-nighter. I pulled pictures off of the digital camera and added a few to this post. Underwater pictures will have to wait until we get the film developed. Yeah, film. Developed. How archaic!