Our Move to Oahu

Our Oahu Apartment

We loved living on Hawaii Island for the past 7 years.  We were able to experience the culture, climate, and life styles of Hilo, Kona, and Kohala.  The beaches, food, people, and amazing activities on the Big Island have been a constant source of entertainment and enjoyment for us.  Even so, our endless wanderlust, made us wonder what it would be like to live on the other islands in Hawaii.

Our son attended college on Oahu, so we visited the island many times.  Although the noise and congestion in Waikiki was too much for us, we marveled at the shops, restaurants and sights to see elsewhere on the island.   There is also the draw of jobs, particularly jobs requiring technical skills.  We started looking around and found a great job in West Oahu.  Last month, we moved from Hawaii Island to find out if living on Oahu is as much fun as it looks.  Our move kept us too busy and overwhelmed to blog; but we are back to it now.

Although we are in Oahu, we plan to continue to update our HiloLiving website and calendar.   We still own property on the Big Island and consider it our home. 

Our next blog will be about our move from Kohala on the Big Island to Oahu.  We always assumed that moving between islands in Hawaii would be  easier and cheaper than our move from California to Hilo.  We were very wrong.

How a Clock Changed Hawaii

Harrison's H4 in National
Maritime Museum Greenwich

We sometimes wonder why it took ships from the west so long to find the Hawaiian Islands. European ships had reached China in 1517, hundreds of years before Captain Cook found the remote islands in 1778. Some of the mystery was solved for us when we recently learned about how John Harrison’s clock assisted Captain Cook.

Longitude is an entertaining  movie about John Harrison who invented the marine chronometer in the late 1700’s. At the time latitude (the distance of a ship north and south of the equator) could be determined from the sun or stars using a sexton, however, there was no method to determine the ship’s longitude (the east – west location) in the ocean.  Ships navigated by following the coastline, which worked when exploring Africa and Asia, but was not helpful when crossing the Atlantic to the Americas or crossing the Pacific Ocean.

So many ships were lost at sea or destroyed by crashing into reefs, that in 1714, the British Parliament offered a huge prize to anyone who could find a method to accurately determine a ship’s longitude.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England was the reference longitude of zero degrees, called the Prime Meridian. The sun moves west from the Prime Meridian at a rate of 15 degrees each hour. If the time in Greenwich is known at exactly noon on a ship at sea (measured using a sextant to determine the exact moment that the sun reaches its highest point in the sky) the number of degrees of longitude the sun has crossed from the Prime Meridian to the ship can be calculated and the navigator can determine the ship’s longitude.  The problem is easily solved by having a clock on board the ship with Greenwich Time, however, in the 1700’s no clock existed that could keep accurate time over a long period or deal with temperature changes and a ship’s movement.

John Harrison was a carpenter and clock maker.  Before starting on the longitude challenge, he had already made several inventions that improved clocks including the "gridiron pendulum", which kept clocks from losing or gaining time due to temperature changes  and the "grasshopper" escapement which was a device for the step-by-step release of a clock's driving power which required no oiling. 

Harrison started working on a marine clock in 1730 in hopes of winning the prize.  “Longitude”, based on the book, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel, tells the fascinating story of John Harrison and his son who spent decades working on perfecting a marine chronometer and proving it at sea.  Harrison’s first creation, called H1, was a monstrosity weighing almost 100 pounds.  In 1759 he finished his fourth version, called H4, which was a complete redesign and the size of a large pocket watch.  Harrison was eventually awarded the prize by the British Parliament in 1773 and recognized for having solved the Longitude problem.

In 1772, when Captain Cook sailed from England on his second voyage he had aboard a replica of Harrison’s H4 chronometer made by Larcum Kendall called the K1. Cook was able to navigate the Pacific Ocean using the K1 and discovered new islands including New Caledonia.  Cook was a superstar on his return to England in 1775 receiving honors, appointments and a promotion.  The K1 clock was exceptionally accurate during the entire voyage and Cook referred to the watch as  “...our faithful guide through all the vicissitudes of climates”.

John Harrison died in 1776, the same year Cook left for his third voyage to explore the Pacific.  On that voyage, in January 1778, Cook found the Hawaiian Islands where he met his demise.  When the ships returned to England, their report made the Hawaiian Islands and its longitude in the middle of the Pacific Ocean known to the rest of the world.

Having an accurate pocket watch, invented by Harrison, on board may have been partially or even completely responsible for Cook finding Hawaii.  It certainly allowed all the other Captains to navigate to the islands after learning the location. 

It makes us wonder what small inventions are in the works today that may alter our world in ways we may not be able to grasp.

Battery technology for Hawaii

Our unexpected night visitor, a rat that ate through our bedroom screen door,  led us to look for a better rat trap.  Our search resulted in a high-tech, battery-powered Rat Trap that zaps rodents rather than crushing them.  The device works because of a new type of lithium battery that reviewers are saying kills tons of rats in their barns and farms before needing to be replaced.  

The latest technology of disposable AA Lithium Batteries last 9 times longer than previous versions. These batteries no longer contain cadmium so they are also less toxic than the first generation of lithium batteries. We are excited about this new technology because we think it could make Hawaii energy independent.

Why?

Hawaii’s perpetual sunshine is great for getting electricity from solar panels, but the problem is how to store all the electricity produced during daylight for use after the sun goes down.  When we had a solar panel in Hilo, the sunlight filled the battery before lunch.  The rest of the day was wasted electricity production.  

If rechargeable car batteries could store 10 times more electricity than they do now, it would solve the problem.  Electric cars batteries would provide weeks of driving instead of hours and big energy users like data storage farms, bakeries, and other manufacturing could become viable in Hawaii with large amounts of electricity stored from low cost solar power.   A power company in Oregon is testing a giant new type of lithium battery to help stabilize their local power grid.

When these new types of  batteries become more widely available, Hawaii residents will be able to generate more low cost solar power and the island’s money spent on imported oil could instead be used to improve the land and everyone’s quality of life.

What will Larry Ellison do with Lanai Island?

In the press, Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, claims that he plans substantial investment in Lanai Island (Hawaii’s 6^th largest island) and support to create jobs and stimulate tourism. We wonder if he will bring technology companies to Hawaii, move Oracle or one of his other Silicon Valley corporations to the island, or just use the island as a getaway and reward destination for his top sales people? 

Lanai Island has been owned by billionaire David Murdock since 1985 and he apparently plans to continue to maintain a home there.  Ellison purchased the island for about $600 million and takes on its annual losses of about $20 million a year.  The sale includes the island's two hotels, the Four Seasons at Manele Bay and the Four Seasons Lodge at Koele, two golf courses, and more than 88,000 acres of land.  The 88,000 acres include the Koele and Manele residential properties, Lanai City, stables, a shooting range, two water companies, a transportation company, and part of a solar farm that sells power to Maui Electric Company. Lanai Island is in Maui County along with the islands of Maui and Molokai and the state, county of Maui, and a few private property owners retain the remaining 2% of the island.  The island is said to be down to less than 2000 residents since the slowdown in tourism to the island.

We live on the island of Hawaii, which has its share of billionaires who hide deep within the tripled gated Kukio complex and dine at the Four Seasons where the staff use code names to protect their identities.  We drive by their private jets parked in rows at the Kona airport.  The purchase of Lanai Island by Ellison is a whole new game in the rise of software billionaires and their private retreats.  Will he create an even more secure location for billionaires and their collections of private jets or will he use his substantial wealth to invest in the infrastructure required to resolve the barriers Hawaii has to becoming a major technology center in the Pacific?

Predictions of the Venus transit in Hawaii

On June 5^th, Venus will be visible moving in front of the sun and provide a show to those of us in Hawaii not seen since the last King of Hawaii sat on the throne. The transits of Venus occur in pairs eight years apart (this event’s twin event occurred in 2004) about every one hundred years. This unusual phenomena in the heavens will not be seen again until 2117.

From a Hawaii perspective, the transit of Venus has been prominent in the islands’ history. In 1769, Captain Cook first voyaged to the Pacific Ocean to observe the Venus transit and map the region from Australia to Hawaii. Ten years later, on his third and final voyage to the Pacific Ocean, he landed in Hawaii to observe the longitude of Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii Island and met his demise. One hundred years later, King David Kalakaua invited British astronomers to observe the Venus transit in Hawaii. Seven astronomers arrived in Honolulu Bay in 1874 with telescopes, chronometers, photographic chemicals,  equipment and supplies of all types for a six month expedition to record and photograph the Venus transit event. The astronomers set up observation areas in Honolulu, Kona, and in Waimea on Kauai. King Kalakaua, who had only recently been crowned, greeted the astronomers upon their arrival, but was in Washington DC during the transit to negotiate a treaty offering Pearl Harbor to the US in exchange for duty-free sales of sugar from the islands. Now, over one hundred years later, the telescopes atop Mauna Kea Volcano are prepared to view the Venus transit from the best place in the world to see the event in its entirety. The transit will start tomorrow, June 5, at 12:10 PM (Hawaii Standard Time) and the small black dot of Venus will be visible slowly moving across the sun’s surface for 6 hours until 6:45PM. It is not safe to look at the sun; you must have special glasses to observe the event.

We have been researching the meaning of this rare planetary event in Chinese and Western astrology. Surprisingly, both the Western and Eastern astrologists seemed to have missed the Venus transit events completely. It may be due to the extremely rare occurrences of visible Venus transits across the sun. Though the Chinese carefully monitored sun spots, they never mention Venus transits. The Greeks misattributed the transit of Venus to Mercury. The Europeans realized Venus transits must be occurring but missed it in 1631 because Kepler miscalculated its timing. The first person credited with observing a Venus transition was Jeremiah Horrocks in 1639 who corrected Kepler’s calculation and was able to catch of glimpse of it in between his business meetings.

The planet Venus is also known as the Morning Star and is associated with love, beauty, relationships, harmony, and unity. When considering the implications of a visible transit of Venus across the sun, some astrologers focus on the changes within the 8 years of the two transits claiming a doorway opens and then closes. Others focus only on the year of the event itself. Some claim that intense periods of social and religious enlightenment take place during the 8 years between transits which sets into motion major changes in institutions of justice, equality, medicine, arts, and religion.

During the Venus transit doorway from 1874 to 1882, the Impressionists were painting their great works, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Ibsen wrote their major works, Thomas Edison switched on the first electric plant in New York, Tessla invented the “permanent magnetic”, TB and other diseases were identified, and the Great comet –C1882R1 – arrived and was so bright it was visible during the day.

In the past 8 years, major discoveries in our solar system and beyond were made with the landing of rovers on Mars, a probe successfully landing on Saturn's moon Titan, the discovery of a huge white dwarf star BPM 37093, and identifying a record number of planets circling other stars – exoplanets - due to improvements in optical telescopes (Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for claiming exoplanets even existed). SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded space plane to achieve spaceflight in 2004 and just recently the first private space ship docked with the space station. The tallest structures in the world were built during the past 8 years in Shanghai (1614 feet), Taipei (1670 feet), Mecca (1971 feet), Tokyo (2080 feet), and Dubai (2723 feet). The first same-sex marriage licenses in the US were issued in Massachusetts in 2004 followed by other states and cities around the nation. A 9.3 magnitude earthquake in 2004 created a tsunami which caused devastation to nations in the Indian Ocean killing at least 230,000 people. The Earth has been wracked with earthquakes since then with the largest earthquake and tsunami last year in Japan causing massive destruction and death in Japan and radiation exposure worldwide from destroyed nuclear reactors.

Whether this transit is the closing of a Venus transit doorway opened in 2004 or yet another significant astrological event for 2012, already crowded with a calendar of astronomical and astrological events as well as foreboding predictions, it is an event not to be missed considering all of us on the Earth today will be long dead by 2117, when Venus, the Earth and the sun are once again in a direct and visible line.

The transit event will be webcast live by NASA.

Kindle Fire Review

We bought a Kindle Fire for Thanksgiving.  We compared the Fire to our existing devices: an older Kindle, Android phone, and Apple iPod Touch and iPad.  Our overall assessment of the Fire is that it is a vastly better Kindle book reader with many features superior to our iPod Touch and many of the features we use on the iPad.  Here is an overview of what we like and what could be better:

A vastly better Kindle

The Fire has all the reading features we like about our old Kindle with many new additions. The screen is high resolution with color making the text easy to read and color pictures in books clearer than on our lap top, iPod, and iPad. Fire uses touch screen buttons instead of the physical buttons on the older Kindle, so a finger swipe flips the page.  The power on/off is the only button on the device. When connected to a computer it presents a thumb-drive file interface, like the old Kindle. To buy or add books, the Fire requires a wireless internet connection (3g is not supported) or connection to a computer so that books can be moved onto the device.

A better iPod

The Fire has the music and video player iPod/iPad features without the frustrating iTunes interface.  Movies are stored in a directory or played via the internet and the screen resolution makes HD videos and youtube look great.  You can purchase music online or move songs into the music directory to play while reading or surfing the net.  The web interface is easy to use and, unlike Apple’s Safari, it supports Flash.  Games, movies, and applications are available from the Amazon store.  Finally, the same iPod/iPad interface we use for keeping track of all of our email accounts is replicated on the Fire.

So in addition to the book reading device, the Fire has the applications we use all day on our iPod and iPad: Email, Skype messaging (IM), Facebook, and web surfing. And, all this is available for $200.

There are, however, some limitations:

Limited Applications

The Fire uses Google’s Android OS, so we assumed that everything we have available on our Android phone would be available on the Kindle Fire.   Currently that is not the case.  There are less games and other applications in the Amazon cloud as compared to the iTunes and Android stores. Hopefully this will change and more applications become available as the device gains popularity.

Connectivity limitations

You have to connect the Fire to a computer to move movies and music into the appropriate directories or email them to the device via an email address Amazon provides.  The Fire does not come with the USB cable needed to connect to a computer (fortunately we had one from our previous Kindle).  When you email files to the Fire, they are put into the download directory and must be moved into the appropriate music or movie directory by connecting to a computer.  The Kindle USB cables may be easy to find on the mainland, but they are not readily available on an outer island in Hawaii.

Text to Speech

The text-to-speech capability on the older Kindle is not currently available on the Fire.

Local flash Apps

Our Android phone allows us to move flash games onto the phone via a computer connection and play them locally.  Though the Fire supports Flash applications, there is no way to run a local application yet. This limits the device’s use as a gaming platform for now.

The Fire is a superior replacement for our iPod Touch and our older Kindle.  With more drawing applications and iTunes applications, it could replace our iPad.  Hopefully, Amazon will add more Android capabilities and the Kindle text-to-speech feature.

We look forward to reading lots of book on our Kindle Fire during our Hawaii winter.

Our first internet writers conference

Last week we “attended” an online writers conference where presenters from around the country created the experience of attending a live conference by providing interesting presentations, discussion, and applicable materials. This was very different from the expensive travel and hotel costs to Oahu we incurred in 2009 to attend what turned out to be the last writer’s conference in Hawaii.

The conference subject was about e-publishing focusing on the complex technology and marketing issues of writing and selling e-books. Since the speakers were calling in from their homes or offices they were very relaxed, spontaneous and more technical than the typical professional conference speakers we have heard standing at a lectern above the attendees sitting in hard chairs in a crowded room. And, since the speakers did not have to take time from their busy schedules to fly to the conference, there was more variety in their expertise and backgrounds. We heard from publishers from both coasts, marketing professionals, and published writers making a living in remote parts of the US. We were mentally exhausted at the end of each day, just like regular conferences we have attended in the past.

We logged onto a voice cast of each speaker and moderator and during the sessions, we and the other attendees posted questions by typing them into a shared message board. Most speakers had a slide set that we could view online or print out. The speakers and conference hosts were located all over the country, in different time zones, yet they only had to call in for their hour presentation and question session.

The conference started at 9AM Pacific standard time and ended at 6PM, which meant we had to be up and ready to participate at 6AM. Conference participants in New Zealand (which is 22 hours ahead of Hawaii time) had to be up at 4AM in our tomorrow. The conference ended at 3PM for us which gave us plenty of time for our afternoon swim.

We are delighted to find that we can attend a conference from our couch in Kona and not disrupt our life in Hawaii. It saved us two roundtrip airfares to the mainland, a rental car, 4 days of hotel and food costs, and the hassle of travel. We look forward to relying on these types of conferences to learn new technologies, connect with others, and support our writing and publishing in Hawaii.

Apple’s iPAD: A review of what I like and don’t like

I bought an iPAD about five weeks ago because I was impressed with the little iPOD’s usability and I wanted to type and draw on a bigger screen.

There are a lot of things I really like about the iPAD:  

1. I love the Sketchpad application that I purchased from the iTunes store.  It has opened up a whole new way for me to do electronic art.
2. I like Apple’s email interface (as I did on the iPOD) because  it is really easy for me to quickly read multiple email accounts.  I can pick it up throughout the day and read all my email without having to wait for a long PC boot up. 
3. The iPADs keypad ( a separate piece of hardware that the iPAD plugs into) is the best keypad I have ever used. It has a great feel and the right amount of springiness in the keys.
4. Apple’s Notes application is a good way to create and share documents and it has the best spelling checker I have ever used with a larger vocabulary and a great touch interface.
5. The applications on iTunes are easy to download, low cost or free, and I find them useful. Why does a PC application costs 10 to 100 times more than an iPAD application?  As more applications become available, I  believe they will continue to increase the value of my iPAD.
6. The iPAD’s battery life is long, and at 10 hours it seems to last forever.
7. The iPAD’s screen light adaptation is wonderful.  It gets brighter in high light and dimmer in low light so it is always very readable without being overly bright.
8. The touch screen on the iPAD (as well as the iPOD) allows me to make the text instantly large or small, which makes reading books and web pages much easier on my eyes.   I like the Kindle application and have been using the iPAD to read books.
9. The quality of the iPAD’s screen graphics seems clearer and brighter to me and since I can hold it close to my face I can really see the details in photographs and charts.

There are some things that really bother me about the iPAD and they keep me from being able to replace my laptop with it. My issues are primarily with Apple’s Safari internet surfing application.

1. For some reason Apple chooses not to support Flash (due to some spat between Apple and Adobe). So when I am surfing the internet with Safari, I am unable to see a large portion of the internet sites that I frequent.  It may not seem like a big deal but I estimate 90% of the sites I regularly visit are flash based and therefore not viewable with the iPAD which forces me to use my laptop to surf the internet.   Safari also limits my viewing of other things on web sites, such as Facebook videos, and in some cases blocks me entirely from some websites.
2. If I select a link in my email, Safari intercedes to display the website. To get back to the original email, I have to click out of the Safari application and reopen my email. This process takes longer than it should and it seems like a strange interface to me.
3. When surfing the web, sometimes selecting a link opens a new page in Safari and sometimes it replaces the existing page.  If it replaces the existing page, I can  return to the previous page with a single click. But, if it opens a new page, in order to return to the previous page, I have to find the page among the other pages that are currently open in Safari which is tedious and weird.
4. The iPAD is difficult to hold. Though it doesn’t weigh much, it gets heavy when I am using it to read a book and eventually puts my hand to sleep. Hopefully, someone will invent an iPAD holder to solve this problem.

The price of the iPAD was $600.00 and so far its usefulness has been worth the money to me.  I hope in the future that Apple chooses to work with the other vendors providing web content, like Adobe, Google, and Facebook, and supports full access to the internet so I can replace my laptop with my iPAD.