I’m a hoops fan, and keep hearing about this “new-look, team-oriented, defensive focused” Team USA basketball squad. I finally got to see them play Italy today, and to be honest I don’t see the difference between them and the team that got dumped on at the 2004 Olympics. The offense is still about one guy playing one-on-one while the other four guys watch. I guess their idea of team offense is to take turns playing one-on-five. No perimeter ball movement at all. More often than not they drive the lane, get the ball stripped and off Italy goes in the…
HyperDither! Graphics as only HyperCard could do them, until now
In the early days of Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & nature photography fame) developed a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data to the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or “Error-diffusion” filter (used by QuickTime, PhotoShop). HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Specifically, HyperDither implements the Atkinson dithering filter. The autor of HyperDither emailed Bill Atkinson in January,…
The Utter Stupidity Of It
O‘ahu’s Hau‘ula community grieves over the senseless deaths of 4 teenagers in two separate accidents at the same exact spot this weekend. The second two deaths occurred as two teens stood at the spot of the first accident and were run over by another speeding vehicle. I spent three years as a police officer on the island of Maui, and witnessed first-hand several unbelievable acts of stupidity that lead to deaths. They probably should have been classified as suicide as it was inconceivable that the victims didn’t realize that they were probably going to die. One example was an individual…
The Last Day Of Summer
I know the official end of summer is a month away, but to me, the Sunday before our fall semester starts is the true indicator that the summer has come to an end. This year is also the first that all schools in the state of Hawai‘i follow a unified calendar, so our daughter, along with all public school students throughout the state, started classes three weeks ago. Perhaps I’ll have to move it back yet again and reduce the summer to about seven weeks. I’m only teaching one class this semester, unless something changes and I need to take…
The debate over debating, or not
The most interesting aspect of this year’s elections seems to be the debate over debate, or lack of debate, between Sen. Daniel Akaka and Rep. Ed Case. I’m really of two minds over this debate issue. Akaka does come off as a hypocrite talking about and having others talk about his “courage” in standing up to Bush while at the same time coming up with really lame excuses as to why he won’t debate Case, but what does the public really learn by that format? How important is the ability to debate on the senate floor? Do senators actively engage…
Discovering del.icio.us
Mahalo to Bernie Goldbach for opening my eyes to the joy of del.icio.us. Of course I had heard about it but only recently seriously looked into it and realized how valuable it can be in organizing my online life. You can view my del.icio.us bookmarks here, or if you have a Del.icio.us account, add me to your network. Since I also use NetNewsWire for reading through my 100 or so blog and news feeds, I started thinking about creating an AppleScript to automate posting to del.icio.us from NNW. Someone had already written it. Personally I would like it to be…
Pics and Audio From Volcano Arts & Cultural Festival
I posted a few pictures from Kenneth Makuak?ne’s performance (with a little support from yours truly) at the Volcano Arts & Cultural Festival, held in Ka‘?, Hawai‘i island last Saturday. Sorry if the pics are grainy; they were lifted from the video that my daughter recorded of the performance. Kenneth allowed me to include some of the audio in my most recent Nahenahe.net podcast, his performance of the R. Alex Anderson hapa-Haole standard “Haole Hula” as well as his N? H?k? Hanohano Song of the Year award-winning composition, “I Miss You, My Hawai‘i.” N? Leo Pilimehana originally recorded the song…
Woman claims she was held for speaking Irish
This is a few days old, but still relevant. A Northern Ireland schoolteacher claims she was arrested for not obeying an order to stop speaking Irish with her friends. It’s been discussed heavily on some Irish blogs. Most doubt that she was arrested simply for her refusal to stop speaking Irish, but who knows. Her attorney has requested that all the papers in the case should be in Irish.
Faster Than A Speeding Bullet
Dave Winer is always up to something interesting, and even though I no longer use any UserLand products, I keep a close eye on everything he does. He’s creating a new podcast directory (sans all of the advertising that most of the other podcast directories have), and doing it in such a way that individuals can maintain nodes. I created an OPML file of Hawai‘i-originating and Hawai‘i-themed pocasts. I emailed the link to Dave at about 11:30HST, checked his directory, and it was already added. I’m not sure if the directory engine caches the OPML from my site or calls…
Language Bigotry in Action
“The mayor of a small Bergen County town is calling for a McDonald’s boycott if the fast-food chain does not take down a Spanish-language billboard advertising iced coffee. Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan said the advertisement is “offensive” and “divisive” because it sends a message that Hispanic im migrants do not need to learn English.” [ From NJ.com via Language Log ] Update: Mayor Lonegan has been awarded Language Log’s Jackass of the Week award. Well deserved!