I just got this via email from Amazon.com: “We regret to inform you that the Hawaii state legislature has passed an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that, unless vetoed soon by Governor Lingle, would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with Hawaii-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of Hawaii. Please note that this is not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Associates Program. All referral fees earned on qualified traffic will continue to be paid as planned. But…
Hawai‘i Tax Dept’s “Fresh Start” Program
The State of Hawai‘i has been operating a tax amnesty program for the past month. When I heard about it I realized that I had not filed my GET forms for 2008, and stopped in to make sure that I was all caught up on paper filings and taxes. It was very enlightening. I found out that I had failed to file for a few years ago and apparently owed a few bucks for that year, and that I also had a few old licenses that I had either never used or not used for years. The clerk helped me…
Macron Support in iPhone 3.0 Update
I laid out $9.95 for the iPhone 3.0 update for my iPod Touch last night, and just discovered why it was worth it – the standard US Keyboard now allows you to insert the vowel-kahak? characters and ‘okina. Here’s how you do it: When you want to type an ‘okina-vowel, touch and hold down your finger over the vowel for a second or two, and it will pop-up a list of available diacritic characters (see the graphic at right to see how this list looks when I held down over the letter “a” on the keyboard). Whether the vowel-macron is…
Memories of Musicians Institute
In spring 1985 I moved to Hollywood to attend Musicians Institute. On the first day of instruction all of us students (@500) gathered in the school’s performance auditorium for orientation. As a “getting to know you” exercise they had all of us in odd number rows (I was in row 1) turn around and introduce ourselves to the person directly behind us, then stand up and introduce that person to the rest of the class. Yes it took a while. The fellow sitting behind me was a guitar student named Nick Nolan, about 19 years old. He was also the…
Memories of K?ke‘e
Last weekend my wife and I traveled to Kaua‘i to participate in the K?ke‘e Hawaiian Music Songwriters Camp. Kenneth Makuak?ne, Puakea Nogelmeier, Kaliko Beamer-Trapp, Walter Keale and I taught workshops on haku mele and other aspects of songwriting. The camp was held at some cabins deep in K?ke‘e State Park, where I had never gone to before, and it was a very inspiring setting. I did two workshops – one was an overview of some of the more common and essential elements of mele, and to demonstrate the composition and editing process, explained how my mele Facebook Hula came about.…
Facebook Hula
One day I saw a Facebook status update from my friend Kama Hopkins, noting that he was on the Pali Highway and it was raining. I thought to myself, “why the heck is he updating his Facebook status while he’s driving?”. I wrote a single verse of a song to tease him about it and to remind him not to do such dangerous things (turns out he was stuck in traffic at the time and not speeding down the road). Within about 15 minutes I had 7 verses and posted it on Facebook. Kama (a member of the N? H?k?…
More To iPod Touch Hawaiian Support
I posted a few days ago about finding the Hawai‘i region in the iPod Touch, and apparently the system-level support is even better than I thought. I set up a few locations using the Weather application, and found that it displayed the days of the week in Hawaiian as well. Too cool. What would be cooler would be to have the Hawaiian keyboard, too. I did find that I could not post this screenshot to this blog using WordPress for iPhone application – I kept getting: “Communication Error. Operation could not be completed (NSXMLParserErrorDomain error 5.” Hmmm.
Partial Hawaiian Support in iPhone!
We’ve been trying to get Hawaiian support into the iPhone for a while now. A colleague just stopped by with his (I am still sans-iPhone) and showed me this screen! This is in Settings -> International -> Regions. When selected all of the date and time string in your iPhone will be displayed in Hawaiian, and in the right order, i.e., Po‘alima, 16 Ianuali, 2009. There is no Hawaiian keyboard yet, but I’m hoping it will magically appear in a future update. Gotta love Apple!
Houdini No More?
We completed construction of and moved into our home 10 years ago this month. Just a few months after moving it we went to the Humane Society and adopted Sam. As we walked up and down the line of cages no dog really grabbed my attention, but our daughter M?lia pointed out this shaggy fellow. He seemed nice enough, and when I asked what his name is, the person helping us said “Sam”, and the deal was closed. “Sam” was the name of the only dog we ever owned when I was growing up on Maui. For some time now…