Be prepared to be amused or offended.
What ever happened to…
Annie Moore, from Cork, Ireland, has been immortalized in bronze and in song as the first immigrant to arrive in America via Ellis Island. This feature from the New York Times helps clarify what happened to her after that famous day. [ Free registration required ]
“Makuak?ne” at the pad, ready for launch!
I’ve talked about my work with songwriter/producer/recording artist Kenneth Makuak?ne previously here. Well, the big day is inching closer. Kenneth picked up the master CD today, and after some final tweaks to the liner notes, the CD and graphics head off to be pressed. The entire process has been a three-pronged effort. I wrote all but one of the Hawaiian lyrics (“mele”), did all of the text layout, worked with Kenneth on the liners, developed his website and taught him how to maintain it. Kenneth wrote all of the music, two of the English songs, arranged and performed every instrument…
Gone But Not Forgotten
God bless you, Steve Irwin.
There is a God!
Jessica Simpson ordered not to sing. Unfortunately it is not a permanent injunction.
New Look Team USA?
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…