Wa'ahila Hike

Heather and I took a pre-work hike on Wa'ahila ridge. This one marks the eastern side of Manoa valley. I've never actually hiked this part of the ridge before. It was really nice....

Pictures Finally Processed....

I had a few late-night hours to finish up photo-shopping the Mexico and Grand-Canyon runs. They're both now up on my pictures website.

10,000 Feet!

Billy and I went out flying today to see how high we could go. It was pretty awesome. We hit 10,000ft after an hour and a bit and got bored with it. It was simultaneously fascinating and scary. I don't know why the fear exactly. Altitude is safety in a glider - we shut the engine off and glided from windward to leeward sides twice before turning the engine back on at 4000ft.... At any rate it was great looking out the window!

Turkey Day!

I have to say that I love the holidays around here. Not time spent sitting in-doors. On Thanksgiving, there was beach, bananna tree cutting, and all kinds of fun outdoorsyness. It was awesome.

Surfing Ali'i...

Lori and Sierra being themselves.
Imu pit!
A timelapse of the sealing....
Smoking coconut!

A Mildly Stagnant Plotting Period....

I spent the weekend sleeping. Literally. Sweaty and sleeping. I got home Friday evening and passed right out. Saturday, I felt really achey and sore mostly functional. Had a very interesting couple of hours on the phone but otherwise a pleasant day working, napping and hanging at home with Heather up here. Sunday was another story. I was mildly feverish but incredibly sore. Heather and I drove around the North Shore for a few hours but basically I was useless. I was her ride to the airport so as soon as she headed out I came home and slept. And slept. And slept. I think I woke up sometime Monday evening. Not quite but that's how it felt. I was a useless pile of cold, in-pain sleepy flesh that couldn't stay awake for 5 minutes until mid-morning Tuesday. At least I was able to get up, eat something and start to get back to my life.... I haven't been sick in years and I have no idea why this one hit so hard and in that way. Strange. And the weirdest thing was the thoughts and dreams. So distorted and just odd... I had one a few days ago about being in a squash court covered in graph paper racing a clumzy Darth Vader who fell a lot up old ladders to complete a colored pattern by drawing in optical transmission curves with foot-long markers as measured in a spectrophotometer in court center. WTF? Run to the center, grab the filter and measure the transmission curve then quickly sketch it, grab a colored marker and run up a ladder to color it in on the wall. Darth's suit was too clunky for the ladders and he tipped over often, nearly knocking me over several times. Maybe I do too much plotting.... At any rate, that dream was before the start of this sleepy sickness and that dream seemed totally understandable.

Pupukea in the rain....

Video of a star!

I'm a geek. Part of a project involves modeling how the surface of a star changes with time. I spent a few days learning how to make colored map projections of the data to make videos.... It was a ton of fun. Way more interesting than staring at the usual spectropolarimetry at least. Or maybe my life is just super pointless and this is a direct expression of my strange interests.

Maui Lab Time

I've been on Maui since Monday afternoon working on a potentially massive upgrade to HiVIS. It could be really cool. We've got a potential complete replacement for the CCD. As in, the original half-million $ one that somebody dunked in a conductive-epoxy-acetone bath a few years ago. Comes with a shiny new controller package allowing fast charge clocking. Sync that up with some fast-switching tunable liquid crystals and you've just removed guiding, tracking and even atmospheric errors and created a systematic-limited spectropolarimeter. Nice......

Component testing and colored squiggles...

Flying Photo Missions!

TerraPAC got hired to do some pretty significant photo runs. Billy and I spent 3 hours on Saturday and I nearly got sick... Damn tiny laptop screen and lots of flying while looking at a small picture. I went up again with Jerry on Tuesday into Honolulu airspace. It was pretty fun dodging 747's. A Korean Air flight was pretty ridiculously close at one point. We were clear to the North but they decended right past us. Maybe half-mile range. Fun. It's our first real big job....

Colored Squiggles!

I had to learn how to make colored squiggles and output jpegs and color post-scripts in order to write this report. It was pretty fun. More time spent behind a computer when I wanted to be flying.....

Grand Canyon NIR 2

Here's the second batch. I really like how the IR cuts the haze and highlights shadows and rays of beams.

Near IR Grand Canyon 1

Artsy...