Snorkeling Hanauma

On the last day, we got up early and did a couple rounds snorkeling Hanauma. I lost my "wallet" bag in the water with my car key, cash, ID and some credit. Made for a fun time... The pictures were awesome!

Turtle!

I took my housing out to the islands and we snorkeled around. There's barely any coral out there but three turtles kepts us company....

Kayaking the Mokulua Islands

We headed to Lanikai to kayak offshore for the day. The weather came up and kicked us off the island, but it was a fun trip. The seat heaters were required for the ensuing roadtrip and dinner with Rahul.....

Hiking Aiea Ridge & Loop

These guys were troopers. Bryan fell flat on is okole 5 minutes in then Nikki slipped on a steep hillside... and then they proceeded to hike another 8 miles up the ridge and around the loop, though with caution. It was an awesome day.

Snorkeling & Jumping Rock

We spent the morning snorkeling sharks cove and the afternoon jumping off the rock at Waimea. Nikki took about an hour to actually jump. She stood up, stared down for 10 minutes, sat down, stared down for 10 minutes then..... some random dude up there called her out and she jumped. Go figure.

A day at the airfield

We spent a day gliding. I spent 5 hours as a tour-guide.... Then we all took rides in the breezy. It's an awesome open-air experimental craft. The glide-ratio is junk - 3:1 - but damn is it fun being out in the air with nothing but a bit of metal between you and the ground.

Day at the beach

My old neighborhood friends are here for a couple weeks. We spent the afternoon cruising...

Eyes.

Eyes are pretty cool. I really like the 50mm + teleconverter + macro-tube for it's magnification.

Centipede

These guys deserve a sword much bigger than any I have... I hate them with a passion... Though they do eat roaches.

Official "College Teacher"

I'm officially an instructor at the Maui Community College. I suppose this is my first official instructorship. The Akamai Maui Short Course is essentially a 3-credit equivalent - it's 40 contact hours. It's going to be pretty cool this year I think. I've started looking forward to it....

A day at the park...

After a fairly hariy morning flight we spent a few hours at the park near my old 'residence' in Pearl City. I do miss that park....

Ala Moana Sunset

Heather's other "Dave from Michigan" came over from the Big Island. I came back from Maui in the afternoon and we caught a sunset at Ala Moana....

AO Video. Finally.

I've been playing around with video codecs for far too long. I don't know much about this type of thing, but it pisses me off regardless. Most video coming out of any type of "scientific" instrument always has some proprietary, screwy, non-intuitive type of encoding that makes it very difficult to use with "normal" software. Everybody's got to get their $ right? Well, after a few hours of installing, googling and the like, I've got quicktime to at least recognize the video. There's still an issue with the intensities, but at least the damn video's play. The AO system is pretty much complete now with only a few things to fix before doing the characterization. Thank god.

Aberrated Wavefronts!

Spent the day getting the AO system set for a push to close the loop. And the fun part was getting the 'scoring' camera up and running. Now we can take video of the DM doing it's correcting every 1/2000th of a second! Sweet. Isn't it nice when you've got $40,000 cameras to play with....

A Fun Figure....

I think this is going to make a cool figure. It's like abstract art.... only sciency. If only I could make something religous out of it. I've been on the summit for a couple days and I'm ready to be done. It's been great, but Mees isn't what it used to be. I've got lots of company and two more full timer's. Not like I can party like I used to....

The Great Central Valley.

Flying from San Francisco to LA was fun - I had a great view of the valley out the window and you could just make out the Sierra by eye. Some photoshopping brought them out. I'm always surprised by how small things seem from way up high.

Ray Tracing!

This program is pretty neat... I got to test out Lens Forge on my mac trying a 'relay' design for the AO bench. Expensive software is usually pretty cool. We use Zeemax to do optical design and it's very powerful (I've heard "Zeemax is reality" from many) but it's something like $5k a license. Lens Forge can read & edit Zeemax files, but it's only $500.... Don't know exactly what the difference is, but maybe I'll find out.

Adaptive Optics Moving!

This was a fun day. Got the system revamped and integrated with the new table.... mostly.