Review: Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach, part 2

When we attempted to find information about things to do on Oahu, we found that some information was easy to find, while reviews of other things were more difficult to find or nonexistent. This entry is part of a larger series of reviews that I am posting so that other people may learn from our experiences.

Again, while on Oahu, we stayed at the Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach [outrigger.com]. Most of the time, we ate outside the hotel. However, the restaurants located in the hotel were notable, so I am creating a separate entry for those reviews.

There were three restaurants in the hotel. The two we tried were Duke's [dukeswaikiki.com] and the Hula Grill [hulagrillwaikiki.com]. We had read in multiple reviews that Duke's is a great restaurant. We ate there for dinner one day, and found that they had an amazing salad bar. Their entrees were good, but nothing spectacular. In general, it was too crowded for our tastes. You can sit out on the patio (right next to the beach), which probably would have made for better atmosphere. However, all of those things left us a little disappointed.



On the other hand, The Hula Grill was our favorite restaurant in Waikiki. We loved it there, and ate there multiple times during our trip. Best of all, it is located right above Duke's, so if you get a table along the edge of the balcony, you could enjoy the live music on the Duke's patio, while getting better food and atmosphere. The food at the Hula Grill was fantastic. For dinner, their kitchen is kind of slow, but that was perfect for us, since we like to have a relaxing dinner. When I'm on vacation, I don't like it when the restaurants try to rush you through the meal so that they can seat other people. The service was also very good. They have some adorable desserts, including a Baked Hawaiian. It's ice cream scoops that are covered in tiny marshmallows, and then lit on fire. It's hard to imagine, but the marshmallows create a texture that causes the icecream scoops to look like little pineapples. Little decorations on the top complete the effect.

Like all restaurants in Waikiki, they started getting jammed up after sunset. We discovered that if you get there before sunset, however, the wait is a lot shorter (since people haven't come off the beach yet). Plus, the view of the sunset from the Hula Grill is pretty amazing (assuming you are sitting at a table on the balcony railing, which we always requested).

A lot of the entrees that we got from the Hula Grill came with various kinds of dipping sauce, and they were fantastic. I think those are what really made the meals. Battered fish or pork chops were very good by themselves, but outstanding once dipped in the special sauces that were served with them.

All in all, I think that restaurant is what I am going to miss most about being in Hawaii.

Review: Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach, part 1

When we attempted to find information about things to do on Oahu, we found that some information was easy to find, while reviews of other things were more difficult to find or nonexistent. This entry is part of a larger series of reviews that I am posting so that other people may learn from our experiences.

For the week that we were on Oahu, we stayed at the Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach [outrigger.com]. In general, we were very happy with our stay there. Be aware that there are three different Outrigger hotels on Waikiki. We didn't go inside either of the other two, so we don't know how they compared.



The Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach was right on the beach, as advertised. It's a great location, although the beach area designated for this hotel was smaller than we expected. Right across the street from the hotel was the International Market Place, where there is a foodcourt and are tons of vendors selling all kinds of touristy stuff. It is also a few doors down from the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center, which is a mall that has all kinds of stores. There are also tons of stores at the street level, all along the street this hotel is located on.

The hotel had a lot of nice features. For instance, each room had complimentary high-speed internet access (not wireless), although we did not take advantage of it.

Every morning, a sheet of paper was slipped under everyone's door, listing the activities happening around the hotel that day, along with other fun information. Unfortunately, that newsletter didn't arrive until close to 9AM most days. And the activities usually started around 10AM, so that didn't allow a lot of time for planning. We appreciated the newsletter, but it would have been better if each day's newsletter also listed the activities for the following day (or if the newsletter were delivered at an earlier time). On most days, we were getting up around 6AM so that we could do some hiking or other outdoor activities before the sun hit its full strength. This caused us to miss the hotel activities we wanted to do (because we didn't know about them in time). The hotel activities included Christmas cookie decorating, lei-making, and other things.

We also had the largest mini-fridge I've ever seen, which we took advantage of. I mentioned before that we did a lot of hiking. It was nice to have a place to store several liters of water and let it chill overnight in preparation for the hikes. A lot of the restaurants also serve entirely too much food, so we appreciated having a place to keep leftovers.

The hotel also had a small convenience store, along with a salon and other types of little stores. The valets at the underground parking garage were fast and convenient. I think that it cost $18/day to park our car there. There was virtually no where else to park, so we didn't have a choice. Everyone who worked at the hotel (including the concierge, who we utilized A LOT), was very friendly and helpful. We arrived in Honolulu after midnight and didn't get to the hotel until after 1AM, and we were surprised at how friendly all of the employees were.

The elevators are amazingly fast. We were on the 15th floor (the only people above us were in the penthouses), and they zipped us right up there several times a day. Unfortunately, the hotel only has 3 elevators, though. These become inadequate around sunset, when everyone is coming off the beach and going out for dinner.

About the only real complaint that we had was the walls are very thin. We frequently heard noise from the floor above us. I don't think those people were talking very loudly, but we could almost hear them well enough to understand what they were saying. Thankfully, it was never really a problem for us, because we only heard noise coming from other rooms during the day, so we didn't lose any sleep. However, we were on a much different sleeping schedule than a normal guest would be on, so it could have been a major problem if the people above us wanted to party until 4 in the morning.

Despite that one issue, we definitely enjoyed our stay there, and would not hesitate to book another stay there in the future.

Back from Waikiki

So, I'm back. We actually got back a few days ago, but I have been busy catching up, and haven't had time to write any entries. We had a great trip to Oahu, where we primarily hung around the Waikiki area, but did make several trips to the other areas of the island.



Above is one of my favorite pictures from the trip. We were on Waikiki Beach when the sun set, and I snapped that shot. I also have a bunch of other pictures posted in a narrated gallery [fluggart.com].

Over the next few days, I hope to post a lot of the information that we learned over the course of the trip. We did some research before leaving for Oahu, and while there was plenty of information on some topics, it was difficult to find information about other subjects. So, I would like to post a bunch of reviews and other information so that anyone else looking for the information can find it via Google.

In the meantime, I hope everyone had a great holiday!

I'll Be Back After Christmas

I will be back sometime after Christmas. For the next week, I'm going to be in Hawaii (I know, I'm a bastard).

This wasn't one of our most well-researched trips. We kind of booked it on the spur of the moment. So, after we booked it, people asked us all kinds of questions like, "What island are you going to be on?" and "are you going to be visiting Waikiki?" and all kinds of things like that. Meanwhile, we had no idea what the answers to these questions were (we do now).

Anyway, hopefully, we will have a great time. We both definitely want to see the Arizona Memorial [nps.gov]. She wants to see the Polynesian Cultural Center [polynesia.com]. She also wants to relax and spend some time on the beach.

And I want to do some hiking. I made a few trips [fluggart.com] to Austria in the past few years, and the parts that I enjoyed the most about those trips were all of the mountain hikes that we did.

I've looked through a few tour books, and it looks like there are plenty of mountain trails for us to choose from. The most well-known, I guess is Diamond Head [hawaiiweb.com], which is a dead volcano practically right next to Waikiki (which is where we are staying). However, there are also tons of others like the Lanipo Trail [hawaiistories.com], and the Manoa Falls Trail [hawaiiweb.com].

We've heard that the sun sets really quickly, and many people are caught out when they try to take pictures of a sunset. So, we are definitely bringing a flashlight. I'm also bringing my camelbak [amazon.com] to make sure that we don't run out of water. Apparently, these hikes won't be anything like Austria, where there was a pub practically at the top of every mountain.

Hopefully, it'll be a great trip and I'll have tons of great pictures to post when I get back. I hope everyone has a great and safe holiday.

Ex-google employees weblog

On Slashdot over the weekend, there was a thread [slashdot.org] about Xooglers [blogspot.com], which is a weblog maintained by some ex-employees of Google.

The day that the link was posted, I read all of the archives from the very beginning to the end, have added a link to their weblog on here, and have subscribed to their RSS feed.

Like most tech-heads, I revere Google. Not only does their search engine come back with the right results quickly (although less so today than it did a few years ago), but they continue to add features that I love (Google Maps, Google News, Google Scholar, etc). And, of course, as an idealogue, I value their "Don't be evil" mantra [business-journal.com]. So, hearing any insider news about Google would be interesting to me.

But it's not just that it's about Google. It's the fact that it's hilarious. Here's a quote:

"If he could figure out the spammer's email address, he would send a terse cease and desist warning to them. If he couldn't, he might block their IP address from accessing Google altogether. In an extreme case, he might request that a spammer's ISP kick them off of their service. And, if the ISP wasn't responsive enough, he might block all of the ISP's other IP addresses, too. That's how Ray turned off access to Google for most of France one day."

It's a great read.

Book Review: Devil's Teeth

A few months ago, I read Devil's Teeth by Susan Casey. It is an amazing book. I was so impressed with it, that I am giving it to at least one person this year for Christmas.



The book is about the Farallones, which are islands just off the coast of San Francisco that are nicknamed Devil's Teeth. It became a wildlife sanctuary decades ago, and only a handful of ornithologists were allowed to set foot on those islands each year. Those scientists began to record other things while they lived there to study the birds. One of the things they noticed through their record keeping was that there was an unusual amount of Great White Shark activity.

So, they started recording sightings of sharks, and they realized that the males returned to the area around the same time each year, but the females only returned every other year. And when the sharks did show up for the first time that year, they looked famished.

It turns out that the Farallones are about the only area where Great White Sharks can be studied in their natural habitat, because all other areas around the world that have known Great White Shark activity (like South Africa) are buried under ecotourism trips. You can't study natural shark activity when there are several boats full of tourists chumming the water constantly.

The book is all about Susan Casey's experiences working with the scientists on the island, and the crazy things she endured. I was riveted the entire time. If you are looking for a great non-fiction book to read, you might want to look at this one.

Of course, I should mention that one of the reasons that this subject might fascinate me so much is because I have an irrational fear of sharks - something that is bound to come up in many future stories that I write here.

Cleveland Public Transportation, Part 2

Last Thursday, I began talking about some woes of Cleveland public transportation. This is part 2 of 2.

If you live in Cleveland and wanted to get around without a car, you would be forced to use the bus system to get to any other useful locations. There are many problems with the bus system. First off, it takes an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere, as compared to the Rapid.

Secondly, you practically have to have a PhD to figure out which bus to take. If you go to the maps page of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's webpage, you can click on maps which show you the various bus routes. Unfortunately, those maps are impossible to figure out. Below is part of the system map.



Why isn't it color coded? Ok, you see a 46 on the left side of the image, and a 46 on the right side of the image. What route does it take to get from one side to the other? And why does the 46F take a completely different route? If the route is different, why append the numbers with a letter, instead of giving that bus a different number?

Ok, then find all of the occurrences of the 55SX on the map and try to figure out the route that it takes. It's impossible. I constantly hear from people that when they go to a foreign city, they have no problems figuring out the mass transportation systems there. But they can't figure out the system in their own city.

Alright, I think that's enough whining about public transportation. I could go on and on, but I think that gets the point across.

Maybe the situation would be improved if the Cleveland RTA participated in Google Transit. I saw the link to Google Transit on the O'Reilly Radar RSS feed. I would post a link directly to the entry that mentions Google Transit, but... uh... I can't figure out their perma-link system. And when I hit the link in the RSS feed about the subject, I was taken directly to Google Transit, not the entry on O'Reilly Radar where it is discussed.

Air Marshals Kill Passenger

I know that I said I would post part 2 of my thoughts on the Cleveland mass transit system today, but that'll have to wait until Monday.

In general, I had resisted posting anything about politics on my old weblog. The primary reason being that I know how irritating it is to read someone's weblog when their political views are opposed to yours. There are plenty of other reasons, too (I hate it when something I write on the internet comes back to haunt me).

However, there are just some times when I can't resist. And this is one of them. A few days ago, two air marshals shot and killed a passenger on a commercial flight who claimed to have a bomb in his backpack. And now there are a ton of people who are proclaiming that they are glad the air marshals shot him and asked questions later, instead of apprehending him and trying him in a court system that is stacked against the police.

I'm not even sure where to begin with this one. First off, there are clearly situations in which the police and air marshals have no choice but to shoot someone. And this very well may have been one of them. I wasn't there, so I wouldn't know. That's not really the part that I have a problem with.

The part I have a problem with is assigning the role of judge, jury and executioner to the police. However flawed our justice system is, it is still better than any other system currently in use right now, and it is impossible for me to understand anyone who does not believe in the presumption of innocence.

Giving the police the power to be the judge, jury and executioner in cases involving terrorism is a bad policy, in my opinion. The result will be that anytime the police mistakenly shoot anyone, they will lie and try to cover it up by claiming the victim was suspected of terrorism. Just look at what happened in the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting.

From the WashPost article linked to at the top of the article:

"This shows that the program has worked beyond our expectations," said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House transportation subcommittee on aviation. "This should send a message to a terrorist or anyone else who is considering disrupting an aircraft with a threat."

It shows that the program has worked beyond their expectations? In what way? In every way that I look at this story, it's a failure. And what message is it sending to terrorists? That our society is so freaked out that we're willing to shoot innocent people? And it most certainly won't stop someone with a bomb.

Authorizing the police to shoot anyone that may have a bomb is a really bad idea. I can only assume that the proponents of this policy think this would stop someone from detonating a bomb. However, what if the bomber had a dead man's switch? Or worse yet, what if the bomber was on a timer? Or even worse yet, what if the bomb was on a timer and it was hidden somewhere on the plane? Now you have just eliminated the only person who could tell you where it was.

The bottom line here is that no matter what the situation was, the air marshals shot and killed someone who wasn't actually a terrorist. Everyone is just so wacked-out and paranoid about terrorism these days that they are willing to accept the shooting of innocent people in the name of "safety". What if it were you or someone you know who was shot?

Cleveland Public Transportation, Part 1

In last week's CWRU Observer, there was an editorial article called "Cleveland Transportation Still Insufficient". In it, the author writes that "RTA’s rail system does not run close enough to the main streets or destinations on the east side of town for it to make a significant difference."

For the most part, I agree with the editorial. It is very difficult to get around town using public transportation. The Rapid (the light-rail line that runs south-west to north-east through Cleveland) is extremely efficient. The problem is that unless you are going to the airport, downdown, or University Circle (where Case Western Reserve University is located), it is almost useless. The Rapid carries a lot of people each day, but the majority of its passengers are people who drive from the suburbs to the edge of the city, and then ride the Rapid into downtown to go to work.

Of course, there is the possibility that it is idealy suited for its job. Maybe people wouldn't ride it anyway, even if there were light-rail lines going to other locations. Maybe the majority of people will only use it to commute into downtown. If this is the reality of the situation, then the enormous amount of money that would be required to expand it would not be an effective use. I just can't help thinking that it is really efficient, and that it might be used if it were most useful.

I also think that the RTAs problems are closely linked with Cleveland's overall problems, and that the only real solutions are going to take a long time, and require a committed effort.

Part 2 of this discussion tomorrow.

Remember, however, that this entire thought process was started by an editorial in the CWRU observer. Overall, the Observer webpage looks nice. It is certainly an improvement over the previous design.

However, there are some really odd issues with the website. For instance, why are there no links back to the front page from any of the articles? That makes absolutely no sense. The user expects that when they click on the logo at the top of the page, it'll take them back to the main site. There is no reason why this website should not conform to the expected behavior. This one issue makes the entire thing very difficult to read.

The second major oddity is... why aren't there any dates on the articles? The article that I just linked to could have been written years ago, and no one would ever know. Every other news website displays the date that the articles are written. Furthermore, it just makes good sense for any webpage to have a date written on it, just in case a user ends up at the page from a Google search.

Finally, why is there no way to get to the archives? The archives are clearly there, so why is no method provided to get to them? If you wanted to find an archived article, I guess the only way you would have to find it is by using a Google search.

Drive Partition Backups

For a while now, I have struggled to figure out how to properly create and deploy hard drive images. I typically back up the system partitions on my Windoze machines because it is much quicker to restore the partition than to do an install from scratch (and I typically reinstall once a year). Furthermore, if I could make backups of partitions on the Windows and Linux servers at work, it would make those duties far less time consuming.

There are many commercial products, such as Norton Ghost that purport to do the job. The old versions of Ghost were great, because you could boot off of the Ghost disk and make create and deploy hard disk partitions from whatever that operating system was. However, the new versions require Windows to already be installed for Ghost to function properly. That complicates deployment of partition images (and doesn't work at all for non-Windows OSs).

Another major problem of the typical tools on the market is that the Linux-based ones can't write to NTFS partitions. This wouldn't be such a large problem if Windows didn't arbitrarily force large partitions to be NTFS, even though there is no technical reason they couldn't be FAT. And the drive image tools that are not based on Linux have difficulty creating and deploying images of Linux installations.

Yesterday, I discovered G4U, which is a freeware tool that copies partitions or disk images bit-by-bit. Meaning that the tool is file system-agnostic. I have just started to test it out, but it appears as though it is the perfect tool for the job. Today, I will be doing more thorough testing, although I fear it'll take a few days to fully build my confidence in it.

For my future reference, I'm also including a link to PartImage in this post.

Dan Brown's Digital Fortress

A few weeks ago, I picked up a used paperback copy of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress ludicrously cheap. I have also read two of his other books: Deception Point and The Da Vinci Code. I thoroughly enjoyed both novels. However, I was much more familiar with the subject matter of Deception Point and felt that certain technical details were completely wrong.

I am only about 100 pages into Digital Fortress (my copy is just over 400 pages total), and I am starting to have the same feelings as I did about Deception Point. The problem is that I am familar with the subject matter and know exactly why the premise of the book is wrong.

The premise is all about some dorks at the NSA worrying that someone has written an encryption algorithm that is unbreakable. And the person who wrote the algorithm has put it up for auction, with the highest bidder being the only person who will be able to see the source code. The source code was first encrypted using this supposed unbreakable algorithm and then posted publicly for people to attack, and the auction was to end a few days later.

Anyone who knows anything about cryptology will have seen a ton of things wrong with the above paragraph. Ok, first of all, an unbreakable encryption algorithm? One problem with cryptology is that you don't have to attack the mathematics. It's the implementation of the algorithm that usually has the vulnerabilities. Furthermore, there is an even weaker link of the users, who often make their passphrases easy to find or guess. So, it would be my guess that the NSA would not be panicking about something like this, because a) if they can't break the mathematics, they can always attack the implementation or the users to get the data, and b) ostensibly, they have the best cryptology experts in the world, and it is therefore only a matter of time before a vulnerability is found.

Also, the strength (and therefore, also the value) of the encryption scheme is determined by experts who examine the mathematics and the implementation. No reputable company is going to bid millions of dollars for it if the scheme has not been throughly analyzed for vulnerabilities first.

The basic technical problems with the plots of Digital Fortress and Deception Point make me think there are more glaring problems with The Da Vinci Code that I am not aware of. It is unfortunate that Dan Brown didn't thoroughly research the subjects and write the plots in a plausible way, the way that Neal Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon (which is also about cryptology).

Phone Phreaking

Last week, Slashdot was running an article called Security Flaws Allow Wiretaps to be Evaded. Overall, the article and comments weren't as interesting as I hoped. However, in one of the comments, there was a link to the Wikipedia article about Phone Phreaking. THAT was an interesting article.

I had heard about phone phreaking before, but never really heard about the details. Here's an excerpt:

Joybubbles taught himself to whistle a tone (Namely, 2600Hz) that would cause a trunk to reset itself. Bill discovered that a recorder he had could play the same tone with the same effect. This allowed control of phone systems that worked on SF, or Single Frequency controls. One could produce a long whistle to reset the line, then one could dial with groups of whistles (a short one for a "1", two short ones for a "2", etc.).

This allowed them to make long-distance calls for free. This was fascinating to me.

Updated the layout

Ok, I think that I have most of the layout issues resolved now. It'll be much easier to match up static pages with the current layout. There are still a few details that bug me, but I have a feeling that they are going to have to wait until next weekend (or until I have time again).

I finally figured out how to turn Post Titles on. For the past few entries, the title field hasn't been showing up for me, so I must have accidentally turned it off. Actually, it didn't really bother me that much, because I often have problems creating an interesting title for my post. However, not having real titles for each post makes the RSS feed impossible to read.

While we're on the subject of RSS feeds... I notice that the feed doesn't cover the comments. Which means that if anyone actually posts a comment, there is no way that I'll ever know about it. That makes me want to turn the comments off, but we'll have to see.

Crappy layout problems

Uh, I was going to start actually weblogging today... and trying to do so on a regular basis, but this layout is driving me nuts.

There are two issues that I am trying to figure out right now. One is, how do you create a title for a weblog entry? Is there just no way to do that?

The other issue is of static pages. There are a few static pages that I would like to create, but I wanted the layout of those pages to match the weblog. And, uh, right now, it's too difficult to do that. So, I was thinking that I should just create my own Blogger template and then go from there. Unfortunately, I don't have all the time in the world, so it might take me a little while to actually get the template to the point where I like it.

New Linux Notebook page

I added another page to my Linux Notebook. We have linux member servers in our Windows NT4 domain, and I finally got around to converting my notes for how to set those up.

I'm actually working on a lot of linux stuff right now. I have a laptop in which the power management stuff doesn't actually work right. So, I am recompiling the kernel as we speak to try to get that sorted out. Hopefully, I'll have another page to add to my Linux Notebook in a few days.

Test

This is a test