Monthly Archives: May 2010

Mauna Kea in Hawaii – Driving to the Summit of this Grand Volcano

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By Steven Anderson

The summit of Mauna Kea is called Puu Wekiu and it is at an elevation of 13,796 feet. This is the highest point of land in the Pacific Basin. An interesting fact about Mauna Kea is that if measured from the bottom of the ocean floor, it reaches nearly 30,000 feet which would make it the tallest peak on earth.

Visitors flock to Mauna Kea for a variety of reasons. There are 11 domes and 13 telescopes at the peak of Mauna Kea which attracts professional and amateur astronomers alike. Others come for the amazing viewpoints, unique bird watching and rugged hiking. Others come to Mauna Kea just to say they did so.

The drive up Mauna Kea takes about an hour. At the start, the driver will see typical Hawaiian tropical vegetation. As you pass sea level, the landscape changes to grass pastures and then into raggedy looking forests of koa and ohia trees. These thin out at 6,000 feet and the landscape becomes dominated by barren lava flows. The sub alpine regions found after the 6,500 foot level still support a few koa and ohia trees and even the rare mamane tree. All vegetation beyond 8,500 feet becomes very scarce.

The mountain is home to some excellent bird watching. The rare, yellow-crowned palila bird can be seen here. The endangered Hawaiian honey-creeper can be seen here as well. This bird only feeds on the seed pods from the scarce mamane tree. Less rare, but still interesting birds such as the uau (Hawaiian petrels), nene (Hawaiian geese), io (Hawaiian hawks) can also be seen on Mauna Kea.

The first step to reaching Mauna Kea is to drive Saddle Road (Route 200). This road is listed as off-limits by many of the car rental agencies. Thrifty will allow its rental cars on saddle road but advises against this practice. The roads are narrow with little or no shoulders and there are no emergency phones on this route should you encounter a problem.

You take the turn off from Saddle Road to Hale Pohaku and the Onizuka Center for International Astronomy Visitor Information Station. This leg lasts 7 miles and takes the traveler to 9,300 feet. This section can be driven by a normal car but it does feature very steep and windy roads. If you are driving a Thrifty rental car, the Visitor Center is as far as you are allowed to go. Harper’s Car and Truck Rental does rent vehicles for the exact purpose of getting from the Visitor Center to the observatory.

Please remember to bring warm clothing on this journey. Even in the summer temperatures can reach the low 40s. Also make sure to fill up the gas tank before you go. The steep grade and thin air pushes the car into very poor gas mileage and there is nowhere to fill up at the top.

(2006 – February) Steven Anderson is the Reservations Director for Hawaiian Discount Car Rentals, specialists in Maui car rentals. He has personally driven to the top of Mauna Kea and rates it as one of the most panoramic views in his travels to Hawaii. Please visit http://www.hawaiidrive-o.com.

Why I won’t be buying an iPad

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By Jeffrey the Barak

I may be the thousandth person to publish a why I will be buying or won’t be buying an iPad rant, but here goes.

I am an Apple enthusiast, with a 27″ iMac, a white Macbook and an iPhone 3G, and I like all of them, despite the Macbook and the iPhone running slower than my needs sometimes demand, but I was determined to play with the iPad before automatically buying one.

The first few times I dropped by an Apple store, the crowds around the iPad table were three deep, but yesterday I had the area all to myself.

The interface and the display on the iPad were so beautiful and sharp, I felt like buying it on the spot, but I decided to stand there and try and perform some tasks over wi-fi first.

There are two things that make this something I should not  buy. Firstly, it may be one of the lightest computers in use today, but since it is handheld, and not sitting on the desk, the meager weight of it eventually becomes a pain, and a warm one at that. This is no great surprise to me because I went through a tablet computing experimental phase in 2005 with an Acer tablet that had an awful display and an even worse operating system (Windows Tablet).

But the clincher for me was the iPad’s version of the Safari browser. It, perhaps deliberately, does not work well with Google. Yes Google, whom I love as much as I love Apple.

In my iGoogle home page, there were white bits representing modules that would not display, and in Google Docs, something my entire business resides in, the spreadsheets were kind of unusable in their “mobile” format. The iPad loads them as if it were a smartphone, and if you’ve ever tried to work in a big spreadsheet on a phone, you will understand torture.

So I will pass on the iPad, and probably also pass on any Google Android tablet that appears, for the same reason, but I will eagerly await the chance to get a Google Chromium netbook. I think that Chromium will be the key, and phone-based stripped-down operating systems like the iPad OS and the Android OS will only be useful for entertainment, as in photo viewing, book reading, video watching etc.

But to be fair, that is what the iPad is intended for, No-one said it should be used for real work first and fun second.

So a Google Netbook with a real keyboard is an exciting prospect to cut down on the weight of hauling a Macbook around, and I’ll gladly pay extra for a beautiful screen resolution to rival the iPad’s beauty of a display.

Such a thing should hit the streets later in 2010.

Jeffrey the Barak is an AppleGoogleTrout

UPDATE November 17th 2010

Well, I bought one, on September 30th and gave it six week of my time. Now it’s for sale on eBay because I cannot work on it. All I really do is work in email for eight hours a day, in Gmail to be specific, but Gmail on iOS is not so elegant as in OSX. Worst of all, my essential huge database, is a Google Spreadsheet, and even with the November Mobile Gdocs update, it’s a pig in iOS.So it will be a Macbook Air for me, unless the fabled Chrome Speedbook suddenly arrives and passes the rest. But I am not trying to be too negative about  the iPad, it’s a superb device and worth it’s price. My personal needs cannot be served by the iOS, but I’m not the average guy.

No one knows how to stop it

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By Jeffrey the Barak

Photo credit: NASA

Anyone who lives in Valdez knows what is still under every rock on the beach. As of now, Louisiana will be the same. And no-one is able to prevent it. The only thing proven to remove crude from seawater, human or animal hair inside nylon stockings, was not deployed sufficiently to prevent landfall, and now it’s too late. What a sad day.

Where is your stuff?

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By Jeffrey the Barak

Stuff? That could mean anything but more often than not these days it means your information, not so much your pictures and music, but your contacts, and your calendar.

Back in the paper and leather era, we could lose our Filofax and lose all, but with today’s synching and backing up, only an exceptionally careless person would lose his or her vital information. The choices today are more focused on local versus cloud storage of this valuable data. If you have a PC (trying not to laugh) then it is likely you keep your calendar and contacts in Microsoft Outlook, part of Microsoft Office for Microsoft Windows, a big old Buick of a program responsible for devastating data loss each time the single “pst” file is corrupted.

Or if you have a Mac, you probably use the Address Book and the iCal calendar and you may keep them in synch with your iPhone via iTunes or Mobile Me. Of course if you also use Google, and I wonder why anyone would not be using Google as much as possible, you can, with a little research and study, find a way to import and synchronize your contacts into Gmail contacts, your calendars into Google Calendar, and your most important documents and spreadsheets into Google Docs, so even if you lose every piece of equipment when a mountain flattens your town, you still retain all in the cloud. All you have to know is your gmail email address and one password and there it all is.

There are of course many choices when it comes to hardware, operating systems and software, cloudware etc., but as these options develop and multiply, there are still people who lose their phone and lose their stuff in the process. It’s akin to keeping all your money in your pocket. Sooner or later you’ll lose it.

Currently I use Apple’s iCal and Address Book and I have Mobile Me to keep my iMac, Macbook and iPhone in sync, and I also export to Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar. Plus I have a folder in my address book called notes, which uses the contacts program to record lists such as to-do, waiting-for, sizes, etc.

We have feedback and comments here at the-vu, so If you have any different ways of keeping it all, let us know!