Month: March 2013

Status

Last day in Maui. 8 turtles swam with, 20 miles hiked, 4 frozen yogurt stops, and lots of sunshine. Hoping to post more travel recaps and photos soon.

Maui – Travel Log, Day 2

2 full days are in the books now and Maui is wonderful. We’re staying in a condo Daniel got just south of Lahaina. Nice spot with a full kitchen, BBQ, laundry, and one row of houses back from the beach.

The first day was pretty low key. Just hung out at the beach next to the condo, picked up snorkel gear, and made an epic trip to Costco. Daniel and Leah had made a trip to the Safeway in Lahaina the first day and after going to Costco I’m pretty sure that Costco 1/4 to 1/5th of the price. We bought way, way too much food including 6 pounds of ground beef, 4 steaks, 6 pounds of brussel sprouts, 6 pounds of edamame, and enough onions to feed us for a week.

Yesterday, day 2, we drove around to the other side of the island and hiked the Waihee Ridge Trail. The eastern side of Maui is much more what I was expecting the terrain to be like. Lush, wet, and filled with plants. The trail climbed about 1,500 feet over 2.5 miles and was a simple up and back. Really nice hike and there weren’t too many other people out on it.

After the hike we were all drenched in sweat. Humidity will do that. So we went straight to Oluwalu Beach to swim and snorkel. The snorkel gear we picked up for the week at Snorkel Bob’s, which is a great deal. $35 for the entire time we’re here for a mask, snorkel, and fins. The beachside sellers charge $100 and up for what looks like inferior equipment. The reef at Oluwalu was way better than Black Rock, which we swam in the first day. Here it stretched for a long, long way and we swam for about an hour. I’m terrible at tracking which fish we saw but we did swim with two sea turtles. One was swimming out to deeper water so we tailed behind for 10 minutes or so. The other, and much larger, one was content sitting under a ledge of coral. Would have loved to see him out and swimming as he was so much bigger.

Play by your own rules:

Listen to your users more than the press. Don’t get sucked into the gravity hole between you and your competition. Ruthlessly run your own path, not someone else’s.

Interesting lessons from the co-founder of Gowalla.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Sometimes fully realizing the infinite scope of our stupidity is the most liberating thing. This is a cool essay about the importance of productive stupidity.

What is the business of literature?, by Richard Nash, is one of my all-time favorite essays about authorship and publishing. The entire piece is phenomenal and this bit was perhaps my favorite:

It was a sign, almost one hundred years ago, of the book beginning to achieve what most technology will never accomplish—the ability to disappear. Walk into the reading room of the New York Public Library and what do you see? Laptops. Books, like the tables and chairs, have receded into the backdrop of human life. This has nothing to do with the assertion that the book is counter-technology, but that the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.

Add that to Instapaper and settle in for some thought-provoking reading.

Bonus link on a related note is Fetishizing the Text, by Kieran Healy.

One time, at Costco…

"Sure, we need 6 pounds of ground beef and 32 corn tortillas."

There are 4 of us here. For just a week. I hope we get hungry!

Maui

Yeah, that will work. Looks like Sunday night will be a cold one! 😉

Looking forward to my first trip to Hawaii. Will be on Maui through April 1st with Daniel, Leah, and Leah.

Learning to See is a fantastic post from iA. It’s tough to pick out any one highlight but I liked this statement:

Beauty in design is not found by adding prettiness to a bold, functional design, it’s adding detail to the essence, so the functional logic becomes more humane, refined, and clear.

The Future of RSS Isn’t Another NetNewsWire:

My hope is that people don’t use this second chance at a decade old technology just to build NetNewsWire with popovers, a Tweetie-like sidebar and Twitter and Facebook sharing. The future of RSS isn’t in the feeds itself. It’s in figuring out how to extract the information out of those feeds and present it in an interesting and non-overwhelming way.

To know is to speak correctly

I’m still working my way through Foucault’s The Order of Things and have made slower progress than previous weeks. Busy weeks at work and lots of travel will do that. As I was working through my notes from the last 100 pages this quote caught my eye:

To know is to speak correctly, and as the steady progress of the mind dictates; to speak is to know as far as one is able, and in accordance with the model imposed by those whose birth one shares.

I particularly like those first six words. To know is to speak correctly. Has a nice feeling to it.