At the top of the Haleakala crater are these strange, and very rare plants called Haleakala ahinahina or Haleakala Silversword. This photo shows clearly where the name came from, but not why I called the plant strange. For that you really need to see what it looks like when it is flowering.
Up very early on our first full day in Maui, we were at the top of Haleakala for sunrise (just). The drive up is fun; the road is switchbacks all the way to the top.
The photo of the inside of the crater was actually taken on our way back down from the peak (which is 10,023 feet above sea level). In it you can see a cinder cone from a more recent eruption (the volcano is officially dormant, not extinct).
You can check out a live webcam at the top of Haleakala as well. Sunrise at the time of writing is around 6am Hawaiian time (9am US pacific time or noon US eastern time).
After an early morning flight from San Francisco direct to Maui’s Kahului airport, we picked up the rental car and headed straight for our hotel, the Renaissance Kapalua Bay Hotel. The photo is from the hotel lobby area (where we had to wait while they finished getting our room ready). The whole area is just open; on either side of the lobby are seating areas, one being the hotel’s bar area, the other just a lounge for relaxing in with views out over the gardens and ocean.
Once settled, we drove back down the road to Whalers Village in Ka’anapali to check out the stores, find somewhere for a light dinner (we had eaten a late lunch at the hotel’s poolside bar) and also work out where everything was for the Maui Marathon that we would be taking part in on Sunday.
We were in Reno at the weekend and since I was not having much luck with the slot machines, I took a break and went outside with my camera. Along the river walk I came across this sign, mixed in with others explaining rules for the park and it made me smile.
Seems that there are lots of these signs dotted around the Reno and Tahoe area, though I did not see any of the others. There is a website mentioned on the signs too: www.welovethisplace.org. Check it out – they have signs you can order, as well as other merchandise.
Ben over at PhotoSydney has been posting some of the photos from his recent European trip. You can see a selection from London on the blog, and even more in his Flickr set. The shot on the right, from Portabello Road in Notting Hill (remember the movie?), is one of my favourites from the collection.
Outside the window of room 1036 at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel, Seoul is a building with a very bright Fuji Xerox neon advertisement on it. The photo shows the sign at its lowest brightness; the other end of the scale has the whole background area glowing bright-white. At some point in the night though it is turned off – when I woke up this early morning it was off. I had left the curtains and inside shutters open when I went to sleep to make sure I woke up early enough to pack, have breakfast and make it to the airport (anything up to a two hour bus ride from the City Air Terminal in the COEX complex).
As is pretty much always the case in Seoul, there is traffic visible in the bottom of the photo. Everywhere we went by car, we ended up stuck in heavy traffic. there doesn’t seem to be anywhere that is not jammed solid with cars, busses, trucks and motorcycle couriers (who use the pedestrian walkways as well as the streets).
At the end of a week in Seoul for a business trip, and I’ve been using my Gizmo Project account to make calls back to the US and the UK from my room at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel. Since I had only the Linux laptop with me though, I could not use the Gizmo Project client (the Linux version was pushed out until next month sometime). Instead, I have been using the X-Lite client from Xten (see my previous post for configuration information).
The call quality has been excellent for every call – at least as good as calling on the regular telephone in the hotel room. We also tried one incoming call (via one of the access numbers) and that worked well too. The price of the all the calls I have made this week using it doesn’t add up to the normal fee the hotel charges just for making a single calling card call, and that’s before the calling card per-minute fees. Of course, I did have to pay US$20 per day for the internet connection in the room, but I was paying that anyway for email and network connectivity.
Looks like I will be heading back over to South Korea in the near future, and this time I would like to keep in touch while I’m there using my GizmoProject account. Unfortunately, the Linux version of the GizmoProject’s client is not here yet (though it is due in August, so I am still hopeful that I’ll have it before I leave), and since it is a business trip I’ll have to take the Thinkpad with me rather than the PowerBook.
Meanwhile, it occurred to me that if it is possible to configure hardware adapters to work with Gizmo, then it should be possible to configure a softphone. I have used a couple of softphones in other circumstances: Kphone for my Asterisk project at Devicescape, and Xten’s X-Lite. The latter is a lot more polished (although getting it to accept a configuration always confuses me), so I thought I’d try that first.
Installation on Linux is simple: just decompress the archive and run the binary 🙂 The screen shot of the SIP settings panel shows my configuration (obviously, replace the first two blurred out numbers in there with your own SIP number – the instructions for setting up a hardware adpater tell you how to find this if you don’t already know it – the Register setting I left at default; it becomes a number once the client registers). The only other change I made was to go into the advanced settings and disable all the codecs except GSM and ILBC since those are the two that the hardware adapter instructions said were supported.
Then I tried an international call from my Linux laptop to the UK, using the Plantronics DSP500 USB headset that I use on the Mac and it worked perfectly. It even shows up in the call history on the Gizmo Project website.
Another jelly shot from the Monterey Bay Aquarium‘s Outer Bay exhibit.
I took a lot of shots with the Canon EOS 20D while there, all hand-held and at either ISO 1600 or ISO 800. I will add some more over this week (and I promise that they’re not all jelly fish!).
Despite being a member, I hadn’t been down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in a long time. Sunday, we made the two hour journey down there and spent some time walking around both the new and old exhibits.
One of my favourites is the jelly fish display in the Outer Bay exhibit. While the new “Jellies: Living Art” exhibit is interesting for the variety of species it contains, I still find the amazing orange jelly fish contrasting with the deep blue of the tank more impressive.