Honolulu Marathon

As we speak, there's a few thousand visitors limping around in Waikiki. That's how you tell they ran in today's marathon even without their finishers' T-shirt on. Every year, the same scenario repeats itself. At any rate, around 7:20pm tonight I was riding around Kapiolani Park nearby the Honolulu Marathon finish line and the final runner was "blazing" it down the home stretch with a fanfare of tv cameras and of course me, saluting him with a beep-beep as I rode by on the opposite direction street. That's what like 14-hours after the race officially started off.

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If you use Disk Defragmenter, you'll recognize the graphic below. At least for me, it's rare to get all the computer files organized in a contiguous group without a few intervening white spaces.

Buy Me

Dear reader, I am being relentlessly stalked by an ad for a Flip Ultra HD camera. It's one of those 'web cameras for webbies' webbie cams. At any rate, ever since I visited the Flip Ultra HD website weeks ago, it's ads have been coincidentally appearing like magic on a number of Internet websites that I regularly visit. If I use a different computer then the ads aren't there. Thus my computer must be the traitor. And here I thought we played for the same team. The ad shown in the pic above was pasted on our local newspaper's website, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. And as surely as night follows day, tomorrow the same ad will make an encore. The persistence of the perpetrator amazes me, some kind of ad agency. They must get paid by the hits. I surmise most probably the tracking software is something that's readily available out there code named Hitman or something along those lines. Oh, about the webbie camera, itself, the reason that I looked into it, is that its much more handy to take impromptu pics judging from the people I've seen using web cameras. It's all walaa and far less intrusive taking a photo, for example, of an apple in a grocery store, and shoppers in the same aisle having to duck out of your way. At any rate, 11-minutes after the hour. The 1 o'clock hour. Am. Later.

The Season of Giving

Today, President Obama dropped a krugerrand in the Republican's christmas kettle by going along with a one two year extension of the Bush tax cuts including benefits to people making over $250,000 a year, 2 percent of the population. Nothing new. Obama never confronted a major piece of legislation that wasn't worth caving in on by tossing the bill's virtues under the bus for the sake of expediency. Take the Health Care Reform Bill, namely the stipulation that mandates every citizen purchase health care insurance or pay a penalty. That wasn't the Obama administration's idea. Instead it was a demand by the health care industry to which Obama acquiesced, and mandatory coverage became the new law of the land with his signature.

Without the concession, the health care industry threatened that they would bombard a national audience with negative television ads and surely snuff out Obama's quest for health care reform and deny him his place in history for accomplishing something that no other US president had been able to pull off. And we certainly can't have that. To appease Sen. Joe Lieberman, the holdout vote, the public option (gov't option) provision in the same health care reform package was dropped at the midnight hour which granted the health care industry a monopoly over a captive market under the final draft of the watered down bill. Up until last month, Obama was suppose to pull the troops out of Afghanistan by summer next year. Notwithstanding Obama's unannounced 4-hour visit to Afghanistan last week, apparently the new deadline in the sand seems to be for 4 years more.

Seasons Greetings

Tis' the season when people flock to the post office to mail their holiday presents early. By and large, if you don't make the same pilgrimage to the post office by next week to mail your own presents, the odds are you'll put it off to the 24th. Just like last year. A friendly reminder to people who re-gift presents that they've stored away a full year already .... don't mail it back by miscue to the same person who originally sent you the present. At least change the wrapping.

Ho, the crowd. I mean, the revelry.

The stars of the show were these the military men sending what I assumed to be holiday gifts to fellow troops stationed overseas. It seems that they must do this every year judging by the temporary conveyor belt that they had set up in advance that takes the parcels to just outside the front entrance where other soldiers carry it to the counter. I was talking to a postal employee and he told me that the soldiers had been doing this for over an hour already.

The other end of the conveyor belt. Almost done.

Your Neighborhood Crime Map

All those balloons you see on the Waikiki map represent crimes in my neighborhood. No, not the crimes featured on Hawaii Five-0. That's a different venue. As in, the crimes on Hawaii Five-0 are exclusively murder. The crimes marked on this map are mostly misdemeanors. Hawaii, here. Other parts of the USA, here.

People Get Ready for the Train to ....

It took a few shots to finally photograph the train as you now see it in the pic. Each time the train would circle around it just refused to stop and pose for the camera. It's a wrap. Or, at least that's what they say in the movie industry when they finally shoot the scene right after several takes, and "it's a wrap" also applies for presents too, I guess. Tis' the season, 2010.

National Buy a Spring Clamp Day

Large size spring clamps were on sale at Home Depot for 99¢ each. I bought 4 spring clamps to use for something that I'll think of later like hanging clothes on the lanai railing, but be glad that I bought the spring clamps then. It's called being proactive. It's called not being able to resist a sale even though you haven't the vaguest idea what you're gonna use the sale item but remembering having wished that you had bought a another sale item you hadn't but needed later.