My kid has grown up. 10 years old now with all the expected problems associated with being a 4th grader. We shuffled him off to a private school this year which I swore I wasn’t going to do. But an opportunity came up to make the tuition more affordable and we took it. It’s a nice small little school with a lot more hands-on teaching which I really like. Get this, 2 (TWO) teachers in his class of no more than 14 kids.  And they’re good teachers too!  So it’s an amazing experience for HIM.  For me?  Not so much, I’m sitting in an extra 40 mins of traffic each day as opposed to what could have been walking distance in his last school.  Sacrifices! That kid betta appreciate it someday.

Work is both amazing and exhausting. They shuffled me and my colleague over to the main university campus at Manoa this past year. Main reason was that they were renovating our offices back on our home campus, but it also overlapped with the fact one of our projects ballooned into a major project that involved the entire university system.  It kind of grew before we really fully realized what happened…one day someone wanted us to explore how to make something perform a little better for one community college campus, the next day we’re presenting to the entire system office who wants to replace an old 20-year old legacy system with ours. It debuted just this week.

It’s just an online form, you might think.  To fully grasp how big a scope this was….imagine someone asking you to design an input and commerce form, not from scratch, but it had to play nice with a database in the order of several terabytes; one that had to keep operating, and had SUPER sensitive student information. OH, and then count in a dozen or so 3rd party and inhouse custom applications that handled all these various uniquely necessary functions for a university…all connected to this giant database over the course of these 2 dozen years maybe handled by people who are no longer around to help.  ACK.

Oh by the way, the old system wasn’t accessible or responsive. So can you hold it all on your shoulders to come to the rescue and make sure this new one holds up to all of today’s standards?!  It’s nuts and it’s sort of amazing that it’s working at all.  Credit goes to having an amazing colleague that somehow is a programming genius, but it’s still overwhelming even from a project management perspective. The way universities work their IT infrastructure is still mind-blowing to me.

All the while I’ve been forced to learn new things; I’m actually grateful for this part. I’m better equipped to handle Bootstrap frameworks nowdays; I’m loving the Visual Studio Code, despite being wary at first; I’m getting more accomplished and rehearsed with SASS CSS; toying around more with Trello and Slack to get things done within a team, etc. All the things that would be part of today’s’ development repertoire but not so easy for an old crow like me to get into because “the old way was good enough why change” mentality.

I’m surviving. I’m growing. I’m still here.

Work at the college has been exciting but also getting stressful. So we managed to push out that college app 2 years ago; which has turned into the highest rated college app in the Android store as far as we’ve seen. (In all fairness, college apps aren’t rated very often at all; so we can lay claim to that title for the time being) But that’s turned out to be better than we had expected. We had hoped for a 14% adoption rate (industry average) and ended up in the mid-20%.

So now, eyes have been on us a bit. That has greased the wheels apparently. Now what started as a harmless little project to improve our own community college online application has suddenly bloomed to the point we’re meeting with hoidy toidy system-level folks considering using our system for the WHOLE University system!

I mean, that’s cool right?  It is…but it’s also high pressure trying to get it right. And the meetings!!! Oh so so so so many meetings. So so so many presentations.

But if this pans out as planned, someday every single university student in Hawaii would be applying through our portal. That would be exciting.  Fingers crossed!

Anyhoo…one thing it seemed we’ve involuntarily been shuffled into was the role of costume designer. This year their theme has something involving video game characters for his play….he ended up choosing to be a Chomper from Plant vrs Zombies. If you haven’t played that game, it’s basically just a walking venus flytrap.

Mind you, beyond a simple Jack and the Beanstalk costume we made for him last year, my wife and I have never built costumes before. I never picked up a glue gun nor reliably worked with felt and materials. So I was a little bit apprehensive when I told the boy “Yeah, sure we’ll see if we can make you a costume”.

First thing we did was jump onto Google to search for any ideas. There were some. This particular version gave us the best tip moving forward. The colander idea and the big floaty tube lips was a big help. It gave us the funniest moment when we were at Walmart trying on colanders on his head….people were giving us really funny stares.

Two cheap plastic colanders. I basically smashed out the bottom half, taped the two ends together and padded the bottom with old, clean socks.

Wrapping it wasn’t easy. I think we made a bad choice choosing felt to wrap the thing…perhaps plain cloth might have been easier and smoother around the shapes.

Rather than sew a suit, I suggested we buy a purple unitard from Amazon. It worked, but the purple didn’t match. I took the extra scraps from the head material and designed a pattern going down the suit.

The leaves we fun to cut. Glue gun worked well although I have a few burnt finger tips

The end result turned out pretty good I’d say. The colors all work well together and it’s apparently a hit with the other kids in the play.

I had fun writing stuff on my blog for a good number of years. It was therapeutic to me at one time when I was spending a good deal of time working by myself in my office. But now…of course my working situation has changed, and frankly I guess social media platforms kinda scratch that itch I have whenever I want to just blurt out a thought or two.

Stay tuned.

So flash forward to today’s world where we got endless wars in the Middle East, we got a giant ice cube melting quickly in the North, we got people voting emotionally against their own self-interest across multiple countries. It’s been hard to keep upbeat. It’s not exactly as bad as a feeling of depression…but it’s a feeling of unease that I haven’t felt especially around this time of year when there’s decorations going up and cooler weather I normally love.

The Trump vote has been on my mind a lot. How is it not when every news venue over the past 16 months has been nothing but. The hope had been “oh I can’t stand it all but after November at least we can put it behind us”.  We all know how that’s turned out.

I want to believe that it will be all fine. In my short life I’ve lived through many different Presidents on both sides of the fence. Some I agreed with and some I didn’t. And you know what? At the end of the day looking back my life rolled on the same no matter who was in office. My little island life trucked on…I worked, earned money, payed taxes, found ways to enjoy what I had either way.

But this one doesn’t feel the same way. I don’t know if it’s because I now have a vested interest in my kid who will live in a future shaped by today’s decisions. I think many of the decisions that could come about with politics will generally be softer here in Hawaii as they have always been. My child won’t face the brunt of the racism that is felt elsewhere. I think my wife and I will generally be ok with our earning potential. Our nuclear family isn’t directly affected by other hot-button issues that are currently being tossed about as much as it pains me to see others being hurt.

But what’s scary regardless of who made it into office (one more scarier than the other) is the environment. As amazing as it is to live in a world where I can see self-lacing shoes and instance face chatting with anyone in the world, it sucks a whole bunch to think that we’re the first generation to actually have to consider a world where something as natural as fresh water may become a limited resource.  How that singular issue, regardless of political leaning, isn’t the most talked about topic boggles my mind.

Sigh.

I’ll get over this funk I suppose. I’ll bombard myself with cheery Christmas music (even though it annoys the other scrooges in my office) and concentrate on tree decorating this weekend. Maybe that will lift the spirits?

I thought it would be the perfect chance to see how well my photography skills have progressed too…last time I visited the Palace they didn’t allow interior areas to be photographed, but now they do. You just can’t use any flash. So I busted out my camera and jumped on the bus for this all-day trip.

Front side of ‘Iolani Palace

I didn’t realize how many local Kama‘aina had never visited the Palace. It sits right in the heart of Downtown Honolulu so it’s almost impossible to pass this landmark on a daily basis. For those of you not in-the-know about this Hawaiian landmark…‘Iolani Palace was the official residence of the former Hawaiian monarchy. For its time, it was intended to be a modern marvel…bathroom plumbing, telephone, electric lights, etc.

Very beautiful dining area for entertaining dignitaries.

I probably couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of my Palace knowledge, so it’s best you check out their website yourself or go on the tour.

All I can attest to is the challenge of getting good my photos taken during the tour. I found it challenging to because of 3 issues:

1. You’re on a walking tour, so I had to either enter the rooms first or be the last to leave if I wanted to get shots that were void of the other guests.
2. I wanted to be respectful of the tour docent and the other guests so they didn’t hear the “click click” of my camera. It’s very quiet in the Palace, there’s several tours conducted at the same time so it’s often very hush in there like a library.
3. It was pretty dark in there. Most of the lights came from very weak electric chandeliers in there and any natural lighting coming in from outside. You can’t use flash, so be prepared to take a camera that can handle very low light. I had my camera up to 2000 ISO at some points. I knew going in that couldn’t take in my tripods or monopods…they make you wear booties on your shoes so you don’t scuff up the floor.

The King’s personal bedroom…they haven’t recovered all his original furniture since it was mostly auctioned off after Hawai‘i’s annexation.

As lovely as the Palace was, it’s always sobering to remember that the Palace and all its history was not always happy. The overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and imprisonment of Queen Lilioukalani remain a very poignant and painful thing for many native islanders today.

Royal throne room. It was awesome to be allowed to take photos in here.

It’s worth taking a visit at least once to the Palace. I’ll probably find a chance to take my child…if I can get over the fear that he’ll knock something over.

This time? Vancouver, Canada. It wasn’t my first option when my wife asked me where we should go since she already had vacation blocked off this month. Oddly…and sadly…a trip to Canada actually turned out to be cheaper than a short hop to a neighbor island. It even turned out to be cheaper than a trip to Vegas which shocked me. So when offered a chance to stick another stamp in my passport for “cheap”, I was all ready to go.

Took the opportunity to practice my travel photography again.

Taken from a moving horse carriage at Stanley Park

As it turned out, we really lucked out on our stay in Vancouver, where I understand it’s usually grey and rainy. That sky was blue and perfect just about every day we were there.  I just had to point my camera in any direction and the perfect sky just helped frame every shot for me.

Coming from Hawai‘i its easy to say we live in a beautiful city. But we don’t own the monopoly on beauty of course. I actually envied how much perfectly green foliage I saw in parts of the city.

Japanese garden at UBC

Look at that. Yes, I could picture my days laying down under one of those trees. I always considered myself a city boy, but a world without looking at trees would depress me.

We did everything from riding gondolas up to the highest peaks, to traveling underground for a tour of an old copper mine which offered me a good deal of opportunity to see what I could capture on my camera. Sadly, I reached the limits of my ability when I tried to shoot underground with no flash. No matter if I turned up my ISO to my maximum setting, it just didn’t allow me enough light to hand-hold a clear shot.

A gondola ride up near Shannon Falls. I ended up liking shots that had context like this more than my exterior landscape shots

Then there were times where shots turned out exactly as I had planned them, which is always very personally rewarding.

“My first time seeing snow!” says the Hawaii boy

Green every direction you look

Vancouver wasn’t without faults. I saw more homeless crackheads than any other city I’ve visited before. A friend of mine told me the homeless in Vancouver were actually “safer” than most metropolitan cities because of some implicit understanding they have with local law enforcement. That might be right, but it was still unnerving.

Wall of deteriorating wall art. I passed this every day near where we were staying and I found it charming.

Well, so goes my continued effort to expand my boy’s mind on the world. I think he’s left with a love of snow, poutine and ketchup chips. Good enough. NEXT!

As it turned out, I’m glad I took it all along with me. These sets of photos were better than the ones I took a year back in Japan. I’m uncertain why, I didn’t necessarily practice my photography a lot over the past year. The only thing I suspect is each year my child gets a little older affords me those few extra seconds I have to think about my photos before taking them. Those 10 extra seconds at a streetside made all the world’s difference playing around with manual settings that turned out to be the key on several shots I wanted.

Street alley on the way to finding that perfect coffee

I’ve always been forcing myself to stick to lower ISOs. I love it when I can get that tack-sharp look when I get back to my computer. However, this time around, I found myself in a lot of areas that just didn’t afford that type of light. I think in past trips, the result was I’d come back with a lot of blurry photos in low-light settings simply because I was too stubborn to use higher ISOs. This time around, I just ignored myself and jammed the ISO settings all the way up to maximum whenever I needed it. I figured it’s better to get the shot, however noisy it would be.

Yes, there were still some unobtainable shots. I didn’t come back with any nighttime city lights that I liked, for instance. On the other hand, there were some lighting conditions that were easily tackled with the high ISO.

Victoria Market. I used a high ISO and just dialed in aperture till I got the shop lighting I really wanted.

Another high ISO shot during the early evening. There’s a little noise, but nothing that bothers me too much.

Finally, say what you will about the standard rules of photo composition. It’s one thing for me to talk to students about depth, rule-of-thirds, angles, light, and whatnot. But when it comes down to developing that “eye” which will let you walk a random street and see potential shots…I think that just comes with taking lots and lots of photos. I’ve watched some of my friends go from taking poorly composed shots one day, to works of art the next day…simply because they practiced. I haven’t been putting that time in.

I made the effort. I tried getting some good angles, worked on light, and tried to get shots away from those I thought hundreds of other people took. They’re not masterpieces, I’m happy with some of the results.

I saw dozens of people taking shots of the bike installation in the courtyard. I wondered what it might look behind the windows.

It’s not that easy getting Kingston to be candid behind the camera once he notices I’m taking a shot

I’ve realized lately these old shoes have traveled quite far with me. Back home they’ve been one of my daily travelers…they “walk” with me to the feet of Diamond Head on a near daily basis.

But I took them with me on my recent trips over the last 4 or 5 years. I’m not sure why I take these…I think I just love the color combination and they’re easy to match with just about any outfit I’ve stuffed into my suitcase. They’re falling apart, they’re dusty and dirty, they’re worn on the back, the rubber is peeling on some areas, and they’re somewhat sore to wear after a long day of travel walking 20k steps.

But I think back on where they’ve gone with me. They’ve gone from Hawaii to the city streets of Hong Kong. They’ve been through the humid city streets as I hunted for the tastiest won ton noodles. They’ve hurriedly rushed past haughty store windows of upscale fashion malls where 1 item could be worth the price of a super car. They’ve gone to Stanley Market where one of my favorite aunts has lived all her life….where I once remember was a stinky pig farm district has now become a busy tourist trap.

They came with me to Tokyo where they went halfway up the side of Mt Fuji! They walked with me through the stores of Akihabara as I hunted for geeky mech toys. They gave me sore feet by the time I tried crossing that crazy streetwalk in Shibuya…over and over again. They’ve gone with me to Disney Tokyo. The most polite Disney I’ve visited thus far.

I almost threw them away in Melbourne. I had figured I really got my money’s worth with these things. But I couldn’t bear it.  In Australia they were with me when I sat out in a cold freezing beach at night watching for little penguins come out of the ocean. They were with me walking a beach of Philip’s Island, a beach scene every bit as scenic and idyllic as the beaches here back home. I walked the streets of a city I hadn’t visited in over 18 years.

These shoes really have to go. But it looks like we’ll be visiting Vancouver, Canada in a couple months. I think I have to bring these little bad boys with me just so I can say they’ve been journeyed with me through yet another world destination. I hope my sore feet will hold out.

I spotted a few gorgeous examples of street art in Melbourne. I love how artwork like this is slowly being embraced more and more in city development.