On vacation last week, I was away from any readily available broadband access, so I’m catching up with some of the incredible content on the web related to the Christmas Tsunami. Cheese and Crackers has one of the better aggregated collections of video content I’ve found. Definetly worth a look.
Back from Vaca
Just back in Atlanta from a holiday trip to Florida. I’ll resume posting shortly. Gosh, this page looks blank without any posts for the past week! Sorry.
I almost forgot…
Yes, it’s true. I’d say it’s looking a lot like Christmas, excpet for my religious affiliation. I have just received a brand-spanking new G5 dual-2.5gHz liquid cooled PowerMac at work. Oh, baby! I spent much of the last day of work before heading out on vacation getting this bad boy set up. It’s just amazing. First off, the Setup Assistant was able to seamlessly transfer my home directory and most of my applications from my old 1Ghz TiPB drive with little or no work on my part. It took a while – over 2 hours – but when it finished, the new machine rebooted and looked just like the old one. Same desktop, same dock configuration – everything. Except of course the incessant slowdowns whenever I tried to do much of anything. Gone are the days of the spinning beach ball in iPhoto. My current library has about 2,000 6MB+ photos. Even touching the thumbnail slider was enough to trigger a beach-ball wait of 15+ seconds. Scrolling was the same – each page took at least 10 seconds. Now, I can scroll from top to bottom of my collection in a blink of the eye.
The new G5 arrived only a day after I received a new Seagate 100GB 2.5″ 5400 RPM internal drive for my aging Titanium Powerbook. The enclosure I ordered was dead out of the box, causing some concern until I could confirm that it was not the new drive, and I have managed to migrate the old data onto the new one, and installing was easy-peasy.
Put simply, I am a very happy man.
Big, Big, Waves
Surfers from around the world converged on Oahu’s north shore for an elite invitation-only event to the top competitors in the sport. As reported in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the event has been held only seven times in the past 20 years, the event features a purse over $50,000, and only takes place when waves are generally over 30 feet. 
The Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational honors the life of former Waimea Bay lifeguard and surfer Eddie Aikau, who was never found after he paddled off for help when the Hokulea capsized in rough seas in 1978. Someday, I’d like to get back to Hawaii during the winter to see these waves and to watch the whales come through in their seasonal migration, but I did get to photograph the windsurfers on Maui’s north shore during our honeymoon in 2003.