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I'm back in Hawaii for a few weeks. The weather is great, the water is hot, everyone smiles. If one manage to get away from the beach, there is an amazing world to discover around here. Last week I decided to head for some back country hiking on Kauai, the oldest of the main Hawaiian Islands.

I was lucky that my post on the Hannah Stove got so much attention. Jim Thompson, a scout leader on Oahu, liked the instructions and he advised me on the best hikes to do around here. I'm on Oahu but hoping from one island to the other is like taking the inter city bus in Montréal. Outside rush hours, flights cost between 9$ and 39$ and bring you to destination in 45 minutes or less.

Kauai is five million years old, five times older than the Big Island. It had more time to be beaten into shape. Valleys have voluptuous curves, beaches are wider, the reefs more populated and colossal canyons intensify the landscape. Volcanic rocks have soft edge and there is a lot of the Hawaiian typical red clay.

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I spent a few days last week in the San Francisco Bay area. For a geek, visiting the legendary Silicon Valley is a pilgrimage.

Paul Graham has a few interesting essays on what might make the magic happen in Silicon Valley. Indeed, when you are there you can feel that some magic is going on but it is incredibly evasive, you can't point at it or describe it but it's there. Someone can cross the whole valley on the 101 or even on El Camino and all what you see is an endless sprawl. The weather is nice but we are still in Suburbia.

When you visit the computer history museum, the power of the valley starts to unfold. As the guide walk you through the landmark artifacts of the computer world he will add "[...] was developed just here down the road.", "[...] not far from here in Stanford." or "[...] and he was here last year and told us a story about this computer.". Some companies have really cool offices (taken from here), people move around with kick scooters and all the big players have offices in the area.

Why they go to the ugly sprawl instead of San Francisco is still a mystery to me. San Francisco is a great city. Being on the peninsula keeps the whole thing compact and compact cities like Montréal are more pedestrian friendly. You can just wander around and stop by an Irish pub or one or the numerous sea food restaurant in the Fisherman's Wharf. There is an endless downtown beach with huge waves but the water is a bit cold so surfers need a wetsuit.

A compact city don't mean that you are always trapped between sky scrapers. The Golden Gate Park offers a peaceful environment that would require more than one day to explore. The city has numerous fairly steep hills and parking a car there must be a challenge, I imagine the balancing feat required to park a motorcycle.

Paul Graham probably score a point when he conjectures that you need great universities to reproduce Silicon Valley. When you walk on the Stanford and Berkeley campuses you feel a majestic excellence. There are Rodin statues and stone arcades all over the place. When you are there, you want to be worthy of this prominence. Even if you are just passing by.

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It is kind of time for another round of pictures from Hawaii. Since everyone prefer lava and since Hawaii in the only place in the world where tourists freely roam on an active volcano, only a few centimeters from glowing lava, I shall start with the pictures of my hikes on the Kilauea.

But first, since this is a geek's blog, I will do some technical rambling. Digital camera manufactures boast that their products can capture a large amount of megapixels. Is this any good for the user? I say hell no! I'll be talking trough my hat since I only used one digital camera seriously but I received enough pictures from others that I'm confident that what I say is true.

Do you recall those new parents who sent you an email with only a few pictures totaling several megabytes? Why do they do that? Don't they know that you are using a monitor that can't display such a large image? Do they expect you to zoom in on this youngling to convince yourself that its eyes are closed? Do they expect you to print this picture? A cheap printer with cheap paper can't match this resolution and sorry buddies, I won't take your pix to a print shop. I'm not saying that parent should not send emails with pictures, what I'm saying is: please, no pictures larger that 300k!

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Even though there is a lot to say about the CASS and about Oahu, I can't find the time to post updates. I will do a good summary when I can but this weekend was the field trip to Big Island and many asked for updates so here is a quick summary.

We left Oahu early Saturday morning. The inter-island flight is less than an hour, we just climb up, get a scenic view of all the islands and go down in the cloudy Hilo. Big Island is really young, less than a million years old. Erosion has only dug rocky rivers and there are waterfalls everywhere. We were ahead off our schedule so we had time to do hiking in the morning. Around Hilo there is heavy rain forest, as we climb up on the Mauna Kea we cross many different eco systems, from deciduous forest to shrub lands and tundra.

While getting acclimated at the Onizuka Station we went for a hike on cinder cones. The station is above most of the clouds, the view was breath taking. The oxygen lean air gave us a good buzz, a diluted preview of what to expect at the summit. We had the honor to get dinner at Halepauhaku, the small lodge where astronomers and support staff are hosted.

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