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Friday, July 14, 2006

IS THIS "LIVE"?

OR A RERUN OF WEDNESDAY?


Oceanview Of Mau'i


Oceanview Of Moloka'i


I'ao Needle


Banyan Tree - Lahaina


Oceanview Of Hana


The past three nights have put me in contact with people I drove on their prior visits to Mau'i. They remember me, I vaguely remember them. Last night's version was a 4-pax that I met this past February. I haul "regular" locals and kama'ainas all the time but now I have been driving long enough that I am getting repeat visitors. I guess my prior contact with them was pleasant, since no one screamed and pleaded to get out of the car.

They tell me that three things cause them to remember me:

  • My pony-tail

  • My beard

  • My voice

I know my voice is distinctive. I sound like a radio announcer. My voice is a deep baritone and my accent is "American Broadcast Standard", which means I do not have a regional dialect. I can thank a high school speech teacher for that. Everyone I come in contact with think I am from their part of the States and people from other countries say that I am easy to understand.



LAST NIGHT

It was a replay of Wednesday. Everybody on their best behavior. While this is very pleasant, it does make it hard to "talk story" for you folks. Moneywise it was good. Made half the meter between 7:00pm and 2:00am and made the other half between 2:00am and 5:30am.

FoodLand had a pretty major theft about 2:15am. Some guy came in about 1:30am and wandered the store carrying one of those hand baskets rather than pushing a cart. Piled expensive food items in the basket and draped himself in t-shirts and huge beach towels. He kept loitering near the checkout stands and when Maggie, the night checker, was occupied he bolted out the door, carrying all the loot. She called the cops and they were slow in responding, by about 45 minutes. The store has a pretty decent digital camera system and they might get a good image of the thief when the store manager replays the tape. This island isn't that big and with a good pic he will be nabbed eventually.

Just two more shifts to go this week and I have to dispatch on both of them, !@#$%&*#@!



HOUSEKEEPING

You may have noticed that I added the Mauna Kea and Mana Kai web cams to the sidebar. While these images should be static, I wrote a javascript that refreshes the Mauna Kea image every 90 seconds and the Mana Kai image every 3 seconds. At times the Mana Kai image will disappear briefly when a refresh here coincides with a refresh at their server. It will reappear three seconds later.

I did this so that dial-up users would have a more "real-time" view. Of course anyone using dial-up to visit Paradise Driver must be a glutton for punishment since the 400-500 assorted images on this blog must take forever to load. My old desktop takes about 10 seconds to load (11 mb connection) and my laptop takes about 2 to 5 seconds to load (54 mb connection) and they are both on broadband wireless router cable connections.



Later.....

Wil
=8^))
"Let's all be careful out there!"