I tried to blog about our first day in Hawaii on Christmas Eve, but my PC crashed. It was pretty late so I gave up and went to bed. We had arrived in Honolulu a little after noon on Christmas Eve. We rented a car from enterprise, and they upgraded us to a convertible. Cool! We checked in to our hotel, Aqua Bamboo, in Waikiki. They upgraded us to the penthouse. Awesome! We had the whole top floor, 2 BR/2 BA, full kitchen and an LCD TV (see the kitchen on the right).

After settling in to the hotel, we went took a stroll along the Waikiki beach (see picture at the top). The beaches were not as big as I expected. There were a lot of sea walls to limit the inevitable erosion. We walked out on one and were rewarded with a nice view of Diamond Head (see picture on left). We walked around until the sun was setting. The picture to the right shows our first beautiful sunset from Waikiki. It was such a beautiful day and a great start to our trip. For a closing shot, here’s a view of Waikiki at night from the lanai of our penthouse suite. More to come…

We’re heading for the Hawaiian island of Oahu tomorrow morning. It looks like the weather should be decent. We’re looking forward to a great trip. In case I don’t get a chance to blog in the next couple days, Merry Christmas, or as they say in Hawaiian: “Mele Kalikimaka”.

I’m still moving forward with Kubuntu, but I haven’t fully committed yet. I had been doing some synchronization tests with my Treo, and at one point my calendar and todo list got wiped out. I was able to get them back from Windows/Outlook. So far I haven’t tried to sync with kpilot/Kontact since that mishap, but I think I’ll try it soon.

Over all I like Kontact as a replacement for Outlook. In addition to all the features I was used to from Outlook, Kontact also includes a news reader and something called Akregator, which provides a news reader like interface for RSS feeds. It’s pretty nice for keeping up to date with the latest developments on the Ubuntu community sites as well as news sites like Google News and SlashDot.

There are a few other KDE applications I’m starting to like. One is Kopete, which is an Instant Message client. It supports all the major formats (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, IRC, etc.). I suppose it’s pretty similar to Gaim. I also like the default music player/manager, Amarok. It has a pretty good interface as well as some interesting bells and whistles. I think I need to play around with it some more.

I have had a few problems with the KDE tools. One problem is the System Setting tool does not allow me to use administrator mode. This means I can’t do much as far as managing system resources through the GUI. The Adept Manager (package manager) does not seem to have a way to refresh the packages after I change the repository settings. I have to quite the tool, do an ‘apt-get update’ then run the tool again. Fortunately I don’t change the repository settings very often. Finally, the wireless management is not the best. I wasn’t able to use the default tool, so I downloaded wifi-radar. I can’t seem to launch wifi-radar from the menu interface. I have to run it from the command line. So far I don’t have any wifi indication on my system bar either. Finding and enabling new networks is a little more troublesome than under Windows.

I still may revert back to Ubuntu and try using kpilot for synchronization. I’m not sure if I would pick Evolution or Kontact for email and such. I guess that’s another problem with Linux, there are too many choices. It would be nice if the open source community would band together to back one key application in each area, but I guess too many cooks spoil the broth…

Christmas is coming. Thank goodness I’m already done with my shopping. Well, I suppose it would be more accurate to say that my shopping list was extremely short. These days I only get presents for Mary and my Godson, Nick. I bought Nick’s present online and I hope will arrive before Christmas.

Mary and I are going to Hawaii for Christmas. We’ll be going to Hawaii for about 1 week, Dec. 24-31. I had planned to call that my gift to her, but I did add one extra item to the mix: on Christmas Day we will go snorkeling with dolphins! Hopefully the weather (and the dolphins) will cooperate.

I haven’t accomplished anything on the Review Summaries site recently. Ron and I got together a couple times last week, mostly making plans for our next step. However, I have not managed to get moving early enough anytime so far this week such that I could get together with him to continue our work. There are some interesting challenges for the site, but it’s a lot of work.

There’s plenty to do in the New Year…

So I’ve installed Kubuntu, which is the KDE version of Ubuntu. I’ve installed the 6.10 version, so I can get the wireless card working. I’m also using kpilot (instead of gnome-pilot) and it seems to be working with my Treo and it syncs to Kontact, which is the KDE mail and PIM suite. I think kpilot works with Evolution as well, but I think I’ll try Kontact for a bit. I’m even posing this using Konqueror, the KDE web browser! Maybe I’ll manage to switch to Linux after all…