Here are pix from a couple of events that I’ve gone to recently.

Woz

First, a couple of Friday’s ago, Steve Wozniak was interviewed on the UW campus by Robert Scoble (I say interviewed, but Scoble didn’t get a lot in edge wise). Woz is someone that I have always respected a lot because it has always seemed that he was a highly unlikely revolutionary. Money and fame hasn’t changed him as he seems to be as lovable a nerd as ever. Great stories from the man who brought computers to the rest of us.

Woz Trivia – apparently, Woz was once the highest scoring player of Gameboy Tetris so many times in Nintendo Power magazine that they asked him to stop submitting his scores.

Hopefully, Scoble puts his video up soon so you can watch this highly animated talk.

John Hodgman

Second, John Hodgman visited Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company to promote his book, Areas of My Expertise, going into paperback. Readers may be familiar with his Daily Show work or maybe his Apple ads as the lovable dufus, the PC. If you get a chance to see John on his book tour, I highly recommend it. His reading and routine are quite witty and his book is side-splittingly funny.

John is pictured with my friend, Suzi.

Enjoy

We went a little nuts with the pictures… if you can believe it, they are highly edited.

Hilo pix

We rented a house out on the coast 7 miles or so outside of Hilo. The place was pretty incredible literally right on the ocean with very large waves crashing about 20 feet outside our window all night. It had a lap pool and a hot tub and we seriously chilled out at this place.

We also met up with Dave’s Aunt and Uncle who lived on that side of the island. They owned a few acres of land with a tropical fruit orchard as a yard. It was nice to see how folks live on the island rather than just the touristy bits we normally see. It was also nice being able to partake in the cornucopia of flavors Uncle Bruce’s backyard had to offer.

Another fun fact – Bruce composts most food waste, but is extremely careful about getting rid of seeds. He constantly has to pull weeds out of his yard (tomato plants) that have been deposited by birds excreting them. I guess the combination of really rich volcanic soil, lots of rain, and lots of sun makes for a good place to grow stuff.

Here are links to rest of the pictures with more stories to come later.

Kona pix

Waikiki pix

Being a nerd on the go, I always travel with a fair bit of gear and adding an 18 month old to the mix changed out my gear bag substantially. I think folks are always a little shocked at the amount of crap I take on board the aircraft, but pleasantly surprised when they enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Here’s what I took, why and a letter grade for usefulness.

• iPod 60gig with video - A+ – This little guy saw lots of use from putting Olivia to sleep to supplying tunes for the crew for dinner or on long drives.
• Altec Lansing inMotion – A+ – Helped Olivia fall asleep and kept the vacationers in music.
• Monster iCarPlay FM Transmitter – A+ – Kept us occupied on two 3 hour drives. Worked great with little FM interference.
• Etymotic ER6i – C – These headphones are great for blocking out noise on a plane, however, demanding children shouldn’t be blocked out. I didn’t really use these much.
• Powerbook G4 – B – Had a few movies/tv shows downloaded but didn’t really watch much tv. Internet connections were few and far between, but did manage to pick up last week’s episode of Lost.
• iGo Juice – A+ – Kept everything powered up and saved us from taking 5 other power adapters. A must for gadget loving travelers.
• Palm Treo 650 – C – The Treo was kind of a mixed bag as Sprint’s network worked pretty badly on the Big Island. As a GPS front end, it worked fairly well (except for a major freeway not appearing on the map). It seems my friend’s Cingular phone worked great the entire time.
• Palm GPS – B – As mentioned above, worked great except when it failed to have a major freeway on the map.
• Tom Tom 300 – F- – Didn’t include Hawaii in its onboard maps. Was a complete dead weight. Apparently, you can download these maps from TomTom’s website. We brought this for our fellow vacationers, but thankfully my phone pulled double duty.
• Canon SD450
  A – Just picked up this camera before we left and it was a gem. A lot smaller than my S100 (yep, the original Digital Elph) and the huge LCD was incredible.
• Panasonic LV-DVD75 portable DVD player – A+ – You might wonder why I didn’t just use my laptop as a DVD player and the answer is simple: would you give your laptop to a 18 month old? While Olivia doesn’t watch much tv, having a few episodes of Arthur and the Teletubbies onboard was a boon to keeping her from screaming her head off while bored on the flight and while were getting ready to go somewhere.

While it makes the carry on pretty heavy (I’m guessing at least 20 lbs), the trip gadgets definitely aided in our enjoyment.

I suspect that our move to Seattle will play some small role in the site as well. This is also a place I’ll alert folks of new pictures, video etc with Olivia, so bookmark me post haste.