1 hour and 18 mins to go until we bid “aloha a hui hou aku” to Hawaii and get back to the bay area. Picture above shows our plane being prepped for takeoff. Weather today isn’t as sunny and warm as it was for most of the last 2 weeks - hence the altocumulus looking clouds in the picture.

First thing I’ll be doing once I get home? Log onto WoW of course

Had an awesome time on this trip. Will definitely miss Honolulu, the weather and the wide variety of possible activities once I get back to the Bay area. Also met some great people along the way that I’ll be keeping in touch with. Can never have too many good friends

Hit Hanauma Bay yesterday with Shaun and Faraaz for some last minute snorkeling and then later on in the evening managed to squeeze in a night dive off magic island and saw a sleeping turtle and lots of other sleeping marine life. Was my first night dive and I was a bit nervous at first..felt weird being out in the ocean in the darkness, but once inside the water all the usual training/thought processes kick in and just feels like another dive. Felt like I was diving inside a cave because of the lack of sunlight from above…was an awesome feeling.  Will post a pic of the sleeping turtle once my divemaster/instructor emails me the pic. Until then here’s some pics from some older dives on the YO-257 shipwreck and horseshoe reef

This pic was taken at the point where the mooring line of the boat was attacked to the buoy of the shipwreck. You can see a chain in the background that we used to guide ourselves down to the wreck. Site was full of schools of yellow butterfly fish as well as other fish. Was my first shipwreck dive so I felt like a lil kid experiencing something out of this world for the first time.

In this pic I’m checking my depth gage. Maximum depth on this dive was 100 feet.

Side view of part of the YO-257 shipwreck

As you can see in the pic above, the YO-257 is thriving as an artificial reef. The ship was bought by the Atlantis Submarine company about 20 years ago for $30,000 and then the company spent around $300,000 making it suitable to use as a artificial reef. Now the site is popular among divers, tourists who visit the site on the Atlantis submarine tour and tons of marine life. In the last 20 years, the Atlantis submarine company has sunk a few more ships (one of these ships is the Seatiger ship I mentioned in a previous post that I also got to dive down to) and aircraft to create more artificial reefs and has worked with groups in Japan and the University of Hawaii on additional artificial reef projects.

Picture above was taken by me on the submarine tour of the same shipwreck that I had dived down to the previous day.

Looks like its time for me to check out and head to the airport. Will post more pics soon and write a bit more. Happy new years everyone!

Been a while since the last entry from Hawaii. Just haven’t had the time (and at times access to the net from laptop - could have used phone but I prefer to use a normal keyboard for long entries :)) to write much and been waiting on some pictures that were taken on some scuba dives I did here on the south of Oahu. Still don’t have the pics (should have em later on today hopefully) so will have to post em next time.

First up…Woooohooo I completed my Advanced PADI scuba certification a few days ago! Got to check out two different shipwreck sites namely the Sea Tiger and the YO-257 sites that . Also did some reef dives (horseshoe reef). Wow what a difference it is diving in Hawaii versus California. Water temperature in California is typically around 53 degrees Fahrenheit (11 degrees Celcius) whereas here the water was around 74 degrees Fahrenheit (23 degrees celcius)!  Then on top of that visibility is much nicer (around 30-40m visibility in hawaii versus 1-2m visibility off the shore of monterey bay in california). Lots of cool tropical fish to see around here along with some sea turtles, some large octopuses, a huge string ray (around 2 metres in width). There was a diver in our group that was complaining because he was comparing the diving here to Thailand and visibility there is much better, but compared to cold water diving in Northern California, the diving here was incredible and I’m glad I took up the chance to complete my advanced certification at such an awesome location.

Also went on a submarine tour that visits the YO-257 shipwreck site. Was excited about seeing the same site twice but this time without being wet, but for some reason didn’t enjoy it even half as much as when I dove down to the site. The submarine just seemed to go by too quickly to get a good look at all the marine life and at the same time there was no feeling of wonder and excitement and a bit of nervousness that I felt jumping off a boat and diving down a 100 feet into the water. It (the submarine tour) felt no different then watching a shipwreck site on tv

Did some hiking and caught some sweet views of the island. Aside from that explored the cuisine of the island, checked out touristy spots like Waikiki beach and also snorkeled off other sites besides Hanauma bay (that I mentioned in my last post).

Cool volcanic formations on the east side of Oahu

View from a hiking trail on the east of Oahu. That island on the right of the pic is Rabbit island (looks more like a turtle then a rabbit to me)

View from the USS Missouri battleship. This is the ship on which Japan surrendered to the US and its allies and ended the WWII.

Thats Diamond Head volanic cone on the right. The city of Honolulu is towards the left of this pic (but not visible).

Now onto the power outage I mentioned in the title of this post - entire island of Oahu lost electricity around 6pm-ish yesterday including the President-elect Obama’s rental property on the east side of the island where he has been vacationing since last week. Wasn’t too bad because I was still connected to the net on the iphone and the 6-7 of us gathered around some candles and made the most of it. Woke up this morning to find that the electricity was still out in this neighborhood (power was restored to the west coast of the island around 6am) so a bunch of us drove to the nearest Safeway store to stock up on food and as soon as we paid for our purchases the power came back on So now I have a bunch of food stocked up that I need to finish in the next few days before we fly back to California.

Enough for today. Will write more once I get the scuba diving pics

Update Jan 6th: Looks like I accidently deleted this entry Can’t remember most of what I wrote here but part of it was about doing a shark cage tour (pic) below. Think I also wrote about some other stuff I was up to during that same time period….too bad the entry is lost now

Yeah yeah I know..been a while since I’ve written anything on my blog. First was busy with the new WoW expansion and then once I got my mage to lvl 80 and then got super busy with work. Didn’t even know if I’d be able to go on my planned vacation to Hawaii until around 11pm the night before I was supposed to fly out!

On day 3 of the trip and so far its been a blast! Staying at a hostel opposite University of Hawaii and the awesome thing about hostels (besides being cheaper then hotels) is the awesome people you come across Let’s see there’s Rick, the former bio-chemistry researcher now turned trumpet player, from Palo Alto. Then there’s Eva, the Biology professor, from Texas who let me use her waterproof camera today to take pics underwater when we hit Hanauma bay earlier today. Sean the green peace dude and damn can’t pronounce or spell her name… marketing PHD student from Ohio. So yeah…interesting mix of people.

Temperture here is perfect. The bay area was freezing when we left on Wednesday morning (highs of 52 degrees F) and here its been between 72 and 80ish even though it rained a bit early yesterday morning. Skies were clear and sunny afterwards and today the overcast conditions were perfect for the evening hike to the top of diamond head .

So far highlight of the trip was swimming with a turtle for what felt like good 10 mins or so at Hanauma bay. Other stuff I came across (both fish and coral) in the water today kinda paled in comparison to what I’ve seen in Fiji waters. Was really hoping I’d see I’d see a turtle and was swimming back to shore after searching for 20 mins on the second attempt of the day when I saw this lil dude that’s in the pic below.

Okay getting hungry so this will be it for this post. Will try to write another entry tomorrow.

Last weekend was fleet week in San Francisco so I took the camera along hoping to take some pics of the blue angels airshow. Didn’t anticipate traffic to be as bad as it turned out to be and as a result ended up catching just the tail end of the airshow…still managed to take a few pics though.

Next year I’ll be sure to leave earlier!

So I signed up for a few personal training sessions at my gym while changing my gym plan…J.P at the 24 Hour Fittness a block from home signed me up with a prepaid plan and now for the same price I would have paid over a 1 year period with my monthly plan, I get 2 years FREE! Well that’s one way to think about it…cost divided among a 3 year period is 1/3 of what I would have paid in 1 year…anyway getting off track.

So today was session #2 with the trainer and he KILLED me…last time I worked out that hard was back in high school when I used to run track and field…..I’m sure if Lin or Regesh reads this they’ll remember how the first training session of the track season was always also so intensive (well mostly because the 3 of us we pushed ourselves harder then the others) we ended up throwing up haha. Haha..good old days! Lin mate you still do that running the 400m for your aussie club team ay? 

By the end of the session just barely had enough energy to drive the 0.2 mile distance between home and the gym. First thought that passed my mind as I hit the shower? -> “I need to sign up for more sessions!”

Have 2 more sessions remaining…looking forward to getting my ass kicked again…what can i say..maybe I have a thing for pain?

Saw a crazy accident today…so this mini van rans a red light..hits a accord… and then the mini van swerves into the opposite lane and then the driver tries to steer it back into the correct lane..and ends up hitting the curb causing two of his wheels to go off the ground and his van goes a certain distance with two wheels and then finally lands back on all 4 wheels. We stopped since we were witnesses….the guy in the accord was shaking…in shock..but thankfully no one was injured..his first accident so was asking us what he should do etc…in the meantime my buddy Fuzzy (hey that rhymes!) called the cops..but before he gives the location, the cops are already there! Was impressed by the quick response time..and by quick I mean less then a 1min and a half! The driver of the mini van was early 40s or so with a SIX year old kid in the van! and 2 other passengers! Thats so CRAZY! They should have died! It was so close to flipping over.

Oh and this happened on the intersection of El Camino and Mary in Sunnyvale…same spot where a lady ran a red light and hit my car in februrary of this year! That intersection is cursed I tell you!

(Maroon car is mine. Car on the right is the accord that got hit. Sunnyvale police car in the background and cop in the foreground is writing down Faraaz’s account of the accident)

Seconds after I published this post, the driver of the accord emailed us to thank us:

“Hi Shiva and Faraaz,

Thank you so much for your amazing help tonight. I truly appreciated it. 

I was very fortunate that you guys kindly called to the police and explained the accident. Without your evidence, it would have been a difficult situation to me. I hope things will soon be clarified.

Thanks again for your kindness. I will keep you updated if anything happens.

Best regards,

(name withheld)”

So I just received a call on my cellphone from a Dell telemarketer. She asked me if I was happy with the dell desktop I purchased last year. Bought it for my mom since her old Compaq laptop was about to die..but now she has a Lenovo Thinkpad t61 from work, so the desktop is mine (never use it though because it runs vista..use my Thinkpad t60 with XP instead). I lied and said yeah its alright, besides problems with vista (Didn’t want to get into a discussion about the cheap wireless card they put in the desktop that doesn’t work, how the hard drive died a week after I bought it etc etc) because I wanted to keep the conversation short.

She asked me how long I was going to keep the PC. I said until the end of this year. Then she asked me if I know that my warranty ends in october. I said I do, but don’t care because I’ll be getting a new computer anyway (I was planning on keeping the monitor, keyboard, mouse and just get a mac mini to replace the heart of the system..but waiting for Apple to update mac mini’s with better graphic cards). Then she has the nerve to tell me that a new computer will be more expensive then an extended warranty and asked why I would want to do that.

Yeah its more expensive, but why the hell would I want to keep that piece of shit Dell any longer then the end of the year? The only thing that sucks more then their cheap shitty hardware is their customer service. For example when the hard drive died, it took them a month and a half before they finally came home and replaced it. Each customer support rep I talked to made me do the same things over and over (”Ok turn off the computer and unplug it from the electrical socket..and now plug it back in and start it up. Is it ok now?) and when one rep couldn’t fix the problem they would pass me on to another rep who asked me to do the same stuff over. Even though I told them I suspected the problem was with the hard drive no one at Dell’s customer support was willing to listen.

Anyway back to the telemarketer…told her that I understood that it would cost me more, but an extended warranty would not help me solve the problems I have with Vista so its pointless for me to extend the warranty. She proceeded to go on and on about how the software support that comes with the warranty will fix my vista problems. Told her that nothing Dell’s customer support can do will fix Vista, and that I don’t care about those problems anymore because I’ll be replacing the desktop with a mac anyway, thanked her for her time, wished a good day and hung up.

Next time I’ll hang up as soon as they introduce themselves to me as a Dell telemarketer/rep, just like I do with those telemarketers from San Jose Mercury News who keep bugging me about subscribing to the Sunday newspaper. Who reads newspapers anymore? Why pay for the paper when I can get all my news for free and whenever and wherever I want it through the web?

Moving this weekend and everything has either been packed up or service has been disconnected

So no DSL until AT&T installs new phone service on Monday next week. No tv until Sunday evening (yay for directtv doing installations over the weekend)..and no ps3 until it’s unpacked.

Thank god for the iPhone!

Update: Wrote the above on the iPhone a few days ago, but didn’t publish it. Since then the tv has been hooked up and the ps3 unpacked. Now just waiting for DSL and tivo

It’s that time of the month again…when the California Highway Patrol comes out in full force to hand over speeding tickets to anything and everything that moves a fraction faster than the posted speed limits. With 3 prior speeding tickets and the last ticket being issued 7 months ago, I can’t afford to get another speeding ticket in the next 11 months otherwise my car insurance will sky rocket…again.

So what did I do on the way home? Moved over to the rightmost lane and drove just under the speed limit…and came to the realization that driving under the speed limit is MORE dangerous than speeding. How so? Because it puts me to SLEEP!

Arghhhh….

To readers outside California: It’s widely believed that the CHP has a monthly quota that it tries to fill on the last day of the month..definitely seems that way with the increased number of patrol cars on the highway and more drivers being pulled over to the side of the road.

Ticket #3 of 3 (issued 12/24/07).
Got me for going 30mph over the speed limit

Had Chinese for lunch and my fortune cookie read:

“Focus on the color purple this week. It will bring you luck”

Yup, you read what the cookie said…purple will bring me luck..who am I to argue with the fortune cookie makers and their infinite knowledge and power? :)  While googling the color purple to get an image to post along with this entry I came across purple.com and haha its just a blank page with a purple background.

That got me wondering…who would pay for a domain name yet keep the site blank? Looked up the owner’s information and it belongs to a former computer science phd candidate from Drexel University in Philadelphia who now works for Goldman Sachs in London. Well I gotta admit that owning the domain purple.com is a lot cooler then owning something boring like blue.com (what are you depressed all the time?),  green.com (get over it..not giving up my V6 for a hybrid) or orange.com (you’re a florida orange farmer?).

Purple, unlike all those boring colors is cool…esp to a former world of warcraft addict like myself. (To non-gamers…in WoW purple items are EPIC items..the most powerful..the gear of gamer geek dreams..the stuff you can wear around a virtual town/city and get everyones attention with)

Anyway heres a purple image..will the image+entry on the color purple bring me luck? Guess only time will tell!