Pushing String

Finally, a few of the images from my recent trip to Hawaii, including a photo nano-essay.

Punahou luau tree

My family moved to Hawaii from Los Angeles when I was eight, and I started attending Punahou School in sixth grade. Hawaii is a most special and beautiful place, and I’m constantly thinking about how I can move back. Over the last couple of years, I’ve discovered that many of my friends from school who had moved away have been slowly trickling back to the islands. Unfortunately my last family connection moved to the mainland a few years ago, but I’ve still got lots of old and dear friends on Oahu. I went back this year for my 25th reunion, which at Punahou is serious business. They have a huge Alumni Luau every year with homegrown hula entertainment, a real alumni-dug imu (pit) for cooking the kalua pig, and all kinds of other festivities. I took this picture just after sunset while sitting outside Dillingham Hall, overlooking the lower-campus field where the luau was held.

And now, the nano-essay, comprising two pictures… Years ago I took Eli to Hawaii to visit the parents for the first time. We made a joke of doing a Diamond Head photo essay, capturing it from all angles and distances. This time I reviewed my photos to discover that I had a little 21st-century version of the essay just waiting to happen!

The real Diamond Head

This first picture is a (rather building-cluttered) view of the actual Diamond Head crater from our hotel (bar bet question: What’s the Hawaiian name for Diamond Head? answer: Leahi). I grew up on the other side of Diamond Head in the Kahala neighborhood, getting sort of a reverse view of that famous outline.

Eveli and the chocolate Diamond Head (sounds like a children’s book, doesn’t it?)

Second, I offer you a Diamond Head rendered entirely in dark chocolate and filled with truffles. Yes, that’s me and Eli posing for the photo op, getting swamped by the dry ice. That night we were out at dinner with my friend Donna at the excellent Bali By the Sea restaurant, where (I suppose it’s too late to say “Spoiler Alert!”) they present this at the conclusion of every dinner. Let me assure you that in Waikiki, there’s no such thing as subtlety.

I’ll spare you the picture of the partially gnawed Diamond Head, out of respect for its passing.

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Way back when, I promised photos of Sun’s Steve Ballmer lookalike. Readers of Pat Patterson’s blog will already know it’s him because he admitted as much when describing the experience of putting together the Sun-Microsoft event back in May.

Honestly, the Sun folks at that event didn’t even think of the resemblance until the Microsoft people started exclaiming about it. Well, judge for yourself (plenty of Ballmer images here):

That’s Pat with Don Schmidt of Microsoft. They ran the web single sign-on demo together and did a really professional job, along with Emily Xu and Lauren Wood (Sun) and Ryan Johnson (Microsoft) behind the scenes. Here’s Pat with Emily and also Dan Dinhoble, another valuable contributor to the proceedings (oh, and I think that’s Ryan behind Emily at the extreme left of the pic):

Emily Xu, Dan Dinhoble, and Pat Patterson of Sun

Apparently Pat continued to cause double-takes at JavaOne last week, where Microsoft gave a number of talks. He even inadvertently performed an act of impersonation by simply hanging out at the Microsoft booth — where one of the booth workers turned to him, addressed him as Steve, and started talking! I guess wetware-based coarse-grained biometrics isn’t a very good form of authentication.

Pat gave a presentation and did the web single sign-on demo again with Hubert Le Van Gong on Multiple Platforms, Single Identity: Interoperable Identity (Hubert describes it here and Pat points to people’s notes on both of his talks here), and I think they had the audience fooled for a second about who was really up on that stage…