Headed a Little South

On the wall of the elevator

Well, maybe a lot south. Saturday afternoon, I headed for the APAN/ESCC/Internet² Joint Tech meeting at the Manoa campus of the University of Hawai‘i. The informal name for this meeting is TIP or Techs in Paradise and this is the fourth time it has been held here. This is the same meeting that we hosted back in Fairbanks in July, 2011. The last time it was hosted by UH was in 2008 also in January. There were a couple blog posts back then when this blog was focused more on walking than riding. Even though it was a direct flight from Anchorage, it was still a 6 hour flight. Not really long but long enough to be tiring. The humidity when leaving the airport made me feel like I was walking in the shower.

The first time I attended this meeting was in 2004 and the University of Hawai‘i had on campus housing available right next to the venue. But not this year so the conference hotel is the Sheraton Princess Kaiulani across the street from Waikīkī Beach. I opted for the bargain priced room and that is evident by the wonderful view from my balcony. A parking garage, no beach of mountain view.

Just for comparison, this is the view from the balcony of my room back in 2008 where the hotel was practically in the ocean and the room cost over 2½ times as much. A Wonderful view of Diamond Head but not worth the price especially since I tend to spend very little time in the room during these meetings. It's a 2.7 mile walk from the hotel to the East-West Center where the bulk of the meeting will be held. Sounds like a good walk at least in the morning. There is supposed to be shuttle service but since tomorrow is Sunday, I'm hoping that the roads will be pretty quiet.

There was a small noodle shop off of the main road and it was delicious. A perfect late night meal. Ramen with tofu in a fish stock. There are tons of tourists packing the sidewalk in front of the hotel so I didn't venture out there for more than a few minutes. Lots of people waiting in lines to get into restaurants and bars. Though I must admit that it's pretty nice to be able to attend a meeting here in Honolulu. I'm not complaining.

As I was getting ready for this trip, my iPhone decided to act up and I ended up doing a factory reset. The timing for this isn't too good as I started the restore process at 4:00pm on Friday and it didn't finish until 11:30pm. All of the apps needed to check in with the mother ship to make sure that it's okay to be installed on my phone. Also, since I have iTunes Match, all of the music on my phone had to be re-downloaded from Apple instead of simply synching from my computer over USB. The m usic download and the app checkin were competing with each other. Kind of a pain but at least the phone is running faster now.

 

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