Parking Lot Mafia

Valet parking, when the driver takes your car to a location where you never would have parked on your own is fine, but when shopping malls block off half of their normal parking and then charge you to let someone else park your car in the same spot you would normally use is not!

Space Time

Assuming the human race will eventually migrate to space, how should we measure time in the future? Our current method of counting how many times the earth rotates and the time it takes to orbit the sun may not make much sense once we abandon our home planet and eventually colonize other planets and or pockets of space far removed from mother earth. It seems to me we should measure the time it takes for something with a constant speed to pass between 2 non-variable points. I believe light is a good object to measure since I believe it’s present in all habitable areas of space and has a constant speed. I’m not quite sure what the start and end points of its travel should be used to signify the passing of one unit of time. One suggestion from a friend was the distance between peaks of radio waves. It would have to be a significant number of radio waves measured by the speed of light to create a unit useful to time every day events like boiling an egg.

Black Thursday

The last couple of years Black Friday "door buster" sales have been starting earlier and earlier. This year many stores will actually begin the sales on Thursday, and early in the evening! In fact Wal-Mart has announced it will start at 6:00pm Thanksgiving night! Many people have expressed displeasure with Wal-Mart’s decision to kick off Black Friday so early on Thanksgiving day because people want to have the option to participate in the sales, but they don't want to feel rushed to get Thanksgiving dinner over with so they can abandon their family for the deals. I'm pretty sure most of the Wal-Mart employees would like to spend thanksgiving with their family rather than at the register. If you think about it the deals we get aren’t really that great anyway. Usually there are a very limited number of exciting items used for the advertising which get sold to people who have been camping in front of the store for many hours if not days! The rest of the sale items are for outdated items that the store wants to unload to make room for the new stuff you will wish you waited for. Another concern is safety. There have actually been rioting and deaths in recent years at Black Friday events. Personally I feel the standard of living and feeling of desperation has been getting worse of late each year and this year is no exception. The likelihood of violence this year is high in my estimation. How much money would you trade to abandon your family on Thanksgiving Day? Would you put your family and or yourself in a potentially deadly situation in order to get those Black Friday savings? I hope people will do the right thing and stay home with their family all day on Thanksgiving, If we do, Wal-Mart won't see huge profits and will stop encroaching on one of our most sacred family traditions.

Halloween Waikiki 2013

For those that don’t know, Halloween at Waikiki Beach is awesome!

After the children have collected all the candy, the adults come out to play! We arrived about 9:00pm and there were already tens of thousands of people dressed in wild costumes partying in the streets! The time goes by quickly and the crowd thins considerably by 1:00am at 2:00am the bars are closed and most of the civilized participants have abandoned the streets.

Some tips to make your trip more enjoyable:

1. Arrive early – we finished the rounds at home with our children first and encountered heavy traffic on the way in. Plan on being on site by 8:00pm if not earlier.

2. Stay in a Waikiki Hotel. You don’t want to worry about designated drivers or traffic.

3. Eat before you arrive and bring snacks and drinks. The place will be crowded if you stop to eat, drink, or even use a bathroom you will lose more time than you bargained for.

4. Have your alcoholic beverages in advance or be prepared to spend a fair amount of time fighting the crowd and waiting on drinks in a club.

5. Wear comfortable shoes if possible. The main attraction is walking up and down the street admiring all the creative costumes.

6. Don't be naked? - Many of the participants are scantily dressed if not wearing in part only tape or paint. There are many police mostly posted at the traffic intersections. Presumably the police might respond negatively to full out public nudity.