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10/16/2006: "Sinking slowly beneath the sea"

Yes we had an earthquake. Two, actually. Oddly, we had just returned from a couple days on the Big Island last Friday.

It took 16 hours (almost to the minute) for the power to come back on. This sucked for me because I'd just purchased a new 15" "Macbook Pro", and had yet to do anything with it, so I waited... all day, with a new toy and not much to do with it. (Lack of power prevented me from moving the data off the mini even.) No emacs, no SBCL, no net, no fun.

Some things about living here suck. The infrastructure here is fragile: the sewers are crumbling, nearly all the traffic is funneled down a single "Interstate", such that what would otherwise be a minor incident resulted in a major traffic jam. The Ala Wai canal, which runs through the heart of Honolulu and Waikiki was recently flooded with sewage, because the city had noplace else to put it. This ruined the beaches for weeks. I have no idea if this killed the giant shrimp.

But the parts that suck are vastly outweighed by the parts that don't, so people stay.

"The problem of excessive population seems to be central to nearly every problem in our state. Too many people means too few jobs and too much competition for them; too many people means too little land for agriculture, and parks, and scenic vistas; too many people means too much crime and too much erosion of possibly our single most important commodity, the Aloha Spirit." -- Gov George Ariyoshi, State of the State Address, 1977