Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Here's Jeoffrey as I aim to remember him, twice as large as life and calmly taking everything in his stride.

There's nothing quite like a Maine, all ruff and dignity wrapped up in a calm self confidence - and still willing to take risks. Shortly before we left on this trip, he jumped out onto next door's roof, a brave leap even when he had all four legs. He seemed most unconcerned, even when we had to climb a wall to fetch him down...

He will be missed.

Just a few impressions:

• Flying in over blue blue waters.
• Airports built around the trees.
• Deep valleys full of viridian verdance.
• Spinner dolphins leaping from a silver sea.
• Slow turtles in warm rock pools.
• Slinky mongoose in the hedges.
• Goats on the golf courses.
• The sound of rain on a tin roof.
• Flowers everywhere.
• Pink guava sweet bread.
• Bright bright fish skittering across the water.
• Moray eels sinuous in a floodlit pool.
• Organic coffee high in the cloud forest, on the farm.
• Decaying theatres.
• Looking up at Mauna Kea and seeing the white dots of the observatory through a gap in the cloud.
• Eating the sweet flesh of a coffee cherry in the rain.
• Red red birds.
• The smoke rising up from the caldera of an erupting volcano.
• Turtles basking on black sand.
• Fine dining in down market shopping malls.
• Green green geckos with electric blue eyes.
• Phil Spector's Wall of Frog on a warm Hilo night.
• Papaya and lime at breakfast.
• Black crabs on black lava.
• White coral beaches.
• Twisty roads and single lane bridges.
• Yellow yellow birds.
• Nene crossing signs.
• Tourists jumping from cliffs into the sea.
• Stopping at roadside fruit stands for fresh juice .
• Black lava just being colonised by plants.

I've still to take any photos off my camera! One thing I know for sure - I do want to come back to the Big Island.

...the proliferation of social networks makes it hard to keep your brand under control.

At least I'm not that popular a brand, so reserving my usual "sbisson" on Facebook wasn't hard. I think there are maybe three Simon Bissons online, and the only one who might also be wanting my usual username is an up-and-coming Canadian ice hockey player in one of the minor leagues. It's not surprising that social media consultants make a decent living handling things like that for big name brands - cybersquatting is at best an annoyance, at worst an act of sabotage.

Even so, the act of setting it up using a mobile phone so many thousand miles from home was slightly nostalgic, reminding me of warm summer evenings in the courtyard of The Lamb with the folk from cix:bofh registering our domain on a (then) brand shiny new Libretto and a direct connected Nokia phone while drinking a decent pint or three.

Ah, the heady days of the mid-1990s. Will we ever see their like again?