First, here are my photos from the trip.

I arrived in Honolulu on Friday the 7th, in the late afternoon, so there wasn't time to do much besides get settled in. jmsa and I picked up barawn from the University, and we went out to eat at Maguro, a decent Japanese restaurant featuring teishoku and very closely spaced tables.

On Saturday the adventures began with renting sit-on-top kayaks at Kailua Beach, which it turns out is famous for windsurfing and kiteboarding, thanks to the strong, steady winds. This does not make it an ideal kayaking location, as we found. I got a single kayak; jmsa and barawn shared a tandem. It may be for the best that no cameras were brought along to capture the epic struggle/comedy that was launching, not to mention paddling upwind. It was the most difficult paddling I'd ever undertaken, and it didn't help that my rented paddle was feathered in a way that didn't seem to be adjustable. We'd brought plenty of drinking water with us, but we didn't drink even a sip of it while out on the water, so rough was the paddling. jmsa was pretty uneasy about the experience, so we turned back after about fifteen minutes; I don't know how much longer I could have kept it up myself. Back on dry land, we grabbed lunch nearby and took it to Lanikai Beach to eat it and stroll.

We stopped at notoriously windy Nu`uanu Pali Lookout to enjoy the vista and take some pictures. Most visitors there don't seem to realize that if they turn right, they can walk along a quiet (and not windy!) trail that used to be Pali Highway, now overgrown with flora. barawn happens to know that there are some guava trees along the trail, so in the course of our walking the trail, he attacked gently commoved some branches, producing several nice guava fruit. Back at their place, we enjoyed the fresh snack. I couldn't restrain my impulse to bite down on the many hard seeds, though; if you find yourself with some fresh guava, my recommendation is to use a juicer or strainer to separate the seeds from the juice and pulp.

That evening, we got "plate lunch" dinners at Rainbow Drive-In and ate them on Waikiki Beach. Eating two out of three meals on a beach—that's paradise! It was dark by this time, but that just meant we had the beach to ourselves as we chowed down on Hawaiian-style macaroni salad and—in my case—delicious mahi-mahi, listened to the breaking waves, and felt the warm ocean breeze. After eating we made our way along Kalakaua Avenue, taking in the street life and shops. This stretch of road boasts an absurd density of ABC Stores; they almost put Starbucks to shame on that front.

On Sunday, jmsa and I headed to Diamond Head Trail, only to find it was closed through the 20th for slope maintenance. So instead we checked out an arts and crafts fair we'd passed by on the way there. We saw a number of interesting craft booths, but for me the highlight of the fair was the chance to try andagi. Sātā andāgī! Sātā andāgī! Sātā andāgī! (Reference to Azumanga Daioh, the pertinent episode of which I just had to re-watch.)

Later in the afternoon, the three of us went to Chinatown, which wasn't nearly as lively as I imagine it is at other times and on other days of the week. We dined well at Little Village, and on the way home we stopped at the Ala Moana Center (a big shopping mall) so I could savor the Lupicia tea shop in person. I bought several different teas, among them a chestnut tea that's not in stock in their web store and one of their limited Hawaiian edition blends. Yay tea!

Monday: after a breakfast of haupia-filled malasadas, barawn headed off to work while jmsa and I headed to Hanauma Bay, a nature preserve that's also a very popular beach. Since I can't see much without my glasses, I stuck to the beach, but jmsa went snorkeling.

Next we drove northward along Oahu's southeastern coast, stopping at scenic lookouts along the way. At least one of them turned out to be a filming location from the TV series Lost. That's something I looked up later, and I found it'd almost be difficult not to happen to find yourself at one of that series' filming locations on a casual tour of that island.

It was a scenic drive. It's funny, you know that phrase, "I took the scenic route," that serves as a euphemism for, "I got lost"? In Hawaii, if you do get lost, it really is the scenic route! Which is not to say that we got lost. :)

On the way home, we picked up a manapua for jmsa and a shave ice for me. Then, grocery shopping at Don Quixote, "the Japanese Wal-Mart". How I wish they had a location near my home! Anticipating the next day's outing to the North Shore, we picked up some bottled tea and a package each of Oreo daifuku mochi and peanut butter daifuku mochi, forms of the traditional Japanese confection that had—like spam musubi—been fused with processed American staple foods to produce something charmingly Hawaiian. For my pantry at home I bought a matcha–potato soup mix (intriguing!), curry sauce mix, some fresh udon, a soba tray, sparkling sake and yuzu-flavored sake, and Kewpie mayonnaise.

That evening we dined at Tsukuneya Robata Grill, where everything was yummy; I'm a particularly ardent fan of their "misonnaise" tsukune. My mouth is watering at the memory of them. They were soooooo good!

On Tuesday morning, my last day in Hawaii, one of jmsa and barawn's cats caught a gecko. Apparently gecko-watching and -hunting is one of these cats' major pastimes, right up there with eating and sleeping. They're obsessed.

We drove up to the North Shore, stopping at Dole Plantation briefly on the way up. As is virtually required, we stopped at Matsumoto Shave Ice, too. From there we beach-hopped: Haleiwa Beach with its stand-up paddlers and shore critters, Waimea Beach with its crazy cliff-jumpers, and then Sharks Cove, where we settled down after grabbing a bite to eat at a grocery store and Sharks Cove Grill. Sharks Cove is a reef that was under particularly shallow water that day, so you could just walk around on the exposed rocks or wade through perhaps a foot of water to get an up-close view of a wide variety of marine life. The ride back on Kamehameha Highway along the northeast coast of Oahu was yet another scenic drive. We had some time for dinner before my return flight, so we bellied up to the bar at Izakayaka Nonbei, a well-regarded Kapahulu pub that didn't disappoint. I had simmered taro, fried oysters, and several snagged-from-barawn edamame, which I'm mildly—and pleasantly—surprised to find myself enjoying the more I try.

And then, all too soon, my vacation was over, and I returned to the chilly, wet, and dreary place I call home. :)

I started the Weight Watchers At Work program (where the weekly in-person meetings happen at my workplace) this past Monday. They have two options, a Core Plan where you can only eat foods on a designated list of very healthy foods, and a Flex Plan where you keep track of the "points" values of the foods you eat and drink and keep it to a target level. (Apparently physical activity counts for negative points, but we won't hear about that until next week's meeting.) I'm going with the Flex Plan.

So far, it has been difficult. On the first day, I ran out of points before dinner, having discovered that one of my favorite lunches—Tandoor Chef's Paneer Tikka Masala with a piece of their Garlic Naan to mop up the yummy sauce—is hugely costly in terms of points. It's hard not to feel resentful about not being "allowed" to eat dinner.

I've become much, much more aware of the nutritional content of specific foods, to the point where I feel I've spent an enormous amount of mental energy obsessing over Weight Watchers points. When I went grocery shopping this week, I made different choices than the ones I usually make, for the first time optimizing for something other than taste alone. I think this is a good thing. I can only assume that I will spend less time calculating and obsessing as I get into the routine of the program and develop healthier "default" eating habits.

I wish it were easier to find the points values of a lot of different foods. I really don't want the difficulty of finding points values for uncommon foods that aren't packaged and labeled, or foods at non-chain restaurants, to push my eating habits away from homemade, ethnic, organic, and independent sources of food. I have no idea how many points to assign a bowl of matcha or the wagashi that accompanies it. When I went to Dino on Wednesday with a couple of friends to sample their mushroom tasting menu, I had to make wild guesses, the accuracy of which I'll never know. This lack of knowability bothers me.

I believe that following this program will result in my losing weight—I've already lost a few pounds over the past six days—but I wonder how long I'll be able to stick with it. I may well be able to change my eating and exercise habits, but I don't foresee changing my pique at the impossibility of calculating points values for foods I don't intend to give up.

I took the train up to New York City to attend The Last HOPE this past weekend. It was a smooth, comfortable ride to Penn Station, right across the street from the hotel where I shared a room with a couple other HacDC folks. One thing I did not do was spent much time at the hackersmart run by HacDC; when there's so much exciting stuff going on—and I've paid good money to participate—it just didn't seem like a good use of my time to try to sell vintage linesman's handsets to random passersby.

My preparations for this trip: instead of making a point to leave behind my pocket knife and any liquids of greater than three ounces as I would on a plane trip, I strategically removed any RFID tags and read up on using a SOCKS proxy to foil eavesdropping on my websurfing traffic. (I even filed a bug on that topic as I was testing it out.) I arrived too late on Thursday to register that evening, so after getting a bite to eat at Tic Toc Diner and trying unsuccessfully to use wifi from my hotel room (dozens of wifi networks were visible, but I couldn't successfully connect to any of them), I hit the sack.

On Friday morning I sat in the back of a few talks and realized I'd need to be more aggressive in beating the hordes of fellow attendees to decent seats. I think I can now appreciate why the ShmooCon organizers insist on capping the number of registrations. I did spend some time hanging out with other HacDC people, pretty much all of whom were more dedicated in their running of the hackersmart than I was. On Friday afternoon I attended The Attendee Meta-Data Project where we learned what would be done with the data collected from the RFID tags many of us chose to wear. amd.hope.net may be (back) up in the near future with more information on that. The team managed to barely scratch the surface of applications for that system, and I'm happy that they're being so open with the platform and the (non-personal-information) data collected on it. I hope they open up some public discussion area on it.

Next I attended Monumental Women Who Influenced Today's Technology. I found it rather disappointing because of the speaker's encyclopedic style of reciting names, dates, and facts supplemented by bullet-point-filled slides. Ugh. Weirder was that the second half of her talk was about "Women of the Phone", which profiled some voice actresses who were "famous" for being the voice of the date/time announcement or the voice menu on your provider's voicemail system. To me, these profiles just didn't make sense in a discussion of technical women. During the question-and-answer period, some audience members enlivened the hour with questions and comments about women in the IT sector today. I was surprised that the speaker hadn't even read Unlocking the Clubhouse, and I suspect the hour would have been more enlightening if it had been entirely based on audience participation.

After a short nap (yay for staying at the con hotel despite its dinginess), I went to Hacker Space Design Patterns and then A Collaborative Approach to Hardware Hacking: NYCResistor. The latter was an awesome panel talk that made me excited about HacDC and likely to hang out there more in the near future, in the hopes that HacDC can be half as cool as NYCResistor. I wandered back down to the hackersmart, picked up my spiffy black HacDC lab coat, and caught up with Andrew and friends for dinner at Soul Fixins'. On our way back, we randomly passed an historical plaque marking the place where Nikola Tesla died and picked up an impressively-constructed fake television sporting "Yo! MTV Raps!" on the screen. The latter was set out in the trash on the sidewalk, the volume of which piled up every evening was impressive, but not in a good way. I intended to check out digital music night, but I was feeling sleepy again—I should've tried a bottle of the Club-Mate they were selling.

On Saturday morning, I started out with Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM)-A Brief Primer on the Arcane Art and Science of Electronics Surveillance and Bug Detection by Marty Kaiser, the kind of old character who could tell you all kinds of fascinating stories from his life if you sit down to listen. I learned more about FBI politics than about surveillance countermeasures (which are apparently quite expensive), but it was a worthwhile talk. Next up was "Off the Grid" Voice/Data Communications, sort of an overview of two-way radio technologies. Incidentally, amateur radio is a sizable presence at HOPE, with a special event station on the air and all levels of license exams being offered. In such a privacy-conscious crowd, I'm surprised I've never heard any grumblings about the fact that getting an amateur radio license (in the US, anyway) means having your name and address added to a public domain database run by the FCC.

I sat in on some of the Debian OpenSSL Debacle talk, but I failed at getting a decent seat, so I couldn't really see the slides or follow the discussion. I left to wander the neighborhood for lunch. When I returned, I was determined to get a better seat at the next talk I wanted to attend, so in order to get a good seat for the Port Knocking and Single Packet Authorization talk, I showed up to the panel on Reprimand, an e-zine of which I'd never heard. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't really engaged with it. By the time the talk I'd really come for rolled around, I was feeling like—guess what!—taking a nap. If I felt the need for so much sleep on a regular basis I might be alarmed, but I suspect I was feeling exhausted by the sheer crush of people. I ended up sleeping through elwing2000's talk (sorry!). I felt pretty refreshed, though, for the dinner at Ninja I'd organized with a bunch of friends, including but not limited to elwing2000, princessleia2, and sfllaw. Sorry we missed you, searchingbuddha and secretsoflife! We had our own private dungeon dining room with ninja waiters and all. Okay, maybe they weren't real ninjas. The lighting was too dim for my camera (at least without the flash that I think makes most photos look awful), so I'm hoping to see some of the shots from those of us with snazzier cameras. I had a flight of Hanzo sakes, Clam Bombshells, a negitoro roll, and sashimi perched over a bowl of mist. Oh, and part of a "Ninja Star" for dessert, but I won't spoil the surprise by telling you what it is. :) I agreed with the consensus that the food wasn't great—this place is more about flash than about awesome food. The visit by a magician to our table toward the end of dinner underscored that point. It was entertaining, and I'm glad I went, but I wouldn't make any particular effort to return. Afterward we wandered TriBeCa, eventually settling down in Cowgirl and inadvertently crashing a birthday party. Wacky western fun ensued. :)

On Sunday, I wasn't sure whether to regret the few drinks at Cowgirl or the clams at Ninja (almost everyone had sushi too, so that's not high on my suspect list), but my stomach protested violently. We scrambled to check out even as I asked myself whether I should be giving up the only well air-conditioned place I could lay down and recover in proximity to a restroom. Everyone else had checked out of their rooms, too, yet the festivities wouldn't end until 7 p.m. or later. Resting on the floor of the anteroom to the ladies' restroom will not go on record as a high point in my life, but I felt much less queasy when I got up and caught the second half of Johnny Long's No-Tech Hacking talk. He walks a thin line between profiling and stereotyping in some of his "hacking", and it's inevitably based on the assumption that he's the only dissembler in a given situation. It irks me to see cases of social profiling that are smugly presented as successful without any evidence of their accuracy. That said, much of his work is solid.

I also caught the Attendee Meta-Data and Network summary parts of the closing ceremonies. I left early to enjoy my first real food of the day, a shepherd's pie, over at Stout before catching the train home.

I'm back from Montréal, and I thought I'd share a description of the rest of my trip (after the Botanical Gardens). I had a chance to catch up with sfllaw over some wonderful food at la Montée de Lait in his part of town. The city of Montréal should probably pay him for his public relations services, as he makes a convincing argument that it's a great place to live, and by extension that I should move there. :) For the past few days I've been spending a lot of time reflecting on my degree of geographical inertia and my career prospects. I can't say I've come to any conclusions—indeed, contemplating such big changes is unsettling to me, but I hope it'll lead to happiness in the long run.

Anyway, we walked around the city and eventually found the location of a party to celebrate the wedding earlier that day of a couple of sfllaw and his sweetheart Aleece's friends. The party was in an awesome loft space downtown. Arriving significantly earlier than the other guests, who were being shuttled over by bus from elsewhere in the city, we chatted with fellow partygoer Xavier, a nice guy who'd just gotten off his shift working at a Portuguese restaurant. Really, everyone I met in Montréal was nice and genuinely friendly. Once the party got going, I got dragged onto the dance floor a few times, but I had a hard time not feeling self-conscious and lonely.

On Sunday morning I met sfllaw, Aleece, dcoombs, diluvienne, and Paul from Toronto for dim sum, beginning a languorous day of dining that would take us to la Brûlerie St-Denis and of course to Camellia Sinensis. All that caffeine was not enough to keep everyone from needing a nap—it's too bad Montréal doesn't have a napping salon. :)

Dinner was quite the experience, as I joined dcoombs at O Noir, one of these "dark" restaurants you may have heard about where you eat in total darkness, served by blind waitstaff. I ordered a "surprise" main dish, just to heighten the excitement. :) At this restaurant, you order (and pay the bill afterwards) out in the lobby, which also houses a bank of lockers to stow your belongings so they don't get in the way in the dark dining room. My main dish turned out to be veal with smothered mushrooms, steamed potatoes, and asparagus. The menu choices and table settings—aside from the lack of table centerpiece—weren't different from what you'd expect in a normal restaurant. Wine in regular stemware, the routine complement of flatware, et cetera. Less difficult than I expected was identifying my food; more difficult than I expected was getting an appropriate amount onto my fork and getting it from there to my mouth. I resorted to eating with my fingers for the most part. If one is trying to simulate the experience of dining out as a blind person, this would certainly be cheating. I was going more for the sensory experiment, or at least that's what I'm telling myself to justify the gravy under my fingernails at the end of the meal. :) On a side note, I find that I enjoy conversing in the dark, which I suspect has to do with the loss of self-consciousness.

The next morning, I spend my last few hours in the city in the Quartier Latin, picking up some newly-arrived Yu Shan tea and enjoying a lemon-and-sugar crêpe on the terrace of La Brioche Lyonnaise.

My return flights were uneventful with the exception of the Canadian authorities' confiscation of my small embroidery scissors. The TSA allows scissors with blades shorter than four inches, and I'd unconsciously assumed that the U.S. would have the most restrictive list of prohibited items of any nation in this hemisphere, but it seems I'm wrong, as CATSA prohibits all scissors. Something to note for next time.

Last weekend was a bit of a whirlwind:

Tea ceremony class on Saturday was sparsely attended with two of our classmates out of town. Lately I've been doing tea ceremonies with tana, a stand with one or two shelves that sit on the tatami next to the brazier and display some of the utensils. This week I got to use an unusual tana with no "floor". I also used a different maccha container than I've used before—one that's squat, with a flat, bright red lid that gives it a modern look belying its centuries-old design. I wish I'd had a camera to capture the handsome assemblage, but I suspect our instructor would frown on that.

On Saturday night, rebelzero and I attended a friend's birthday party in the loft of Cafe Citron. Pictures are up. I enjoyed my share of mojitos and met some new people, but I couldn't stay too late, because the next morning I had to get up for...

... a board meeting of our local tea circle, in which I'm a recording secretary. That group is separate from the tea ceremony classes; we organize related workshops, lectures, museum visits, and perhaps most importantly, tea ceremony events like the autumn 茶会 coming up in a few weeks. Anyone with an interest in Japanese tea ceremony is welcome to join.

Next up: a rare DC LinuxChix meeting! I wouldn't mind getting more than three people out of the nearly thirty on our mailing list together at the same time, but it beats not meeting at all. :) Here's a picture. We talked largely about user interfaces, KDE versus GNOME; seelevaracuzzo could use some (paid!) participants in the DC/Baltimore area for her usability activity.

Sunday evening was DC United's last game of the regular season, a loss to Chicago Fire. From the games in my recent memory that I've attended, I wouldn't have guessed our team was tops in the MLS standings—not because of the quality of play, but because they just don't seem to win very often. Afterwards, we stopped for a bite to eat at the intriguing 前後, a Latin-Asian fusion place to which I could definitely see myself returning.

rebelzero and I have made the most of another DC Restaurant Week. Last week we joined elwing2000, brian_252, Hallie, seelevarcuzzo, and Justin for dinner at 21P, which was generous with its Restaurant Week menu, offering pretty much the whole menu with a few surcharges for some items. I had Chilled Cucumber Soup w/ Cilantro, Chilies, Lime, and Shrimp Salsa; Porcini Dusted N.Y. Strip beef medallions w/ Truffle Yukon Gold Potato, Mushroom Jus and Cabernet Glazed Onions; and Dark Chocolate Pot De Cream. For me the cucumber soup was the standout—something different and refreshing.

Dinner on Saturday was preceded by a DC United game against the Colorado Rapids. RFK Stadium has two sides: the raucous side dominated by La Norte Barra Brava, and the relatively quiet side, where our seats are. The mood at this game, though, was really mellow. United played badly in the first half, but the early game time (4 p.m. instead of 7:30 p.m.) and back-to-school clouds over people's heads may have contributed to the quietude too.

Then: dinner at Vidalia! It was my first time there, and right from the start I love their decorating. They too made their whole menu (with surcharges) available for Restaurant Week. I had a salad with fresh greens and goat cheese and a risotto with summer vegetables, and we shared two side dishes: Baked Macaroni with Brad's Goat Cheese and Summer Truffle, and Vidalia Onion Casserole with Smoked Bacon and Pecorino. I can't express how delicious it all was. I adore earthy food like that.

We wrapped up Restaurant Week with dinner last night at Neyla with crossbonesdj and oletheros. There was a commotion in the area because a jewelry store down the block had been robbed earlier that afternoon. Neyla is a Mediterranean grill with exotic-looking decor and so-so food; they offered only a few choices for each course. I had a watermelon gazpacho (sweet, watery, and weird), strip steak, and a dessert of mixed summer berries.

One difference I noticed in Europe, relative to the U.S., was in eating out. We didn't generally eat at fancy places but at brasseries, cafes, pizzerias, etc.; I think they were generally the same 'level' of eatery we mostly eat at here. What I noticed was that the waitstaff service was much, much slower than I'm used to.

Maybe one factor was a difference in attitude about dining, a more leisurely attitude. If you think of eating out with friends as a relaxed, multi-hour affair, you might not want the waiter imposing too much (although I'm straining to think of 'taking your order' or 'noticing that your glass is empty' as 'imposing'). I'm willing to chalk up some of the slow pace to cultural differences.

I wonder how much the tipping customs make a difference, though. Customers generally don't tip in Europe. I often don't like the custom of tipping in the U.S. because I think waitstaff should be paid decent wages without having to depend on the kindness of strangers. I've heard horror stories of snotty customers treating waitstaff poorly and unfairly. Perhaps I've overlooked a major advantage of the tipping system, though, which may be that it results in restaurant service that is much better than it would otherwise be. Of course, I like to determine how much money my waiter receives for the level of service I got.

The worst service we got was at lunch in Paris, where the waiter all but ignored us, got rebelzero's order wrong, never brought our drink orders despite a reminder when we managed to get a moment of his attention, and might never have brought the bill without the intervention of another waiter. Fuming, I thought to myself, "This guy has totally lost his tip," before I remembered I didn't having any tipping power here (except to reward exceptional service). Other customers at the restaurant seemed to be suffering from his lack of service, too, which brought to mind another possible factor: labor laws that—according to my understanding—make it more difficult for employers to fire staff than it would be in the U.S. I'm just speculating, of course. Your viewpoints are welcome!

Addendum: From the most recent J-List newsletter:

Japan is unique among industrialized nations in that the concept of tipping never caught on, and is in fact about as alien to people here as taking your shoes off before entering your house would be in the States. You can expect service with a smile wherever you eat (as a wise gaijin once observed, "in Japan, you know no one is horking in your food"), and if were to leave a tip on the table you can be pretty sure the staff would run after you to return the money to you. While it's certainly nice to not have to tip when eating out, there are times and I receive exceptionally good service and want to show my appreciation, but the lack of a custom of tipping makes this impossible—it would actually be quite rude to even try in most cases.

rebelzero and I took advantage of DC's summer restaurant week to dine at The Oval Room last evening. While normally, as I understand, you might see the rich and powerful there, the crowd we saw looked like us: young, not especially important, and up for a gourmet meal at a discount price. The atmosphere was quiet enough for conversation, and the service was excellent. I had steamed mussels in a parsley garlic broth (not nearly as plump as the ones I recently had in Ottawa, but the broth made up for it), pork tenderloin with crispy polenta (just "eh"), and bittersweet chocolate mousse with strawberry confit (yum). rebelzero had a classic caésar salad (with reportedly really good parmesan cheese); chicken breast with taleggio crust, radicchio mushroom confit and foie gras sauce (reportedly good); and the same chocolate mousse for dessert. As I commented, though, in my mind the food was a mere accompaniment to the wine, a bottle of syrah—full-bodied, contrary to any wine that might be suggested to suit what we ate, and wonderful.

That said, I wouldn't recommend The Oval Room on the basis of its food. In this city, there's no reason not to choose someplace with mind-blowing food and great wine. Among those I've visited and would recommend instead are Grapeseed and Jaleo, and I know there are many others.