Hawaii Day 3¾

it's the spookiest thing when the sea just seems to drain away. in maui, nothing too bad as a result so far. +/- 6ft swells, 15 mins apart.11 Mar 2011 via Twitter for iPhoneIsaac Hepworth
isaach

At the end of Day 3½ we had a decision to make. Stay on the 5th floor of the hotel, 30 yards from the shore, or grab the car and head for higher ground (to where many on Maui had already been evacuated). We had about five hours before the tsunami was to arrive.

We decided to stay put. The hotel building was a 1970s concrete affair, built apparently without subtlety or delicateness as a concern. For whatever it was worth, to my untrained eye it looked sturdy enough to survive a watery onslaught—although with lines at convenience stores getting longer and longer, and cell service already gone, thoughts of an "aftermath" started to enter my head. From our balcony I surveyed the ground below and tried to picture it being overwhelmed by a tidal wave.

We stayed glued to the TV and to Twitter. Lux still sleeping, Wendy and I exchanged messages with friends and family and read on-the-ground updates from Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan. On TV, the local Hawaii stations were solidly informative and helpful; national ones (I'm looking at you, CNN), barely so.

Twitter in the aggregate was incredibly useful although individual Tweets were on occasion off-base. Salim Ismail scared the crap out of me when he tweeted that a second, M8.8, earthquake had hit Japan after the M8.9 one (I asked him about it a couple of days later and he deleted that Tweet and said he'd gotten mixed up).

And then 3am arrived, the time when the tsunami was scheduled to first hit the westernmost point of Hawaii. Local TV stations, cameras pointed at beaches, showed nothing—a dark eerie absence of drama. But then gradually, over the next ten minutes, we saw on TV the ocean recede 100ft back from the beach exposing a bare sea-bed. It left silence and coral and an enormous anticipation.

Not long after that, the first wave hit Maui (it would later turn out that Maui was the worst-affected of all the Hawaiian islands). From the balcony, through the darkness we could make out the receded water and then 15 minutes later a swell coming up to the vegetation line.

It did that about six times over the course of the next hour and a half. The water level would go down 6ft—the waterline receding perhaps 50ft horizontally, like a very low tide—and then up 12ft—like a very high tide. In the darkness it was actually easier to hear than it was to see.

And just like that, by 5am or so it was pretty much over and we went to bed. Lux, of course, hadn't even woken up.

Dr Fryer of the #hawaii Pacific Tsunami Warning Center just said that he thinks the worst is over for most islands. and @wendyverse sleeps.11 Mar 2011 via Twitter for iPhoneIsaac Hepworth
isaach

Hawaii Day 3½

there's a fucking tsunami in hawaii right now #hawaiifacts2.44am, 11 Mar 2011 via Twitter for iPhoneIsaac Hepworth
isaach

We didn't really finish the day with pineapple. The evening was beautiful and I wandered around the Hyatt taking a few photos. The pagoda where, I guess, folks hang out or something?

some loungers by the beach:

a coastline cabana:

a wedding shoot:

and a (different) happy couple eating pizza:

After that we headed out for dinner in Lahaina (Lux joined us for a date in a fancy restaurant and was actually exceptionally well-behaved). And after that was when the fun began.

We were just walking after dinner in Lahaina when a man on the sidewalk told us that there'd been a huge earthquake in Japan and we should start preparing for a tsunami. We weren't sure how seriously to take him but certainly he fully freaked out the elderly couple behind us, whom he told to get gas and head for high ground. For all I know they're still up there, cowering in the hills.

For us, Twitter confirmed the news about the earthquake and by the time we got back to the hotel there was definitely a heightened level of activity as people tried to work out what was going on. At about 9.30pm the sirens went off across the island, and local media alerts confirmed that we should expect the arrival of a tsunami. By 9.35pm we were being moved to a hotel room on a higher floor.

This is the sound which roadblocks local broadcast, by the way, when a tsunami is coming:

Wendy grew up in Colorado with this sound as a tornado warning, and it still makes her instinctively fearful.

By just past 10pm, with more than five hours to go until the swell was supposed to first arrive, we were settled into our new room on the 5th floor. It was surreally calm; Wendy and I kind of looked at each other wondering what now.

We'd seen the first footage on TV of what the tsunami did in Japan (or at least what was available by then) and we'd heard that this is a phenomenally powerful earthquake. Wikipedia already said that it was the seventh greatest ever recorded (today the USGS has it as the fourth largest since 1900). We're in a beachfront hotel on the western shore of Maui and the rental car is valeted in the basement.

We knew that they were evacuating people near the coast who didn't have the option of moving to a high floor, and that there were already long lines at convenience stores and gas stations for water and gas and other provisions. They said the tsunami would arrive at 3.19am (and 3.03am in Honolulu, a little further west than us). With a running start we could be safely at 300ft elevation within about 15 minutes.

We have a seven-month-old baby, still asleep through all of this...

to be continued

Hawaii Day 3

every other US state has a higher record high temperature than Hawaii. every other US state also has a lower record low #hawaiifactsless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneIsaac Hepworth
isaach

The third morning in Hawaii we were checking out of our apartment and moving down the road into a hotel. We started with a little breakfast

and after a dip in the pool decided to drive around the west coast of Maui to see what's up. The drive was spectacular (not to overly foreshadow a later post, but I'd say better than the Hana Highway)

although rather alarming at times. For many miles the road was as wide as just a single car, and it clung improbably to the side of precipitous cliffs. You can get used to that easily enough—but meeting a car coming in the opposite direction, and having to reverse a few hundred yards down the curvy lane, added a whole new dimension of adventure. Tiny villages like Kahakuloa were dotted along the way, and we even found cattle in the hills.

We finished the day with a dip in the pool at our new hotel, and (for Lux at least) a chunk of pineapple at the bar:

There are a few more photos of the day on Flickr.

Hawaii Day 2

every US state has at least one straight line as part of its boundary, except for hawaii #hawaiifactsless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneIsaac Hepworth
isaach

On our second morning in Hawaii we headed into Lahaina, a few miles south of where we were staying. This coastal town was the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii back in the day, but today it's a compact tourist town of about 10,000 locals and probably twice as many visitors. Here's Wendy and Lux leaving breakfast:

Like most of Hawaii, the place is insanely verdant and lush. Every plant you see is having the best day of its life, including the 140-year-old Banyan tree in the courthouse square. This tree too is having an awesome time:

and so is this garden:

I put a few more pictures of Lahaina on Flickr.

In the afternoon we headed down to Wailea, which turned out to be (as far as I could tell) Beverly Hills crossed with Pebble Beach. Nonetheless we found a public area and Wendy helped Lux cover herself in sand while I had a swim in the ocean.

We finished the day with a dip in the pool back at our hotel. Here's Lux post-swim in her swimsuit:

Hawaii Day 1

also: east to west, hawaii is the widest state in the union #surprising#hawaiifactsTue Mar 08 via Twitter for iPhoneIsaac Hepworth
isaach

For the first time ever, we woke up in Hawaii. The previous night we'd had snacktime at the resort bar, and Wendy had managed to rip the nail off her big toe. The former was a delight

and the latter less so.

First morning in Maui, though, and we decided to go to the much-renowned Gazebo for breakfast. It took us 50–60 minutes to get through the line, but eventually we were seated with an ocean view:

Yes, the food was great and worth the wait. We met people in line who did the wait daily. Incredible.

After breakfast we explored the grounds and beach where we were staying. What a pretty area; it's incredible what a place becomes in such a blessed climate. Maui's the most lush and verdant place I've ever been.

Day 0 in Hawaii

I didn't invent the #hawaiifacts hashtag, but I adopted it when we touched down last Monday.

and here we are in Hawaii. land of the 13-letter alphabet, and the only US state with a coffee crop. #hawaiifacts#maui2011 Mon Mar 07 via Twitter for iPhoneIsaac Hepworth
isaach

The coffee crop fact is beyond doubt but the alphabet is less clear-cut. There are those that will tell you that there are only 12 letters—A, E, I, O, U and H, K, L, M, N, P, W—but of course the venerable Wikipedia makes clear that in 1864

the ʻokina [apostrophe] became a recognized letter of the Hawaiian alphabet

...making 13 in all, so there you go.

Lux, Wendy and I were going to be on the island of Maui for a week. We'd picked a few different locations to stay and were kicking off with the relatively snazzy Honua Kai resort outside of Lahaina. It was beautiful

and Lux got settled in quickly.

We spent the first day scoping out the place (in general: gorgeous, lush, 83°F). By the evening I'd learned another fact.

every US state has at least one straight line as part of its boundary, except for hawaii #hawaiifactsMon Mar 07 via Twitter for iPhoneIsaac Hepworth
isaach

Back from Hawaii

We arrived back from Maui last night. Here's a cheeky couple of photos while I work through the others and figure out some longer blog posts.

This one I took at lunchtime in the place we stayed in Ka'anapali:

This one a day later I nominate as the signature photo of the trip. Taken at sunset on the shore of Lahaina, two or three hours before the earthquake in Japan and Maui's tsunami sirens going off:

Holiday Lenses

WARNING: PHOTOGRAPHY GEEKERY FOLLOWS

I've been renting camera lenses from BorrowLenses.com for a couple of years now. I can't speak highly enough of them. The range of available equipment is incredible (by now way beyond just lenses), the price is right and the people are friendly and happy and helpful. When I worked at Google they were perfectly on the way between Mountain View and San Francisco, ideal for mid-commute pickups. Now I work at Twitter they have a pickup location in SOMA two blocks away. Sweet!

For the Hawaii trip I rented:

• EF 100mm f/2; I thought I'd give this a whirl based on how much I love my own "nifty fifty" EF 50mm f/1.4. This basic range of affordable primes from Canon (35mm, 50mm, 85mm, 100mm) is widely lauded and fantastic value: each one sharp, lightweight, fast, and with great autofocus. I rented the EF 50mm f/1.2L ($1,500 to buy) back in the day and the autofocus is every bit as sluggish as all the reviews say (a great studio lens, no doubt, but out and about it's a pain—and heavy too). Afterwards I bought the nifty fifty ($399) and never looked back. Almost all of the bean shots are with the 50mm.
• EF 16–35mm f/2.8L II; such a fun lens on a full-frame camera. I rented the first version a couple of years ago, again a little later, and I've pined for it since. For whatever reason, I rarely feel a need for anything longer than 100mm or so (although I had fun at Carnaval one time with the EF 300mm f/2.8L), but I'm a sucker for super wide angles. If I ever have budget for an L lens again, this'll be the one I buy.

Since I'm on it, I'm also taking (of my own)

• the "nifty fifty" EF 50mm f/1.4. Sure it's made of plastic and doesn't have a red ring on it, but it's a fabulous sharp prime with fast autofocus and it weighs next to nothing. Such a super lens, I couldn't be happier with it. Great for bean shots.
• TS-E 24mm f/3.5L; I bought mine second-hand from BorrowLenses.com after renting it a couple of times. Tilt-shift lenses are a lot of fun and (almost literally) add a new dimension to photography. This one's a tad wide for executing the infamous "miniatures" (though you can just about pull it off) but I love it for striking portraits, moody stuff, unusual perspective or just interesting opportunistic snaps. I've used shift (rather than tilt) about twice.
• EF 24-105mm f/4L; no denying it, this is a fine walkabout lens on a full-frame camera. Constant aperture across the zoom range, sharp similarly, solidly built (like all L lenses), and autofocus plenty fast enough. It doesn't really excel at anything, though (apart from being general purpose) so it's the lens I use the very least.

If I had to leave one behind, it'd be the 24-105. If I could take only one... gosh it'd be a struggle but it'd probably be the 16-35. This is Hawaii, after all, and I'm expecting some fantastic vistas.

We're setting off tomorrow morning. With luck I'll post some photos soon.

History

I'm going to Hawaii in a couple of days with Wendy and the bean. We spent this afternoon picking up a few items downtown (Wendy got a bathing suit, I got some shorts, the bean got a sunhat) and tomorrow we'll probably spend most of the day packing an infinity of baby things into our suitcases.

Our first proper family vacation, this trip feels historic—I mentioned to Wendy this evening that we'll be getting out the holiday photos in 20 years when the bean brings friends home from college. And then it dawned on me that in two decades we'll not be fetching dusty albums from the attic like our parents did but instead doing some unimaginably futuristic things involving holograms and brain implants. Suddenly I felt personally like an historical artifact.

Talking of photos, though, the other thing we picked up downtown was a couple of rented camera lenses. I've heard Hawaii's picturesque and I can't wait to photograph what we see while we're there.

In the meantime, here's the bean on her 217th day:

A Single Consonant

I was really taken aback when Lux started saying "buh buh buh" recently. It shouldn't have been surprising—I think it's pretty much normal for six months—but something about those particular syllables seemed suddenly grown up, in a way that none of the previous half-year of sounds had stood out.

The sound "b" is plosive, and of course Wikipedia identifies it properly as a voiced bilablial plosive: made by both lips, sounded by the vocal chords, and resulting from a released stop in airflow. And no, you don't find this sound anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

It's interesting that six months of shrieks and wails and cries and howls and gurgles and giggles and coos had not until now produced a sound which was uniquely human. Suddenly, with the introduction of this particular consonant, Lux's burblings become personal: quite literally, she's a person now—from a speech perspective.

Here's Lux on day 203:

Yahoo! and Hadoop

I loved this recent post from Eric Baldeschwieler on the Yahoo! Developer Blog. Eric heads up the Hadoop effort at Yahoo!, and sums up why the company has nearly 100 people working on the project. What does Yahoo! get from this investment in open source?

• help recruiting world-class scientists;
• help building Hadoop and new tools;
• access to trained talent, and easier collaboration;
• avoiding obsolescence; and
• good will from doing good.

This was music to my ears. A year ago when making the transition from Google to Twitter I published a couple of posts about this exact issue. In "Learning or Earning" I wrote

Over time, though, [the proprietary] advantage naturally erodes in relative terms. The open source stack grows ever thicker and by now includes pieces of technology like Cassandra, ZooKeeper, HDFS and Pig (and indeed the Hadoop project in general). The principles of huge-scale computing on commodity hardware are being better understood, and the open stack becomes ever-more viable for real-world work.

As the gap between commodity and proprietary narrows, the downsides of a homegrown stack become increasingly palpable. It takes longer to migrate acquired companies to your platform. There's no liquid talent market into which to tap when hiring. Maintaining a custom toolchain becomes burdensome. You risk making your engineers feel like outsiders in the broader tech community—ironically despite the hyper-advanced technology with which they work. Your existing employees may even resist or resent developing skills which aren't marketable elsewhere.

and I'm chuffed to hear directly from Yahoo! that the theory is true in practice, and converts into measurable value at the company level.

At Twitter I use Hadoop to analyze interesting tweeting phenomena. I get personal value from the fact that for Pig and Hadoop there's a public community of users producing amazing documentation, best practices, tips and tricks and tutorials on the technology. You don't get that when working on a proprietary framework.

Golden Gate National Cemetery

I've been to the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno twice now. I went for the first time in July 2010, just before Lux was born. I took a set I was proud of that time but I knew I'd be back.

I finally made it down there last weekend, with Lux in tow and now just over six months old. We spent an hour or so wandering around the 162 acres, in amazing February sunshine. I took another set of pictures, and here are a few:

There are a few more on Flickr.

Robin Relief

I had to share this: my favorite Christmas card this year was a beautiful homemade relief print from my sister Zoë in the UK. She has an amazing talent for all things crafty and creative. I loved this robin:

In other news, The Bean is half a year old today. Here's a picture taken this afternoon:

Jesse and Larisa

I'd photographed weddings before but never a proposal. This last weekend I got a chance to change that when my friend Jesse brought me in on his plan to ask his girlfriend Larisa to marry him, and asked if I'd be up for bringing my camera along to capture the event.

Jesse had a venue picked out for the occasion: a pier behind the Ferry Building Farmers' Market. Right by the water, with the Bay Bridge in the background, was his chosen spot:

The idea was that we would wander round the market together, magically end up in this location, and then I would suggest that Jesse and Larisa pose for a photo against the lovely backdrop. It happened just as planned, and here's that photo:

Then a split-second later Jesse was down on one knee and bringing Larisa to breathless joyful tears with his proposal:

They exchanged rings (a very modern couple)

and, bless them, were engaged:

After that we wandered round the corner to Hog Island Oysters for a sparkling seafood celebration.

I'm so happy for Larisa and Jesse. I've known them many years, going back to when I lived in Colorado. They're super people.

The 30-Minute Product Manager, redux

A few weeks back I threw out a handful of reading recommendations for Product Managers. I got a bunch of good feedback and additional suggestions—in blog comments, Tweets and email at work (the latter by default I won't be sharing).

Jim Ray reminded me of Michael "Rands" Lopp, "another great source of geek and management advice". In particular there's the book Managing Humans (which I have on my stack but haven't read yet).

Satyajeet Salgar, whose own blog I linked to, added a recommendation for Ben Horowitz's wonderful "Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager" [pdf].

Hunter Walk, another great PM whose blog I linked to, chipped in with a recommendation for the Quora Product Management Topic. Good call! That's where the Ian McAllister post on "working backwards" came from. As Hunter says, right now there's lots of interesting and diverse material from which to learn.

Finally Michelle Dy pointed me at a blog post by Jason Goldman (erstwhile Product VP at Twitter): Enable Float Alignment. In a similar vein to the previously linked Anatomy of a Feature, this speaks to the cost burden of every single feature added to a product and urges product designers to take more active stewardship in creating "just the experience they feel is best overall" rather than pandering to every niche desire.

I feel pretty lucky to have the benefit of input from these folks!

In other news, The Bean was 161 days old this weekend. I feel pretty lucky on that front too: