My birthday is July 18th, 1971. I was born in Bakersfield, California and traveled around quite a bit, in fact my family and I spent a couple of years living and traveling around in a converted Short School bus very much like this one below...

after a while I wound up in Vegas, briefly escaped to go 1.5 years at U.C. Berkeley, before my karma sucked me back in. 

Many people are charmed by Vegas, and the notion of living there seems to be a novel one, but let me tell you from experience, when the money is rolling in and the economy is good Vegas is like a Paradise, but when the economy tanks, the jobs dry up and the money isn't rolling in anymore, Vegas is a very dark place where people turn nasty on each other, and try their damnedest to bleed each other dry. 

So it was on my birthday, July 18th, 2011 that my partner (whom I love very much) brought me my 40th birthday cake with candles blazing, and I closed my eyes, and with all my heart wished---in these exact words---"please please please God, let me and Joe get out of Vegas soon and go some place, any place, but...just let it be someplace green!" and I blew out the candles. It only seemed like a few weeks later that a friend started mentioning some possibilities of new work on Facebook, and shortly after that I was interviewing and only a few weeks after that Joe and I had plain tickets to Hawai'i. It seems my wish had been granted! 

I came to Hawai'i to be a lab technician for The Monorail Project, which has recently struck ground, and the very first ever bathes of concrete (hopefully the first of many) were poured, here is historical documentation...photos of the first truck pouring the first load

Ok, configuring wireless for the Lenovo S10 ideapad under Opensuse 12.1 can be problematic because the chipsets can easily be confused. On my ideapad yast configuration recognized my wireless card as a BCM4313 but the output of DMESG reported it as BCM4312, and there is a HUGE amount of bad information on the net telling you to just install the BCM43XX drivers and you should (Theoretically) be covered, but alas it is not so! I was actually told by people in the #SUSE irc room on freenode to run the script /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware and all my problems should be solved, but they do not realized that MANY ideapads actually have the BCM4312  (Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4313-, BCM4321-, BCM4322-, BCM43224-, and BCM43225-, BCM43227- and BCM43228-based hardware.) chipsets which is NOT supported by the b43, what you need to do is use the broadcom-wl drivers also availble in the 'packman' repository or here and most likely your wireless will magically start working again like mine did.

Be sure to remove the b43 modules with a command like 'rmmod b43' or remove the packages with 'yast2' because the conflict with the broadcom-wl drivers.

I have found an amazing T’ai Chi Ch’uan class for FREE!! It’s in Mililani twice a week. It is taught by Master Herbert Pong and his more senior students. It is twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday. Wednesday classes are at 9:00 am, sharp, at Holanailii Park in Mililani, HI. The Saturday classes are also at 9:00 am, but at the Park & Ride in Mililani Mauka. The class is not too strenuous, wear comfortable, loose-fitting clothing. Even though the class is free, you will be expected to register, and sign in on following classes, and bring a few bucks with you because they occasionally have excellent deals on training manuals,T-shirts, cd’s and dvd’s etc. There are easily 50+ students at a time, of all ages, and the class is broken up into three groups by skill levels, beginners, advanced and very advanced students, so no matter what your skill level you are sure to fit in. Come out to enjoy the beautiful Hawai’i sky and air, and learn T’ai Chi Ch’uan from one of the islands most revered Masters of the Art.

Hurra!! Joe is quitting smoking today!! I am so happy for him, I just want you to know I will be there for you! Looking forward to Tai Chi class tomorrow morning, maybe it will help Joe with the smoking and blood pressure.

going into Honolulu tomorrow at 8:00 AM to take my ICC Soils Special Inspector exam, wish me luck!!

These are some pictures of the view from my dining room window…

still on Hawai’i overload, computer burned out, had to get a cheap one from craigslist for like $100, going to NorthShore for Christmas, hopefully will see some whales.

Finally back on the internet!!