Ah to be in Hawaii again. The ups and downs I refer to jokingly are or were experiential as I spent a week on the sunny isle of Oahu or the Gathering Place. Ironically a rolling stone gathers no moss and so it was with moi. With all that walking along the shores and ridges and high mounts I did indeed not gather any moss but certainly gathered a fresh set of wonderful memories. The missing ingredients being the better 90 percents (as in wife and daughter) but oh well. They were traipsing through some scenery in Asia.
Beginning with a Monday arrival I was able to get the rear limbs wet on Ala Moana beach,
our former stomping grounds when we lived on this isle a couple decades ago.
Then it was a quick bus ride and a half to a famous Malasada joint called Leonard's on Kapahulu for some amazing doughy goodness - Malasada being a portuguese invention and precursor to the donut.
Its simply fun to stroll along the streets and see the Hawaiian language spelled out on street signs and adverts and informational material and observe the hilarious meanings in another language for the same phonetics. Maharashtrians will esp enjoy them - from the innocuous Maitai
to Makai (meaning toward the ocean) to the other provocative signage in any language (other than the Asian original) it was comedy for free.
Minus the descriptors in many cases the readers would agree that the signage would have merely been food for thought!
More of my travails (some one has to do the hard work) in the continuation of the trip - days 2 to 4.
This time for a tech conference in the realm of what else? AI. But applied to an oft neglected space called Knowledge Management. The latter is a community of practice that focuses on analyzing, organizing and making available reams of data that have been gathered over time by various functions within an organization for anyone in the company to utilize. This function or process is ripe for applying AI agents (or agentic AI framework) and optimize for better outcomes. It was informative. More rewarding was getting acquainted with folks who practice this craft as well as learning of what they see in the corporate or public sectors. Since the venue was Washington DC it also afforded me the chance to take evening strolls albeit the weather was trying. With wind chill in the single digit it still is a glamorous place to perambulate through history absorbing what this country has been through since its founding days. I was able to visit the place Lincoln was killed along with his monument t...
Certainly beats snowstorms and the like now on in parts of the U.S. Yes, mai, tai, seem like words in Marathi. Oahu, I don't know..
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