Network Status, Updates & Ramblings

Aftrer some maui users informed me that something was not working this past Monday June 15th, I ask PLNI (our modem vendor for Maui) what was going on. Here's their reply:

There is no automated way for me to check modem ports. PLNI doesn't have any way to check either. Sorry for the troubles... (BTW "RFO" means Reason for Outage, not REFUND FOR OUTAGE.)

The other night we dined at the newish Tanaka of Tokyo's at the former spot of Jackie Chan's Kitchen (which just before its demise actually started serving good food.)

About oh 7 years ago we went to Benihana's in Waikiki and the food was expensive but pretty bad tasting. I swore off going to anymore restaurants whose main focus is Coyote Ugly style jumping around as opposed to simply creating GREAT FOOD.

After that Benihana experience, I reflected over a few days of WHY THE FOOD WAS SO BAD TASTING. Then I hit it... To create great tasting food, any good chef in any restaurant must TASTE HIS FOOD and adjust seasoning or cooking technique based on what he has just tasted. Also the chef (especially when cooking meats to medium rare) MUST TOUCH THE FOOD WITH HIS FINGERS to test if it's done correctly.

So my conclusion 7 years ago is that while the Benihana chefs may indeed posses skills they are hampered by their live performances in front of the diners... they can not touch the cooking food in front of the customers and they certainly can not taste the food in front of the customers ---things that happen ALL THE TIME IN KITCHENS hidden from customers' view.

(But I forgot all this stuffs and well now it's seven years later...)

Tanaka of Tokyo at Ala Moana Center suffers from this very same restriction. And the resulting food tastes HORRIBLE. My $68 dinner was bland and the meat was tough. My shrimp cut up into pieces on the grill by the chef (as was my wife's and daughter's) came out like tiny rubber balls i.e. pretty badly overcooked. I swear they'd bounce if thrown on the floor (which I actually felt like doing/testing.) My scallion medallions came out like those red white solid fishcakes at the supermarket.

A new realization! All the food was cooked on the same grill area. This means your food sorta had flavors from everything that was cooked before with mis-matched and mud tasting results. In a normal kitchen NEW PANS are used and each entree gets it's own!


P.S. I sharpen knives on japanese waterstones (1000 and a 6000 grit King) as a hobby. When I saw the chef cut up meat DIRECTLY on the grill i.e.the knife edge ran across the grill's metal surface, I just shuddered. Razor sharp edge cutting on metal surface equals butter knife.

And a chef's most prized tool is his knife set.

So I asked and found out that the "chef" (Keoki) sharpens his knife after each performance (that is how he put it... now, no wonder about the quality of the food...) I also asked about his chef training. It is two months on the job, no culinary school e.g. KCC's most excellent culinary program.

So I just had my $68 dinner cooked by someone with no culinary experience and two months on the job. He spent all that time learning how to flip this pepper shaker around all the while tapping out a beat, this knife spinning around his spatula, etc. Apparently learning everything except how to cook great tasting food.

To conclude, eating at Tanaka's of Tokyo/Benihana restaurants is like having Animal House frat boys yuck-yucking around whilst cooking your very expensive food...

GRRRRRRR.

When I forward an e-mail that has pictures in them, the recipient just gets the text and not the pictures in the message - can you tell me why that's happending or what I need to do to get the pictures to be included with the message.

An Aside: Embedding pictures/images in your flexgmail email account aka see how a thousand pictures can not match one well constructed paragraph/thought. I can hear you clucking right now. Guess no one has yet shown you pictures of their "cute as a button" new born baby? I'd rather have just used my IMAGINATION after viewing them!

There are two parts: One is ENCLOSING images (via embedding or file attachment) and the other is VIEWING images. Let's take the first.

How to ENCLOSE Images in Your Email

Via File Attachment
This method works for most every online email service including flexgmail. Just attach your images via FILE ATTACHMENTS. In flexgmail when you hit the reply button (or compose button), look carefully. You should see something called "Attach a File" with a pretty paperclip icon to the left of it. Click there and hopefully you got the smarts to figure out where your pictures are on your computer blah blah blah.

Via Image Embedding
However, say you wanted your recipient to view the images "live" right in your email? Well you are in luck! Recently flexgmail (well, gmail domain email services) released a "beta" widget that now allows you to enclose images right in your email's body text area. So finally gmail is like yahoooo and whatevers.

First off though, you need to check to see if you are using the "Newer Version" of flexgmail. How to tell if so? Well, look in the top right hand corner of your flexgmail webpage. If part of that says "Older Version" than this means YOU ARE USING THE NEW VERSION (counter-intuitive i know.) Vice versa if your top right hand corner has the words "Newer Version" then CLICK that to go to the new version of flexgmail.

Okay you are using the "Newer Version". Now to enable this schabang. Because this is still "beta" to EMBED images you need to install a LAB widget. Click on "Settings" in the top right hand corner.

In the new web page that opens up, look carefully for "Labs" link and click on that. Look for the widget by Kent T. called "Inserting Images". Click the "enable" radio button. Then go to the very bottom of the page and click on "Save Changes".

Note: Please for Internet sanity sake, don't go hog wild and start clicking on 1001 different widgets and then use each one in all your emails you send out. THERE IS NOTHING SO IRRITATING AS GETTING EMAILS WITH GAZILLION IMAGES, MAPS, VIDEO, ETC IN THEM. STOP IT!!!!!!

How to VIEW Images in Your Email

Okay, so you are happily spamming I mean "communicating" with whomever with all these images you've taken/stole/snarfed. Happy as a clam now huh?

BUTTTTTT. Hmmm. "I can't SEE any images in my emails that i get????"

Well flexgmail wants to serve and "protect" your innocent lamb eyes and by default will never show images in any email that you get via the flexgmail web interface. NEVER.

But each time you view emails for the first time that do contain images look carefully. There will be two links. One says something like "Display images below" and the other says "Always display images from obama@whitehouse.gov". If you click the second option, well... guess we'll all have to suffer eight years of this.

Spammers use images sometimes instead of text. That really is the reason for the default behavior of not allowing images to just be displayed without your permission.

Okay, time to actually answer this helpdesk ticket:
Check to see if your recipient is actually being denied access to images or if they just didn't "enable" it on their end...

today i've eliminated all future quota charges (formerly $1/Meg/month for anything over 10Megs per account.)

we no longer do quotas because our bandwidth usage is quite low nowadays:

1. offloaded news server duties to READNEWS
2. offloaded mail servers (three servers) to flexgmail
3. less users. (boo!)

so use what you need. however, if you go over like 1 GIG then well....!

but since day #1, it has always been about bandwidth usage. my thinking was if someone wants more disk space then that means they are using it to serve up more pages/images/files on their homepage and that means....more bandwidth usage.

but now bandwidth is not a biggie. we change with the times. please don't ruin this good thing.

Note: If you want to do something LARGE, then let me know and we could work something out. Via AWS, we got TERRABYTES of storage available...

I just answered a helpdesk ticket that brought up something I thought would be a good idea to share with all of you.

Say you got a large file (like 20 Megs) that you want to transfer to a friend on the mainland.

Well, if you tried to do this with flexgmail, you will find out quick that gmail won't allow attachments that large (the limit is around 500K total). And I agree with this! email is not meant to transfer large files!!! being that email is strictly ascii, email programs must convert your binary files (called encoding) to something that resembles text soup that increases the TRANSFERRED file size by 25% (the email program on the other end will decode and your file goes back down to its normal size.)

So what to do?

There is a free service that is SUPER EASY TO SETUP AND ACCESS and loaded with features. The free access requires no messy registration or stuffs like that. 100% anymouse. and you can store up to 100Megs for free in each "drop" (and no limit to the total amount of "drops".)

it is called Drop.io (http://drop.io and pronounced like "scorpio" but instead of saying the "scorp" part say "drop"... is that clear?)

check it out. totally anonymous, easy to setup, can put in voicemail messages, have chats, password to access or not, password to add files or not, can access and send file via computer, phone, voice phone number, have live text chats, have your drop "erase" itself after a certain amount of time, etc.