RickMcCharles.com

I’ll be a couple of days hiking Haleakala National Park, Maui.

Movember (a portmanteau of the words ‘Moustache’ and ‘November’) is an annual month-long event involving the growing of moustaches during the month of November. …

I learned about the month long holiday from shaving from Bede Campbell.

Some Movember fund-raisers are dedicated to fighting Prostate Cancer. It’s for a good cause, I’m sure you’ll agree.

OK, Apple is the Evil Empire. … I can live with that.

But Microsoft cool? … I never thought I’d live to see the day.

Windows 7 Outlasts Snow Leopard in Reader Vote

Microsoft always loses these kinds of polls on the internet as the Apple fan boys are disproportionately vocal online.

… I’m going to have to try Windows 7.

Driving in the middle of my first night I saw a huge fire in the distance, not far from the aiport.

Could it be a LIVE VOLCANO?

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I never did hear on the news what was happening there. A controlled burn?

… spotted in the restroom at Maui’s Haleakala National Park visitors center.

Amateur Traveler

For the first week on Earth’s most popular island I did have a rent-a-car.

But I gave it up for my second week.

Why?

Normally I feel it’s essential to have your own wheels when traveling in the U.S.A., but (hopefully) Maui is different. They have a pretty good public transportation system called Maui Bus. And I’ll be several days this week on foot in the middle of a volcano in Haleakala National Park.

The cost of a rent-a-car is about double what I paid only 2yrs-ago. Over $50/day … plus fuel. The agent at Dollar insisted I buy the $13/day extra insurance. INSISTED.

Fuel is US$3.24 / American gallon. But I had to pay $4.39 in distant Hana. (Don’t you wish you owned that service station, the only one on that side of the island.)

The average holiday maker in Maui spends $171/day. … My target budget is about $40. Ha. So far I’ve spent at least $70/day despite sleeping in a tent.

Yesterday I moved into the Banana Bungalow hostel. Nice.

They offer “free” tours each day. Have a great kitchen. Free WiFi.

The location is in historic (rundown) Wailuku town, the administrative centre of the Island. Low rent. There are no suitcase tourists here. We mingle with locals, a racially diverse crowd of Asian, European and Pacific Island descent.

It will be a different Maui experience. I won’t be able to stop and gawk anywhere as I did with the car. Tooling all over the island. The highlight of Maui so far has been the motor touring, actually.

Having a rent-a-car was a worry though, in the States. I don’t trust insurance companies to deliver if I did have a major problem. They’ve been devaluing the payoff for claims in recent years. And I don’t really understand the specifics of …

Collision Damage Waiver (CDW) or Loss Damage Waiver (LDW)
Personal Accident Insurance (PAI)
Additional Liability Insurance (ALI)
Personal Effects Coverage (PEC)

Do YOU have confidence you’re actually covered when you rent a car?

Rockin’ links to research out of Stanford:

… today’s students are writing much more than previous generations, and in a profoundly different way. Consider these findings:

An amazing 62 percent of student writing is outside of school. That’s a giant paradigm shift from the pre-Internet age, when almost all writing was for the classroom.

Not only are students writing more, they’re writing things they truly care about and want others to read.

And they’re writing in a lively, competitive and very public marketplace (text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that hones their rhetorical skills and teaches them how to influence their audience.

Trunk’s loveably brazen conclusion: “So everyone can just shut up about how no one can write anymore.”

details – For Your Approval – Another reason employee communication is changing for good

Perhaps it’s the mobile phone that’s ruining writing.

Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo is well known as Hawkeye Pierce from the old TV Show M.A.S.H.

I’d heard good reviews of his autobiography, published 2005. And finally listened to an abridged audio version with Alda reading.

Alan Alda’s autobiography travels a path less taken. Instead of a sensationalist, name-dropping page-turner, Alda writes about his life as a memory play, an exercise in recollecting his childhood, his parents (dad Robert was a veteran on stage, film, and vaudeville), and his career. You want to know about Alda’s most famous work, the eleven years on M*A*S*H? You have exactly 16 pages to do so, and guess what: It’s one of the least entertaining parts of the book. …

Really, who else would name his memoir after an unfortunate trip to the taxidermist? The year the book was published during a revival for the 69-year-old; he was nominated for an Oscar, Emmy, and Tony in the same year.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned

He was the prototype starving actor who financed his lousy career by inventing “systems” to win at the horse track.

Very interesting and engaging.

I loved his story of the morning of the Academy Awards … (He had been nominated for his supporting role as Senator Ralph Owen Brewster in Martin Scorsese’s film The Aviator.) … While at the grocery store he was mistaken for an elderly shop clerk.

Alan Alda is a likable actor. And an entertaining writer. Highly recommended for one and all.

His second autobiographical book, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, looks to be less appealing.