Voggy Vapors Up Your Nose

Did you know that the worst sulfur dioxide air pollution site
in the US is a volcano? Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawai’i
to be exact. In fact, when the lava flows into the sea, a cloud
of, among other things, hydrochloric acid is produced (you can
read more about this from Yahoo! News
here).

Now, before we go too far, you potential visitors out there
don’t need to go running and screaming like the Japanese in fear
of Godzilla. It’s mostly something residents of the Big Island
need to be aware of. Ongoing studies are being done to
determine just how bad this toxic mix is to residents (visitors
don’t need to worry too much because they aren’t exposed long
enough to have long-term, ill-effects. YMMV. Insert disclaimer
here). But it is well known that the state of Hawai’i has the
highest asthma death rate in the country.

Although, here on O’ahu, we are usually too far from the Big
Island to have any problems, it does reach us when the winds are
from that direction. When it is, we have what we call “vog”,
short for volcanic smog. But when the trade-winds return, all is
blown out to sea.

Smoke in Your Eyes

Speaking of smoke. With a hot, dry Summer fast approaching, it’s
brush fire season here. The latest is a fire in the Nanakuli area
on the island of O’ahu. The fire has come close to burning some
homes but so far, the fire fighters have been able to literally
beat back the flames.

And, to coin a phrase, where there’s fire, there’s smoke. This
story from KHON-tv tells of school closings due to the
negative health effects of the thick smoke coming from the
fires.

Food Finds

For you Foodies out there, comes the UK Guardian
Unlimited’s
The top 50 things every foodie should do. Some examples are:
dismember a chicken (is that legal everywhere? -ed), eat lunch at
Le Grand Véfour, slurp udon noodles in Takamatsu, and
squeeze a fresh pineapple on the island of Lana’i.

Raising Syntaxes

I may be able to do a lot of
things, but learning different languages is not one of them. The
US version of English is about all I can mangle manage so
it should not come as a surprise that learning computer
programming languages is not something that comes naturally to
me.

Yes, I can usually learn enough of a language to be
dangerous get the job done, but it’s a struggle I don’t look
forward to.

For those of you who are aces at programming, you may be
interested to know that Free
Pascal 2.0 is on the wire. After five years in development
the new Pascal compiler:

has excellent compatibility with TP 7.0 as well as with most
versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings,
widestrings, interfaces). A Mac Pascal compatibility mode is also
provided to assist Apple users. Furthermore Free Pascal supports
function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and
other such features.

I assume the above description has meaning to you. As for me,
other than the reference to, I think, Turbo Pascal (which I
learned a long time ago in a ga…never mind), it’s all Greek to
me. In any case, go Forth and be fruitful.

unit testman;
interface
type
  myobject = object
    constructor init;
    procedure mymethod;
  end;
  
implementation
  constructor myobject.init;
  begin
  end;
  
  procedure myobject.mymethod;
  begin
  end;
  
  function myfunc: pointer;
  begin
  end;
  
  procedure myprocedure(var x: integer; y: longint; z : pchar);
  begin
  end;
  
end.

Aloha!