I tend to be supportive of the rule that if you haven't personally served in any other branch of the armed forces, you don't get to use the term "Chair Force" the way others in uniform are allowed to. However, i will say that at cons and other security events, i consistently see more dumbass things done by airmen than by any other military folk. In addition to one of the Air Force personnel leaving her ID around on the tables during lunch breaks, etc (just her con credentials, not like a military badge) we found this laptop in a bag next to a chair as we were cleaning out the room at the end of day one. Yeap, that's a D.O.D. system... and yeap, it has the goddamn login credentials on a post-it note stuck to the keyboard.

This was good for at least a half hour of laughs, from "I wonder what the owners reaction was when they got to their hotel room... possibly oh man, i left my DVD player at that big roomy place thing" to creative ways that people attempted to think about logging in without violating federal law (they system had the default login warning message)... suggestions like "What if you type the username, then someone else types the password, and then i... uh... trip and fall on the Enter key." (In the end, no one chose to login. It's just as well, you don't need to mess around with Federal standards like that, especially when you consider how boring almost all those systems are. It's almost always crap like contractor billing software and inventory control databases. Policy documents and other goodies are very rare... no keys to the missile silos are on field laptops.)

We spent a few disastrous minutes on a bus when we wanted to see Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial. I highly discourage the mass transit in Hawaii. That is a shame, given that the roads are pretty slow and congested a lot of the time. Still, i really just hate buses... simply on the grounds that they stop every goddamn 50 feet. If people would just be asked to walk a few blocks to a bus stop, that would be one thing. But as it turns out, we were looking at a ride of over an hour to get about 10 miles.

As it turns out, the only thing about the bus ride that was worthwhile was seeing this emergency release panel hanging open. That sort of stuff always fascinates me, even if the equipment is so often mundane behind typical access panels. It's very along the lines of Johnny Long's "What does a hacker see" line of reasoning.

All during the lead-up to ShakaCon i was trying to coordinate with locals to get on the ground knowledge about renting a fun, simple vehicle. I didn't want a car from way out at the airport which would cost me an arm and a leg and be all frills and no fun. I wanted just a basic jeep. (See the fifth and eleventh posts in this thread to see my comments about "jeeps" vs "Jeeps" etc etc)

My disappointment was rising daily when i heard of nothing except one company after another offering rentals of ultra-modern TJ-series vehicles with hard tops, full doors, air conditioning, and automatic transmissions. That may be fine for public accountants on vacation with their home-ec teacher of a wife, but my sadness turned to elation when we found a no-name place of questionable ethics right down the street from our hotel that offered this sucker for very low cost.

True, it was a more modern vehicle than i would have liked (and was in that slightly unfortunate"Jimmy Buffet island bum" color) but it was a stick shift and beyond that was enough of a shitbox junker to make me happy. The vent system was broken so it blew hot air 100% of the time (which was also likely a good thing given that the dash was awash in warning lights, see below) and the steering was terrible. (I originally thought it was manual steering but in the end i discovered that it seemed to be power steering with a dead master cylinder... try cornering that in tight spots. It was funny to see the hotel valet banging into rocks and such when he pulled it around).

Full of sand and burning our feet wasn't a concern. The top came off the moment we pulled it off the lot and if it's there next year, i'm renting it again and ditching the doors in our hotel room, too. Local Hawaiian radio tuned to 100.3 FM was wall-to-wall island-style and south-Pacific rock, and the wind in our hair and views of the volcanos and glistening water took care of the rest.

Good bless the USA and this vehicle that we gave to the world.