Travels, Return to Hawaii, 2009

Click on any of the little pictures to see it at normal size. Click on the '=0=' after the picture to see it in giant size (about 2 minutes to download on dialup connection and larger than screen size). This could be useful if you wanted to really look at one part of the picture or to make a print.

Further along King Street is President William Mckinley High School with a recycling drop off point (shown here and below). It didn't look much like a High School and had a very nice campus (I assume it is a magnet school). Hawaii really isn't into recycling very much. Many schools have a recycling drop off point similar to the one below. Further, they were way late in passing a bottle bill. Instead of requiring a deposit (with the money collected by the bottler), they declared it a tax. Of course, they also did not require stores to accept bottles back (as it is a tax and the state collects the revenue), but instead they opened a few recycling centers where people can return their bottles (mostly existing recycling centers and generally not convenient to most anyone). Then they expressed surprise that only 30% of bottles were returned for the deposit in contrast with the 'expected' return rate of 70% which most other states get (but those states didn't call it a tax and insisted that it be easy to return the bottles for deposit). So, it looks like the Hawaii bottle bill was really a beverage tax with the purpose of raising revenue rather than minimizing litter and increasing recycling.	=0=
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A few days later, Michael and Bob spent Friday night and most of Saturday installing PC's and configuring the printers for a group at Metlife who were getting new computers (23 PC's and 16 printers). On Monday, Metlife wanted someone to be there to fix any issues and I went out. It turned out there were several issues, the most common of which was setting the time zone to Hawaii (which I had to do as a local administratgor and could not be done by the users). Pooh! Their building (shown here) was only a few blocks from the Kawaiahao Church.	=0=
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The state capital and old royal palace (above) were right there as well. On the grounds of the old royal palace was a large banyan tree. Below are pictures of what I think was the back and front views of the state capital (but who is to know for sure). I had gone to google maps to find out where the building I was working at was and went there via bus, but noticed the capital was right on my way home (I walked home for exercise). However, I hadn't printed out the map so wasn't sure exactly which building was the capital.	=0=
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