I’ve been doing more video these days.  But rendering video files takes a long time, like maybe two hours for every hour of video.  So I decided to run my rendering operation like a dentist’s office, with multiple operatories.  That means multiple machines.

I have a Dell desktop and although it’s ok on editing (I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS 3.0), whenever I need to render I have to take a nap or go for a walk because it takes so long and you can’t edit the next video while you’re rendering the last.  This can’t be efficient.

So I decided to get a second machine, and keep it pure, with only Adobe video software, and use that when the first machine is tied up.  Ah, but what computer should I get?

First I went to Dell, but boy their high end video quality machines are really expensive.  Then I went to Best Buy, because, like the mountain, it was there.  They had a 64-bit HP that looked pretty good for a good price, but I started to wonder about the 64-bit thing.

I googled 64-bit and it wasn’t clear that Adobe can use all of the memory addressable by the 64-bit processor or whether it can use even the 4 megabytes of memory it uses on a 32-bit processor.  64-bit, like Vista, is probably something for later, but not now.

So I decided to call Adobe.  Luckily, I got a sales guy who would talk to me about this, and luckier still he was wiling to talk to me about his own personal setup.  He said he didn’t buy factory built machines, but was into hand built machines.  Although I’d seen components at places like CompUSA, I’d really gotten close to hand built machines.

He was high on hand built.  You can build it your way, like a hamburger.   With any kind of motherboard and chips and drives and video cards and everything.  And because it doesn’t come with all the creepy software the factory built machines come with, which invariably shows your machine down.  And for what you get, hand built is cheaper.

What price purity?  He told me what he had on his machine, from the name and manufacturer and model number of the motherboard to the chips and drives and video cards, and so forth.  Then the problem was for me to somehow recreate what he had.

Sure I could get on the web and order a case and all these components, and then try to put them together and configure them.  Daunting, I thought.  Why not just get someone here in Honolulu to do that for me?  A geek person, I thought.  But how many geek people do you actually know, ones you can actually talk to.

And then I remembered Supergeeks.  I had heard that they do hand built.  So I gave them a call in hopes that this would simple and quick, that I could tell them what I wanted and they could just build it and deliver it to me, and make me happier than I had ever been.

Lucky still again.  I called them and got Oliver, their parts man, and he laid out how this would all happen and what it would cost.  I ordered it right there and then, and he flew in the parts and set up the machine and delivered it me in one week. Just like Dell.

Had I ordered the parts and put them together myself I suppose I would have learned more about how to build and configure hand built machines like the guy from Adobe, but that would have involved more time and risk for me.  It was better to have them do this.

I had to a learn a few things about the machine after they delivered it but in one day’s time it was fully operational, just as I had dreamed it would be, and now I have exactly what I wanted with exactly the specs I wanted, and I’m as happy as clam.  You know that feeling of elation when you get a brand new high powered computer that actually works.

Kudos to Oliver and his friends Ryan and Ron at Supergeeks.  They did a great job.  My fingers are crossed that this will work swell and for a long time, better than factory built, and that I won’t need onsite maintenance, because that unfortunately is not in the deal.

Hand built is like hand coded, all transparent, all modular, all yours.  And all things considered, I might even make this the way I get my computers in the future. It’s not so much a geek thing as the fact that these parts and components are generic and modular.  In the 21^st Century they have become commodity, and for me that is a very good thing.

If we really wanted them back, we’d do something about it.  Everyone always says they’re leaving by the carload, our best and brightest, and we’ll never get them back.

We’re tried silly things like parties, websites and clubby chat rooms.  But for the most part we’ve been unable to get them to come back, with all the damage that does to our demographic.

The longer they stay away, the less likely it is that they’ll return.  They finish school, get jobs, get married, have kids, and make a life.  Can you blame them?   Do you think they’re going to drop all that and come back midcourse?  Lots of luck.

But there is something we can do about it – that should come as no surprise – if you really want to do something about this sort of relentless brain drain loss, all you to do is bear down, spend some money and make some sacrifices and, lo and behold, you can.

A few years ago, an expatriate Chinese scientist in New Jersey was wooed back by the Chinese government.  They offered him what they knew would appeal to him most of all, the trappings of science itself – a laboratory and research money and laboratory staff galore in China.  He succumbed easily, and back to China he went to take the prize.

It’s not hard to do that, and certainly worth it – scientists, after all, come with high leverage.  No one knows what great things this guy will do for China now.  His work there could be, probably will be, worth far more than the cost of repatriating him.

So how about repatriating our departed boys and girls, the ones who left because they saw brighter future on the mainland than in Hawaii?  Because their teachers and parents and friends all inculcated in them the notion that the best thing they could to was to follow their peers and go to the mainland for a better life than they could have in Hawaii.

In fact, we have a good life here – it’s just hard to overcome the mainland sirens, as in Odysseus.  We can’t just ask them to plug their ears.  It takes a meaningful incentive to bring them back.  So why don’t we bite the bullet and pay the price of that incentive and bring our best and brightest back home to help us build a future for our state.  We need them more than we can say.  What are we waiting for?

How do we do this?  By the same kind of incentive you would always use – economics mixed with career satisfaction.  Just like the Chinese scientist.  You pay their way.  You give them a free ticket.  You get them a great job and salary, appropriate to their skill.  You help them buy or mortgage a house, or you rent one to/for them cheap for x years.  You excuse them from state income tax for x years.  You offer them free courses at the University to advance their professional training.  You tell them you love them, you make them feel good about themselves and their choice of returning.  Priceless.

You give them bus passes, and opera seats.  You give them memberships at the “Y”.  In short, you do everything you can.  You make them feel like returning heroes.  You target them singlely, expatriate by expatriate, or you do it in groups.  You can fix these incentives in concrete or you can change the benefits and quotas every year depending on the need for skilled workers in that sector.  It’s like the HOT lane – computer driven – you adjust things depending on the need, you adapt the supply to the market place.

Are we doing this now?  Not a chance, but we need to.

You can, in fact, for a controlled and predictable budget, bring back as many pau hana expatriates as you need.  You target them, you incentivize them, you make them offers they can’t refuse and, if they do refuse, you sweeten the deal until it’s completely irresistable.

They say providing a skilled workforce is the trick to building a tech industry.  If you want to build that industry, you have to provide the workforce, however difficult that may be.  Well, we can do it.  All we have to is design a system to focus on it.  This is the way to our future, and theirs, and their families.  Let’s not waste a minute – we can’t afford to keep on losing them, we need to stem the tide right now and get them back here post haste.

Those who would oppose this will say, “why spend our money on bringing these kids back – they’ll come back when they’re ready.  Why should we give them special treatment?  And if they don’t come back, that’s their problem”.  I don’t agree.  That kind of attitude will isolate us from our own children.  This problem is our problem and it’s serious.  We’re got to take charge or our collective destiny, or we will surely be the Sahara of the Beaux Arts (as from H.L. Mencken), and of the Sciences too.

In Hawaii right now, Verizon delivers DSL for $14.99, Qwest delivers DSL and wireless for $26.99, EarthLink delivers DSL and cable for $12.95, delivers DSL for $14.99, Road Runner delivers cable for $29.95, Adelphia delivers cable for $23.95, MediaCom delivers cable for $19.95 and Hughes delivers satellite and wireless for $59.99.  All of these guys provide unlimited monthly Internet service to local customers.

Watch out. Most cable companies have official or secret caps on the amount of data they allow subscribers to download every month.  Three of the country’s largest internet providers are moving toward a new way to charge us for broadband - by imposing limits on our online accounts.

Time Warner Cable began a “trial” of “net metering” in a Beaumont, Texas, this month.  They want customers to sign up for “plans” that have limits and pay hefty surcharges when they exceed those limits.  Comcast said it would slow down the connections of its heaviest users in the markets of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and Warrenton, Virginia.

Comcast continues to engage in “contact blocking” against its customers despite an investigation by the FCC and widespread public outrage over what it has been doing.  And AT&T said it would limit heavy users by basing prices on data volume.

Ben Scott, of the public interest group Free Press, says that the new strategy of the big providers reflects a decision to admit publicly what they have been doing secretly all along.  He adds that their new strategy will not provide the kind of relief that would result from larger investment in high-speed network.  Clearly, as national usage increases, we need a scaled up system, not scaled up prices overworking the existing system.

In Beaumont, Time Warner is “offering” plans with a 5 gig cap, a 20 gig cap and a 40 gig cap.  Prices run from $30 to $50.  If you exceed your cap, you get to pay $1 for each additional gig, so use it carefully.  An hour of TV quality video is about 200 megs, higher quality video 500 megs, and high definition is much more than that, say 5 gigs.  After one hour of high definition, the user with the 5 gig plan will be over his limit.

While these carriers want to return to a pre-1996 dial-up juke-box pay-phone standard of metered charges, most everyone you know is way beyond email and website surfing.  We, all of us, are using more bandwidth every day - video, movies, music, games, voice over and everything else.  Overall bandwidth use on the net is surging, doubling every year and a half.  The net is becoming a center of our culture and daily life.  Computers and TV are now finally coming together for the long-awaited convergence.

This new throwback pricing scheme runs counter to that trend, and to what we have come to love about the Net, its openness and vitality.  It is a huge step backward.  Just when we thought we were all on the road to a new world of Net nirvana, the change these guys want is a complete bummer.  Instead of surfing new heights of Internet delight, we will be tied down by this electronic ceiling.  It will be a constant psychological barrier on use and experimentation, one which will cast a shadow on every moment of our Net experience.

They tell us that net metering is the “fair” way to ensure access for “all” users.  Why does that sound so fishy?  I suggest they’ve noticed this sweeping trend to greater public use, and they want to cash in on it.  Time Warner, the parent of our own Oceanic Cable that provides Roadrunner to so many of us, is leading the charge, pun intended, and our days of Net freedom may be numbered.  Today Beaumont; tomorrow Hawaii.

Hawaii is sitting pretty for this kind of pricing scheme.  You need to vote to vote with your feet on this, to get off your duff, watch what happens and be prepared to go over to the competition without looking back.  That’s why the smart thing may be to squawk about it now, before we get sucked into our own “trial” and a whirlpool of escalating prices.

Why not write to Oceanic at oceanic.com and tell them that we don’t want no stinken usage based fees here, that we love the openness and global exchange of the Net, that their escalation plan flies in the face of the global trend, and that we know very well that they’re doing this only to make more money.

Nationally, the stakes and the resources in play are huge.  In Hawaii, the market is hundreds of millions.  Do the math.  We could wind up paying more, much more.  We can’t afford to be complacent.  Once the sliding scale begins, it’s so easy for them to migrate the data limits down and the charges and penalties up, hoping no one will notice.  We should notice.  We should tell them that if they want to raise the monthly price of broadband here, they’ll have to pay a price in market share, and that we and the PUC will be watching.

Things are also happening in Congress.  The push for net neutrality protection against content blocking has led to several bills.  The “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” co-sponsored by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) would amend the Communications Act of 1934 to codify open access to the Internet. The “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act” introduced by House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) would use antitrust regulations to prevent the price discrimination inherent in forcing some customers to pay more for higher bandwidth.

We should ask our delegation to support these two bills.  Failing that, maybe we should go out and buy Time Warner stock (symbol TMW) and vote against management to make the point.  As a last ditch effort, perhaps we should move to the mainland and sign up with the competition, assuming there are some other carriers out there who decide not to go along for the ride.

The Hawaii Venture Capital Association meets on the third Thursday of each month for lunch at the Plaza Club, and this month was no exception.

Their program was entitled “What Entrepreneurs Seeking Funding Should Expect When Choosing A Lawyer”. It was moderated by entrepreneurship luminary Rob Robinson. The panel was blue ribbon, and included attorneys Lori Hiraoka, Darren Nunn and Dick Sherman and entrepreneur David Watumull.

They talked about how to select attorneys to help you raise investment capital and how to deal with that attorney once you select them, and the discussion was helpful. But in my mind this raised another question - how these lawyers themselves can deal with the competition for Hawaii legal work from counsel on the mainland.

Knowing the business environment of Hawaii is undoubtedly an advantage in fund raising here. But many entrepreneurs of Hawaii companies don’t even look for counsel on Bishop Street. They go straight to the mainland on a knee jerk basis. From my observation, this is the case in many business areas, including but certainly not limited to areas involving investment capital and intellectual property.

I suppose there are a number of reasons for this, some real, some based on myth. Some clients believe mainland attorneys can read Hawaii law just as well as Hawaii lawyers – after all, the law of all American jurisdictions is freely available on the net. Some clients are not concerned with higher costs on the mainland on the notion that if it’s more expensive it must be better. And then there’s the mystique - some clients feel that if you’re a patent attorney and your office is across the street from the Patent Office, you must know something we don’t know in Hawaii.

Legally, yes the world is smaller and the mainland is closer now than it was before. So entrepreneurs are more comfortable in dealing with counsel on the mainland – what’s the difference between emailing across Bishop Street and emailing to San Francisco or New York? The long distance telephone call or fax is the same and costs the same. If you really feel you need to have a face to face, use a webcam.

And the lawyers on the mainland are increasingly bold in marketing away from their home states and all the way to Hawaii. They can contact and develop relations with local clients and prospects with very little effort and without opening an office here. The limitations on practicing law without a license do not pose the same barriers as they did before. Most mainland firms representing clients here feel free to advise those clients on Hawaii law and when they need a little local help, they’ll hire a local firm on local points but do all the heavy lifting themselves, from the mainland.

The natural progression is that the work available to the local bar is proportionately less than it was a decade or two ago, and promises to be still less going forward. But what are the underlying sea changes, for the clients, and for the local bar?

I suggest that if local clients do not use local counsel, the local bar will not be as robust as it has been during the years since Statehood. There will be fewer matters, fewer jobs, fewer lawyers and more generalists. Some people will say that’s a good thing, but it may rather be a downward spiral. There will be less incentive for local lawyers to develop specialization. Scary, since the law is more complex all the time.

If specialization is not available locally, more Hawaii businesses that need lawyers in those areas will have to get legal help from the mainland. Given the increased costs on the mainland, some, or many, of those local businesses simply won’t be able to afford the representation and the advice they need to thrive. Not a good thing.

What to do? I suppose we could encourage local clients to give preference to local lawyers, but remember this is a free market driven by business considerations. The akamai client will, and should, look for the best expertise he can find at any price he can afford, and geography is not an object. That usually translates into going to the mainland.

One approach that can address this phenomenon, and trend, is to affirmatively encourage local attorneys to greater specialization and greater expertise, so they can more effectively compete with counsel on the mainland. How do we do that?

The answer may come from our Law School. I am hoping, looking forward, to the possibility that the Law School, under Dean Avi Soifer, might include outreach programs to the downtown legal community. Programs that would go beyond traditional CLE (Continuing Legal Education) that would liberate lawyers to develop new or greater expertise to migrate their practices into the areas they like best.

In the old days, if you were a generalist and wanted to expert yourself, you would refuse all other work and put all your time into learning the new field. In the context of a law firm that has to make money, this could put your job at risk. With programs from the Law School, where law faculty come down to teach local lawyers new areas and specialties in downtown classes, that kind of learning would be much easier.

If I’m a real estate lawyer and I really want to be an investment capital lawyer, on the job training will probably not be available for me. I could learn this new area by candlelight, but that’s hard to do if you’re working every day. Wouldn’t it be great if I could learn it as in law school, from someone very knowledgeable and dedicated to opening that door for me and bringing me up to marketable competence. This would be a kindness not otherwise available to many lawyers in the community, and would improve their prospects, their careers and their professional quality of life.

So I’m hoping the Law School will do this, and that they will have an enthusiastic response from the bar. If you get a chance to support them on this, please do, not only for the educational ideal but also because over time this kind of program is likely to build greater expertise, greater legal infrastructure, and greater confidence by local clients in local lawyers. All good things for Hawaii.

When it came up, my Neighborhood Board voted down a resolution supporting cycling in Honolulu.  I couldn’t believe it.  Then, after an embarrassing discussion the resolution squeaked through by one vote. Kind of sad, don’t you think.

What is it about bicycles that bothers people so much?  Years ago I recall a jury trial where the voir dire revealed early on that the panel did not think there was a place for cyclists on either the streets or sidewalks of Honolulu.  The injured cyclist settled at first opportunity.

In fairness, I would have to add that Frank Fasi built some marginal bike lanes on University Avenue and on Kalanianaole, but then lost interest and no mayor has done anything much since.  Tell me it isn’t so. 

In Fasi’s day, you could commute on Kapiolani or Beretania or even Ala Moana.  You could ride to Waimanalo or even to Waianae in reasonable safety.  Try that now.  They’d say you were crazy. And they’d be right. 

What is it that makes so many people reject cyclists and the use of bicycles as serious transportation.  They don’t use bicycles, they don’t give way for cyclists and in fact many of them want bicycles to go away, to disappear.  Some even shout epithets and run cyclists off the road. 

As far as I can see, the city doesn’t plan for cyclists in any way or do the slightest thing to encourage them or make room for them.  Au contraire, the city wants them off the road too.  Witness the recent contentions between HPD and groups of cyclists trying to popularize cycling. 

Beyond bad temper, isn’t this a huge squander of a perfect opportunity?  Aren’t we supposed to be a tropical outdoor sports paradise?  I guess not.  It’s not only my Neighborhood Board that’s conflicted about this issue.

If we had bikeways and bike lanes on the highways, thousands of people would ride bike.  They would have fun, they would be healthier, and they would enjoy life more.  They wouldn’t be on the freeway using fossil fuels.  But they’d get where they’re going, and given the traffic sometimes faster.

Cycling is certainly high tech, thrilling us with its leverage and near perfect efficiency, offering us the personal zen of bicycle maintenance.  What a fabulous statement to innovation – a machine that can take you anywhere, but requires no fuel or engine other than the human body. 

A couple of years ago the people voted for a charter amendment to make Honolulu more bike friendly.  A terrific idea, and well supported.  But not one thing has been done since then.  The amendment and the people were ignored and are being ignored on this issue.  Tell me I’m wrong.

Bikes - what could be a more obvious solution to so many issues, fossil fuel, traffic, public health and environment?  And what could be so easy.  We already have these magic carpets waiting in our garages and storage rooms.  All we need to do is pump them up and ride them.  Voila.

We could of course wait around in hopes the government will implement the charter amendment, but frankly that would be a miracle for which none of us can wait.  Instead, I’ll just suggest that everyone get out there and ride.  Ride, Sally, ride.  If we all do that, things will be better.