Hurricanes and (UH) Hilo

Well, it's been an eventful month here. A week-and-a-half ago on the 15th hurricane Lala swept by and knocked out power to 60% of the entire state, the week before the fall semester started. I lost power for ~54 hours from Saturday afternoon through to Monday evening, and there are people who still haven't gotten it back. We didn't actually see too much wind or rain here in Hāmākua, but Puna and especially Kāʻu got slammed. Then tropical storm Moke passed by on Saturday, but thankfully was far enough away not to add much more than a little rain. I definitely learned a few things about disaster preparedness (namely, that having solar and a battery is the way to go, having spoken to multiple people who were able to keep their fridges running for even longer than the two days I was without electricity).

And did I mention the fall semester started at UH Hilo on Monday? I'm back to teaching with a few more classes this semester, though most of them are labs for which we have experiments already prepared. (I will be grading a lot of lab reports, though.) There was a bit of the usual start-of-semester craziness, with the building AC once again not working, the internal network acting up, the laptop I'd been using last semester giving up the ghost over the summer, and me forgetting to put in the list of rooms I needed access to for my key fob until the day before, but things have been working out. (The AC has been halfway repaired, the network seems to have sorted itself, I got my key access before the end of Monday, and the college has a loaner laptop I can use which should come this week.) I also switched up how I'm writing my syllabi in a way which should make it easier to update them (namely, using Typst instead of \(\LaTeX\), but that'll get its own post here shortly.

In brief: no real damage about the place (but hurricane seasons lasts through November), classes have started, and I'll probably get really busy next week as the labs start to kick off. But I do want to talk about Typst now that I've actually gotten around to trying it, so expect a post on that before too long. A hui hou!