So I went and stayed at the King Kam. Do the same thing if you want to watch the triathletes - it was quite the spectacle. From my cheap hotel room I had neither window nor mountain view, but I had an unobstructed view of the assembly space where the triathletes gathered. And there were quite a few of those - in all shapes, ages, genders and groupings. The funniest was a father with two dogs and two kids - and they all jumped into the water and swam out towards the open sea. What a sight!

Biking was a bit of a disappointment. There were bikers all over the place, but nothing that really competes with Foothill Expressway. The weather was perfect, and yet you'd find people on the main highway, Queen Kaahumanu, only sporadically. As it were, the shoulder was wide enough to fit two bikers not on good terms, and went that way from Kona to the turn to Waimea, about 33 miles.

If the road was good, not so was the terrain. Hawaii is fairly flat, as it turns out, and the road has only minor ups and downs once in a while. You can go all the 66 miles and never encounter a decent hill! (Nor are there side roads, since the island is really not very densely populated.)

Aside from this highway, probably made specifically for triathletes, the shoulders are not encouraging. A tour of the whole island would be a pain, since the roadway is frequently quite uneven. The slope of Kilauea is much steeper than it seems, too, by the way.

Am I becoming an expert on the matter? I have been working on this off and on since 2000, when Marshall T. Rose first started talking about his beloved BEEP (back then still BXXP) and a new generation of IM products and protocols. He was getting excited, sat down a while with a bunch of smart nerds, and there you are, out comes IMXP (soon to be renamed APEX). Marshall is an incredible man. Once he decides he is going to revolutionize the world, there is no stopping him - even if his revolution is not really what the world wants.

But there you are, I got in touch with IM. And a few years later, I got a chance to work on it again, this time for Yahoo!. The company that made the Internet, as one might say, had a wonderful IM product, but no money streaming out of it. Somehow it felt like a labor of love for the beloved users, no money attached.

And now here I am, trying to get enterprises to spend millions of dollars for a product they basically could have for free. Hard to believe, but we got something going, and we are pretty much where we want to ship.

This, in a nutshell, is Marco and IM. From the ancient days of IRC to modern day webcam traffic.