Yesterday’s entry concerning the poor state of building maintenance at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus again forces the question–how can the state possibly afford to build, staff, operate and maintain an entire new West Oahu campus when we can’t seem to afford to keep the ones we have in good working order?

In a recent Faculty Senate executive committee meeting, the Manoa vice-chancellor for students, Francisco Hernandez, said he is trying to expand services to students but is “finding that it is difficult to attract suitable candidates because of the high cost of living and the reluctance of the administration to grant high salaries to compensate for the cost of living, for faculty, APT, and executive positions.”

But at the same time we’re going to be hiring enough faculty and staff to operate a West Oahu campus serving 7,500 students? Somewhere down the line there’s going to be a lot of finger pointing in a search for who was responsible for this setting this future fiscal meltdown in motion.

Let’s see…a press release from a European spam filter developer reports that the amount of spam is actually increasing since the arrest of the so-called “spam king” at the end of last month.

Previously, SPAMfighter noticed a ratio of around 80% – 85% spam to legitimate e-mails. However, in the last month, this ratio has increased and is now up around 90% of all e-mails are spam. These statistics are collected from the SPAMfighter anti-spam community consisting of over 3.4 million members in 216 countries.

While on the computer beat, the New York Times reported yesterday that we’re in a new cold war arms race aimed at achieving “electromagnetic dominance” in a future cyberconflict that might be fought alongside a more conventional military conflict.

For your browsing pleasure, check out Consumerist.com, a site with the subtitle “consumers bite back.

And you might find this entry in my cousin’s blog, The Clutter Museum, of interest as she ruminates over how to best teach technology. It seems to me there’s a lot here about teaching and learning in general, applicable to things like how to teach potential readers to appreciate the importance of newspapers. She includes enough interesting links to keep you occupied for a while.

I’ve been struggling to crawl up the learning curve of the NeoOffice database module, which appears to be modeled after Microsoft Access. Unlike Access, which costs some $230 and runs only on a PC, the NeoOffice database is part of the full NeoOffice suite, which is free and runs on Macs. So I’m willing to put up with a bit of floundering around to make this set-up work.

After delaying today’s entry until after our morning walk, the least I can do is share a bit of the beach experience. This time of year lacks the brilliant colors of dawn (well, actually, they just happen so early that we miss almost all the show) but in their place we get these incredibly brilliant ocean views. A fair trade, I suppose.