Let’s sign on to a new tradition

Hawaii has some unique election traditions.

One is that the candidates and their supporters stand alongside the streets and highways and sign-wave in hopes of gaining votes.

Another is that they return to those streets the day after the election, win or lose, to again sign-wave and shaka-sign their thanks to those who voted.

A new tradition we’d like to see added to the list is that all the candidates and their supporters comb the neighborhoods immediately after each election and remove all the campaign signs posted in yards, on fences and everywhere else.

The effect would be to prove that election cycles here do have endings, and that there is life in Hawaii besides politics — at least until the next election cycle begins.

Start me up, in Hawaiian

Bill Gates speaks Hawaiian now.

Well, that’s not exactly true. But at long last, his Windows platform has opened the door to proper Hawaiian diacritical marks, with the release of its new Windows 8 operating system.

This was a collaborative effort between Gates’ Microsoft and the Hawaiian language college at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. The bottom line is that the glottal stop (okina) and macron (kahako) will display properly as a single open quote and a line over a vowel, and not like gobbledygook, in PC documents.

It should be pointed out that Apple had the jump on Microsoft for several years, where programming for isle diacriticals was concerned. Ah, well. How do you write, "better late than never" in Hawaiian?