How to photograph people?...........................

I am really struggling with something here that most likely will not apply to many of my blog readers (yes I do have a few of you regulars left!).
My dilemma is how to find the excitement and inspiration in photographing people that I do in landscapes and architecture. Sounds weird I know, but it is a struggle for me. My recent tri p to Maui highlights this issue. Keep an eye on my Flickr stream ( http://www.flickr.com/sl33stak ) and you will notice a lack of people in my images, unless of course they happen to be passing through my shot. In every town we visited there were a lot of people. Not just the typical tourist people walking around either. There were many people who were interesting from both an aesthetic and action based standpoint. Whether they were dreadlocked surfers , street performers , exotic birds handlers or artisans of some type people were doing interesting things. I think you get the picture, interesting people doing interesting things. And all I took pictures of was scenery. Now obviously in a place like Maui there isn’t a lack of beautiful and interesting scenery, but I still feel like I didn’t capture a good part of the essence that makes Maui so fun.
Actually, I have only pictures of my wife and I, and the obligatory shots of the dancers at the luau. Oh wait, I did snap one badly composed shot of a man carving totems. Very badly composed I might add. I just want to know how you find that interesting angle when photographing people. How do you capture those moments that say so much about your subject? If you look through my images on flickr I have only a handful of shots of people, of which an ever smaller number are what I would call good shots…..none of which in my mind are “great” shots.
So I plead with you photographers who “just know how to do it” to please offer me some insight to help me get beyond this hurdle in my photography. Is there anything from landscape photography that I can carry over to photographing people?

Sigh……