2/16/2007

Vacation

Filed under: — Anastasia @ 9:41 pm

Some things we will be up to in the next two weeks:

  • Spending the most consecutive hours on a plane in our lives to date
  • Liveaboard diving in the Great Barrier Reef off Mike Ball’s Spoilsport
  • Attempting to drive on the left side of the road
  • Riding a hot air balloon over north Queensland
  • Rainforest hikes in the Daintree Forest (including a nighttime croc-spotting walk)
  • Lounging at Sydney beaches
  • Carting around far too much luggage for a measly two people
  • Not getting killed by box jellies, cone snails, blue-ring octopi, sea snakes, or sting rays

Wish us luck! I’ll save up the blog entries for my return, as we don’t expect to bother with the internet on this trip.

Belated

Filed under: — Anastasia @ 3:34 pm

I kept meaning to write a post about Christmas jewelry, both given and received, but I’ve been putting it off for two months now. Jeff recently reminded me that he took this gorgeous photo of the necklace I made for Mom, and am I going to post it anytime soon? So here it is:

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The cowry shell is one I found diving at Old Marineland last September, and I threaded the bead strings and braided them myself. This is about as craft-y as I’ve ever bothered to get, but I was pretty pleased with the result. I made a nearly-identical one for Katie, with a second shell I found in October.

Now I’ve got to go find one for me…

2/9/2007

Sea Lion Overload

Filed under: — Anastasia @ 1:02 pm

Last Sunday, we took the Great Escape out to Santa Barbara Island. We boarded the night before, sharing a stateroom with our buddy Bonnie – which made for a “slumber party” atmosphere (poor Jeff). The boat left the dock around 1am, and we slept sort of fitfully as we made our way across the swells.

Half the time when you sign up to go to SBI, you wake up at Catalina because the conditions were too rough to make it. So I was both excited and annoyed when the divemasters pounded on our stateroom door at 6:30am yelling that we had 30 minutes to get in the water. Yay, we’re at Santa Barbara… but 30 minutes? Rushing into the water? Barely awake divers? That could definitely be a recipe for disaster.

The boat being only half-full (Suberbowl Sunday kept a lot of folks away) meant there was plenty of room on the dive deck, which made the rush to get wet a bit easier. Groups of sea lions frolicking around the boat helped speed us on, too! Our threesome plopped into the water by 7am, and we dropped down to a sandy area between ridges to wait and see who would show up to play. I was borrowing Lars’s hi-def camera again, this time with his Ikelite housing so I had full access to all controls, and a removable red filter.

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I was quite happy to be doing a dive that basically entailed sitting still and letting things come to you, since the new camera was plenty of task loading already. Diving in a threesome is hard enough; diving in a threesome and covering ground makes for lots of lost buddy situations.

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The visibility was amazing, and the heavy sand out at Santa Barbara Island meant that even if you (or the sea lions) kicked it up a bit, it settled quickly without mucking up the vis. I’ve never seen such a good combination of cooperative pinnipeds and clear water. Everyone had a good enough time at the first dive site that we stayed put for dive #2, dropping back in the water around 9am.

For dive #2, we camped out in the sand next to the edge of the kelp forest, and watched sea lions scare away schools of senorita. But out in the sand was where the sea lions really liked to play, both with each other and with us. We wound up forming a wide circle with each other, everyone getting photos of sea lions pestering everyone else.

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This dive was also when we saw the largest number of juveniles. There is just nothing cuter than a baby sea lion, with their big puppy eyes and enormous whiskers.

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When we surfaced, we realized we’d drifted a bit with the current. Normally, surface swims pretty much suck – but they’re a lot more fun when you have an escort of sea lions the whole way back!

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We moved over to another site for our last dive of the day, but the sea lions still didn’t desert us. This was my 300th dive, as shown in my previous post, and a pretty pleasant way to spend it. Although I did have an embarrassing incident where my fin strap came undone – and at my current weight, my drysuit is so tight at the hips that I can’t bend over properly to put it back on! Jeff had to do it for me.

Everyone was out of the water by noon, and the boat started back to shore while the cook served lunch. I talked to some friends the next day who were supposed to go out to SBI on another boat, but bailed when they learned the plan was to just cram in 3 dives at one site for nothing but sea lions. It’s true that sometimes that can really suck – if the vis is poor, or the sea lions don’t show, those sites can be mighty boring. But we really had a great time, even just doing 3 almost-identical dives.

How can you not have fun with these guys?

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More pics at the Santa Barbara gallery – and I’ll put together a video soon!

2/7/2007

Dive #300

Filed under: — Anastasia @ 5:52 pm

Haven’t gotten around to writing a full-on dive report about the sea lions on Sunday, but I love this photo that Bonnie nabbed of me on my 300th dive:

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Why Dreamhost?

Filed under: — Anastasia @ 2:34 pm

Carol asks why I stopped hosting the website myself – seems like a good topic for a blog entry. :)

I originally ran the server from home for two main reasons: I wanted full control over installations and server issues, and I needed more space than hosting companies at the time could affordably provide. The main downside when I first started up the server was that the download speeds could be very slow, since we had a pretty slow Earthlink connection. We shelled out for some extra speed with a different DSL provider (Speakeasy), and basically wound up paying an extra $40 a month for the privilege of hosting our own server.

I enjoyed it though – no need to wait for user support if I needed something fixed, I got to practice lots of sysadmin stuff, and I was able to configure everything exactly how I wanted to.

Recently, though, it’s been getting a little slow. Even with the “fast” uplink that we pay for, once you get a few users looking at photos or downloading movies the connection gets eaten up pretty quickly. So I started looking around at hosting companies again.

And, lo and behold, they’ve come a long way in 3 years. I can now get 200 GB of room for only $10 a month, and – the best part – I have shell access to my account, so I can log in and futz around with stuff on the command line. I can install my own software, manage my own databases, and even make most (possibly all) of the configuration changes I’d ever need to things like the web server, mail server, etc. It’s all done through web-based control panels which wrap my changes in all kinds of levels of security, but it works. So far I have yet to find anything I can’t do with my Dreamhost account that I could with my own server.

And what’s been even more surprising is their great response to user tickets. So far I’ve had exactly two problems: one required an actual configuration fix at their end, the other was just something I didn’t know how to do. In both cases I heard back within an hour with a fix.

So – faster, cheaper, still plenty flexible, tons of disk space… I have yet to encounter a downside. But I’ll let you know if one ever rears its head. If all goes well in the next month or two, we’ll be able to shut off our noisy server in the office and stop paying the extra cash to Speakeasy every month. That seems worth the day or two of hassle involved moving over all my databases and files.

Test Post

Filed under: — Anastasia @ 9:52 am

So far, so good in my migration to DreamHost.   An actual post will be coming later about sea lions now that I’ve got my blog in its new home!