Bill’s Reals Blog - Scuba, Travel & Gadgets

Now that Tax Season finally over, it’s time for my annual dive trip with my dive buddies. Last year we dove the USS Wilkes-Barre in Key West, Florida, it was a blast.
This year, we are doing a cave diving trip in Akumal, 5 days of diving the shallow fresh water centoes in the Yucatan Peninsula. This is going to be my 4th vacation and 3rd cave diving trip to the Rivera Maya. I love the place, if I could I would buy a nice vacation home and spend a month a year down there.

Anyway, I plan on taking my still camera this year and getting some good shots of the cavern zone and some of the interesting cave formations. John is shooting HD video, so we should be able to put together a nice little DVD of movies and still pictures when we are done.

I leave the last week of June.

So I hit my goal of losing 20 pounds and now my goal is to keep it off and start strength training. I was doing primarily cardio-based workouts 3 days a week but with strength training it’s anaerobic, so I need to add two days of cardio on the days I don’t life weights. This means that I’m working out each morning, before work 5 days a week.

I might be getting a little obsessed with this whole workout thing. I went to Vegas this weekend for a guy’s weekend and seriously considered bringing my work out gear with me.

My mother-in-law was diagnosed with breast cancer last month and her operation yesterday. April seems to be dealing with it as best she can, but I know it’s a lot of stress on her. I personally don’t know how to react, life threatening illnesses seem to leave me numb and not knowing which way to feel.

She has good doctors and will start a full round of treatment in a couple of weeks which should take care of it.

I wish her a speedy recovery and a long life.

Had a great day with Tyler, Steve P and Clint and myself aboard Clint’s 20ft zodiac. We arrived on site, just off Torrey Pines State Beach and dropped anchor in the brown water. It was gross. The red tide or whatever crap that is in the water column was not what we wanted to jump into and looked like it might be sewer overflow.
The F4 Phantom is an unidentified wreck, well to us, I’m sure the Navy has a ream of reports on it, that crashed and sank into 150 feet of water.

We descended down and thankfully the viz opened up on the bottom. However, so did the temp, it dropped to 50 degree F, one of the coldest dives I’ve been on in a while.

Tyler got one good topside photo of a HARDCORE San Diego wreck diver. I forgot my backplate at home and had to borrow one, beggars can’t be choosers.

I’ve known a core group of friends, since high school, in fact we all went to college together. Now this wasn’t the plan but we all ended up at Chico State and graduated around the same time. Most of us have moved around a bunch, started families and changed careers but we still keep in touch and try to get together.

This weekend we are converging on Las Vegas…god help us…..

Haven’t been blogging because I’ve been busy at work and home. In the past month or so, Tax Season has been coming to a close, we’ve been remodeling our kitchen, we’ve been traveling, frequently, to see my mother in-law before her operation and keeping the house/pets alive and well.

We’ve also been redoing our kitchen, we’ve replaced the sink, microwave, cook top, fridge and counter tops. In addition, we are also painting the kitchen a darker color and changing out the cabinet hardware to match. The big set back we had was with the tile guy, who screwed up our tile bad.

Here is the email exchange I had with him after my wife asked him to leave the house and he refused to answer our repeated phone calls.

Mr. X

After having several people in my neighborhood come by, give me an honest, non-biased, opinion and comparing your work to the tile in their homes, I am extremely unhappy with the results of your work and am not satisfied that the job is completed.

The tile is not level nor does it lay flat in most places, additionally the v-caps are uneven and the grout lines are not straight. When we voiced our concerns on this matter, on Monday and Tuesday, about these discrepancies, you assured us that we were seeing a work in progress and that the grout would fix everything. This is not the case, the end result is a counter that is neither level, straight or acceptable to the standards on which we sought your services.

Therefore, we’ve placed a stop payment on your check and are now willing to meet with you to resolve this matter. I have called several tile setters to come give estimates/appraisals on what it will cost to repair the damage or whether we will have to start over from scratch, which alone is $250.00 in materials.
We are willing to come to an agreement but we cannot in good conscience pay you the amount agreed.
Please advise us with your wishes on how to proceed.

He’s response:

I will send you $100 cash today, then $150 as soon as possible.
That will get you back to where you started.
Guess I picked the wrong time to quit drinking.
You might want to apologize for deeply offending me about not being clean. You’re full of shit when it comes to that.

Now that is class. You live and learn with this thing and trust me, we’ve learned our lesson. We hired a new tile guy and bought another batch of tile and we actually went upscale so the result should be nice.

I installed Windows Vista one of my computers at work. I mainly did this to see what all the hoopla was about, so of course I decided to install it, yah know, just to see what the fuss was all about.

I was underwhelmed. While I liked the clean look of the interface and the widgets, that you could install on the desktop, it really wasn’t any different that Windows XP but with tons of DRM. So with all the hysteria of Windows Vista and the related hardware upgrades that they are suggesting, I decided to take a look at alternatives. I kinda like the Mac OSX interface. However, since you can’t just install Mac OSX on any ‘ole machine you want, I thought, “Maybe I should take a look at Linux again.”

So I went and installed Ubuntu, which folks have been saying is contender for as a true alternative desktop operating system. I was impressed, it installed in about 20 mins and after I figured out how to disable the integrated video card in the computer and then found the correct driver for my ATI video card, it worked like charm.

I’m still playing with it but I’ve expanded my test.

My new goal: Can I use Ubuntu to replace my Windows laptop at work?

Looks like fisherman in Northern California are having a fine time catching Giant Squid. It’s not actually a “Giant” squid but Humboldt Squid. The squid have been spotted off the California coast for the last couple of years in beaching incidents but are native to Peru and Mexico, where they are affectionately know as ‘red devils” due to their aggressive nature. Humboldt Squid can get up to 100 pounds and at 8 feet long they are strong, aggressive and lethal hunters.

So the warm ocean water temperatures, hello El Nino, are thought to be driving them farther north. Considering all the hoopla over global warming, I’m wondering if they are here to stay and when I might see them in San Diego.

If so, I might need to put on body armour to go diving.

[Via cbs13.com]

Check this out, a 100 year old rockfish was caught off Alaska, it’s mammoth fish. Anyway, “the 44-inch, 60-pound female shortraker rockfish was caught last month by the catcher-processor Kodiak Enterprise as it trawled for pollock 2,100 feet below the surface, south of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.”

Scientist measure the rings in fish ears like tree rings to determine age, the maximum suggested age of this species is 150 years old!
Oh yeah, rockfish are good eating.

[via MSNBC]

I’ve basically lost 20 pounds at this point and I’m now thinking about changing my goal from losing weight to increasing muscle mass when I hit 167 or so.