Bill’s Reals Blog - Scuba, Travel & Gadgets

The largest dive expo in the U.S., SCUBA Show 2007, will take place this weekend June 2-3 at the Long Beach Convention Center — and you are invited!
You are cordially invited to participate in:

• 76,000 sq. ft. of exhibits of new gear, experts and dive travel pros and bargains
• Continuous Underwater Film Festival with premier films
• Full schedule of seminars
• Door Prizes
• Saturday Night Casino Party benefit (Texas Hold-Em!) and much more!

For full information go to http://www.scubashow.com

I’m going to try and make it but there is a lot going on.

EDIT: I’m going to the sow. I’ll post my review here sometime this weekend.

I used to bike at lunch with my co-workers for exercise, it was great exercise and unlike the gym, you can get the wind in your hair. We used a series of dedicated bike lanes that took us from work to the beach and unlike just using the road, you felt a level of safety on them that made the experience more pleasurable.

I’ve toyed with the idea of riding my bike to work, but the 2000 ft mountain between me and my place of employment is one barrier. However, the lack of a physically seperated bike lane on the freeway that crosses the summit is the larger concern. I don’t relish the idea of sharing the road with trucks, cars and motorcycles going 80 mph downhill, somehow I don’t think that 4-inch strip of paint is going to protect me very well.
This video, explores the case for a physically separated bike lane in NYC but the concept could be brought to other major cities, like San Diego and improve the traffic and maybe the quality of life.

This is cool as researchers have found a new species of sea anemone living on the rotting carcass of a whale in the deep ocean.

The anemone, called Anthosactis pearseae, is small, white and roughly cube-shaped. It’s about the size of a human molar and even looks like a tooth with small tentacles on one side.

Whale fall as it’s called in the ocean research biz, are apparently stable communities on the ocean floor the revolve around a dead whale. New species of crabs, worms and fish have been found in these strange and specialized communities but this is the first anemone to be found living in them.

A treasure hunting company has recovered an estimated $.5 Billion USD of gold and silver coins from the haul of a ship wreck in the North Atlantic. I’m guessing on the location since they, obviously, aren’t releasing that information.

While the $ amount is staggering, it’s good to remember that they are basis this value on the price a collector might pay for each coin, which are estimated to fetch $1,000 a piece. But “17 tons of 400-year-old silver and gold coins” is an amazing find.

They flew all of the gold to Tampa, Fl in sealed plastic tubs. The stock price, of Odyssey Marine Exploration, doubled this morning when the news hit Wall Street

McMaster Carr is basically a mashup of Home Depot and Amazon.com and even with boat loads of $$ in annual revenue, you’ve most likely never heard of them. They are legendary among the garage-tech folks for having any part or tool that you could think of and they will ship it to you next day. They are also well known for customer service, which brings me to this post.

We are currently redoing our kitchen. The handles to my cabinet hardware need an odd bolt that no big box store carries, and it’s impossible to find online in batches less than 7000. I only need 100 of these puppies.

I found them on McMaster-Carr’s gorgeous website; it’s the model of simplicity and hiding away complexity from customers. You have access to 400,000 parts but it feels like your just flipping pages in a catalog.

I needed the screws overnight, when they didn’t arrive yesterday I called them. UPS had destroyed the packages on accident, so McMaster-Carr just refunded me the shipping and are sending me a new box. I didn’t have to wait on hold forever, I didn’t have to fight someone to get a shipping refund, and the best part is that the phone call took about 2 mins.

Check out this story on McMaster-Carr

Dear Blackberry Pearl,

I didn’t mean to leave you but your slim, non-QWERTY keyboard just isn’t doing it for me any longer. While I love your consumer appeal and sexy crappy phone cam, I’ve figured out that your smaller screen size and my larger eyes just aren’t a good fit any longer. It didn’t help that your flimsy design didn’t hold up very well and the final straw was when the trackball stopped working. So the way that I see it, you pushed me away to my old flame phone and made me realize just want I was giving up to be with you.

It’s not you, it’s me and I’m back to my Blackberry 8700c.

Men’s Health has this an article on some junk food that you might actually think about eating..well maybe continue eating.

Highlights:

• Drink more alcohol
• Eat pork rinds
• Eat some chocolate

Apeks, the UK manufacturer of diving equipment or kit as they call it in Britain, has come out with a new “DIR doubles” regulator.

These look to be the same bullet-proof Apeks regulators but have all the ports on one side and are matched as a left and right pair. With this arrangement, you have your hoses routed in the correct down position.

Kinda of a neat idea, and if I were in the market for new regs, which I’m not, I might consider these for my doubles-only reg set.

The are available for approx 549 euro for the pair. However, I still have no idea why a pair of regulators is called “Tec 3-set”

Amigo’s Dive Center, a dive shop in Northern Florida, aka Cave Diving Country, has been taking pictures of Scuba related license plates of it’s customers.

They have some good ones.

A California dive company has release a new product that they claim will help reduce Decompress Illness. Called Safe-d-stop, it consists of 4 main components: 100% O2 cylinder with 20-foot regulator-whips, a trapeze bar that extends 15 feet, and a surface-floating bag with attached dive flag. The bag is also the carrying/storage case.

So you float this thing out, deploy it, then do your dive, come back, do 5 mins decompression or safety stop, on 100% O2 , surface, put this thing away and drag it back to shore.

The thought is that the O2-stop is a better decompression stop, as you aren’t absorbing any nitrogen (N2), because your Oxygen-window open and are now off-gassing more N2 than simply on air alone, which is only 21% O2. This is also what is done on a technical dive, it allows for a faster decompression and gets you out of the water faster.

However, you have to watch it. Your body can only take so much O2 at a time and too much oxygen can result in oxygen toxicity or ox-tox. Ox-toxing underwater can be a little troublesome, since it’s comparable to a grand mal seizure where people typically spit the regs out of their mouth and drown.

So I’m not sure this is worth that potential hassle or the $1200 expensive. However, they have made a clean, compact, system that would be great for remote locations

So, if I were an instructor, I might consider buying one of these things and using it for classes. Check out this video, they made it look really easy to deploy, but I can’t imagine trying to drag this thing out into the surf on beach dive unless you had a bunch of people helping you keep track of it when a wave hit you.