July 2007 Archives

For the past three weekends Kara and I have been taking SCUBA diving classes to earn our Advanced Open Water certification. The first dive was ‘Peak Performance Buoyancy’ at Ulua Beach where we had to practice staying neutrally buoyant (hanging in the water, not floating up or sinking down). The instructor brought out hula hoops and suspended them vertically in the water by anchoring them down to the bottom. We had to swim through the hoops without touching the sides.

Using my lung volume to adjust my buoyancy came natural to me from my very first dive. Kara, however, has had some difficulty with it. To give her credit, she’s got smaller lungs, and the tank and wetsuits add positive buoyancy that her skinny body can’t counterbalance! She is retaking this class this weekend, and I think she’ll be better off now that she’s started using ankle weights.

Our second class was ‘Underwater Navigation’ which we did at Keawakapu. We had to swim an unmarked square that was 100 feet on each side using only our compasses and counting our kicks and see if we ended up where we started. Both of us did really good on this, we both ended up within 10 feet of our starting positions! After that we got to cruise the reef a bit and then the instructor made us find our own way back with natural navigation and reciprocal compass headings.

That evening we met back at Ulua Beach to do our third class, ‘Night Dive.’ This was a VERY cool dive, we got in the ocean after the sun had set and swam around the reef. It was very strange walking into the ocean at dark, with only our flashlights to light the way! We saw lots of cool things like eels, big crabs, lobsters, a HUGE turtle, and brittle sea stars (like starfish but not rigid). You could only see what your flashlight illuminated, so it felt like exploring a cave on a different planet or something!!!

This past weekend we did our fourth and fifth dives off a boat at Molokini. The fourth dive was ‘Deep Dive’ where we dove down to 100 feet. The water was VERY clear and we were able to see a lot of neat things. We saw a juvenile grey reef shark, a HUGE manta ray, and a bunch of garden eels. The eels stand up out of the sand so it looks almost like sea grass waving around. When we would swim up close to them they’d slowly recede into the sand.

The final dive was ‘Underwater Photography’ so FINALLY we have pictures to show y’all. On this dive we saw a barracuda, a big lobster, a few eels, and lots and lots of fish!! Here are the pictures we took. The filenames say who took each picture.

So now I am officially an Advanced Open Water Diver!! YAY!

Last night I rented and watched Pan’s Labyrinth on my Xbox 360. It cost $4 to download the 480p version of the movie (1.3 gigs) which will ‘delete itself’ after 24 hours. The experience was flawless, there were no stutters and the media remote (which I’ve never really used) was comfortable and worked as expected. The only “problem” was the notifications that kept popping up until I went into my settings and disabled them while videos are running. And even that was smooth, I was able to access those settings without dropping out of the film (I love that Xbox button blade that just slides over whatever you are doing).

Anyway, the Xbox 360 rental experience isn’t the point… The point is that Pan’s Labyrinth is a fantastic movie! This thing defies all Hollywood conventions, it’s in Spanish (with English subtitles, of course), about a girl living through the Spanish Civil War who experiences a fantasy world, and is rated R. You’d think from the movie poster that this would be a kid movie, but it most definitely is not. The real world in this film is gruesome and bloody, but that’s war for ya.

Anyway, I’d rather not discuss details of the film because you should go into it with a clean slate. Just watch it… it’s very good (and if you don’t trust me, maybe the Academy can convince you… they awarded the movie 3 Oscars).

Last night I saw a new episode of Futurama!! Well, it wasn’t really new, but it was new to me! I have all of the episodes on DVD and slowly but surely Kara and I are watching our way through them. It turns out that there was at least one episode that I’ve never seen before. It was a real treat and I hope there are more that I haven’t seen!! I guess it pays to walk the line between big fan and uber-"I've seen every episode 20 times"-fanatic…

Yesterday afternoon Micah arrived for his Hawaiian vacation. We brought him home and he unpacked and then we went out to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. The food was yummy and surprisingly cheap ($9 per plate). Then we stopped by the house to pick up beach chairs and cigars then headed to Kam II to smoke stogies and watch the sunset. After the sky was sufficiently dark, we headed to Safeway and did some grocery shopping. Micah was surprised at how expensive everything was; when our grocery bill came to $125, Micah said “but you didn’t get that much!” Went back home and hung out… talked, ate cookies, killed another giant spider, played Dead or Alive 4, and went to bed.

Going to work in the morning is like 100 times harder when there are people staying at our house on Hawaii vacation…

Well, it’s all over… The 360 bit the dust on Sunday with the infamous Red Ring of Death. I wasn’t too surprised or disappointed since apparently this is a design feature of the system. See Microsoft knew that they’d lose money on each system they sold, so they designed for a small percentage of consoles to break so they could charge a repair fee and make up some of their initial losses. But if we learned anything from Office Space, it’s that too much of a good thing is… bad. Microsoft must have accidentally left in an extra zero, so now 100% of consoles die instead of only 1% or 10%... And now their evil scheme has backfired to the tune of one billion dollars in free repairs… Ouch.

I gave notice at work yesterday. I will be leaving my current company on August 16th. But then what, right? Well… I’m going back to school to get my Masters in Computer Science… In Sydney, Australia!!!

But studies at the University of New South Wales don’t actually start until March, so what are we doing until then? Here goes…

The Masters program is one year long, so I’ll be done by the end of 2008. And then what? Who knows??? Maybe get a job in Sydney? Maybe move to Oahu to work? California? Maybe continue school for a PhD? It’s wide open… got any suggestions? :p

Woe is me, Micah is gone. He left on Friday afternoon and things just haven’t been the same since! :p

We did lots of cool things while he was here: plenty of smoking cigars on the beach, hiked through a burned up wasteland to see petroglyphs, tried to fix our jeep, drove around West Maui on a ridiculously narrow “two way” road, watched the sun set from a field of dried up lava…

But the best thing we did was our hiking day in Waihe’e! I took the day off last Wednesday and we drove out to Waihe’e to hike a ridge and a valley. We did the ridge hike first which was 3 miles and a 1500 feet elevation climb to the summit. The views along the way were stupendous! When we got to the top, the summit was clouded in which looked really cool. The ground dropped off all around us, and then only white.

The 3 mile hike down was steep and slippery so it was kind of freaky, but we got great views of Wailuku and beyond, as well down into a lush green valley.

Once we got back to the Jeep, we drove down the road a bit to the Waihe’e Valley/Swinging Bridges hike. This hike was a bit easier, 2 miles each way on fairly level ground. The views weren’t as amazing, but it was cool to be down in a valley similar to the one we saw from our ridge hike. The highlight of this hike was the two decrepit swinging bridges that we had to cross. These bridges have seen better days, the boards to walk on were loose and split and being held up by rotten looking two by fours. There were cables to hold on to, but these were attached to the floor cables by flimsy wires that were mostly loose or broken. It was CRAZY but a lot of fun!! At the end of the hike there was a little swimming hole where we sat on some rocks and ate the food we brought.

A quick hike back to the Jeep, and then I decided to drive us over to the other mountain on Maui, Haleakala. We went up the mountain from Kula on Waipoli Road and pulled over at the Ali'i Kula Lavender Farm. We claimed an area with deck seats and talked about life/family/etc while taking in the view of the valley from the other side of the island. It was an awesome way to wind down after our 10 miles of hiking!