Mine the Harvest

Wanting to feel a bit nostalgic I decided to fire up Gopher and see if there were still any Gopher servers running out there. Back in the days before the Web had yet to be consolidated from the spinning mass of the proto-planetary internet mass, Gopher was one of the Gems of the Net. Using it you could seamlessly glide from server to server in a more or less hierarchical directory structure. No longer did you have to telnet to individual servers, you could just hop around. This was how surfing really started. Often you really had no idea where you where. And Gopher also allowed you to search – holy crap, this was hot stuff.

Sure – today I could just find a gopher server on Google and connect with Firefox to something like gopher://quux.org/ but this misses the point really as Gopher pre-dated browsers. Hardly nostalgic enough for a purist.

No problem – I’ll just install a gopher client on one of my Linux boxes and use it. Humm, they don’t have one installed by default anymore. Oh well – I can just install it from the repos. Oops, it’s not in the Base, Extras or RPMForge Repos for CentOS. Wow, seriously? Okay, I will just get the rpm for one real quick. Humm – that is not too easy either, dependencies blah blah. Oh – here is one for Debian, I guess I could make it into a RPM with Alien – oh why bother, it is so tiny I will just compile it locally.

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I have really been having some fun with the new OpenSolaris 2008.05 release. It actually prompted me to break down and get a new 500GB SATA drive and do a fresh install of Suse 11 with LVM so I could have more room for virtual machines. My old install was just running out of room and I could not add more VMs, plus hdparm showed the old drive performance was pretty horrid (17MB/sec).

Installing VMware Server 2.0 and getting OpenSolaris to run was a bit challenging though. There are pages on my wiki discussing both and some of the issues I encountered.

Getting VMWare tools to work was a bit challenging. After installing it and restarting X the screen would go black and you are unable to get to a virtual terminal. Quite annoying. I finally found the solution courtesy of a comment by Ankush on this blog.

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Woot! Today I was contacted by my credit union and informed I was one of 5 people being awarded a $2,500 cash scholarship!

GTE Federal Credit Union posted a notice on their website a month or so ago announcing a scholarship contest. It was open to all members and required applicants to submit an essay on the role of credit unions and what effects would be caused if legislation were passed to remove their tax exempt status.

Being in school at St. Petersburg College perusing my degree the idea of a $2,500 cash scholarship to help with tuition seemed quite an appealing idea. And the subject itself, of why it might not be a good idea to remove the tax exempt status of credit unions was of interest too. Someone could actually give me money to be opinionated and write about it – how alluring . . .

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Here is a story on how safe divers, following the rules and diving within limits can still get a DCS hit . . .

Last weekend classifies as an adventure. Syd and I went on a dive trip to West Palm Beach Florida for a 4th of July weekend of diving we had scheduled a few months back and had been looking forward to. We drove to the Atlantic side starting out early Friday morning, and arrived at the Riviera Beach marina (just north of West Palm Beach) about noon, in the midst of a impressive thunderstorm, which by this time was mostly dissipating. The dive boat returned late from the morning trip and reported flat calm seas, excellent vis and great conditions so despite our groups high speculation the trip would be canceled and with an eye on the storm we headed out.

The weather was indeed in our favor and the storm continued inland taking the lightening with it and by the time we arrived at the first dive site conditions looked quite good. Seas were indeed flat, a welcome site for Syd. We did two Nitrox dives on 33% O2 to 55′ for about 40 minutes (well under limits) and had a great time, seeing a wonderful variety of marine life (more on that later). We ended the second dive, had a good trip back in returning to to dock at about 7pm.

The next day we arrived at 7:15am for our next two dives. Due to returning late the night before, we were unable to get Nitrox fills arranged and so would be diving air this day. (Alas, were that not the case, perhaps things may have gone differently – but that is how it went.) The boat left on time and we did two more great drift dives along ledges and once again saw some great marine life. The dive masters from Diving Solutions were fantastic and pointed out all manner of interesting things to see. Both dives went without incident and we were back on the boat after the second dive by about 11am and headed in.

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Wow! This weekend Syd scored in a major way at a scuba sale at our local diving store Mac’s Sports. Each year they have a few big sales with special promotions and raffles. We went last year and didn’t win anything, but it was still fun. The vendor reps are there to answer gear questions and there are presentations all day on underwater photography, spearfishing, diving techniques and equipment. But of course, there is the raffle drawings through the day. I went early in the morning and bought 6 tickets for $5 and hung out talking with all the shop staff for a while – most of whom we have been diving with, etc. I went home and we did some things and then went out to grab lunch and hit the 11am drawing where they were giving away the dive computer. And here is how it happened:

Syd walked in and bought $5 in tickets. About 5 minutes later they held the drawing. Sure enough, she won – the happy and surprised new owner of an Oceanic Geo dive computer! Wow! That was cool! It’s a very nice computer – I considered it as a potential one last year when it came out, though we ended up going with our Mares Nemo computers. The Oceanic retails for about $430 and is going to make a perfect secondary computer for Syd. They even let her pick what color she wanted, she went with the yellow and black titanium bezel one. It a sleek little thing for sure. She was very happy.

We then went and had lunch and did some things at home. We decided to go back for the big finale drawing at 6pm. We walked in and about about 5 minutes later they held the drawing. The gave away several items, dive lights, etc. and then the big drawing for the Zeagle Stiletto BC came up.

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