Introverts Rule

As someone who could almost certainly be considered an introvert, I was fascinated to find this story in the news. It turns out that introverts have more brain activity in general, and specifically in the frontal lobes. One of my favorite quotes from the story is that "Extroverts gain energy by being out and about," but "being with people takes energy from introverts, and they need to get away to restore that energy."

I find myself in complete agreement... after spending an evening out with a bunch of people I want nothing more than to go home, relax, and hang out by myself. I enjoy the company of others. I have a number of excellent friends without whom I would not be nearly as happy as I am. Nonetheless, there are times where I just want to be alone. For people like my brother this is a completely foreign concept. He's actually energized by meeting a bunch of people he doesn't know. Me... I find it a bit draining. It's nice to know that there are some positives to being a bit on the introverted side.

Sudoku

I appear to have found my latest addiction. For those that don't know I have a certain propensity for finding some cool thing I'm interested in and dedicating altogether too much of my free time to it. On the bright side, I'm not hooked on sex, drugs, and rock and roll. On the down side, Sudoku appears to have some crack-like characteristics. After solving two or three of them I find myself sitting, with bloodshot eyes, at the computer in a dark room. When I check the clock I find that I seem to have misplaced a fairly serious amount of time.

What, you ask, is this Sudoku thing which has so consumed me? It's a simple, and apparently popular, numeric puzzle. For anyone willing to risk becoming addicted I recommend reading Solving Sudoku by Michael Mepham followed by solving some puzzles over at Sudoku Daily. If you don't want to read the long article, here's the synopsis. You have a nine by nine grid made of of nine three by three grids. Each row and column of the nine by nine grid has the numbers one through nine once and only once. Each three by three grid has the numbers one through nine once and only once. A bunch of the numbers are missing. Fill them in.

If you get bored there or if you're more of a spatial relationship person I'd also recommend http://www.gieson.com/Library/projects/games/matter/. I scored a 1017... how will you do?

Diving at Gilboa

I'm back from a fantastic dive trip to Gilboa Quarry. I went down to Ohio with a bunch of people from the dive shop for a weekend of hanging out and diving. When we got there Friday night we hung out in the on-site apartment we had rented. Gilboa has an awesome facility and the apartment is outstanding. The people that went down are an outstanding bunch and we had a great time. Friday night we ended up till about 3:00 in the morning... morning seemed to come very quickly.

We got something of a late start to the diving day but ultimately made it down to the docks. Gilboa has a set of six docks which are connected by a long deck with handy benches for all your equipment. The site is all about diving and it definitely shows. My first dive was with Roger, and instructor who is just starting to work with my LDS and Brandon, the 12 year old son of a couple that was there. The three of us went down to a max depth of 56 feet and were down a total of 49 minutes. The fish were fantastic we swam with dozens of huge carp, rainbow trout, bass, and others I couldn't identify. We swam around the quarry and saw a submerged bus, several boats, tubes, and a Grumman airplane. Roger actually took us through the plane which is a relatively short 20 foot swim through the cargo area. There's a hole cut through the ceiling in the middle just in case you need to bail out (of course no parachute is required as this is not a perfectly good airplane).

A couple days before heading down I had Ryan at Equinox hook me up with 5ft hose for my primary reg and a bungee necklace and short hose for my octo. The cover on my octo was also replaced with a black one so that my buddy won't be tempted to grab for it. With the new setup I donate my primary reg to an out of air diver and keep my octo which is hanging a couple inches below my chin. The whole thing works very well (I know because Roger and I practiced an OOA drill) and allows an OOA diver to breathe off my reg but still have a reasonable amount of distance from me. All my new gear worked perfectly and I was very happy with it. The research paid off as I had a very streamlined, well organized rig which worked very well for me. As I watched a bunch of other people with dangling octos and consoles that were banging into things I was thrilled with my choices.

Over the weekend I fit in three more dives.
Dive 2: 35ft for 35 minutes
Dive 3: 53ft for 43 minutes
Dive 4: 83ft for 20 (almost 21) minutes

Dive four was just Roger and I and was my first experience diving past the 60 foot mark. Although I haven't technically taken the deep dive specialty, Roger actually teaches it so I was comfortable going down there with him. He was watching me and signalling to me frequently to make sure I wasn't narced. We weren't down there very long and the average depth for the dive was actually only 37 feet.

The weekend was a huge success. I met a bunch of new, fun, interesting people that I'm looking forward to hanging out with again. In fact, there's actually a group going to Bonne Terre the three days after Thanksgiving and I'm seriously considering going with them. I'll also be heading down to Florida to visit Dave and Susan very soon. It looks like I'll be heading down around either December 17th or January 7th. It'll be great to see them again and to try ocean diving for the first time!

Gilboa

I spoke with Ryan at the dive shop tonight and decided to join a group of people heading down to Gilboa Quarry in Ohio for a weekend of diving. Some of the people I took the open water class with are doing their drysuit certification during the trip but I opted to postpone the drysuit experiment. Since I'm using all my new equipment for the first time I'm a bit concerned about a high level of task loading if I were to toss in a drysuit. Of course that means I'll be diving a wetsuit in November buy hey, everyone already knew I was nuts.

I'm excited... these will be my first dives since certification and it'll give me a chance to try out my new gear before I head down to Florida to visit Dave and Susan. Gilboa is supposed to be a fantastic dive site and should have far better visibility than the 10 feet we had in Lake 16. As the PADI book says, Go Dive!

The End of the World

Some time ago I was introduced to a short Flash cartoon titled "The End of the World". Everyone in the office has seen it and we find ourselves quoting it frequently. Since I wish to continue quoting the cartoon it is in my best interest to disseminate the location of this cartoon to as many people as possible. Thus, when I say "hokay, so..." people will know that I'm quoting the cartoon and that I haven't just lost my mind. *Note: This is not to say that I haven't lost my mind, merely that this is not proof of such a loss.

On a related note I find it mildy disturbing that if you type in the end of the world in Google the first four hits are all for this flash cartoon. Don't get me wrong, it's cool... just a bit disturbing.

In case you didn't notice that you could click the link above I'll give you one more chance to go watch the cartoon. All you need to do is click here.

Scuba Bonanza

At long last I have taken possession of the last of my scuba gear. Of course when I say "the last" of my scuba gear I really mean "the last of the scuba gear that I need right now in order to swim and breathe under water without presenting an unnecessary danger to myself or others." In actuality I'm quite certain that there will be many more fun scuba things that I'll want to buy. Fortunately for my wallet, they can all wait for a time and I can focus on actually diving.

Shown here is my new Dive Rite Transpac BCD with Trek wing. On the floor in front of the BCD you'll see my regulator, octo, and SPG. Note the nice big clip on the SPG which will allow me to clip it off with minimal loose hose floating about. The pockets on the sides of the BCD are the TransWeight 16 pockets. As their name might suggest, they hold up to 16 pounds of weight (lead weight, there's not nearly enough room to pack in 16 pounds of feathers in there). The two weights sitting on the floor to the right side of the pic are trim weights which mount to the back of the BCD. They reduce the amount of lead I'll need in the weight pockets and should make it easier to maintain good trim.

Our next picture is a rear view of the BCD which gives you a good look at the Trek wing. The wing provides 40 lbs. of lift and can handle single or double tanks. Our final pic is of my Suunto Vytec computer. The computer came in a rather large wrist mount which I replaced with a very nice, very small mount from DeepSeaSupply. The new mount comes with great mounting holes which have been threaded with two pieces of 1/8th inch shock cord. The shock cord is compression compensating (fancy way of saying it's elastic which is good when your wetsuit compresses under the weight of several atmospheres of water). I used two pieces so that if one should somehow break my computer won't end up in Davey Jones' Locker.

I also received my Open Water certification card. On the bright side the card is very nice looking, it has a picture of a cool dolphin on the front, and it has a not entirely scary picture of me on the back. On the down side my name is spelled incorrectly. I called PADI earlier today and they said they'd correct the info and send a new card directly to my house. I was a bit surprised since I figured they'd make me go through quite a bit more red tape. I'm tentatively impressed with their willingness to rectify the problem. I'll be very impressed when the card actually shows up. In the interim I'm fairly certain that all but the most intransigent dive operators will let me use my existing card.

All in all, I'm very excited. My stuff is here, I'm ready to dive, and I wish it wasn't November. Fortunately I'm planning a trip to Fort Lauderdale to visit my good friends. It should be great fun!

How Nerdy

Brian, a good friend of mine, recently sent me a link to a test titled How Nerdy Are You. Now, I'm not normally the type to fill out random surveys online, but I figured I'd give it a try. For those that don't know me I could, if one were so inclined, be called a nerd or a geek (not the kind that bites the heads off live chickens mind you). I'm actually somewhat proud of my geek status as it gives me mad street cred with the other computer programmers and software developers. In fact, I actually had considered myself a fairly big geek until I met Brian.

Brian makes me look like a technology neophyte. Of the people I know personally, Brian is by far the geekiest of the bunch. He is the only person I know that can spend 45 minutes on a monologue describing the relative merits of different object relational mapping schemes without pausing for breath. Until he moved out of state, Brian and I would spend many a morning (and quite a few lunches at BW3) chatting about anything and everything that would come to mind. In true nerd fashion we implemented a stack in our day to day conversations to help us avoid losing topics. If you don't know what a stack is you may not be a geek (or at least not a computer geek). OK, if you're really interested you can find out what a stack is here.

Back to the survey... you do remember the survey don't you? I'd hate to lose you with this discussion of stacks and object relational mapping. I took the survey and found myself in the 80th percentile. Twenty percent of the population is, apparently, more nerdy than I am. Of course my low score may be based on my poor speed of light answer. I won't spoil it for you though... take the test. Just remember that multiple answers may be correct, some more so than others. Take the test and enjoy! Post a comment and let me know how you did...