Kevin's Musings

We went to see the new Spike Lee movie Inside Man. This is a really good film, I strongly recommend it. Good acting and writing. Nice twists and turns. Good stuff.

We spent the day on Saturday at the Beneath the Sea scuba expo. This was a good show. I got some information about local diving, met some of the diving icons, got fitted for a DUI drysuit. I’m glad we went, fun show.

According to the Best Buy web site, the Xbox360 is available at one of the Manhattan Best Buy locations. Although the site has claimed this for a few days and although I was a touch skeptical, I decided to check it out this evening. I entered the store and steered toward the video game department. The clerk there answered that they didn’t have any. After I mentioned the website said otherwise, he admitted they DID have a few but weren’t allowed to sell them, but, he expected to have a LOT of them for sale on April 2nd. Apparently, Best Buy is again hording 360’s an April 2nd sales event. We’ll see.

We had a mostly lazy weekend. We watched some good movies The Price Winner of Defiance Ohio, Lord of War, and Domino (all really worth watching). We had dinner at an Irish pub to celebrate St. Patrick’s day. We walked around the Jersey Gardens Outlet Mall (which was CRAZY crowded, it was worse than right before Christmas). We got caught up on the new season of The Sopranos (very interesting so far, not the direction I thought they were going to take the show for its last season). Finally, we watched V for Vendetta. We really enjoyed V for Vendetta. Good story, good casting, though provoking. Very 1984-esque with definate Wachowski touches.

Here are the pics I took at Rachel and Jeremy’s wedding.

Here are the pictures I took diving the Ancient Mainer in Florida.

I found myself in the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida area and decided to try to do some diving — I had planned it out and brought most of my dive gear. For a charter company, I chose South Florida Diving Headquarters, mostly just a flip of the coin decision. They were friendly and helpful on the phone and have a decent web site (you can book charters right from the web site).

The weather wasn’t terribly cooperative. I had wanted to do one day at a relatively shallow site and one day at a deeper site. The shallower site would have accommodated divers, snorkelers, as well as non-divers, but, the wind made the water too choppy to go to this location. So, we scrapped the trip on Friday and just took the trip Saturday afternoon to a deeper location. Originally, several people were going to go with me just to ride along, but, the other folks were warned against the trip as the waves were in the 4-6 foot range. On the boat were something like 15 or 20 divers (quite a few people, but, it didn’t feel overly cramped) — a pretty even mix of new divers (certified the same morning) and experienced divers.

The waves were pretty strong which made a lot of folks (myself included) feel pretty queasy. The dive (pictures to follow in another entry) was at a wreck named the Ancient Mariner. The ship is 165 feet long sitting at 50 and 70 feet. There was no current to speak of and the visibility was quite good. A really nice dive. This was especially fun for me as it was my first wreck dive and because the wreck is so open, penetration is quite feasible. I got in about a 35 minute dive. While doing my safety stop, the waves again became quite perceptible which started me feeling queasy again.
I would say the trip was a lot of fun, but, I would have preferred calmer waters. Maybe next time.

We travailed JetBlue for the first time on our trip between Newark, NJ and Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. We have classically enjoyed Southwest because of their superior service, but, JetBlue was relatively efficient and friendly, the seats were very comfortable with plenty of leg-room, and, as a big bonus, they offer about 35 or 40 channels of DirectTV for free in the headrest of each chair. Having the television is really nice… it starts before takeoff and continues almost to the point where you can get off the plane. My only complaints where (1) anytime they wanted to talk to you (mostly meaningless drivel) they sound cuts out (2) the remote is to simplistic (3) there is no guide and (4) during the holding pattern, queuing to land, there were frequent signal cutouts.

I can definitely image we will fly JetBlue again.

I am sure somebody has thought of this before and it has probably actually been done, but, I was sitting in the Ft. Lauderdale airport today and looking at the available wireless networks (they offer free although very unreliable 802.11b Internet access) and along with the usual airport networks (named Ft. Lauderdale something-or-other) there was one just labeled “Free Wireless Internet” or something like that.

Looking at the list, it occurred to me that it would probably be pretty easy to setup your own customized wireless router, repeating the traffic from the legitimate router, but, collecting all of the data from the users: capturing passwords, business information, etc. I would think doing this would be quite easy. Thoughts?

Yeah, a little off topic, but, I thought I would include a link to my sister-in-law’s website MT Pockets Ranch. They provide horse training, lessons, sales, etc. If you are into horses and live in the far northwest, this might be of interest to you.