Spent a couple days out in Nashville this summer. Checked out the Hard Rock and some local bars with kick ass live country music. yeehaw.

I had a pretty nice ride, and the sun was shining so I decided to zip down to see the Jack Daniels distillery.

The car found my iphone’s bluetooth connection and next thing I knew I was talking hands free through the car’s speakers. It had all my contacts right there on the screen, no need to touch the phone at all.

Mixed signals here. The sign says welcome but the car is leaving… not sure where to put this photo.

On the way to the Penny Powell wedding I met a cow.

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty and raw sexuality according to to Greek poet Hesiod.

They say Aphrodite came from the sea, but I think it’s quite clear she’s from Vermont. Either way, I’d say it was a good omen for the newlyweds.

3G – No

EGDE – No

o – Hell yes.

For the last week or so, iPhones in Vermont have sporadically been showing the o network icon. The o icon indicates you are connected to the GPRS network. GPRS is a data system based on smoke signals and different patterns of tapping noises.

EDGE data xfer rate = 3x GPRS data xfer rate.

Thank you for choosing AT&T, have a nice day.

Here is a scanned copy of the 2008 Big Whitefish Lake Directory & Association Information booklet. The 55th year of this prestigious publication.

If you were to turn to page 22 you will find that for the last 17 YEARS my record  18 1/4″ bass still holds, well is tied for, First place in the Division 1 group!

125cc’s added to the garage this week!

This December, while sailing in the British Virgin Islands, me and my brother Kev did some diving on the ship wreck of the RMS Rhone. 

I think Maranda took this photo, which is one of my favorites – the irregular surface of the water combined with its clarity really made a cool effect. 

We had done six days of snorkeling all around the BVI prior to the dive. Both Kev and I were pretty impressed with how different things look once you are down 50 feet, versus on the surface.  The equipment we rented was pretty nice, and my gauge looked something like this -

The top gauge is your depth, the bottom gauge is your air pressure. My maximum depth on the dive was 55 feet. Before even putting the tanks on, my brother and I confirmed that each of us had 3000 psi. 3000 is the max psi a “normal” rated SCUBA tank can hold. Given that your air supply is limited, breathing control is really important while diving. 

On the surface, you are at one ATM. The standard atmosphere (symbol: atm) is a unit of pressure and is defined as being equal to 101.325 kPa. Another way to think about this is: a 1 inch column of air as tall as the atmosphere, would weigh 14.7 pounds.

Water weighs considerably more than air does, so it can exert much more pressure. It only takes a 1 inch column of sea water 33 feet tall to weigh 14.7 pounds. This means that at a depth of 33 feet deep in the ocean, there is a total pressure of 29.4 pounds per square inch (psi). This would be 2 ATMs of pressure.

Alright, here are your lungs breathing air at 1 ATM, and the rest of your body’s cells absorbing the normal (by volume) 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen that compose “air”.

At 55 feet we are close to 3x the pressure experienced at the surface. The pressure causes the gas particles to be compressed much closes together, so that every normal breath you take contains 3x the normal concentration of nitrogen and oxygen. It looks like this in your lungs:

As you continue to breath this compressed air, the tissues in your body and your blood absorb the concentrated nitrogen. 

When underwater the nitrogen is in your blood as microscopic bubbles that pass harmlessly through your body. The problem is that when you head back to the surface, these microscopic bubbles expand as the pressure decreases. If you have too much nitrogen in your system, these bubbles expand inside you and give you decompression sickness, aka the Bends. The Bends can kill you if the bubbles form in your brain, heart, or thickly in your blood stream.

To avoid the Bends, divers use a dive chart, which takes into account the time you are under and the depth at which you are diving. These two factors really determine how much nitrogen your body is absorbing. Here is a PADI dive chart which indicates the time you can spend at each depth before requiring a decompression stop on your way back to the surface.

You can see by this chart that between 50 and 60 feet we’d have a maximum dive time of somewhere around 1 hour. We were probably only under 45 minutes because my brother was facing two problems which caused him to use his air much faster than me. 

First, Kev did not have enough weight on his weight belt. A diver a buoyant with a tank of compressed air on his back. To compensate, we wear weight belts – in the photo below you can see the red weight belt, and the weight on it. Looping the belt through it self like Kev has done is a small danger. The belts are designed to be released with one hand and slip off which would send you rocketing towards the surface in an emergency. We noticed it and unlooped his and mine before we actually went down.

Because Kev did not have enough weight he was Positively Buoyant. This meant he had a tendency to float upwards all the time, requiring him to counteract this with a small amount of downward swimming. This caused his muscles to be used more, which in turn required heavier breathing. 

Kev also got cold on the dive. For a number of reasons, at different levels of cold, the body increases breathing to generate more heat via shivering. This probably was not as much of a factor as the buoyancy because the tropical waters are never really that cold, but it probably did add to his usage somewhat. He had on a tshirt versus my rashguard.

On my motorcycle tour of western Europe, we stopped in Köln. Köln is located in North Rhine – Westphalia, the most populated state in Germany.

Ben recently pointed me to an article in motorcycle-usa.com that included a stop in Köln.  The major attraction was the Kölner Dom – the cathedral. It is a UNESCO world heritage site, and it is easy to see why. Here I am, standing in front of this monster…

Here is a beautiful photo from further away – that I did not take - 

I did not realize it then, but this is the river Rhine, and we’d meet up with it again in Luxembourg!

We found this masterpiece in a store in Luxemburg and I’ll be damned if we didn’t consider trying to get it on the back of one of the bikes. It really would have looked great back home, right in the living room.

Elevation 724 metres (2,375 ft)

My Ducati 848

An early morning in Shelburne Bay with Greg, Ben, and John.

Only have One out of Three cameras….

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  is being built in a circular tunnel 16.7 miles in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva.

It is unreal.

“Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the biggest machine in the world. To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation you have to focus energy on an awesome scale.”
The Guardian

I’ve begun to put together information on a five week trip to Seychelles to assist in a marine conservation program.

The mission as GVI states it:

GVI, working alongside our partners, is the leading marine data collection organisation in the country. We do the work that our partners do not have the manpower, time or resources to carry out. We collect data on the coral reefs as well as on turtles, whale sharks, dolphins, octopuses and many more species; and much of this data is used by other organisations in the Seychelles. Our volunteers are trained to such a high standard that the information they gather is used to show an accurate picture of the overall health of the Seychelles coral reefs used by the government for management policies.

The five weeks cost $3,370.00 and include food, and a place to stay. Airfare is about $2,000.00.

Obviously the two challenges are the expense and the time off from work.

Most of the five weeks would be spent surveying the marine life around the island. I believe the first four or five days are studying the types of coral and fish in the area so then when you are diving you can ID them properly.

I chartered the boat below for seven days in January.

My brother and his girlfriend Jessica will be in one cabin, myself in another. There is a third cabin which sleeps two – If you are interested in seeing the British Virgin Islands in January of this year, drop me a line.

Here is the last wake board jump in July 2008.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Virtual Server
Event Category: Virtual Server
Event ID: 1066
Date:  7/28/2008
Time:  8:31:49 PM
User:  NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
Computer: MH1
Description:
Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0×00000003.

You can find a solution Here.

Click below to view my sailing photos.

Frustrating.

If you are running Microsoft Virtual PC the problem is the Virtual Machine Additions. Either restart Virtual PC or see this to disable clipboard sharing.

Please show your support HERE

If you haven’t seen it let me know – I’ll let you borrow mine.

This was my lunch break today.

This was the suggested way to acomplish a row select from a couple sources:

Private Sub dataGrid1_MouseUp(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs) Handles DataGridView1.MouseUp

Dim pt = New Point(e.X, e.Y)

Dim hti As DataGrid.HitTestInfo = DataGridView1.HitTest(pt)

If hti.Type = DataGrid.HitTestType.Cell Then

DataGridView1.CurrentCell = New DataGridCell(hti.Row, hti.Column)

DataGridView1.Select(hti.Row)

End If

End Sub

I found a much easier way:

Private Sub DataGridView1_CellMouseUp(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.DataGridViewCellMouseEventArgs) Handles DataGridView1.CellMouseUp

DataGridView1.CurrentCell = DataGridView1.Rows(e.RowIndex).Cells(e.ColumnIndex)

DataGridView1.Rows(e.RowIndex).Selected = True

End Sub

Compared to using a ManagementObjectSearcher this is much faster and will return all installed applications including MS patches.

Dim myServerName As String = “WAADESK1″

Const HKLM = &H80000002 ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Dim reg_hklm, key, subkey As RegistryKey

reg_hklm = RegistryKey.OpenRemoteBaseKey(RegistryHive.LocalMachine, myServerName)

key = reg_hklm.OpenSubKey(“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall”, False)

If Not IsNothing(key) Then

For Each temp In key.GetSubKeyNames()

subkey = key.OpenSubKey(temp, False)

If Not IsNothing(subkey.GetValue(“DisplayName”)) Then

Console.WriteLine(subkey.GetValue(“DisplayName”).ToString)

subkey.Close()

End If

Next

key.Close()

End If

        Dim myServerName As String = "WAADESK1"
        Dim reg_hklm, key, subkey As RegistryKey
        reg_hklm = RegistryKey.OpenRemoteBaseKey(RegistryHive.LocalMachine, myServerName)
        key = reg_hklm.OpenSubKey("Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall", False)
        If Not IsNothing(key) Then
            For Each temp In key.GetSubKeyNames()
                subkey = key.OpenSubKey(temp, False)
                If Not IsNothing(subkey.GetValue("DisplayName")) Then
                    Console.WriteLine(subkey.GetValue("DisplayName").ToString)
                    subkey.Close()
                End If
            Next
            key.Close()
        End If

Out on the wakeboard boat today

While testing SQL Server 2008 RC0, I ran into a problem when connecting to the server via IP address on the default installation.

An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 – Could not open a connection to SQL Server) (.Net SqlClient Data Provider)

I resolved the problem in the SQL Server Configuration Manager under the Server Network Configuration. The TCP/IP Protocol needs to be enabled.

Once you make this change you’ll need to restart the services.

175 miles

The LTD got a little lighter on her toes.

When working on a VBS script today I ran into the following:

My code looks like:

After screwing around with this for an hour it turns out this is a problem related to CDO on Vista and that this code will work fine on 2000, XP, Server 2000/2003, etc.

In Vista if you use:

‘.Item(cdoSMTPAuthenticate) = cdoBasic

‘.Item(cdoSendUserName) = “test”

‘.Item(cdoSendPassword) = “test”

It will work correctly.

Tyson smokes the Cuban cigar I picked up in the BVI while sailing and Scott grills with a fish

]]> http://drewoconnor.wordpress.com/2008/06/01/tyson-joins-the-institution/feed/ 0 ScubaDrew http://drewoconnor.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/coca-cola-600/ http://drewoconnor.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/coca-cola-600/#comments Sun, 25 May 2008 16:31:15 +0000 scubadrew http://drewoconnor.wordpress.com/?p=75 ]]>

Largest man-made river in the world. On this run Ben and Bob swam down. On the other runs, we all swam!

Scott dropped by to lend a hand swapping out the belts on my car.

Click the map below to see the 300+ mile ride home!

Sold the Ducati Monster (In 30 minutes on craigslist) to be replaced with the 848 Superbike.

Pulled over and got this shot with my Canon XTi.

You can view all my Sailing photos here.

ﾠ