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That its much easier for me to Scuba than it is to empty my ears.

I seem to suffer from a non-painful, but still irritating, version of swimmer’s ear. It took me hours after class last night to finally purge them (thanks to a hint that pouring a little rubbing alcohol or hydrogen pyroxide in would help to both envelop the water and protect against more serious infection).

I also hurt like hell after having to swim eight lengths of the pool. I’ve never swam lengths. Ever. Come to think of it, I don’t remember taking anything other than a few swimming lessons when I was really young (I’m thinking four or five-ish). I learned to float from my uncle (Uncle Dale) and I don’t do that well either (that’s not a slight against his teaching ability. I just don’t remember alot about that). Most of my other normal swimming is self taught.

On a brighter note, we were in the deep end and had to take our masks completely off—only breathing from the regulator for a minute. And we did an Out of Air simulation—where the instructor, Sasha (who is awesome, by the way. We’re learning a ton), turned off our air supply. We actually got to see the guage on our dive computers drop and feel what it was to take our last breaths from the tank (you feel it before you’re completely empty), at which point he opens the valve, allowing you to breath again.

I actually breathed as much as I could before giving the Out of Air signal—draining what little air remained in the regulator first stage (the valve and tube leading to the regulator, known formaly as the second stage).

Air surrounds us every moment of every day we’re above ground, but even at ten meters deep, it becomes a precious commodity not to be taken lightly.

I feel strangely at peace in the water, in spite of that fact.

Dear Mr. Dive Instructor,

Please ensure that I get a substantial amount of chlorinated water in my mask so that when I do the Mask Clear, small amounts can travel up my nose burning anything and everything.

I really have to much hair in there anyway and not having to trim it all the time would be nice.

Thanks,

-David

Actually, outside of the chlorine thing, I had a lot of fun at my first scuba lesson. It isn’t as difficult as I thought it would be and the people—instructor and classmates alike—are pretty cool.

Now, I have a whole lot of reading to do before the next lesson.

This post is brought to you via Lynx—A text-based browser favored by ‘Nix geeks.

If it works, it should look just like any other post.

If not, it won’t be seen for long. I’ll delete it.

Damn fast…that’s for sure.

[update]: Outside of a few typographic quirks, Lynx seemed to work rather well. Its defininately a browser I’ll be using more.

For anyone that hasn’t heard, Apple has released an app that allows Windows XP to be used on the new Intel-based Macs.

This is obviously in response to the growing number of people buying these machines with full intent of loading “that” operating system. People have already found ways to do this.

They’ve also been loading other ‘nix systems since before Jaguar. And Microsoft has already released a product that allows you to run Windows on Macs (not in a true way though…you still had to load the Mac platform).

So why is this such a big deal?

Because having a company (especially one like Apple) release a product that “supports” it’s biggest rival (”support” meaning “Don’t call us when you bullocks your machine”) means they’re opening the market. You could buy an Apple machine and still use you “prefered” platform (”prefered” meaning “I don’t”). Or, you could run OS X and Windows independant of each other on the same box (I could see alot of web designers/programmers doing this for ease of browser testing).

It would be like Coke allowing Pepsi in their vending machines.

Not that THAT would ever happen.