This gallery contains 18 photos.
Tuesday morning we drove to the north to a site called “Oil Slick Leap”. The site is set on a cliff of about 8 feet, and you can either climb down a ladder, or jump off the cliff into the … Continue reading
I did the last couple of dives of the trip today. I fly out tomorrow at 3; this means I had to be out of the water by 3 today.
I ended up doing two dives today. When we got up, it was raining and the sea looked kind of rough, but by the time we were done with breakfast, the waves had calmed somewhat. We had decided to do Aquarius again, mainly because of the easy entry. Nice and sandy, we could just walk in and out. Or we could just walk out if we came up in the right place, but we ended up a little off course. Continue reading
It was really too early for a boat dive at 8:10 this morning, especially after last night. Everyone was kind of draggy, and in fact, Ralph skipped it. Paul was hoping to do Rappel this morning, but when we got there, there was clearly too much surge there for the boat to be safe, so we headed southward to the next mooring spot, “Bloodlet”. It gained its name when Captain Don, who surveyed and named most of the sites, cut himself up getting out of the water after his boat sank. Continue reading
A very full day today.
The first dive of the day was a shore dive in the morning to a site called “Weber’s Joy”, or “Witch’s Hut” (a lot of the sites have two names). It’s a beach full of dead coral sloping down to a sandy bottom, which slopes down to the reef, right by the main road to the north. We had a little trepidation about getting in, especially for one of the divers who was recovering from a broken leg, but we decided to go in. Continue reading
I’m sitting here on the patio of our unit, looking at the sun set over the sea. It’s been a long day, and I’m a good kind of tired.
The day started at 5:10 this morning, when the alarm went off for our dawn dive. Paul had proposed it last night, and Joe, Chris, Brie and I had taken him up on it. Paul himself was at the dock, but skipped the dive, having had a tiring night the night before with his spaghetti supper. Continue reading
After the boat dives this morning, Paul took care of the free flowing in my regulator, and then Ralph, Joe, and I headed out for a leisurely dive on the house reef. It was a really nice dive. I was such a relief not to have the regulator constantly leaking air, and I felt a little more comfortable heading deeper along the drop-off on the reef. This time, we headed to the north, along the edge of the reef, until we reached the sunken boat at the next resort. It was easier taking pictures along the wall than it was on the flatter reefs we’d been doing. Continue reading
Today was our first actual day of diving. After breakfast, we headed down to the dive shop to pick up our weights, and get in the water. The resort requires guests to do their first dive on the house reef, in order to allow people a chance to get their weighting (and hence their buoyancy) correct before heading out other dive sites.
I vacillated for an extra day, but in the end, decided to get rid of most of the beard. In some ways, I liked having a long beard, but what decided me was that my beard is kind of wispy, and looked ragged. If it were fuller, I probably would have kept the full length. Continue reading
Happy 2016! For me, 2015 was kind of a middling year, aside from the weather at the beginning of it. Not too bad, not spectacularly great. One of my best memories of the year is the trip out to Billingsgate Island I did last July. It was part of the reason I bought the kayak, and the trip was memorable. It stayed with me for a few weeks – I did a little research into the history of the island, and saw two different maps, one from 1897 when it was goodly sized, and one from 1940, when just a sliver of land remained above water. Land is not supposed to be mortal.
The other big project of the year was the year beard. I decided to let it grow the entire year. Here’s how it ended up: wispy, but kind of impressive
The Year Beard
I still have it as of the moment.
I went in to see First Night last night, and came away under impressed. There was a lot less going on this year. The ice sculptures were more spread out — there were supposed to be a bunch on the waterfront, but I only found a few of them. Faneuil Hall Marketplace was very pretty — I’ll have to remember to visit before Christmas next year, and the early fireworks show was great. I stayed in town long enough to see the ice sculptures in Copley Square and the Pops and Percussion performance at Old South Church and headed home.
Ice Sculpture at Copley
I’ve been aware since the day I bought this Mac that it was going to be space constrained. I have a lot of pictures that I like to keep locally, and so I’ve always kept an eye on the amount of free space it had. Lately, I’ve had around 30 GB or so free, so it was a shock when I suddenly got an alert in the middle of editing a scan that I only had a GB or so remaining.
With OS X, this is an emergency, since it uses disk space (or rather, SSD space) to facilitate virtual memory. My first thought was that the Photoshop scratch file had gotten out of hand, so I quit Photoshop. Not much improvement. Then I figured maybe the OS X swap file — the file the operating system uses for virtual memory—had gotten too big, so I restarted.
Still not much improvement. The Finder was reporting only about 7 GB free, which is still unusable. So I fired up Daisy Disk, to be able to visualize where my free space had gone. My pictures folder was big, but that was not new. Then I spotted the culprit: a 47 GB log file that Mail had created.
My first impulse was to open the file, and see what was in it, and promptly locked up the machine hard. It was too big to open, and I couldn’t do anything. Reluctantly then, I powered it down, and restarted. Once I restarted, I was able to delete the offending file, after quitting Mail, which had auto started, and the machine was under control again.
The next job was to figure out why the file had been created in the first place. I’d deleted the file without being able to see what was in there, so I don’t know the proximate cause. I suspect some temporary difficulty with my web host. But the underlying cause was that at some point, I’d used Mail’s Connection Doctor (Window > Connection Doctor) and enabled logging. There were a number of logs saved in the /Users/_username_/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs folder. I turned off the logging option in the Connection Doctor window.
I still don’t know what caused it to dump so much data so fast — I think it was over the course of the day, since I remember noting free space in the morning, but at least, it shouldn’t fill up again. I also think I’ve solved the mystery of how I managed to gain back lots of free space when I moved to this machine; there were probably log files that weren’t copied over by the Migration Assistant.
Since this Mac uses an SSD, I’m a little concerned that there may be long term effects from having filled it up to capacity. SSDs prefer to write to empty space, and don’t alway mark freed space as empty. But for now, I’m back in business.