white river dive

saturday me and S dived the White River site in Akamas, past Paphos. It was an easy dive, but we had a few problems with the weighting (that means that we got much less weights than needed, and the dive guide had to get back to the car for some more weights).

It was the first time I put a large rock in my BCD pocket to be able to stay down. Other than that, it was a smooth ride (well ... dive).

Also, half way through the dive (as my tank was half empty) I had to get some extra-weights (again) because I was starting to float.

Enough with the boring stuff, here are some pictures:

white river dive-site, before water entrance, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

me and S, fully geared, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

underwater sky, originally uploaded by utnapistim. This was taken aproximately 10 minutes into the dive (~6m depth); The surface was very very calm and the clouds are perfectly visible :D

jellyfish in the sky, originally uploaded by utnapistim. This was a bit of an experiment on my part: I went under it and shot it against the sky; it turned out looking good

Dive technical data:
time in:14:39
time out: 15:33
(dive time: 54 minutes)
water temperature: 20.4 deg. Celsius
max depth: 12.8m

fire coral

fire coral, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

blue fishes

blue, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

corals

corals, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

yet some more corals

yet some more corals, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

corals

corals, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

gold fish

gold fish, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

things are moving again

I spoke to P today; tomorrow afternoon I'm starting the emergency first response course.

Also, saturday me and S. will be going to Paphos for a dive. I haven't called the guys there yet, so it's still 'in planning phase' so to speak.

wish me luck with the course :)

I'm going back to eating olives with my chopsticks.
se'ya!

the tyranny of email

quote taken from the main page of W-UH.com (emphasis is mine):

As an example, I received an email from a company called BSIL, and this was on their home page:

   'We are a global, end-to-end IT solutions provider with a global delivery footprint. With over 20 years of experience, we understand our customers’ needs better and provide a portfolio of services, using robust processes, which enable them to leverage their IT investments.'

   Do you have any idea what these people do? Nor do I. (Apparently they 'provide solutions' :)

this website is preety insightfull.

i'm cold; maybe it's just too much coffee

ever get that feeling ...

it's monday morning ... (i know, i know! just thinking about it puts a bad spin on your mood).

... but!

do you ever get that feeling that everything is right in the world? of ... perfection?

well ... I knew you didn't, but i do.

i mean ... yeah, it's monday morning ... but it's still perfect; and you might still want to be in bed (and that's ok ... it's perfect too) ...


but i don't want to be in bed and the fact that i don't want to is just fine.


i know i'm not making that much sense right now (infact, when do i ever?!) but ... things are just the way they should be; (if you don't see that, take my word for it)


you're where you chose to be (no, that might not be where you wanted to be, but you're definitely where you chose to be); and the fact that you might want to change things does not dimnish the perfection - it never did!



so, sit down in silence for a few moments (even if there are sounds around, make enough silence within that you can hear your breath for some time), then look at the world and tell me:

do you ever get that feeling that everything's right as it should be?
that everything is perfect?


... just wonderings of a monday morning ...
utnapistim

in the zone

i am in the zone;

i posted something online this morning (on freindsofcwg), then i offered a massage to a friend after lunch; at times i switched to rei-ki.

it was a fun way to move the energy around (and i'll have to play with it some more).


at the moment i'm trying to make a project work and have many many many things to get done till the evening.

so it's back to work :)

yeah, and I set this as my background just because it reminds me of the dives in sharm more than the actual uw. pictures.

waiting, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

my business plan

so, this is how it's going to work:

first, you send me your phone number;

then, you look at this for like ... 15 minutes or so;

then i call you and tell you the account number where you will send all your money.

it really works

yet another fish

yet another fish, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

random impressions

it seems as of late i've taken to only post on mondays ...
well ... almost.

i spent yet another weekend at home, closed in my room with lots of sleeping and reading; for whatever reason i slept very sporradically friday and saturday night, and was tired for the whole weekend.

what else?

friday, around 5 PM the winter arrived in limassol: we had a major storm with ice falling; when it started I was in the bathroom, with a window opened and it was preety exciting (darkness outside, charged air and thunder and lightning everywhere).

i bought a small blue booklet about zen; i hoped it will help me understand what exactly zen IS.

no such luck: i still have no idea what zen is, but apparently that's ok - when you find out, you are lost;

then, i started practicing the art of being utnapistim in the spirit of zen (in layman terms, i cleaned my room a bit).

random joke

It's been said that once the Dalai Lama went to a New York hot dog stand and told the guy:

Make me one with everything

rAndom updAte

it's monday evening and i'm waiting to go home.

methinks it's nothing unusual: i did it last monday also.

so, let's see:
friday evening we went bowling with the whole team; the bowling games were ok, the pizza and garlic bread we had there were more than ok, and we had reason to leave office early on firday afternoon (and that was perfect).

two hours or so later (around 2000), we (that is me, M, I and VP) gathered in Woodsman's Pub and played bridge;

around 2330, (after two beers) i went brain-dead and we had to stop ( sory guys :) ). it was a fine evening, and not as adventurous as last time.


saturday i did some shopping (so my fridge is full again), and i made a vegetable soup (which was quite good if i do say so myself).

it took me all of three hours to eat it all (yeah, i'm a monster!).

anyway, saturday evening i went to Woodsman again for S's birthday party (happy birthday S!), and I tasted Strongbow beer (or is it cider?) for the first time.

that was cool.


and sunday ... well ... i watched a movie on B's computer on sunday. it's called mindhunters and while interesting, it was one of those everybody-dies-before-the-last-two-minutes movies.

it was interesting in a way (and gruesome, and thrilling and ... hell, i don't know!); i wouldn't watch it again though (too violent for me).


so, that was that, this is now,
ba-da-bim
ba-da-bam
ba-da-boom!

this was utnapistim on the net,
signing off...

white coral

white coral, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

blue fishes

blue fishes, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

I found this while browsing my pictures from Sharm.

K dragging P

K dragging P, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

K dragging P through the water.

in technical terms, it's called a DPV: Diver Propulsion System (and it usually involves a propeller with batteries :))

sitting down

sitting down, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

K sitting in the sunlight (taken on our first dive on saturday)

reason for diving

reason for diving, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

just so you know: this is what I dive for :D

wreck

wreck, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

same wreck, different view

some creature

some creature, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

anyone knows what this ... thing is called?

it was doing a small left-right dance with the uw current ... strange :)

at work

IMG_8652, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

this is on a wreck found just outside our working-place

who would have thought?

setting up

IMG_8591, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

picture taken on saturday: P setting up the his equipment (and me behind the camera :) )

clouds in the evening

clouds, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

am i lazy or not interested?

this post is about diving



i haven't blogged in a while ...

it seems at some point i either lost interest or i lost interest ...
or i lost interest ...

or something like that :)


so!


after comming from egypt and resting for a whole weekend, i did something new:

i went diving :D
(you weren't expecting that, were you?!)


that is, i went diving on my own, along with P and K (friends at the company). we rented the equipment and did four dives:

two on saturday and two on sunday :D

so, what can i say?

it's quite different; i mean, with an operator, you get the 'ok, we're doing this dive, this is the place/depth/yada-yada-yada'.

here, we had to decide where we'd go, max depths, bottom times, what to do for currents and all the jazz.



and.it.was.FUN.
it rocks!

on the second dive on saturday we missed our objective completely (not cool :D);
and on sunday we reached our objective (a very nice ship-wreck), by keeping compass direction for about 200 metres in poor visibility;
we changed a dive plan underwater due to the presence of jellyfish at water entrance, and we ended up doing an L-shape following compass W for 30bar, then S for 20 bar then back, and exitted around the same point;

so, i god to play a lot with a compass (i've got to get me one of those! :D)

i hope i get to do it again


smilingly,
utnapistim

LD

it happened around a week ago;

and i was sleeping (well ... duh!).

what am I talking about?
LD of course.

i was in sharm ... and all i remember now is that i decided that if i was dreaming, i might as well dream of flying.

it was great. really really cool!


and i found out that it's not so much a matter of what you do before going to bed (as i seemed to grasp from all those technique things i read about), but how you sleep.

it's in how deep you sleep and getting an impulse of looking at what you're up to ... while sleeping.


it looks like a good start ... to nothing in particular.

see you arround people :)

a little lesson on trip planning

ok, so we had the tickets; and the luggages; and good will; and we were in the airport;

you'd say that would be enough;

but it was a bumpy ride to there:

first, we were told that getting here is a definite "maybe" (so to speak). we arrived at the airport and were told off, because we had israel visas on the passport; we had to wait for some egyptian man to come (45 minutes later) and approve our visas so we could get on the plane.

fourty five minutes, a caramel chreme and two sandwitches later, we got our boarding approved and were on the way to the plane.
that's one, solved.

second, we were late. we had to switch planes in cairo, which turned to be a new experience:
our plane was late ten minutes;
then we had to choose between two queues to get into cairo with a visa and a queue to an empty desk for transits. since we were in a hurry, we chose one queue (at least something was happening there), and got sent to the transfer (still empty) desk. then we waited for someone to get there, then after he did, he sent us to get visas and go by one of the queues back.
we finally passed the visa checking, went to get our luggage (the only one left on the band) and, with 15 minutes 'till the second plane was due to leave started searching for the new terminal.

turns out the new terminal was like 300 metres down the street. running with 20kgs in scuba gear and two backpacks down the street is no fun.

we finally got past the security checks and here we were, waiting for the bus to pick us up. if we only knew, we'd have gone at a pace.

well ... after that it was smooth sailing (errr ... plane riding ... flying! whatever it was).

so kids, when doing transfers between two planes, make sure you have at least one hour between them; if you're flying through cairo, that means two or three hours between flights.

this concludes our lesson for today!
(no homework assigned)

IMG_8252, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

blue coral

blue coral, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_8329, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

balloon fish

balloon fish, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

a school of tuna

a school of tuna, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

coral wall

coral wall, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

giant clam

giant clam, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

school of yellow fish

school of yellow fish, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_8116, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_8082, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

balloon fish

balloon fish, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_8135, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_7720, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_7596, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_7571, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

I found nemo

IMG_7684, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

(clown-fish by some anemones)

blue coral

IMG_7703, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

blue-spotted manta ray

blue-spotted manta ray, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_7828, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_7827, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_7808, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

IMG_7783, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

hoooooneeeeey, i'm hooooomeeeee!

don't expect any rocket science in this post because it's past ten in the evening, i've eaten just sporadically, and i switched two planes today. in short, i'm a mess:

tired, dizzy, dehydrated a bit (methinks) and overall exhausted.

but happy

my week-long trip to sharm el sheikh is finished; done; over with.

this means that sometimes tomorrow (now i don't feel up to it) i'll start showing off with fish pictures, coral pictures and reefs pictures; and yeah, maybe some surface pictures also.

untill then,
sayonara!

age of darkness

hey, look at this!

i've gotten smarter!

no, really!

really!

ok, stop laughing!



actually no, i haven't; i read today some posts i had made a few months ago (june or july posts methinks) and was surprised at how ... spirited they were.

i mean ... i was funny (if i do say so myself :)). it's a form of inspiration that i somehow lost.

i'm trying to explain here and i just remembered something i read in Coelho's the alchemist: first, the signs show you the trasure; then, they keep showing it to you more and more often; then, when they see you ignore them at some point they will show you the trasure is lost forever, then they will stop showing themselves to you since you ignored them.

the signs show me it's time to move on.
that ... change feeling ... i see it calling me; and find myself in the position of saying yes or no.

my posts from a while ago were inspired ... and i find it harder and harder to find that inspiration, simply because there's something missing here. i think i know where that something is, but leaving the familiar for the new is somewhat scarry.


but there's still some time to decide; some time to abandon the confort zone.

happy hunting,
utnapistim

something about water

there's something about water ...
something about rain ... and shower and sea and moist air;

i don't know how to put it exactly ...

i went for a dive yesterday morning ... and it was better than before, for a simple reason:
it was close to raining: cloudy sky, winds and all that.

this kind of weather, this close-to-rain atmosphere is charged; electric

then it was raining and i kept my window open;

i also prolonged washing the scuba gear ... just to keep my hands in the water;

and then i felt like going outside, in the rain again;

there's just something about rain ...

something about water ...

another truck

another truck, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

Jesus loves you

Jesus loves you, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

this is written at 35m depth on the exterior of the Zen, near one of the propellers

exit from the Zenobia

exit from the Zenobia, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

do the zen

tomorrow i'll be doing the zen again.

it will be my third and fourth dive with my new regulator.

also, i've attached my dive knife to it.

here's a useless picture of that:

IMG_7404, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

see? it's useless!

some call it illusion

there is a "place" of clearness.

... a place where things are clear, well-defined, obvious and, for lack of a better word, weightless ...


i am still looking for the key of this place.


it's there, in my own mind; i know it's there; i get to it accidentally from time to time;

i usually get there when i'm willing to shed all thought; all ideas and all striving to reach ... well ... anything;


it's ironic: the strive for this clear state of being pushes it away from you;

it keeps your mind clouded.

that's why, it is a place that cannot be reached; trying to, in any way, keeps you away.

any kind of effort to reach it keeps you away;
any ... attempt;
any action;


then how does one reach it? one doesn't; i don't know.

a man went to the buddha one day and asked him what to do to attain moksha - to attain liberation;
the buddha said: there is nothing to do; just don't think of the monkeys.

and the man left.

two days later, as the buddha was preparing to leave, the man came running back with a haunted look in his eyes and he told the buddha: i no longer care for liberation. i don't want it; you can have it all for yourself!

just help me get rid of all these stupid monkeys!

to get there you have to let go of all effort ... without making any effort to let go of all effort; in short, it's the easiest path to madnes;

doest this make it the most difficult thing to do?
the most easy?


some call existence in this ... elusive place - liberation; some call it a state without friction; samaddhi; buddha nature; european mystics have called it carpe diem - live in the moment; i call it utmost relaxation; ultimate peace.

the opposite of this state, they call clouded mind (altough clouded is not what could be said since it's the normal state of mind);

different spiritual systems call it different things;

some call it maya and some call it illusion

this is where we are.
utnapistim

octopus

IMG_5685, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

i don't remember posting this before; it's a picture i took a few months back while visiting malta

anticlimatic

i had a tensioned day today.

... had to fix my american express account problem;
... and took my bike to the workshop - the rear-wheel was still not working well;
... and had to decide on holiday accomodations;
... and see about an amazon.com order (there wasn't anything hard about that actually);

then i spoke to N ( hello N. :) ) and she brought up something that's been eating me for some time;

half an hour after speaking to her i (sort-of) got past being upset, then someone gave me a casual remark and my whole morale came crashing down for good.

strange how this happens on some days ...


as i was going home i was doing a real effort to keep my morale up;

and then i got a flat tire, so i got to walk home; looking back, it's the best thing that happened all day (and no, i wouldn't have said that as it happened :)).

you know, whenever you do a mechanical, phisical and repetitive activity (like - say - drag your MTB through half limassol) you can get some serious thinking done.

and i thought about what's been eating me ... really thought about it.

so, you know that feeling you get when you suddenly get free? that weight-lifting-off-your-chest thing? your arms and stomach and chest relax suddenly; actually, i think your whole body does; and then, you feel light; and feel that nothing is impossible, and everything is allright;

it's like a dose of ... reality? freshness?;

it's happiness in some way, i guess.

i got that today;

as i arrived home i was smiling for no reason ... and i felt so very releaved; i still am actually, and hope the feeling is here to last.


looking back it was the best day in a long time.


so long,
utnapistim

feeling a change

i feel a change comming;

it's nothing distinct, just ... half a feeling, so to speak;

it's the same feeling i had a few months before coming to cyprus ... before i knew i would travel ... and before everything changed.

it's an indistinct form of something waiting ... within ... or maybe waiting into the future.

it's an indistinct feeling and i'm not sure i'm not making it up.

actually i probably am :)

Edit, three years later: The change is complete. My life turned over (the feeling wasn't made up after all).

may your days bring you fortune and your nights bring you peace,
utnapistim

stay-at-home diver

this weekend i'm a stay-at-home diver.

this means the only place i'm going to dive in is the shower :(


maybe it was time for a break;

but it doesn't really matter: tomorrow evening i'll go for a party and sunday ... i'll be probably recovering from the party :D

and it looks like some more time to write code :D



and speaking of code: wednesday i went to a conference for cyprus .net users group. It was a preview of a framework to be integrated into the next version of .NET, and prety interesting.

i might get more involved with .NET: i passed from writing my little diver log in java to writing it in .NET and i've made more progress in three days in .NET than two weeks in java (damn java layers!)

MoonLightShadow - A baby figuring her way out

MoonLightShadow - A baby figuring her way out: "A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt about a tragedy.

He said, 'I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.'

The grandson asked him, 'Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?'

The grandfather answered, 'The one I feed.'"

running in disguise

i can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people i've met through my life that were not running from the truth; any truth!

besides them (they were three, maybe for), everybody does it.

i do it, you do it, we all do it.

that's fine and i have no problem with that per se.


what i have a problem with is putting down others to run from your truth; dismissing somebody else because you're not able to deal with what he/she is showing you.

and i've heard them all, usually dirrected at me.

i think it started with you're a kid, you don't know what you're talking about coming from my grandfather; i never asked him to explain it to me; just somewhere ... my sense of fairness got bothered by it and i kept silent;

there was also the you're a kid, you don't have problems! every time i was upset or had a problem;

then there was you'll understand when you come to have my experience (experiences are unique and by that not comparable; why not talking when you have my experience?), and we'll talk again after twenty years - then you'll see things my way (hey, guess what: i don't!)

then there was the you don't know what you're talking about thing; you can practically dismiss any argument or reasoning with these words alone!

and two favorites of one of my teachers in university: you don't know it, but <insert obvoius truism here> and when you'll reach my experience you'll see that <some other obvious truism here>.


but my all time favorite is you're so naive!; i don't mean it as a way of arguing; not you're naive if you think that bla bla bla; i mean just telling someone that he's naive and leaving it at that.
i mean ... congratulations! you brought something constructive to the discussion and gave some usefull information!


sheesh!


it's not about disagreeing with someone; i'm not talking (well ... writing) about that;

it's about putting someone down; when he or she has an obvious illusion one can simply point it out; tha't fine; it's constructive!


but when you find yourself in the position of having no remaining arguments?

Come on!

calling the other the naive one (or the deluded one or saying he lacks the experience or ... take your pick) ... that's actually not saying anything about the other;

if anything it's saying something about you; it's a form of censorship: it just points out to the world that your claim to truth is so weak that it supports no public scrutiny.


i mean ... if you feel what another is saying or doing is naive, then you're not going to 'enlighten' anyone by you don't know what' you're saying; if you tell yourself you're helping anyone by calling somebody naive to his face just to silence him then you're lying to yourself through your teeth;

you're doing nothing else but attacking the person when you cannot attack his/her ideas;

it's
bad
form;

and if it shows anything, it's about your character, not another's ideas, thoughts or values;



so, why did i write this?

as our managers say to any question asked during a presentation:
this is a good question;

one reason is that i have a habbit of going through my older posts from time to time and i wanted to remember this ...

i also wanted to rant a bit about it, since somebody told me in a conversation a few days ago that i'm so naive!; i went over it in my head and coudn't pinpoint what was bothering me about it.

now i know and i didn't want to forget my reasoning.

anyway, it's late, i got it out of my system, and i have better things to do at this point then ranting on the friggin' internet ...


i'm going to sleep

random spirituality

the blindest of men doesn't even see how blind he is.

the simplest form of trance

"i thought it wasn't real!"
"it's real to the mind."

from Matrix, the movie

Hypnosis (as we know it) is a term derived from the greek hypnos which means (or meant at some point) simply sleep.

the term was coined some years ago (one and a half centuries, give or take a few) by some physician who was following the steps defined by a mr Mesmer.

but who cares about that?

i started thinking about this post while coming back from today's diving, as i noticed the following:
after a day of diving i find myself both relaxed and tired; this means that usually sometimes on the way back i fall asleep; today though, i didn't want to do it.

since i was still tired, i closed my eyes and started imagining; i don't remember at the moment what it was i was imagining ( and no, it wasn't sex you single-minded dolt :) ), but i do know i lost track of the real world;

as i came back some twenty minutes later i realized that i hadn't been asleep and i hadn't been really awake either; the music in the car had kept on running and i had kept on hearing it all along; i was conscious during that time, but not really awake ...

... and that is the simplest form of trance; call it self-hypnosis if you like.

it's not the first time i went through it either: i've done it before just to avoid getting bored ...

once in highschool i did this during a break for a few minutes and remembered a park i used to go in as a kid; when i 'came back' i could still smell the leaves from that park and could almost hear them;

this is a natural form of trance; there are LD techniques that use the same setup, asking one to wake up after six hours of sleep:

this way the body is still tired (since it needs eight hours of sleep) but the mind can remain awake (since the mind only requires six hours of rest).

this leads to the same situation: mind awake, body tired.

maybe i should play with this some more, see where it leads, should it lead to anything (though i'm not too keen of waking up after six hours of sleep just to play with my mind :( ).

if i get anywhere i probably won't be able to resist blogging about it.

see you around people!

buoy anchor

IMG_7268, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

rope anchoring a buoy to the zenobia wreck;

some more uw plants

IMG_7306, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

uw plants

IMG_7340, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

when i saw these i thought they might make a decent picture; i was right :)

Zen lorry

IMG_7284, originally uploaded by utnapistim.

i've taken pictures of this before; this one is from below