Scuba

Hobby Alert : Scuba
I started a new hobby the other day - scuba. I've always kinda wanted to try it, and so I signed up for lessons. It turned out that we were also heading to Indonesia in February 09, so I figured it was a great time to learn. Of course, I really had no idea how "equipment intensive" (aka expensive) this sport was. I still haven't made it into the open water, but I decided (somewhat stupidly) to start buying gear. So far I've picked up:

* Shorty wet suit
* Fins (ScubaPro Twinjet)
* Mask (I forget the brand, unwilling to go dig it up right now )
* Snorkle (I forget the brand, but a dry snokle)
* Regulator (ScubaPro MK25/S600)
* BC (ScubaPro Knighthawk w/ Air2)
* Dive computer (UWatec Aladin Console)
* Light (UC C8)
* Knife

I also spent a good part of Sunday building a rack system for all the gear to dry in the garage above a bucket to catch the water. The bucket will also double as the soaking/cleaning station.

Merlin thinks I've gone a little nuts on buying all this equipment before I've even gotten into the ocean. I agree... however, I think I'm going to do quite a few dives - my goal is to do 100 lifetime dives and then I'll feel "justified" in getting into the sport. 50 dives and I'll be OK with the purchases, 25 and I wasted my money.

Wednesday night I have my final class for certification, Thursday is my dry suit specialty class, Saturday & Sunday are my open water certification dives. I already have a dive lined up for Thanksgiving weekend!

I ended up getting almost a month off in February, I'm going to try and get in 25 dives before the new year (5 for my certification, 5 in Indonesia, 10 before Indonesia, 5 more somewhere?)... it's a bit agressive, so I'll probably only get 15 or so... the key for me is to get out of the "totally new" space before going down to Indonesia. I'm a little nervous about diving with a bunch of random tourists in a resort, where your life may depend on the guy or gal swimming next to you. If I get a couple cold water dives under my belt, I'll feel a lot more confident. Also, I won't look like a total newbie with gear that has never touched the water before ;-)

Digital Video

New hobby - digital video

As part of the preparation for our upcoming adoption (no news, still in a holding pattern) I want to get setup for boring people with both still *and* video images. I saw the Sony HDR-SR1 which met my initial bar for video capture equipment - no tapes and HD quality.

I just about bought it, then started doing research. Of course, the HDR-SR1 records in AVCHD format on the hard disk, which very few editing suites support. It seems that this month is the when most of the vendors are supposed to be starting support for AVCHD, however I'm skeptical.

I started pricing out editing systems also. Final Cut Pro is the big standard, however it requires a Mac. I'm actually not against buying a Mac at all, I've been looking for a good excuse. However I then priced out the "dream machine" for editing.

* 2x Intel Core 2 Duo (total of 4 cores!)
* 4GB RAM
* 2TB HDD (4x 500GB 7200rpm)
* 512MB dual head video
* 2x 24" Widescreen LCD panels

The Apple weighed in at $7500, while a homebrew from NewEgg was in the ballpark of $4000. Of course, Apple has fabulous industrial design... however given that the CPU, RAM, Hard Disk, and Video card are effectively identical, I can't quite figure out where the $3500 is going. With that said, I need good HD video editing, so I may end up still getting a Mac, just lowering some specs to get it affordable.

My assumption with all this is that the longest I'll ever want to torture someone with video will be ~22min, which is the length of a normal 30 minute TV show (minus commercials). My assumption is the 10:1 ratio that I use for good pictures to bad on still will work for video - so I need the ability to record at least 242 minutes of video without a reload. This means a minimum of 30GB in my hand held.

Once back at the station I expect that I'll need to edit all that content and boil it down to the core 22 minutes, and being the AR person that I am, I'll want to keep both the raw footage and the finished product - so per video I'll need roughly 35GB of storage.

I figure I have 3 - 6 months to purchase the equipment, so that I can learn to operate it before the big trip. I think we'll get our referal before the end of the calendar year, Megan thinks it will be sometime next summer. Either way, apparently I need a new toy.

Any suggestions on equipment, sites to visit, people to chat with, are welcome. Since I can't stop the comment spam, i'd love to just get emails to my work account: CHRISAN, at, of course, microsoft.com.