Hoke’s Ramblings

Check out this new scuba website. It’s a bit sparse right now, but will soon feature loads of great content, including my howto for modding your SUV to carry scuba tanks safely as well as equipment and dive site reviews.

www.wetworks.co.za

Just thought I’d share that…

Quick post for a Friday/first half of 2009/whatever…

I really, really love this HTPC software. It’s just lacking the EPG and TV recording, otherwise it’s the bomb

Try it out, share the love, vote, and encourage them to integrate the tv stuff

moar funny pictures

Hulk (the incredible one) kick’d asz! Then I saw Iron Man, it kick’d moar asz!!1

For Iron Man, make sure you stay till after the credits.

And if you haven’t seen either, see Iron Man first.

Right *dusts off cobwebs* let’s see if I remember how to use this here bloggy website…

It’s been ages since a post, but finally some news worth mentioning…it seems after decades of speculation, Robotech will finally be coming to the big screen. And it seems we have Tobey Maguire (and probably Transformers) to thank for that.

Just do a search for “maguire robotech” and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m fearful that it’ll be a sorry case of Notstalgia, but I’m prepared to give it a look

Quinn has already let the cat out the bag regarding my online collection of books. I wasn’t going to say anything until I had the whole lot in there, but since that will only be in several weeks when I have the energy and equipment to do so, you may as well take a gander now. I’ll do another blog entry once my our (95% of the books in the house are Lina’s) library is up to speed. (Quinn’s library is here.)

In a similar vein, I took the RSS feed of my ‘DVD’ category of ‘My Movies’ over at IMDb and stuck them into my blog using this fabulous WordPress plugin, inlineRSS. So take a peek and let me know if you want to borrow any, taste permitting. I’m hoping LibraryThing will do something similar soon, so I can integrate all my collections into one website.

I made a wonderful discovery last night. If you’re thoroughly parched and feel like you could drink up a small lake, Mugg & Bean has BOTTOMLESS lemonade for R8.90!

A couple of days back, Quinn showed me this page on IMDb, for a movie called ‘Half-Life‘. Unfortunately, it’s not the one we want to see, but this got me thinking: who would make a good Gordon Freeman?

My vote goes to Edward Norton. What do you think?

EDIT: There’s a pretty well made page of potential talent for a Half-Life movie here, but I suspect it may blow the budget!!

So, after almost a year away from the salty oceans, I got to join a bunch of workmates for a week of super-relaxed leisure diving at Sodwana Bay.

One of our crowd, Heidi, was doing her advanced course, and we all joined her on her deep dive. I must say, that’s the most relaxing time I’ve ever had underwater – it was magnificent! Perhaps there was a bit of narcedness involved, but I’m not complaining.

The only complaint is that at those depths, after fifteen minutes or so your dive computer starts spouting dire warnings of impending doom, so we had to cut it short.

A real pity, but the dive was definately worth it – warm, calm, and all the usual oddities you see at those depths, including an organic feather duster like the one I saw on my last deep dive in Sodwana, and now I have a witness, too! Pity Ed didn’t see it swimming, though.

We also had two stints on quad bikes, which was just as much fun as I remember having last time, if not more so. We did a one-hour tour the first day, and two days later, after recovering from the first ride, took a three hour, 50 km tour up to Lake Sibaya. What an awesome way to see such a beautiful location (if not the most eco-friendly).

On a techie note, Picasa2.5 supports geotagging via Google Earth. Click here for a KMZ file for Google Earth showing the location of some of our adventures, with included pics (about 200kB). For general pictures from the trip, look over here.