It is my birthday next month and want a Furby Gurdy, it is available on eBay.

Tags: weird

On my visit to Oxford this weekend prior to my week long bootcamp at a nearby training company, I went to The Gloucester pub. Unfortunately it was no longer there, which is a shame as I remember having loads of good nights there when I lived in Oxford.

In fact I noticed dozens of Oxford pubs now closed and even the venerable Zodiac in Cowley Road has become the ‘Carling Oxford’ - sad sad times we live in. I suppose the Gloucester will become just another trendy pub alongside The Duck next door.

I’ve been suffering from the man flu for a couple of days now and our CTO sent me this video:

Eck, its that time again - house move.  After decades of a techno nomad lifestyle of moving to where the contracts are, it has become time to move along again.

Although we’re only moving three miles West, the sheer logistics of moving this much computing and dive equipment amazes me.

http://view.break.com/526155 - Watch more free videos

Just finished day one of my MOD1 rebreather course with Mike Potts and I am knackered. Today has included a couple of dives with lots of drills under the pier in Swanage.

It is a funny thing after hundreds of dives giving over control of what you are breathing to a computer, albeit a analogue computer with plenty of redundancy built in.

Breathing the warm air in almost total silence, as opposed to the noise of high pressure air coming from a traditional regulator and consequential exhaust bubbles, is very relaxing.  It takes a while to overcome the fact that you can no longer control buoyancy using your breath and automatic additions of gas by the computer may affect the total amount of gas in ‘the loop’ - and therefore your buoyancy.

I’ve been diving on an Inspiration Classic today - named unfairly by some as the ‘Yellow Box of Death’ (due to its luminescent yellow cover which is removed on the above photo, as well as the disproportionate number of users that have died using Inspirations) or ‘Yellow Box of Debt’ (due to the initial cost of the unit and ongoing running costs).

Tomorrow we are off at the crack-of-dawn to Vobster Quay to crank up the pace of training.

Good fun so far. I think my future may lay now in Closed Circuit Rebreathers rather than in open circuit scuba.