While we were on vacation at the start of July we spent a week on the live-aboard Kona Aggressor II catching up on some scuba-diving. Two of the night-dives were to a site where Manta Rays congregate (up to 16 of them at a time) and feed off plankton attracted to dive lights. The basic idea is that you put on extra weight and sit on the bottom (about 40 feet down) and shine your dive light up. Thousands of plankton will swarm in the light beam and the mantas will come down right above you (think a 20-foot wide ray swimming within 2 feet of your head). Anyway, there's a large Moray Eel that's become used to the divers and will swim up to see what's going on. The link below is to a video taken at one of these night dives where the eel was playing around the neck of the dive boat's chef, Ashley.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=33530882

Very cool!

One problem (the only one!) of going on vacation with Kimberly is that can be hard to banish SQL Server completely from conversation. Over breakfast this morning we were discussing the pros and cons of advising someone to use sp_attach_single_file_db as a way to shrink an out-of-control transaction log - with careful guidance it can be done, but there's a lot of scope for misuse and getting into trouble.

One problem with being on vacation in general is that your mind wanders away from the normal bounds of rational thought (well, at least mine does...) While discussing the merits of shrinking transaction logs I was cutting up my eggs and mused aloud on how much easier it was to divide an egg in half when it was scrambled compared to when it was raw - you can get a nice Euclidian straight edge. After that Kimberly had nothing else to say about transaction logs

Then I wondered how far away we are from the mainland (we're on Maui for a week, then on a live-aboard dive boat out of Kona - the Kona Aggressor - for another week). Luckily the waitress brought the breakfast check so I spent 5 minutes doing the a² = b² + c² calculation (where a was our flight length from Seattle, b is the distance south from Seattle, and c is the distance from the mainland). Figuring about 2700 miles for the flight, and 2000 miles south of Seattle (and no-doubt convincing everyone around us that I needed to use long multiplication, scientific notation, long division, and geometric figures to calculate the tip on the breakfast check), I came up with roughly 1800 miles as the distance of Hawaii from the mainland. In reality, the distance is about 1625 miles - not bad!

This is my first trip to Hawaii (and Kimberly's fourth, but first to Maui) - it's a very cool place. On Tuesday we took a long helicopter tour around the island (courtesy of Blue Hawaiian Helicopters) which gave us some stunning views of the volcanic scenery (we're doing a similar tour of the Big Island after the dive trip). Today we're going to drive to the top of the 10000 foot volcano to watch the sunset and do some bird-watching. Here are a few photos:

Ok - back to vacation...

Totally off-topic blog post this time. I haven't blogged in a week as we've been in Chicago and Illinois for the memorial for Kimberly's Father (see here). Everything went really well at the memorial and then the ashes scattering in Lake Michigan - perfect sailing weather! The only fly in the ointment came back to backups again. I bought a very cool video camera to make sure we captured the memorial for posterity (actually I probably went a little over-the-top but the HD picture quality is awesome - Canon XA H1). I video'd the whole memorial, and then out on the boat the next day. The only problem was that I didn't check the tapes before taping on the second day and managed to overwrite half of the memorial video. Should have taken a backup onto my laptop in the evening on the first day but too much rum was drunk in the Columbia Yacht Club in Chicago and I didn't think to check in the morning. Oops. After we've been burned so badly with Kimberly's computer mishaps (see my diatribe here), you'd think we'd have learned by now...

The last few days we've been in Galesburg, IL visiting Kimberly's Mom and Fort Madison, IA visiting her Grandmother. As a bird-watcher, this was paradise as I managed to pick-up eight new bird species for my life-list. Galesburg is the home of the largest railroad switch-yard in the world, and much as I like trains, it seems like most of the 150+ trains per day that go through Galesburg actually go through at night, making lots of noise as the do so - which doesn't make for the best sleep.

Here are some pictures from Galesburg... (click for larger versions)

Okay - so why does the title mention movie plots? And why is this blog post filed under the Bad Advice tag? Well, it would be bad advice for me to recommend you go to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which we saw this evening. We're both *huge* Indiana Jones fans, but this movie was pretty bad. Contrived plot, boring dialog, wooden characters, and a predictable ending. Without giving anything away, the refrigerator scene is totally unbelievable, the accents of the baddies are cliched and awful, and what's with the cutsie gophers at the start? Well, I enjoyed a few bits here and there but I was ready to leave after about half an hour. I can't believe Harrison Ford made this movie... Oh well - I'm sure opinions will vary but I think they should have left the series to end with The Last Crusade back in 1989.

Tomorrow we fly home and next week we're back to work for a little bit before flying out again to TechEd on Friday. And I'll be finishing up some exciting 2008 whitepapers for the SQL teaam and back to blogging about technical stuff.

Hot on the heels of a frenzied few weeks of teaching for Microsoft and we're off again - this time to Iceland! I've been wanting to come here for as long as I can remember but Kimberly's already been here 3 times before. We're teaching some seminars in conjunction with Miracle Iceland next week but decided to come a few days early to hang out in Reykjavik and see some sights.

Today we headed out of town with our friends Gunnar Bjarnason (Miracle Iceland's chief) and his wife Thorun with the aim of getting to the top of the Skjaldbreidur volcano (dormant of course!). First up we headed through the Thingvellir National Park to check out the fault line. Iceland sits on the boundary between the American and Eurasian tectonic plates - hence all the volcanic activity - checkout this link to see how Iceland sits in relation to the plates. In the park you can actually see where the plates come together as the fault line is a very obvious cleft lined with basalt formations. At one point there's a little bridge across the fault line and the strip-lake that formed in the cleft - not many places you can stand on a plate boundary. Apparently there's a tunnel that you can scuba-dive through to the nearby Lake Thingvallavatn, and the lake has amazing visibility for diving as it's fed almost exclusively from springs (see here). This is also where the oldest parliament in the world was established in 930AD. The Icelanders would meet here for a few weeks every year and the new laws would be memorized as there was a shortage of writing materials.

Next we headed out on road 52 for about 20km into the snowy wilderness, until we came to a set of power lines heading to one of the aluminum smelters on the island. Electricity is pretty cheap here (because it can be generated from steam from the geothermal activity) and so it's actually more economic to ship bauxite (the mineral that aluminum is smelted from) from Australia to here to be smelted and then shipped back again. Electricity here must be really cheap! Anyway, we followed the power lines across country along the side of the volcano and then Gunnar decided 'here!' and we simply turned and drove directly up the mountain in the snow. We got about 880m up before we finally got bogged down 200m from the top, even with the balloon tires down to 2 psi so we very carefully turned round and sat admiring the stunning view over lunch before heading back down.

Due to the remoteness of the area and the possibility of things going awry it's essential to have multiple radios and other emergency gear. We had no bother though, mostly due to Gunnar's excellent off-road driving skills, and the rugged Land Cruiser we were driving. We had towed along a snow-mobile part of the way with the idea of racing to the top of the mountain but the -7C temperature with *amazing* wind-chill killed that idea. Once back down by the lake we did a spot of bird-watching to add some more species to my life-list (Teal, Barrow's Goldeneye, Goosander). Kimberly and I dozed through our jet-lag on the drive back to Reykjavik, hitting the hotel 8 hours after we left.

Here's a couple of photos - click for bigger images.

 Gunnar and Paul unhooking the snowmobile.

 The view from up the mountain looking at other volcanoes.