Holiday, glorious holiday

jarich on 2005-01-14T00:47:51

My glorious holiday feels like it might just have been a dream... 2 weeks back at work and the stress levels are climbing again, but not so fast yet and not so high.

In total I spent 2 weeks away from computers and my email and most worky kind of stuff. And even better, thanks to pjf adding greylisting to our mailserver and upgrading SpamAssassin, I only had a few hundred spam messages when I got back.

First I visited Gwen and her husband in Tieri (a tiny mining village in central Queensland). Gwen taught me how to fossick for sapphires, but mostly we just hung out in her airconditioned house playing games, watching movies, talking or putting a puzzle together.

For the second week, pjf, I and another friend: David, went on a live-aboard scuba trip out to the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. David's involvement was rather brave as a couple of weeks before the trip he couldn't even swim.

We saw lion fish, juvenille and adult Barramundi Cod, a huge sting ray, white-tipped reef sharks, turtles by the tonne, morray eels, an octopus, a morton bay bug, maori wrasse, at least 4 kinds of clown fish and hundreds of other kinds of reef fishes.

pjf and I dived 23 times over those 5 days, for a total underwater time of about 810 minutes. Interestingly enough this equates to between 6500 and 8000 Calories burned, so I don't feel quite so bad about how much I ate between dives.

The whole dive trip can be summed up in the following code snippet. :)

%meals = (
                0 => "First breakfast",
                1 => "Second breakfast",
                2 => "Morning Tea",
                3 => "Lunch",
                4 => "Afternoon Tea",
                5 => "Dinner",
);

@dive_times = (
        "6am (ish)",
        "10:30 am",
        "1 pm",
        "4 pm",
        "7 pm" );


$date = "27 Dec 2004";
$time = "11 pm";

$boat += $pjf + $jarich + $dmend;
unpack "dive gear", $bags;

sleep $well until $dawn;

for($day = 1; $day < 4; $day++)
{
        chomp $meals{0};
        for($time = 0; $time < @dive_times; $time++)
        {
                do_dive( sub { wait } );
                chomp $meals{$time+1};
                sleep;
        }
}

        # Special dive.
$date = "31 Dec 2004";
$time = "11pm";

do_dive( sub {
                until($new_year)
                {
                        wait;
                }
         } );

chomp $party_food;
sleep;

$date = "1 Jan 2005";

chomp $meals{0};
for($time = 0; $time < $dive_times[0 .. 2]; $time++)
{
        do_dive( sub { wait } );
        chomp $meals{$time+1};
        sleep;
}

pack "bags", $dive_gear;

return $land;


sub do_dive 
{
        my ($dive) = @_;

        alarm $Who_let_the_dogs_out;

        accept $dive_brief, $instructor;
        bind $dive_gear, $me;

        $boat -= $pjf;
        $boat -= $jarich;
        $boat -= $dmend;

        &$dive();

        $boat += $pjf;
        $boat += $jarich;
        $boat += $dmend;
}

More or less....

We swapped one of the 4pm (ish) dives for a snorkle in a lagoon with turtles, reef sharks and other fun critters.