Northwest Dive Club

I feel for you Curt. When my trauma put a pause that looks more and more like an end to my SCUBA I also lost the home I had built off the road system. It was 22 miles from the road system. When we went there it was Alaska Wilderness. My wife and I cleared the land. I built a house there and spent mu...

Too bad can't drink the label, eh?

Lots of swill, not so much good brew.

Bob; that guy must work for a moving company in his off time. In our recent move, despite our best efforts, the movers packed a black bag of trash; an it wasn't even our trash!

Or, maybe TSA? Last dive trip before I got beached I unpacked to find some of someone else's gear in my dive bag.

That is a nice area. Pretty open so that should work for you. Going with an established group/tour company, or solo?

Was listening to a report on a trip to the Wrangle-St Elias area. Reminded me of you.

Ever get it sorted?

WheRe did you go?

Don't count on any electronics exposed to sea water, or even some, but not all, fresh water to be usable. That includes solid state memory devices.

thanks! I don't know much about the emergency locators. Do they have the same range as the text communicators? Two different animals. The EPIRB/ELT is a radio transmitter that sends a signal to a satellite. That starts a search and rescue effort by everyone in the area. In Alaska that could involve...

You may recall I had a pretty good diving career going with about five trips a year with 20-25 dives per trip. Very little was shore diving. Mainly because I was very awkward due to some old injuries. Some unkind folks misinterpreted. But, other than that I fully enjoyed my 10 years dropping off a b...

Oh yes, The Cascades; Battery rule applies. Remember the phone needs to see the sky to work well.

My experience is that sat phones are iffy in the northern latitudes. That makes them less than ideal for emergency communication. For just staying in touch on a flexible schedule they seem to work just fine. For life and serious bodily harm there isn't any substitute for a modern emergency locator w...

This has been educational, sort of. Reinforced what I thought I knew. Now I'm fairly certain I know what I know. :) The old shred the hard drive is the only way to assure security. The several media pieces showing people in South Asia stripping hard drives from recycled computers, copying informatio...

Yes indeed a "trial version" is just what I want to erase my private information before giving the device to a stranger.

Marc

The reference supports my experience and what I've found on this iteration.
>It isn't easy to securely wipe a hard drive.
>Currently there is no way to securely wipe a SSD.

Guess these computers are designed as disposable commodities.

The thread on Shredding started something. Time to see if we can finish it. Personal information security is important. How important most people don't realize until they have a problem. At the same time industry/business works hard to get info. Prime examples are "apps" that are marketed ...

Duh...maybe. I just signed on to another machine that has Axcrypt on it. I need to check its' current status. It is a file oriented program. But it may be a possibility. Too bad there are so many folks, not government, who spend so much effort mining data. Some of that is voyeurism. But much is the ...

Thanks Rox for that reference. It was a good article but a see bit dated in some respects. Last I looked TrueCrypt is no longer supported. Thaat means any of several changes in hardware, firmware, or software could make encryption incomplete, ineffective, or end up making a drive useless. I've never...

You folks seem to have no better ideas than me. I can destroy the mechanical hard drive without any difficulty. Replacement is cheap. Or, CCleaner has an overwrite function that will overwrite a lot. Takes awhile. But, so far it works. Probably not worth it for the XPS. I used CCleaner on another co...

I don't mind destroying the hard drive in the Dell XPS. The new owner can just pop in a new inexpensive drive. But I am not so sure the same is true for the Surface Pro 2 and it's solid state drive.

Have you ever sorted your old files and shredded some, hopefully a lot, of them? Just spent the day with my spouse doing just that. Did Not Realize how much was in our files. The first drawer and half generated 2 1/2 large trash bags of shred and paper. Still have the rest of the first filing cabine...

and yes, this is me beating an incredibly dead horse. ... Prevention is the best medicine. ... Oh, one other thing... the brain remembers that feeling... the feeling of panic... with remarkable clarity. If you have experienced this, you know. Tincture of time and easing back into things. It will st...

You can really insert 'people' instead of divers and have the same conversation. People that are panic prone on the surface will be panic prone under it. Absolutely. You are going to meet situations you have not trained for, maybe haven't even contemplated. Some people just can't learn how to resol...

Bests for new adventures.

Check the pool in Redmond, I dove in that pool several times in the fall of 2012. FYI Arcticdiver is not exactly close to Redmond, being from Alaska... Yep, I'm a 3 1/2 +/- hour Alaska Air flight North. In the gym today I did 5x12 260lb incline leg presses. Couldn't quite make 60lbs on the seated c...

I thought of the pool. But the one I would have used is closed indefinitely. So I was hoping for a non-water measure. I'm headed Outside next week. Maybe I'll have luggage room for some fins, mask and snorkel. If so, maybe 24Hr Fitness might let me splash around in their pool. Calf raises are pretty...

When I was in Hawaii last week I did exactly that. I climbed the pool ladder with a bit of effort. A regular ladder, no problem.

But finning and the rest concern me.