But what are you going to photograph? A few months ago, we started the painful task of sorting through tens of thousands of slides and prints and Polaroids saved by my Mom and Dad. We’re not talking a couple of shoeboxes… we’re talking six footlockers of photographs. Way too much to work through in a single sitting or a single weekend, but I’m slowly separating out the ones to be scanned and cataloged versus the ones to just be deleted.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that the only photographs I’m saving are the ones with people in them. I don’t care how good your shot of the Eiffel Tower is, I can find a better one on Flickr. I don’t care how good your shot of a sunset is, National Geographic has a better one. But Flickr doesn’t help me find photos of my family and friends and people we’ve met in our travels. So those are the ones that I’m saving and scanning.

A couple of more lessons learned:

• Polaroids fade. Badly. If you have a box full of your father’s Polaroids, they’re not going to get any better than they are right now.
• Metadata is important. Just a few pencilled scribbles on the back (name, date, location) make a huge difference. If you have someone in your life who is getting older, sitting them down in front of thousands of photos is just too intimidating. So do it in steps:
   
  1. First, sort through and extract the best photos that include people.
  2. Take another pass. Be ruthless in whittling this stack down to manageable proportions.
  3. Then show just that subset to your loved one, and note the names of the people you don’t recognize.

  I wish we’d done that when Mom and Dad were still with us.

• As you can see from the photo of my Dad taken 60 years ago, I inherited my innate sense of style from him. Sorry, Mom!

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There’s amazing footage of storms off Cape Horn, as well as less stressful footage of daily life on board one of the last commercial sailing ships: no engines, no electricity, no hydraulics, no GPS, no radio (except, probably, a short range Morse-code rig). Oil lamps and a hand-cranked foghorn. Over an acre of sails were controlled by a crew of dozens of young men swarming up and down her four masts, up to 170 feet above the sea. Four hours on, four hours off, for a hundred days. Lousy food and worse sanitation.

All this within living memory. Of course, my first reaction was admiration for the strength and endurance of the crew. But then I began to think about all the skills required by the underlying technology base that permitted three dozen men to transport three tons of cargo around the world using wind, muscle power, and ingenuity. How almost every item and every task on board would have been instantly familiar to Lord Nelson after Trafalgar in 1805.

And about how all of those skills have been lost within one human lifetime.

I’m exaggerating. I suppose the skills aren’t really “lost.” There are plenty of books, and journals, and even courses on the Age of Sail. But these are intellectual curiosities. We no longer have an industrial base whereby thousands of sailors, and tens of thousands of at-shore workers, rely on commercial sailing ships. So, of course, as far as the job market is concerned, the skills have been lost.

It’s true in every field. No one other than historical re-enactors knows how to make a buggy whip. Or a suit of armor. Or a flint knife. Heck, just ask any office worker of a certain age for a sheet of carbon paper! (My mom typed the board minutes of the Trust Company of Georgia, now SunTrust, every month. Twelve copies, eleven sheets of carbon paper. As you can imagine, she learned to type very accurately without touching the backspace key!)

Those aren’t commercially-useful skills anymore. So we don’t learn them, and we don’t teach them.

What do we teach? Look at the last resume that crossed your desk. It probably has a line saying something like “Proficient in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.” You can get a degree from Harvard with your sole “quantitative reasoning” class being “Practical Math,” which appears to be a review of basic arithmetic plus tips for using Microsoft Excel.

Does anyone really believe that Microsoft Excel will be a core skill set in forty years? Twenty years? It’d be like telling the first mate on a modern merchant marine ship that you know how to repair a canvas sail by hand.

But, like sailing a barque around Cape Horn by hand, what have we lost? I used to know how to do basic car maintenance. Changed my own oil. Changed fan belts. Changed plugs, points, and condensers. This isn’t special; probably every American male born in the Fifties and early Sixties learned the same. Now, I open the hood of a modern automobile and am baffled by the complexity. So I take it to the dealer, who has $15,000 worth of computer equipment to diagnose its ills. We’re probably not far from the day when, like your iPhone, your car requires special tools just to open the hood.

I’m pretty much the opposite of a Luddite. I think that, in general, new technology makes our lives better… and that when technology has unpleasant consequences (like pollution), the answer is usually more technology, not less. But watching this video, my mind filled in a Jimmy Buffett soundtrack… “Watched the men who rode you switch from sails to steam.” And I wonder if we’ve lost something worth keeping?

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Sometimes, you just have to say yes. Guillermo Sohnlein, a friend from the Space Angels Network, is now CEO of the OceanGate Foundation. He emailed me a few weeks ago asking “Do you want to take a dive in a research submarine?”

Guillermo and his partners have bought a refurbished submarine, Antipodes, that has been refitted with enormous (58″) twin Lexan domes. One on each end. If you’ve seen pictures of research subs like Alvin with its handful of 6″ portholes, these domes make for an entirely different experience.

Then he sweetened the pot. Also on our dive would be Scott Parazynski (@SPOTScott on Twitter), a five-time Shuttle astronaut who has climbed Everest slightly less than twice. And Steve Jurvetson would be diving later the same day.

Sometimes, you just have to say yes. (Even though it meant missing the Clemson game! Luckily, we found a couple of loyal young alumni to use our season tickets.)

We flew into Monterey on Friday night, and immediately joined the team at their rental house in Pebble Beach. They’d been in Monterey for most of the month of October, and we shared their dinner while listening to stories of previous dives and of the students they’d brought onto the sub the previous week.

Scott joined us… in addition to being an astronaut, rock climber, and mountaineer, he’s also an pilot (commercial, instrument, multiengine and seaplane-rated), and scuba diver. And an M.D., medical researcher, and inventor of a CamelBak that works in sub-zero environments. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to find that he’s an Olympic athlete and cordon bleu chef on the side. And, on top of that, a genuinely nice guy! Made for an interesting dinner.

We made it to our hotel on Cannery Row around 10pm local time, which our body clocks insisted was 1:00 in the morning.

Up early the next morning. Skipped breakfast (no bathroom on the sub!) and walked down to Breakwater Cove Marina.

(Click on any photograph or video to embiggen.)

Antipodes was docked in a slip behind the surface support vessel, Kraken. After a safety briefing and handing over our shoes, we boarded the sub. The conning tower is only 21 inches wide, so it’s a snug fit, but there’s a surprising amount of room once you’re inside.

Although Antipodes can dive over 900 feet deep, getting to that depth from Monterey requires a long tow out to the Canyon. Due to time and logistics constraints, we chose to do a shorter dive onto a wreck in Monterey Bay in just over 50 feet of water.

Cissa and I have been deeper than that with scuba gear, but this was a completely different experience:

• We could talk to each other and to the other mission participants. No more tapping on the shoulder and pointing silently. This is an enormous advantage over scuba diving.
• You can share the experience with friends and family who are not scuba-certified (think grandparents and children).
• Much better view. I have poor vision and, even with a prescription faceplate, my field of view is limited by a scuba mask. Those Lexan domes on each end make for a truly immersive (sorry!) experience.
• No worries about tank capacity. (I go through air about twice as fast as Cissa, so even with dual tanks, I usually have to surface before she runs out of air.)
• No worries about equipment. Tim took care of that. (Tim has lived in research submarines for years, working for everyone from oil companies to James Cameron.) No clearing the mask and adjusting for leaks.
• We could use our own cameras, not finicky (and expensive) underwater cameras. Yes, National Geographic has better footage… but some of our favorite shots from this dive were taken with our iPhones!
• We could park and watch a particular fish or starfish or whatever without worrying about keeping up with a dive buddy or group.

And, of course, on deeper dives, you can go 900 feet deep, which technically you could do with scuba while breathing Tri-Mix if you don’t mind the very real risk of dying.

Lots more photos here but just a couple more:

All of us got a chance to steer the sub for a while… a joystick for X/Y translation, a dial control for yaw rotation, and a slider for Z-axis. Painless.

We saw a lot of jellyfish. Some of whom, inevitably, fell afoul of Antipodes’ electric thrusters.

The circle of life had a few gaps cut in it that day. Scott, in particular, seemed to attract clouds of the beasties, earning him the nickname “Shredder.”

Don’t miss Scott’s comment about duct tape.

After about ninety minutes that flew by far too quickly, we surfaced for a quick tow back to the dock and a change of crew:

Cissa and I played tourist for the afternoon, then we all rendezvoused back at the house for dinner, where we got to watch Steve Jurvetson and his son drive a knuckle boom crane.

Then Scott Parazynski sang for his supper by showing his slides from his five Shuttle missions and seven spacewalks, including one of the most challenging and dangerous ever performed. In order to repair a damaged but fully-energized solar array, he was positioned by a 90-foot robotic boom farther than any orbiting astronaut had ever ventured from the safety of their airlock. The tremendous coordinated effort in orbit and on the ground by Mission Control and other engineering experts has been likened to the Space Shuttle and Space Station era’s “Apollo 13 moment.”

Then he talked about his two climbs of Everest. He had to turn around at High Camp in 2008 due to a spinal injury, possibly a consequence of his extended time in zero-gee. Then he went back in 2009 and made it to the summit. In his pocket, taped between two Pringle can lids, was a moon rock brought back by Apollo 11. His sherpa nailed the photo of Scott holding it up beneath the crescent moon, while standing on the summit.

He spoke for almost an hour. If you’re ever at dinner with Scott and he says “Let me show you my slides”… say yes!

The rest of the weekend was pretty standard Monterey/Carmel tourism…

We came back to the Pebble Beach house on Sunday evening for the end-of-the-expedition party… the team was scattering back to their home bases in Seattle, Virginia, Arizona, and elsewhere. (A few stayed behind to prep Antipodes for her cross-country trek to Florida next month.)

Met all sorts of interesting people, including a delightful gentleman named Bob Talbot. I’ll confess, I had seen a billboard at the airport for Robert Talbott, and I assumed it was the same guy. After all, how many Bob Talbot(t)s can there be in Monterey? Until one of the OceanGate team said “I have one of your posters; will you autograph it?”

Yeah, that photograph. You’ve seen it. He took it. Check out his website and buy your own copy.

Also met a high school student (and his parents) who had been inspired by an OceanGate educational visit a week or so earlier… from not having any particular goals in life, he’s now convinced that he’s going to spend his career in marine research, and I think he might be right.

With that, it was time to go back to the hotel for a 4:00 am wakeup call and a pre-dawn flight on a little bitty regional jet to LAX, then home!

All in all, an incredible experience. I can’t express sufficient gratitude to Guillermo and the entire OceanGate team for letting us share their underwater world. And, after all, how many people can say they’ve been in a submarine piloted by an astronaut?

Complete gallery of photos and videos here:
http://photos.stephenandcissa.com/Travel/Monterey-2011-10/

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Some of you are too young to remember the Model 100. I travelled with one of these bulletproof boxes for years, starting in 1984. It ran forever on AA batteries. It had a full-size keyboard for touch-typing. The acoustic couplers would connect you to CompuServe or your corporate mainframe at 300 bps over anything… hotel phone, pay phone (remember those?), and probably a barbed-wire fence. I loved it. So did a lot of people; Radio Shack sold 6 million of them.  It became standard issue for foreign correspondents and other road warriors.

One drawback was the display: big, clearly legible LCD dot-matrix, but limited to 8 rows of 40 columns. That was a bit cramped, but I wrote multiple-page memos on the thing. I even claimed that it helped me focus.   

Today, I spend most of my time on the road using my iPad. Computationally, it’s not even in the same universe as the Model 100. But, if I need to type more than half a page or so (this blog post, for example), I’m likely to rotate my iPad sideways and fire up the superb iA Writer.

One of the features of iA Writer is an optional “focus mode” that removes all framing and dims everything but the last few lines. I feel like I’m using my Model 100 again.

iA Writer is five bucks on the iTunes App Store. Whether you use the focus mode or not, its a great tool for banging out text. And, like everything else in the iOS universe, it syncs with Dropbox. Go buy it. (If you’re one of those people who complains about $4.99 productivity apps being “overpriced,” then we can’t be friends any more.)

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Whatever the view looks like out of YOUR window this morning… I win! Happy Monday.

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Drinks and dinner on the beach at Ipanema. Location: http://j.mp/gAXfo8

Notice anything funny about the parked cars?

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Overlooking Copacabana Beach and Corcovado
Rio de Janeiro

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