Tero Pikala

My first dive at Subic was USS New York. It’s impressive war ship with main gun and 5 meter propellor still in place. Most exiting part of the dive was going quite deep inside the wreck - definitely much deeper than I would have gone without experienced guide.

Next dive was El Capitan, little bit smaller boat but easier to dive in. I think we dived some 40 meters through it and came out from other end. It’s wide enough for 2 divers side by side.

Visibility in the bay isn’t that great - maybe 7 meters. This is due volcanic ash and also constant shipping traffic. Actually it’s slightly disturbing to start dive with huge oil tankers only some 250 meters from you but I guess locals know what they are doing…

Tags: Diving, Travel // Add Comment »

I was planning on going to Subic Bay immediately when in Philippines but since my sleep last night wasn’t really good I decided to spend a day next to airport in Angeles. Sleep was really needed because I slept from 4PM until 6AM only waking up to watch Die Hard 2 in the middle of the night
Lonely Planet guided me to nice (and bit too expensive) Oasis Hotel. It has huge pool and bar which was all I needed. I impressed some other residents by freediving pool length - some 25 meters. I could do better when rested and without any beers…

Angeles is best known for it’s girl (and boy) bars, little bit like Pattaya in Thailand I guess. After seeing some of the bars I really hope I would have skipped whole place. It’s not that I have an issue with that kind of stuff or anything but too much is just too much.

I’m now in a minibus on my way to Subic Bay where should be some good wreck diving main attraction being USS New York sunk in 1941 by Americans themself.

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Today I decided to visit Cheung Chau island. It’s small place with only about 30.000 inhabitants and most people are earning their living from the sea.

Contrast to central Hong Kong is huge. There are no cars here as far as I can tell. Primary way to travel is with bicycle! Somehow this is like Suomenlinna fortress outside Helsinki but here is nice beach and seaside boulevard with restaurants.

Tradition here is to burn “money” in memory of friends passed away and I participated in that for Lukasz. It’s still quite hard to accept that he is no longer with us.

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24 hours after leaving home I am finally in Hong Kong. At least now I feel pretty much adjusted to new time and who cares if I will fall a sleep at 8pm? I’m on holiday!

Hostel is slightly worse than I recalled from last visit but it will do for 2 nights. At least it was way easier to find - I just walked from bus stop there. Last time in 2006 it took over an hour to find just right entrance!

Immediately after shower I did only thing imaginable: find nearest bar and get some beer. There’s nobody but me here but beer is cold and it’s happy hour so it’s 2 for 1 at $35

Then I needed a free wifi to post this so I wandered down Nathan rd and eventually to central. Plenty of bars to choose from here but boy is HK expensive compared to London! Pint of Guinness at £5 or even more. Second pub had happy hour and wifi so I’ll stay here for few

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I’ve used Qatar Airways before and again they managed to deliver good service during the flight even in tourist class.

Food was actually really good lamb biryani and french Syrah-Grenache complimented it nicely. Combine that with nice service and I guess they have winning formula.

Anyway, how many airlines let you choose between 3 main courses?

I would love to try their 1st class one day just to see how nice is separate business terminal in Doha.

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(of course this was supposed to be posted earlier but I’m still learning how to use wordpress & iPhone)

Ok, let’s try to blog little bit more for next month.

I’m at Heathrow airport enjoying cold Guinness and waiting for my flight to depart. Plan is to spend 2 nights in Hong Kong and continue to Philippines for almost 4 weeks. And return back to London through Hong Kong again.

I’ve never been to Philippines before so it will be a new experience. I hope to find world class diving, relaxed evenings in a beach pub with new friends and nice time generally.

I’m travelling solo but 2 friends are already in the Asia and hopefully I’ll see them both. Stuart is professional photographer and Ville is friends brother - both interesting and nice persons with similar views to life as I do!

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I just upgraded my WP installation. Finally I can blog from my iPhone

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Originally I was planning to use this holiday season to travel somewhere warm but ended up  going to Finland instead. I guess it’s nice to see friends and family there as well but I would have preferred some quality time with fish and corals

Right now I’m waiting in Heathrow airport to get my bag checked in. For some reason self-checking here doesn’t work like anywhere else where you can just skip queus by doing everything yourself but after checking you still need to wait together with everyone else for 30-40 minutes just to drop your bags. Not really nice but at least I have plenty of time.

Provided my flight is on time I’ll be in Turku around 3AM

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Of course, lot of things happened in 4 months. Here’s highlights of my life:

• I moved from Greenwich/Deptford border to Rotherhithe. Not too far away but totally different place. I have first time in my life own outside door. This place is so quiet I can’t believe it; I think I haven’t live anywhere this quiet since I moved away from my parents house in -94.
• I went to Dublin for long weekend with Elina, Markku & Jani mid July.  We ended up drinking way too much (who would have guessed that!) but anyway it was nice to see my friends from Helsinki.
• Hanna & Wesku got married. Really cool wedding at Hotel Kamp and hopefully ok stag party. I went to Helsinki twice in September for them
• I left tmg. I really liked that company but I just refuse to work with 5+ servers making hellish noise less than 2 meters from my desk. But I miss having lunch at Borough Market so much already…
• And I started at Haymarket. I hate commuting all across London to Hammersmith but it seems like a nice place to work in. I’m little bit worried about how often people go for “couple of pints” after work though
• Now I’ve been in Haymarket for almost 2 months and things are “settling down” bit by bit.

Now it’s less than 4 week until I’m back in Helsinki again - and again for wedding!  This time I have no official role so I can enjoy party even more…

Tags: London // 2 Comments »

I moved to new home late June (that’s 4.5 months ago already).

Of course previous tenant had decided not to terminate his ADSL connection properly and I had to wait again about a month before I had connection.

Then in August I got tired of the fan noise from current server and decided to change it - and being careless managed to fry CPU or motherboard. I got replacement parts few weeks ago and now I’ve finally moved everything from old computer to new one.

I have now rather fast Intel Celeron D 3.2GHz with 2GB of memory - and there’s still room for additional 2GB. It has also total of 1.1TB hard disk space. That should be more than enough to run small home server
I know it’s nerdy but this time I decided it’s time to virtualize some services. I have now following virtual machines:

• SSL-VPN with SSLExplorer and SSH server. I’m using it to run Irssi in Screen
• Mail server. Procmail, Fetchmail, Dovecot, Spamassassin. One day I will setup Roundcube webmail here as well.
• Web server. Apache 2.2, PHP, ColdFusion 7, MySQL.

Still under construction is separate server for Micro$oft stuff - I’ll be using .NET in the future as well…

Most important reason for doing this is being able to backup virtual machines easily. If I ever decide to upgrade my computer I only need to backup virtual machines, reinstall base operating system and install VMware. I can also test new server software way easier this way.

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