Blog reborn… (This is not a Phoenix Egg..!)

After several years of inactivity, I finally updated this blog to make it back to work.

The most trouble is the disappearance of “Picasa Web Album” service. There were plenty of photo albums to store in the Google Cloud Service. But it has already been discontinued in 2016.

Picasa Web Albums (PWA) was an image hosting and sharing web service from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites. The service links with Google’s photo organizing desktop program Picasa. It was discontinued in May 2016 and succeeded by Google Photos which does not support sharing photo albums on the public world wide web. It allowed users with a Google account to store and share photos in public albums with an initial free storage offering of 15 GB, that is shared with Gmail and Google Drive. Storage was unlimited for photos of resolution less than 2048×2048 pixels for Google+ users, and for photos of resolution less than 800×800 for everyone else. Videos shorter than 15 minutes also don’t count towards the limit. Once the storage is full, uploaded photos are automatically resized to fit the resolution for unlimited storage.

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Scuba Diving

基本上,這件事情(指Scuba Diving),我個人真正跟它發生交集的時間,是早在今年年初一月份的時候;真的沒想到會延續到今日,而且可能得到九月初才會有個比較正式的暫停。

這樣說好了,首先我會想到Scuba Diving,是去年2009的事了;是在MSN上跟大學同學聊天時,問到他怎麼會對Brisbane感到有興趣時,他提到『讀博士班閒閒沒事,就去上了潛水課程,拿到相關證照。』對啊!既然都已經花大錢來國外享受生活了,怎麼不試著做些不一樣的事情?!

也剛好暑假不想回台灣,嘗試一下異國跨年的風情;可是想要找到PartTime Job的期望並沒有實現的情況下….就決定花點錢去做一些在台灣的時候自己不會去做的事情。

潛水的認證機構,主要是兩個比較大的,SSI(Scuba Schools International)網址與PADI網址,根據深愛潛水的朋友解釋,這兩個機構的認證都差不多,在器材教育與潛水訓練上都算是很嚴格的;不過,近幾年來SSI教導出來的學員普遍評價比較好,可能是對於合作店家的要求比較嚴厲以及需要學員比較多次的潛水訓練吧?!

我自己找了找,其實在Brisbane的潛水器材店資料很混亂(游泳池與舞蹈訓練教室也是一樣超級混亂,根本不知道有甚麼網站可以分享這些資訊的?!)最後,我找到SSI在Stafford的DiveXsite, http://www.divexsite.com/

Stafford在哪?簡單的說,我坐公車大約單程要花一個多鐘頭(南部zone2到北部zone3)….如果是開車,根據Google Map的預估,大約是四十分鐘上下。

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