In november/december 2009 Julie and I visited the Eastern Fields area in Papua New Guinea, joining a Wetpixel.com expedition with Eric Cheng and Tony Wu. We did two back to back trips on the Golden Dawn, the only liveaboard that visits the area. The Eastern Fields is a pretty remote atoll between Papua New Guinea and Australia, 450 nautical miles wide, consisting solely of submerged reefs. Nearest land is half a day’s travel away.

We knew before we went that this was going to be mostly a wide angle trip. That was going to make it a bit different from our usual trips, as Julie and I both like macro. The area was visually stunning, and Carl’s Ultimate was probably the most beautiful dive site I’ve ever seen. When the current picks up, the amount of life on that reef is so overwhelming you don’t know where to start. But a lot of this lushness was hard to photograph, and more suited to video. At some point I just stopped taking photo’s and watched the splendor in action.

Nevertheless we did take a lot of images, and even managed to take some macro shots.

read on to view our gallery

We’re back in St Croix and noticed there are at least 10 new geocaches this year. For those that don’t know, a geocache is sort of a treasure hunt using a GPS. You get a GPS location and get there any way you can to find the treasure. Then you take something from the treasure box, and leave something of your own. It’s great fun.

One of the new geocaches is not that far from the house we rent. Or at least, not when measured in a direct line. Walking it is quite a different matter, as it includes two very steep hills that are pretty difficult to walk in the full sun. But we decided to do it anyways, and had a very nice afternoon. It took us three hours to complete the hike, find the cache, and walk back, but it was well worth it as the views during this hike are spectacular. Now on to the next cache!

Read on for some images..

On a recent trip to Papua New Guinea my friend Eric Cheng suggested (on advice from his friend Alex King) I use SVN to maintain my wordpress installation that runs this blog. I used to just download the latest version, and unzip it right into my blog directory. Works fine. Only problem is that you lag behind as wordpress releases a new version only every few months, while svn updates happen daily. I’m already very familiar with SVN, as we use it extensively in our office for coding projects, and I use it myself as well for some plugins I made for Roundcube.

So today I switched my blog over to SVN, and it all went without a hitch. I checked out the latest version 2.9.1, and copied over my own theme and some plugins, and it all worked immediately. Hopefully this will make updating easier in the future.