Why I love the Internet...
Last weekend I went on my annual dive trip (called The Truth Trip, after the first boat it was held on) with a group from my other internet home, ScubaDiving.com. This was my 6th year with the group diving the Santa Barbara Channel Islands 20 miles off the coast of California.
The first year I joined the group, in 2003, was about 6 months after I started posting there and maybe 9 months after I started lurking. About the time I started posting, there was much shock and sadness on the board because a long-time and regular poster with the board name of RickWreck had died in a motorcycle accident.
As a tribute to him, Rick's ashes were divided up, and small packets were sent to divers going on trips over the world to be distributed at sea in his memory. On that first trip I went on, about 20 of us went in the water and knelt in a circle on a sandy bottom at about 50', while one person released the ashes and another placed a plastic bag containing a picture of him and a rock and buried it in the sand. It was an moving experience, even though I did not really know him. In all, Rick's ashes were probably distributed in at least a half-dozen places.
A few days ago a young woman registered and made her first post, saying she was looking for information about a man named Rick Fallis. A google search had led her to the message board, and she wanted to know if RickWreck was the man she was looking for, her father whom she had never known. The thread is here:
http://www.scubadiving.com/forum/tm.aspx?m=116236
As with my American Idiot post a few days ago, and like my subject line says, this is why I love the internet: I have these people in my life because of it.
The first year I joined the group, in 2003, was about 6 months after I started posting there and maybe 9 months after I started lurking. About the time I started posting, there was much shock and sadness on the board because a long-time and regular poster with the board name of RickWreck had died in a motorcycle accident.
As a tribute to him, Rick's ashes were divided up, and small packets were sent to divers going on trips over the world to be distributed at sea in his memory. On that first trip I went on, about 20 of us went in the water and knelt in a circle on a sandy bottom at about 50', while one person released the ashes and another placed a plastic bag containing a picture of him and a rock and buried it in the sand. It was an moving experience, even though I did not really know him. In all, Rick's ashes were probably distributed in at least a half-dozen places.
A few days ago a young woman registered and made her first post, saying she was looking for information about a man named Rick Fallis. A google search had led her to the message board, and she wanted to know if RickWreck was the man she was looking for, her father whom she had never known. The thread is here:
http://www.scubadiving.com/forum/tm.aspx?m=116236
As with my American Idiot post a few days ago, and like my subject line says, this is why I love the internet: I have these people in my life because of it.