In Reply to: Re: Re: concept of minimal impact posted by Elaine on August 28, 2006 at 17:11:33:

Elaine, you wrote:

"It is easy to sit on the side lines and act like you are a scuba god in judgement of everyone else. It is much harder to put yourself out there on the line and put up some trip reports."

You actually make a reasonable point here to which I have a couple of responses. I realize that you are "new" to this list. And by "new" I mean you are a frequent poster, but your only connection to the past history of this list is basically from what Max and/or Chris have pointed you to in that direction. But there is another side to the story. Many of us used to post trip reports here all the time, Chris in his infinite wisdom, used to delete them because most of them were from exotic locations. You see, at the time, Chris didn't want DIR taking off in any way, shape or form and Sergio had not yet started scubadivernet.com, so Chris was the only game in town, and believe me he played the "it's my ball and you can all go home card" even worse then he plays it now.

John Walker & I spent a week in Mexico and we wrote a VERY detailed trip report about all of the caves we explored, but coincidentally that didn't fit into Chris' paradigm so the report was deleted because it wasn't "California" in nature..

You see Elaine, you're late to the party.. You quoted me the "rules" last week in some attempt at suggesting I don't know what they are, but what you don't seem to comprehend is that many of them were written for my benefit. The "once-a-month" rule was implemented when we were doing "free" DIR Demo's. Chris couldn't fit our demo's into his commercial posting of classes rules since we were giving them away for free, so he invented a "new" rule that deleted our posts whenever we offered something for free more then once a month irrespective of whether they were in different cities, or different dive clubs. Chris deleted our posts when we posted unique and exotic diving experiences from around the world since he didn't want to hear about Florida caves, or Mexico caves, or wherever we were writing about. You see, to some of us, writing about the same old Marineland dive site has the feel of "been there, done that". Again, I have no problem if people want to do that, but it isn't my thing anymore since it is like pulling teeth on this list because guessing what Chris will leave up from one day to the next is a mystery. If you, or Max, or any of Chris' other cronies write a trip report from a foriegn location, he'll likely let it stand.. If we write something from the Florida caves, he'll delete it as "not from California".. You see, the archives only tell a part of the story, the historical part Chris wants to preserve.

While you want to pretend you have been around here for a while, the history of this list is lost on you..

As for "putting yourself out there", please; give me a break, I do it everyday, I just do it diferently from you.. For some people, trip reports are it, for others it's comparing and contrasting things that work, things that don't and things that are done routinely, but could be done safer and more efficently. The difference between you & I is that I don't criticize you for writing trip reports, but yet you criticize the way and manner with which I choose to express my thoughts..

Later

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