Judging from the light pouring in over the top of my hatch cover, it’s a beautiful day outside.
Judging from the weather report, it’s going to be gorgeous for a week or more, with each day just getting hotter and hotter.
Yay!
Author: drew
Fake Monday
Today is Tuesday, but it’s technically the start of the week since yesterday was Victoria Day, a statutory holiday here in Canada.
The holiday long weekend was gorgeous. I technically took Friday off of work also, so it was a four-day weekend full of sunny boat repair work. I got so much done! Where to begin…
Thursday night I went out to the Anza Club to catch a show – Tarran the Tailor was playing upstairs. Excellent time, great music as usual – afterwards I biked back to my rowboat, but as I approached I noticed a couple of bicycles abandoned at the top of the dock ramp. As I arrived, I found three 20-something folks sitting in my boat, drinking bourbon – they mistook me for a fellow Midnight Mass rider and invited me to join them. As I explained that I was actually there to kick them out of my boat and go home, they were shocked and extremely apologetic, but really, it’s not like they were hurting anything. The boat is always locked up with a padlock, and there’s nothing left in it to steal. I mean, if they’d thrown my oars in the water or tried to damage the boat in some way, it would have gone much more sourly – but as it was, they were nice enough folks, geeks even. We exchanged names and URLs, so Adam, Andrew and Rebecca, if you’re reading this, feel free to drop me a line. 🙂
Friday and Saturday I got up at 8am and worked hard on the boat – I finished a bunch of epoxy work, got hinges onto all the storage hatches finally, and made progress in getting the hinges and hasps onto the cabin hatches – that project still needs more work, of course, but the end is finally in sight. I spent a bunch of time in the engine compartment working to get the kill switch in place, and finally succeeded – but when I went to test it, it didn’t work, and in fact I’ve apparently damaged the cable to the point that I need to go and find a new one. Boo – at least now, after two visits to the marine store and one visit to Canadian Tire, I know that the cable is called a ‘utility cable’ and that I should be able to get a new one from LloydCo Auto Parts.
I also removed the traveler on Friday – ie the seven-foot-long pulleys-on-rails thing that the boom attaches to – so that I could fix a few leaks in the bedding hardware. The leaks were directly over the stove, which meant that every time it rained I’d have to use steel wool on the cast iron stove grill again to get rid of the big patch of resulting rust. The leak had, over time, caused some of the roof to rot; this led to the first cutting of a large hole in the boat roof, and the bulk of the 1/4″ of sawdust that covers everything in the galley at the moment. The hole is patched, the surface is fiberglassed, sanded, faired perfectly with epoxy and fairing compound, and the traveler is now ready to be rebedded – perhaps this afternoon, if the weather clears up for a while.
Sunday I had a few guests over helping me work on the boat – it seems unfortunately that adding more people to a project doesn’t necessarily make the project go any quicker. Still, it was nice to have the company, and a few projects got nailed down properly – though when I removed the trampolines to fix a few small cosmetic problems on the center bow of the boat, we discovered a few patches of rot that quickly grew into a huge seven-foot hole in the boat. The rot wasn’t structural, which was a relief, but all that wood still needed to be replaced. I got a bunch of the wood in, but then Sunday was mostly rainy, so I had to cover the work site with tarps and pray for the best, spending the day curled up, drinking rum and watching movies with a friend. Sunday night was more rain and a lot more wind, which picked up the tarps and blew a cold wind through the boat, though as far as I can tell not much rain got in. It’s supposed to be rainy today and tomorrow, but then it’s supposed to be calm and sunny for another five or so days in a row, so this coming weekend I should be able to completely nail down the problems in the bow, and be done with it for the foreseeable future.
Today, however, I’m back to the day job. I’m working to figure out why the bottleneck in our EC2 migration appears to be network traffic – the frontend webservers seem to handle my load testing without a hiccup, but the database server spikes to a load of over 50, even though it’s an “extra large” EC2 instance. It doesn’t appear to be file I/O wait, nor a lack of CPU time, so I’m stuck. I’m not sure what I can do about that – I’ve always been under the assumption that network bandwidth between EC2 instances would be incredible, seeing as they’re virtual instances on more or less the same physical hardware. This week I have to solve the problem, but I’m not sure how just yet.
There’s still a few holes in the boat. I still don’t have clean water, though that’s just a matter of time – a reasonable amount of time actually, because filling the tanks takes a good fifteen minutes, then the bleach should be left in for an hour or so, then fifteen minutes to empty the tanks, then fifteen minutes to refill, fifteen minutes to empty, fifteen minutes to refill, fifteen minutes to empty, and finally a final refill. The traveler is still sitting a few feet away from where it should be mounted, and I still have more research to do on epoxy compounds before I can put the hatch doors properly back on the boat. The work is tiring, but very fulfilling, and a few long days of working in the sun have topped up my stores of vitamin D and left me with a positive outlook and a fantastic tan.
Morning
Well, apart from the bitter cold (mitigated by a merino sweater) and strongly gusting winds, it’s a beautiful morning in False Creek.
Today is the first morning of cooking breakfast on the Coleman propane burner, and hence the first morning for oatmeal with cinnamon, raisins and craisins! Delicious. About time I can actually start making use of the stores of dried food in the pantry.
This morning when I was woken by the sun at 6:50am, I hung a dish towel over the window, which allowed me to go back to sleep for another two hours. Sweet – even the crow landing on the deck and caw-caw-cawing at me for twenty minutes didn’t phase me, and I slept. Good thing, too, I needed the extra few minutes after staying out until 1am watching the new ‘Star Trek’ movie with JT. For the record: movie 7.5/10, theatre-going experience 1/10. $12.50 tickets, $4.50 fountain pop and more than a frackin’ hour of commercials and previews prior to the movie! God. And they wonder why movie piracy is so rampant!
Today I have to launch a bunch of webserver instances in the cloud and start stress-testing the website with ‘siege’. I suspect it’s going to hold up just fine, but we’ll see. I really wish there were some way to pull information about the cloud cluster *from* the cloud, via CSV file or something, instead of having to remember long strings of identifier numbers, IP addresses and volume IDs.
Today I also have to go back to WestMarine to buy wire, and possibly a pair of rubber boots. It has become uncomfortably obvious that I do not own a single pair of waterproof footwear! I mean, seriously, I have three pairs of rainpants, four waterproof jackets, two pairs of neoprene gloves… and no shoes. Given the rain of the past two weeks, this has basically meant constantly damp feet. I’ve been trying to get a pair of boots, but everywhere I try they seem to always be sold out of my size.
Oh! One very interesting piece of news – I spoke with Rogers Wireless tech support the other day, regarding my RocketStick cellular modem thing. Specifically, I wanted to know what the charges would be if I were to go waaaaaaaay over my allotted bandwidth for the month. Currently I have a “scaling” plan, which gives me 500 megabytes for $30/month – should I go over 500 megabytes, it changes my plan to a gigabyte for $35/month. Should I go over that, it changes to 1.5G for $40/month, then 2G for $45/month, and so on until $85 for 5G.
So that’s where I was worried – currently I am using anywhere from 100 megabytes to a gigabyte per day, just in regular internet traffic, mostly from work stuff, and I would really rather not be stuck with some kind of $2000 cellphone bill. I called to ask if there were a bigger plan I could get on. They said no.
So I asked what would happen if I went over…
“Well, sir, we then bill you per-kilobyte.”
“I see. How much is it per kilobyte?”
“Ummm – actually, I don’t really know. I know we cap the bill at $100 though.”
“Pardon me?”
“We cap your bill at $100.”
“Soooooo… $100 is unlimited internet?”
“We… cap your bill at $100.”
“Ok, so $100 is unlimited internet, but you’re specifically not allowed to use those words.”
“That is correct, sir.”
Sweet. So $100/month for unlimited wireless internet on the boat. That smells like a tax-writeoff work expense to me.
Soon I will have to leave the relative safety of False Creek and head for unknown waters. My current plan is to head for Victoria and anchor in either Cadboro Bay or Esquimalt Harbour for a couple of weeks, then perhaps head north towards Nanaimo before coming back to Vancouver for another two weeks. I’m trying to keep my plans somewhat open, but I am starting to feel the itch to move.
I’ll Never Stop, Nancy.
Argh.
I spent a gorgeous weekend working on the boat, a stupid grin on my face most of the time. The end results are a few less fiberglass problems, a nagging cough from the sanding dust that got past my dust mask, a mild sunburn in the middle of my back, two more banged-up fingers, one of which is looking a little bit infected, and a hangover.
The boat is a disaster right now though, with every powertool I own littering the kitchen, a sink full of dirty dishes and screws and bolts and wires on every flat surface. I really need to spend some time cleaning up, but frankly I don’t know when that’s going to happen.
This morning it’s back to banging my head against the bulkhead – hey, maybe that’s the source of the name ‘bulkhead’? I slept well, but when it got light outside I was awake. I lay there for a long while, convincing myself that while it must already be 10am, with my work schedule I could afford to stay in bed until 11am or so… but then my pager went off with a work emergency. My laptop batteries were low, so staying in bed only lasted a few minutes before I had to get up, dress, and switch to the aft cabin (ie, walk out through the pouring rain). On my way out the door I grabbed my cellphone to check the time: 7:15am. I guess my internal clock needs some adjustment.
It was so cold this morning! I could see my breath, so I decided that it was probably time to tackle the stove – and at around 10am I rolled up my sleeves and dove in to clean it out with a stiff wire brush. Of course, burning sooty for the past week or so hasn’t done it any favours, and soon there was a three-inch deep pile of soot in the bottom of the burner. This is when I was struck with a rare moment of genius: I have a generator now, and so I can use the little shop vac that came with the boat!
Well, it worked, and I was able to suck up the soot just fine – but since it’s a shop vac there’s not really a filter, per se, and so about a third of the soot was promptly blown out the other side of the shop vac, all over the inside of the cabin. The second I noticed this, I put the motor portion of the shop vac outside, so I could continue cleaning out the stove, but it just blew soot all over the cockpit instead. You thought my boat was dirty before? Let me tell you, it was positively sparkling compared to now.
For now I’ve given up on the stove, and am returning to work. I went to Canadian Tire and picked up a decent single-burner propane camping stove instead, and proceeded to make coffee in under five minutes instead of an hour. It’s much warmer out, and I’m somewhat dry, so my mood is infinitely better, but damn, what a crappy morning! Best part: it’s supposed to stay rainy all week again. :/
Two Lists
Things That Suck:
Things That Don’t Suck So Much: