Myerchin Navigator Lightknife

The knife in question was a Myerchin Navigator LightKnife; a half-straight, half-serrated blade for cutting rope accompanied by a tapered steel spike called a marlinspike, used in splicing and knotwork - or in my case, mostly used for untying seized knots. Of course I immediately brought the knife to their attention, so that they wouldn't think I was trying to sneak in with a weapon.

"Oh, um, hey - there's a large knife in my right front pants pocket."

The guard stopped searching me and looked somewhat taken aback. "Um. What?" he said.

"It's nothing sketchy, it's just a sailing knife, I live on my sailboat. I forgot I had it with me. I'm happy to check it with my bag or whatever.". I had the attention of the second guard now, who stepped closer.

"You can't take that inside, you'll have to leave it with us..." he said. So long as I could pick it up when I left, I had no problem with that. They both agreed to hold the knife at the door for me.

I also had my Leatherman Kick in my backpack, so I had to surrender that as well, but of course when I got out of the bar I flailed and forgot to retrieve the knives. In my defense, there was the small matter of having to step in and break up a fight between a big guy and the skinny prostitute on the ground that he was kicking, but that's a whole other story. A friend who works at the Lotus is currently trying to retrieve the knives for me, but I'm sure it'll be no surprise to hear that nobody knows exactly where they have gone. *sigh*.

Anyhow. I'd like to say that the Myerchin knife has served me well in the five or so years since it was given to me by an ex-girlfriend, but in fact it is the third iteration of the same knife. The first knife lasted three years, but finally the locking mechanism stopped working. With a lifetime warrantee, I had the knife replaced, but the locking mechanism on the new replacement fell apart within two months! The third iteration has lasted about a year so far with no troubles, but has grown quite dull in a very short time - and I don't own a good sharpening kit.

Spyderco 'Atlantic Salt'

I mentioned the dullness in passing in a chat with my sister Heather, who lives on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick with her boyfriend Matt, a professional diver for the east-coast fishing industry. He started enquiring about the knives on my boat, and was startled to find out that I didn't have a Spyderco 'Atlantic Salt' knife onboard , and apparently stomped around the house muttering "How can he not have one?!  He lives on a boat!!".  He (and she) promptly ordered me one for my birthday, along with a knife sharpening kit which he insists that all marine-type folks should have. The knife and sharpener are currently sitting in my other sister's apartment waiting for me to come and pick them up. Apparently the Spyderco knife blade is made from "H-1" steel; a "precipitation-hardened steel containing nitrogen instead of carbon, which cannot rust".

When I told Matt that I already had a knife, and showed him a photo of my Myerchin Lightknife, he scoffed and called it a 'city boy knife'. I found this funny, because most of the city boys I know don't carry knives at all, and the ones that do are just as at home in the backcountry as they are in downtown Vancouver.

I quite liked the Myerchin, for several reasons:

• it has a half-serrated, half-straight blade - hard to sharpen, but good for lots of cutting tasks,
• a marlinspike for untying knots - very useful,
• a shackle key in the blade, very handy on a sailboat,
• a basic LED flashlight in the handle,
• decent sized with a pocket clip, fits well in my pocket, and
• it looks and feels good.

What I didn't like about the Myerchin was pretty much only one thing: the build quality. With the warrantee I just have to walk in to any West Marine store to order a free replacement, and the edge is apparently maintainable with a little attention every few weeks, but I haven't had the tools to properly sharpen it.

My friend John Foulkes feels that every man should carry a knife, and refers to this type of knife as an 'EDC' - an 'Every Day Carry'. I don't think the Spyderco 'Atlantic Salt' would make for a good EDC in the city, but I can certainly see how it would be if one were working around boats as a day job.   I am very much looking forward to adding the 'Atlantic Salt' to Tie Fighter's equipment.

the Boye Knives 'Cobalt Basic 3'

I do wish sometimes that I were the sort of person that could get away with wearing a small fixed-blade knife, but unfortunately, due to my social nature and my general clumsiness, wearing a sheathed knife on my hip - regardless of size - is an invitation to trouble either in the form of accidents or unwanted attention from authorities. Perhaps in the future, when I've both calmed down somewhat and moved on from the bustling city life, I will be able to wear a sheathed belt knife. When that day comes, I will purchase the Boye Knives 'Cobalt Basic 3'. The Basic 3 is - in my humble opinion - a *gorgeous* small fixed-blade knife that would be absolutely perfect for life on a boat.

...that is, for older, calmer, less city-living people than I. Furthermore, it's a $300 knife, which is currently out of my price range.

If I don't end up getting my Myerchin back from the Lotus, I think I have decided to purchase the same knife again. I'm fond of it, I'm familiar with it and the list of things I like about it far outstrips the list of things I don't. I've been shopping around the internets for similar knives, and I just haven't been able to find another knife that I like better than the Myerchin.

If you're looking for an EDC, check out these links:

Columbia River Knife & Tool - good quality pocket folders, no sailing/rigging specific tools though.

SpyderCo - excellent reputation and variety.

SOG Speciality Knives and Tools - good variety, though a somewhat difficult site to browse.

Do you have an EDC that you love? Please share a link in the comments!

<Geek>

On the work front, I've migrated two very large web properties into the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud over the past eight months or so.  I've been learning the ins and outs of the new technology as I go, and the playing field really has changed.  There have been a tonne of little headaches and bugs and glitches, and I've been pulled out of bed at 5am more often than I care to admit.  And now - just when we're finally stable - a directive has come down from the Evil Masters to port both sites to a common backend using the latest new Drupal code.  On one hand this will open a lot of doors for us, allowing us to scale a lot quicker and use some of the more modern tools, like storing all images on a Content Data Network (CDN) instead of on our current frontend webservers.  Still, the deadline for launch is February 12th and that's coming up faaaaaaaaast.  I've barely got the preliminary test servers in place!

</Geek>

On the boat front the engine work continues, though the work seems to multiply every time I put time into it.  I'm finding a great deal of satisfaction in it, actually - I mentioned to a friend yesterday that it is very much like 'The Legend of Zelda', in that the puzzles are difficult, but once solved there is immediate positive feedback (ie the engine works better) and you can move on to the next puzzle, often using knowledge or tools you gained from the previous level.

Yesterday's miniboss was changing the zincs in the engine.  Sacrificial zincs are bits of... well, zinc.  The theory is that if you bind several types of metals together in a marine environment, the weakest metal will corrode.  Because of some kind of galvanic voodoo, the other metals will not corrode until the weaker metal is completely corroded away.  Zinc is a very weak metal, easy to work with and cheap, and so quite a few different parts of the boat have sacrificial lumps of zinc attached to prevent the more important bits from corroding.

The zincs in the engine should be replaced about once a year, more or less depending on use.  My engine has three zincs - at $7.00 per zinc, it's a $21.00 job to replace them all, but compared with approximately $10,000 for a new engine, the price is negligible.  The zincs are attached to the end of thick bolts and screwed deep into the heart of the engine.

One of the three zincs is located right on the front of the engine, easily accessed.  The other two zincs are located far down the right side, between the engine block and the wall.  Once I stepped back and surveyed the engine, I found that I could just barely get a socket wrench in a gap, which allowed me to remove zinc #2 with little difficulty - but zinc #3 was a real hassle.  To get at the third zinc I had to remove the fuel lift pump (skills and items gained from previous level!) and the exhaust manifold - and even then the bolt holding the zinc into the engine was seized pretty solidly.  I ended up having to extend the socket handle and actually step on it to get the bolt free; never send a hand to do a boot's job.  I swear I heard victory music when that bolt finally gave way.

So far in the past month I have rerouted the fuel lines, replaced the fuel filter, installed and plumbed a second fuel filter, replaced the damaged exhaust water trap ($300, ouch), replaced the impeller in the raw water pump, and replaced the zincs.  Remaining, I have to have the alternator tested and serviced, pick up new oil, drain and change the current oil, drain and change the transmission oil, take the heat exchangers to the radiator shop to have them boiled out, pick up antifreeze, install the secondary cooling pump, drain the engine cooling system and replace with antifreeze, reroute the raw water intake through the heat exchangers, rewire the instrument panel, and then get the fuel tank polished.  Whew!  Someday soon, I will have an engine that runs reliably; ideally one that I do not have to climb into the engine compartment with a screwdriver to start.  There's almost no chance I'll have all this done by Monday, so I really have to pick and choose what tasks are actually important.

...and then I get to start on the electrical system!  For some reason, since returning from Vegas the house batteries aren't holding a charge anymore.  I have no idea why; I need to replace the batteries and purchase and install a modern charge manager.  I don't expect to get that one sorted out for under $1000.

Lastly, I have Sequential Circus coming up on Saturday.  This is a huge show, with six live-pa acts performing 45-minute sets at a local show venue slash warehouse space.  Everything is coming together smoothly, mostly because it's our sixth time running this show and we're all getting really good at it.  It's really starting to look like we're going to have a solid crowd too, which takes a lot of the financial stress off of my back - if everything works out well, I might just come out of it a hundred bucks richer!

I still haven't figured out where to go on Monday, and the False Creek / Olympic Village security lockdown continues... more on that soon.

At my last major post, I was about to speak at the Open Web Vancouver conference at the Vancouver Conference Center.  My talk went pretty well, I guess - I mean, I definitely didn't win any awards, but nobody walked out either.  I met some great new folks and had a good experience overall.  I know now that speaking at tech conferences is almost exactly like doing live-pa techno in front of a big audience - the more prepared you are, the easier it is to let go and just be yourself.

Since then, there's been... God.  Seriously, where to start?!

I've had repeated, profound musical experiences on the boat, jamming with friends.  Picture if you will a mirror-smooth False Creek, with the boat anchored about fifty feet offshore.  Dan Ross playing guitar and singing, Chad Taylor playing muted trumpet and providing some percussive backup and myself on mandolin and backup vocals - folks walking past, double-taking and sitting down on the seawall to listen, applauding between songs.  Making music on the boat with friends has given me far more joy than I ever imagined it could.  Actually, making music on the boat at all - I've been spending on average about eight to ten hours per week sitting on my deck, playing my guitar and singing.  If there is a greater peace than playing music on the water, I haven't found it yet.

Yarrrr!

I've gone on three epic sailing adventures, the third of which is still ongoing - as of this writing I am anchored in this lovely little bay, surrounded by million-dollar waterfront houses and a beautiful cliff infested with rock climbers.  More on that in future posts - but suffice to say this ongoing solo-sailing adventure is not without its trials and tribulations.

The first of the three epic sailing adventures was with a beautiful woman named Miya who I met at Burning Man in 2008, and who had come to visit me several times over the past year.  Her confidence in my sailing ability was appreciated, though perhaps unwarranted, as we left Vancouver and immediately ran into eight-foot breaking swells just off Point Atkinson, enroute to the Sunshine Coast.  The sailing got a lot better after the first day, but we still had to spend a few days on Bowen Island with engine trouble - mostly waiting around for a mechanic, until we tackled the problem head-on with the manual and some elbow grease, finally solving it ourselves and getting the engine back up and running.  We then cruised up the coast to Secret Cove and Smuggler Cove, where we spent a night before returning to Vancouver.  It was an amazing trip; the ocean opened my eyes and put a good fear into me, and the company was exquisite.  The parting of ways at the end was wistful to say the least.

Drew and Laurel spinning fire on the boat at Diversity

The second sailing adventure was with yet another beautiful woman, Carrie, who joined me on a trip to the Diversity Festival on Texada Island.  Technically we were supposed to sail with a crew of six, but Vancouver being the city of flailers that it is, the crew slowly called in to cancel until it was just the two of us.  The winds were against us the whole way there and back, forcing us to motor around 90% of the tip, so it's debatable whether or not we actually saved any money travelling by "sailboat".  We did get the sails up once or twice, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.  The festival itself was excellent, with us arriving in full pirate regalia to great fanfare, spending a weekend surrounded by beautiful people and great music, and rolling out again on Monday with a grand exit.  Sunday was a bit crazy, as the wind suddenly went from 5kn up to 25-30kn, and Tie Fighter danced in four-foot swells for the night - I now have a lot more faith in my anchor than before.  Another boat nearby actually did slip their anchor, and came within a few feet of hitting us, but we held steady and Monday was much calmer.  Another thing learned: rowing a dinghy in calm waters is one thing, rowing through four-foot waves as they break on the beach is another thing entirely!  I made very good use of the drybags my sister gave me for my birthday.

The next weekend after Diversity was the Emrg-N-See Festival just outside of Salem, Oregon.  I went to this festival with Trent last year, and it was probably the best festival I'd been to to date - it was as though someone had sent a personal invitation to every single gorgeous, blonde, dreadlocked, dubstep-loving yoga instructor on the west coast.  I cannot express how many times I had to stop and shake my head at the sheer beauty surrounding me.  This year was similar, though somewhat diluted, as though every guy who went last year went home and explained the situation to every guy he knew.  I know I did, which is why I was surprised that the crew going down fron Vancouver was much smaller this year.  Regardless, I definitely got my fill of amazing dubstep and bassline music, on very excellent soundsystems.  I also got to take a tablespoon of dancefloor dirt out of my nose every morning, which I am choosing to look at as preparation for this year's Burning Man expedition.

The weekend after Emrg-N-See was Sequential Circus 5, an electronic music event that I guess I'm sort of in charge of.  I say that with some reservation, because the show couldn't happen without every one of the seriously talented and driven people involved - we've got the whole thing pretty much down to a science now, and even with six live acts on a small stage, we continue to be efficient and competent, and we still have a good time doing it.  This SeqCirc was probably the best music to date, though we were up against some very stiff competition.  The capacity of the venue is about 180 people, and we had about 100 people, so while it was never packed, it never felt empty, and nearly everyone who was there at midnight was still there at 3am when we turned the lights on, so I count that as a win.  The next Sequential Circus, SeqCircSix, will be in January.

After recovering from SeqCirc, having a few sailing missions out and around English Bay, and basically settling down and focusing on dayjob work for a while, I took off on my first big solo-sailing trip, headed for Victoria...

OMG TEH BLOG CAN HAS PHOTOZ NOW!!!111!eleven

OK, FINE!  I WILL SPEND THE HOURS AND HOURS TO MANUALLY MIGRATE ALL MY OLD CRAP OVER!

There.  Are you happy?

Actually, I am.  Wordpress is waaaay nicer than Drupal, at least for a blog.  Using Drupal for a blog was kind of like driving a Jeep - I mean, sure, it's rugged and capable and even beautiful, but it uses a lot of gas, it's noisy, and while the ragtop is nice in the Summer it's just impractical in the winter.  Really the only thing that prevented me from moving earlier was the complete lack of Drupal-to-Wordpress migration scripts.  Yes, I did in fact have to migrate each and every post by hand.

Oh well - at least now it's done, and I have a blog I can be proud of again.  Welcome to 2001, Drew - the internet now supports fancy things like "photos" and "videos" and "multimedia"!  Good thing I managed to lose my camera battery charger in the move.  Nice going, Drew.  Seriously though - in order for Drupal to have the simple feature "add image to the blog", you had to resize the image manually, upload it to the FTP site manually, and type in the full path to the image.  Now *that* is some serious 2001 stuff right there.

The downside of this whole migration fiasco is that I've basically had a mental block against doing any sort of blog updates ever since I committed to the jump.  That means that it's been almost three.  frackin'.  months.  since my last update - and honestly, this has been one of the most action-packed, adventurous, utterly insanely awesome Summers of my life.  I don't even know where to start.  I guess it'll be roughly at where I left off, back in June...

I just got off the phone with a colocation facility in Houston, Texas, trying to figure out why our servers are dropping like flies today. Four down so far, and signs of trouble on a few others, almost certainly foul play - I'm trying to keep in mind the old sysadmin truism 'Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity'. Still, my lip curls a little at the thought of some fourteen-year-old kid in his mom's basement in Iowa sending his massive botnet up against our servers in response to some unrealized slight. Or maybe he's earning money somehow, or even just the admiration of his peers. Or maybe he's just being a dick. *shrug*.

I'd say "he or she", but I have yet to meet a girl with both the skills to launch a DDoS attack and the sociopathic tendencies to actually do it. I'm sure she's out there somewhere.

Just to juxtapose, by "phone" I actually mean "Skype from my tiny laptop, sitting in the sun on the roof of my sailboat". Seriously, had you told me five years ago that this would all be possible, I don't think I would have laughed outright, but I would probably have smirked. All of these little incremental upgrades in technology and lifestyle have slowly and quietly added up to the WORLD OF TEH FUTUR3!!@1 that we were promised as kids. It's finally here!

...now where's my rocket car?

Anyhow. I was actually only using Skype because my cellphone batteries are currently dead, and I left the charger in New Brunswick the last time I was there. Since it's a basic no-frills Motorola flip I can charge it up with a regular mini-USB cable I had lying around, but unfortunately my MacBook Air only has a single USB port. I get to choose - would I rather have my cellphone charged up, or would I rather be on the internet? Internet, I choose you.

Also in the realm of electricity, my diesel engine currently isn't starting. I turn the battery selector to the starter battery bank, I pull the power toggle, flip on the lights and test the alarm to verify that the panel is receiving power, hit the starter button aaaaaand... nothing. Nada. Not a grumble, not a click of the solenoid, nothing at all. I'm hoping it's just a wiring problem, as the wiring is a real mess and I may well have accidentally disconnected a wire when I was cleaning up the other day, but frankly I can't tell.

To add to that problem, I have no water. I'm drinking (and cooking, and cleaning) from a 10l jug currently, because my water tanks are empty. Filling the tanks requires motoring up to the nearest hose, and, as I said, my engine isn't starting. *sigh*.

Man. I think it's time to convert this blog over to Wordpress. I've been using Drupal for the past year, and in a solid year I have yet to find a reasonable way to upload photos. For instance, I'm sitting less than four feet from the exposed wiring rats nest that is my starter panel, and my laptop has a camera - but for me to take a photo of that and post it to the blog involves using Skitch to take and resize the photo, uploading the photo to the webserver, and referencing the URL using full HTML tags. I can do that, but I don't wantto. With Wordpress, I can do all that in one step, and I think that'll make a huge difference for me.

Anyhow - an email just came in requesting an RSVP for the Open Web Vancouver speakers' pre-conference social next Wednesday night - and I'm realizing that I'm just over a week away from speaking to 400-odd geeks about work that I'm currently procrastinating against. Soooo... I'm going to cut this abruptly and get back to work.

Do you know what I mean by 'amplitude'? I can't remember if I've written about it here before or not. I like to believe that the universe needs a balance, and so for every bad thing there is an equal and opposite good thing. I like to think of life as kind of a sinewave of bad and good.

Well, ever since I've jumped headlong into this adventure, the amplitude of that sinewave has gone through the roof. Good days are awesome, bad days are terrible. There's really no in-between, it seems. Actually, I guess I can'treally complain; I know there are folks out there having a lot worse days than I am. I also know that the bad days are important, because without a reference of what a bad day is like, how can you really know that you're having a good day?

Anyway. I've been watching the weather all week, expecting "light rain" today before the sun returns. Since I've been making repairs to the boat, I had all the windows out and a couple of big holes in the bow, where I've been excising rotted wood and replacing it with fresh new stuff. To prepare for the rain I deployed tarps and garbage bags, duct-taped the windows back into place and made fast anything that looked like it wasn't held down well. I looked over the repairs of the week with satisfaction, knowing that my fiberglass and epoxy work was solid and would withstand a little moisture.

This morning I was awoken at 6:30am by a phonecall from the Evil Masters, to the sound of pouring rain beating on the roof of the cabin. I fielded the call, feeling smugly warm and dry in my bed, content in the knowledge that my work was sound. Apparently there were massive database problems that needed dealing with immediately, so I got up to go fetch my laptop and start working on it. I swung out of my berth onto the floor... and my feet wentsquish on the soaking wet carpet. D'oh!

Turns out my hatch repair, while definitely watertight, wasn't sloped correctly. Water pooled in the repair until it overflowed the lip of the hatch, and all the overflow went right into the forward cabin.

Actually, the forward cabin was fine by comparison to the aft cabin, which had the same problem but about ten times worse. Water had been flowing into the cabin by the liter, running down the guitar case inconveniently placed below the leak, and spattering onto the floor and a tupperware container. Better still, the tupperware container was the one that contained all of my foul-weather gear, hats, gloves, anything that would keep you warm out in the rain. Of course the lid wasn't on.

The carpets were soaked, the rain gear was soaked and another leak was exposed in the ceiling - I have no idea where this one came from, it's a new leak. There's another small leak from my repair to the corner of the cabin roof, and yet another in the side roof. At least my traveler repair - formerly the worse leak in the cabin - seems to be watertight!

So I went to the washroom to get started for the day and found that my tarps had somehow blown off in the night. The gaping hole in the ceiling was wide open to the elements, and rain was pouring in there as well. Oh, good.

I should probably mention at this point that I didn't get a chance to run the generator last night, so the house batteries were too low to run the inverter which powers my laptop. Then in a fit of stupidity, I used my laptop in bed to watch cartoons before crashing. Now, in the pouring rain, I had a work emergency to deal with and 8% battery on my laptop - and I can't run the generator without setting up some kind of elaborate tarp system to keep the rain off!

At this point, I gave up. There's a coffee shop just up the hill with good coffee, excellent food and free wireless, so I went for it. As I returned to my bed to get the laptop case, however, I discovered that the window in my bed had actually leaked - a lot - into the bedside storage locker. Ohhhhhh, good. The laptop sleeve was sitting in a centimeter or so of water, as was my GPS and my Nintendo DS. The GPS is weather proof, so it should be fine, but the DS might be toast - I guess we'll see. It was only sheer, dumb luck that I didn't toss my laptop in there last night!

So I pulled on wet raingear, threw my bike in the dinghy, bailed a few dozen liters of water out and rowed for shore. Life got a lot better with a large, four-shot americano. I got a bunch of work done, figured out the database problems, and had some food. Eventually the sun came out, offering a brief respite from the terrible mood of the day, and some hope for the remainder.

I left the coffee shop at around 12:30pm, heading back to the boat. As I rounded a corner, I hit a patch of gravel and went down, banging my shin and thigh and scraping up my hand in the process. It figures, the one time I hadn't bothered to take my cycling gloves out of my bag because it was such a short ride home, I fall on my hands! My bike is ok, and I've only got a few small scuffs and bruises, but there's still a couple of bits of gravel in my left palm. I should probably put a bandaid on; I'm leaving bloody palm prints on my laptop.

I guess it could all be a lot worse. Like, the new unexplained leak in the cabin roof, the drips missed my mandolin by a few centimeters - it would have made the day a lot more unpleasant to have to pour water out of the F-holes! At some point today I'll have to break out the shop vac and vacuum the rainwater out of the bilges, and in the next few days I'll need to tackle the newly-obvious leaky parts of the roof. The work never stops.

Anyhow. Big work deadline tomorrow; first site goes live in the cloud! Back to the grind...

I survived the rains of last week without incident. Actually, the rains are a really good thing, as they help by pointing out any spots where the cabin still leaks. I *think* I've got them all now, and it's almost time to start painting! I have to admit, the boat is looking better and better and better - I mean it goddamned well better be, given the amount of hours and money I've been pouring into her. Still, I needed a good project and every hour that I work on her she becomes more "mine".

I spent the whole weekend working on her, again - third weekend in a row of two solid eight-to-fourteen-hour days fixing, upgrading, grinding, fiberglassing, sanding, sanding and sanding. I'm starting to run out of things to fix which is a really, really good sign.

Thursday was a bit odd though - I basically wore out my Mastercraft random-orbit sander. The bearings just "went"... I went back to Canadian Tire to see what they could do about it, and they said not much without a receipt or at least a transaction number. Of course, I can't remember when I actually bought the sander, I think it was around two months ago. Two lessons learned: keep your receipts, and don't buy the cheapest power tool just because it's on sale. A hundred dollars later, I have a new DeWalt sander.

When I returned from the store with the new sander, I arrived at my rowboat and looked out to see a large, shiny, expensive fishing boat tied to mine! Obviously I jumped right in my boat and rowed out as fast as I could to find out what was going on. Apparently the guy lost one of his two transmissions, and wasn't able to get his boat out of 'forward' to steer back into his marina properly, so he quickly dropped anchor and called his mechanic - but apparently where he dropped anchor wasn't the best place, so he drifted right over into my boat. He put out his fenders so there wasn't any damage, but he was still bumped right up against me. He explained the situation

"So," he said, "I thought I'd just tie off to you for a while until my mechanic got here..."

Which he had - his docklines were now tied to my boat, and my docklines had been untied and lay on my deck. Now, I'm a pretty friendly and gracious guy, so I didn't lay into him - still, I'm pretty sure that boarding someone else's vessel without permission is considered a hostile act under maritime law, so at the very least it was very poor manners. I glowered at him some and hurried him along until he realized that he was utterly unwelcome to stay tied to my boat for any longer than absolutely necessary. He made some noises early on about leaving his boat there overnight, but I think my derisive snort got my point across.

To top it off, my anchoring permit, with my cellphone number written on it in sharpie with a message saying "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, PLEASE CALL:" wasright there, posted in the nearest window. If running into someone's boat and having to tie off to it isn't an emergency, I'm not sure what is.

Anyhow. Within an hour his mechanic got there, and they got the boat untied and moved along - I'm not sure if he was fixed or if the mechanic was just a better pilot, but whatever. Barely a thank you, and no hint of an apology. I don't know whether he was just a newbie boater, or didn't consider live-aboard squatters to have the same rights as people from an expensive marina, or if he was just utterly oblivious. Still, I have half a mind to borrow an RV from someone and go park on his lawn for a couple of hours with 'engine trouble'.

The weekend was mostly calm, with twenty-odd hours of hard work in the sun putting a new layer on my tan. I got a tonne of work done on the deck, spent way too much money at the marine store again, and finally installed my LED lighting system. I had gone to Ikea mid-week last week to find the fixtures, and managed to find the perfect fixtures - these ones to be precise, in white plastic. They have a fixture-mounted switch, they accept the LED bulbs perfectly, they have a long cable, and they're mostly plastic so they're ideal for the marine environment. I am incredibly pleased with these lights! I had purchased five, with the intention of putting two in the salon, one over the navigation table, one in the bathroom and one over my bed - but instead I installed all five in the salon and will have to purchase more. WOW though - I do not at all regret the purchase, nor the decision. In one step, the salon at night has changed from "camping" to "home". The light is warm and pleasant, and the difference in the general "feel" of the place is staggering. I will be purchasing another five of these lights, at least. The best part is that even with ten lights installed, I will still only be drawing a total of 30w of electricity to light the entire boat - just about half the draw of a *single* regular lightbulb!

Today, it's back to the grind. We've committed to having one of the gossip sites live and launched in the Amazon cloud by Wednesday. Just in time, the weather has turned sour, and later today and tonight it promises to rain. I've still got a few holes in the front of the boat, so I'll need to cover those with garbage bags or something for Tuesday, but then Wednesday and on through the weekend is supposed to be bright and sunny, so I should be able to get that job finished this coming weekend.

Just in time, too - coming up, I have a speaking gig on cloud computing at the Open Web Vancouver conference, an open offer of a live-pa set in Victoria, a possible second live-pa set at a music festival out on Texada Island (plus I can sail there!), and a third offer of an acoustic live set over on Vancouver Island. Furthermore I have a lovely young lady coming up from Michigan for a ten-day epic sailing adventure in June, a hacker conference in Washington the weekend after that, and I am putting together a live electronic music show on the only weekend in July without a three-day outdoor festival to go to. It never stops!

I have to pick and choose between the musical bookings, because I frankly don't know how much free time I'll have to practice up between then and now - but it's all very flattering nonetheless. Public appearances come with a thrill of adventure, but also with a dark sense of foreboding which drives me to work much harder on my music and performance so that I don't suck. It's one thing to play badly in your living room, it's another thing entirely to play badly in front of hundreds of people!

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.

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.