"Estrallita, TIE Fighter, go two-one, over?"

I have to say, one of the things I've been enjoying most about La Paz is the active community of sailors monitoring and communicating on their VHF radios. Most of the boats have their radios on listening to channel 22 full time, and there is a popular radio net every morning, giving updates on weather, tides, lost and found, boat arrivals and departures, local news, swaps and trades and more. Seeing how effectively it creates a bond among the sailors in the harbour, I think if I were back in Vancouver I would try to encourage a local False Creek radio net.

the navigation-slash-comms table on TIE Fighter

The great thing about VHF is that the hardware is cheap and easy to use - the downside is that the functional range of the VHF signal is somewhat low. The signal can go a lot further, from land-based transmitters or larger installations, but for a ship at sea you get about ten kilometres and that's it.

That's where higher-power radios come in; on the TIE Fighter I've recently (finally!) finished a long, expensive ham radio install. Since then I've linked the radio with my laptop, and have been able to use it to send and receive emails from sea and update our current position with the WinLink.org tracking site. Through the emails I've also been able to have weather reports and even up-to-the-minute satellite images sent to me, giving us a view of what's happening over the horizon and letting us know what to expect during those stressful nights at sea when the winds just won't stop building.

It's not like data over ham radio is a new concept, though admittedly the number of active hams has been somewhat in decline for the past twenty years and the interest in packet radio doubly so. Ham radio in general has been picking up a little lately, probably in part due to more and more people taking interest in emergency preparedness and doomsday scenarios - nobody really seems to have a land-line telephone anymore, and if there's a big earthquake or natural disaster of some type, history shows us that the cellphone networks cannot be relied upon. Still, the concept of linking ham radio with the internet has fallen somewhat, due to cheap, fast and ubiquitous internet access. I have not been able as of yet to get a straight TCP/IP connection to the internet over the radio; I've only been able to send and receive messages.

my grandfather, 'Marconi' Moe Smith

For what it's worth, ham radio is apparently in my blood! Two of my uncles are active hams, and my grandfather on my mother's side was the Chief Engineer of CBC Radio for many years. "Marconi" Moe Smith was responsible for the design and construction of the huge Radio Canada International 500,000-watt curtain array antenna, broadcasting CBC radio international - to most of the planet - from Sackville, New Brunswick.

It took me thirty years to finally take the plunge and get my ham license, but when I took a certification class with the Bluewater Cruising Association I found myself slapping my forehead in disbelief at the parallels. I have been a certified pocket-protector computer nerd since a very young age, dabbled in homebrew electronics and spent countless hours in front of a bank of analogue synthesizers, all of which contributed to me receiving an honours grade on my ham radio exam.

For the ham radio install, I chose an Icom IC-7000 radio - I considered the Icom IC-706, but I figured if I'm only going to buy the one radio, I should buy one with ample room to grow and features geared towards using the radio specifically for data. In retrospect I'm not sure I gained much going with the newer model, but I'm not dissatisfied with my decision. For a tuner, I was recommended the SGC-230 Smartuner over the matched Icom AT-180, because the SGC-230 can be used with any radio, not just the Icom, and I figured that might come in handy someday if I upgrade (or otherwise destroy) my IC-7000. On other recommendations, I also added a marine voltage booster and a tuner interface device to make the radio and tuner work together even smoother.

attaching the new backstay, insulator visible against my foot

For the antenna itself, I had a secondary, non-structural backstay constructed by Ed at Sailing Supply in San Diego. The 3/16" stainless backstay is somewhat overkill, given that it will never see any serious loads, but at least it's nice to know that it's there in case my main backstay ever breaks, and I don't have to worry about my main backstay losing strength from being cut to add the insulators.

Lastly, I had to add a radio-frequency ground - this is similar to an electrical ground, but for radio-frequency energy. Normally on a sailboat you would connect the RF ground to a series of copper straps that are eventually bound to the huge chunk of metal in the keel, but with TIE Fighter not having a keel I had a bit of a problem on my hands. I would have to add a lot of copper strapping, creating a counterpoise of a few hundred square feet - and with the price of copper currently through the roof, I wasn't looking forward to dropping hundreds of dollars on copper alone.

I had a recommendation of a new kind of counterpoise, a "KISS-SSB" - apparently a thick rubber hose with over 600 feet of carefully-sized wires inside. It was about a hundred bucks, so I figured I would gamble and give it a shot before forking over for the copper ground. It worked, though I'm not entirely satisfied with the results... I think the real goal of the KISS-SSB is to provide a counterpoise very specific to the small number of frequencies used for Marine-SSB, not the enormous spectrum available to ham radio. I've been experiencing a lot of RF feedback in the signal and in the other electronics on the TIE Fighter - everything I read says that this is because my antenna tuner is not properly grounded.

RF grounding for marine radio, as it turns out, is a huge can of worms with many fiercely-defended opinions. I've got a few lines out to experts, and I think the next step will be to try replacing the KISS ground with a thick copper wire going to the bolts holding my propellor-shaft strut to the bottom of the boat - it's one of the very few metal items that make contact with seawater. If the information in this PDF is accurate, I should be able to get away with it - otherwise, I might have to drop the money for copper strapping.

the vmware desktop running various ham radio software

Once all of the parts were installed (including a new VHF radio, a Standard Horizon Matrix AIS+ hurriedly purchased in Sausalito when our previous VHF quietly died the day we were leaving for San Diego) in a newly stained, varnished wood panel, we left offshore for two weeks, giving me a lot of time to spend bent awkwardly over the nav table fiddling with the radio dials. Within a couple of days I had figured out enough to get into Winlink and start sending and receiving emails, which made the trip down feel immensely less isolated. I don't think I've welcomed email from friends and family as much as I did on that trip since my first internet emails almost twenty years ago.

The grand overall cost of the radio equipment and installation was somewhere around $3,000. I was careful to select components that are modular enough that I could migrate the system to another boat or to a land-based station in the future, and I feel like I've succeeded in making the setup somewhat "future-proof". Admittedly I could have spent a third of that on a satellite phone and had $2000 leftover to spend on a data plan, but I don't feel like a satellite phone would give me the same sense of being a part of a global community as the ham radio has.

Arguably our most important guiding tenet on this boating adventure is to actively strive to be as self-sustained as possible. It would be difficult to call ourselves self-sustained while paying a monthly phone bill to a satellite service! Now that the ham radio is installed, the bills have been paid and the licenses acquired, we're free to use it for the rest of our lives without any further fees - communicating from virtually anywhere in the world, using power that we generated from the wind and the sun. That's a good feeling.

delivering the eulogy

Schaltwerk.riotnrrd.com began her life in a Magitronic assembly house on September 25th, 1994. She was a very fast machine for her day; although Pentium processors had begun to arrive in the local computer stores they were still thousands of dollars, and as a 486DX2-80 boasting a 40MHz bus she gave machines twice her price a solid run for their money. I worked at the time at the larger of the two local computer stores, and as such I was able to source a single 16M RAM SIMM for far below the retail price. I (or rather my father) paid $800 for the RAM alone!

Schaltwerk spent the next few months running OS/2 Warp, supporting an active Telegard BBS and many, many hours of Doom, Doom 2 and Heretic deathmatches over 14.4k modem - and later over a local ARCNet network, cabled through my parents house with chained 25' phone extension cords from the dollar store. When I left for college in January of 1995, she came along as my primary college computer, the task for which my father had intended her. At college she continued to support the BBS, running Renegade and then Iniquity software, but the BBS was often suspended to allow me to spend long nights mastering Autodesk 3D Studio and Photoshop. At some point I also discovered Linux, and when a friend began handing me surplus computer hardware from his work, I was able to add several more hard drives and increase her RAM to a whopping 40 megabytes. I would give a lot for photos of my workstations at this time, but as far as I know none exist.

the SysOp screen for iNiQUiTY BBS

As college came to a fruitless end - a diploma, but zero job prospects - I took a job as a graphic designer for a college web project. Schaltwerk was the main graphics workstation, putting in months of midnight-until-dawn marathon Photoshop sessions. I was also working hard on my own Linux interface design projects, working closely with the Enlightenment window manager team.

In about March of 1997 I moved back to Sussex and took a government-funded web design position. I was offered a Pentium workstation of my own, but after struggling with drivers and software installs and an unstable machine, I moved Schaltwerk into the office to be my primary workstation. This didn't last too long, as I couldn't deal with the lack of computer at home! Schaltwerk, nestled in her basement lair in my parents' house, had sprouted two more monitors - a monochrome display addressed with a second video card and a Wyse 60 dumb terminal attached to the serial port now accompanied the main SVGA monitor. One mouse, two keyboards and three displays - pretty fancy stuff for 1997!

the first Enlightenment theme designed on Schaltwerk

In 1998, my friend Darren, my baby sister Jen and I packed all of our worldly possessions into Darren's car and drove across the country from New Brunswick to Calgary, Alberta. We only had about $800 between us, but with one minor speedbump we managed to get settled and employed and much to our parents' collective surprise, we made a go of it. After we all landed jobs at a major ISP, Schaltwerk became a networking powerhouse, having half a class-C subnet (128 addresses) of real internet IPs delegated to her for several months! Of course, at the time I really didn't know what to do with that kind of resource, so I occupied myself learning Linux networking and DNS, and Schaltwerk got her first live, static-IP instances of BIND, Sendmail and Apache. Thankfully by this time I had gotten over the debilitating CircleMUD addiction I picked up in college!

In early 1999, my new girlfriend and I moved into a new house with our friends Ivan and Andy, who were running what was at the time the most technologically advanced Shoutcast station in the world, BeNOW. I became their network administrator, and together we whipped eleven machines and hundreds of gigabytes of storage (a big deal at the time) into shape. Schaltwerk took over as the router and firewall, also handling DNS and mail services for the BeNOW and riotnrrd domains, as well as primary and secondary DNS for dozens of other domains.

Jonnay's desk, Schaltwerk's home for years

In late 1999, I had a job offer in Vancouver, so we packed our things and moved into a geek house in East Van. Schaltwerk stayed in Calgary and went to live with my friends Jonnay and Shell, where she spent the next few years humming away under Jonnay's desk. During this time, she remained on a static IP address, becoming the primary DNS service for scores of domains, handling primary and backup mail services for dozens of others - but most importantly, she became the webserver for a number of domains. The most popular by far of any of the websites hosted on Schaltwerk was eastvan.bc.ca - a Slashcode site boasting 'News For Crackheads - Nothing That Matters' which quickly gained notoriety as a gathering place for Vancouver's dot-com underbelly. Most of the people I call close friends can trace their roots in our friend group back to eastvan.bc.ca. During this time, Schaltwerk also hosted the Black Hole Club email list, gathering a sizeable portion of Vancouver's electronic music production scene together online.

In 2001, we moved to Costa Rica, leaving Schaltwerk with Jonnay and Shell - to her credit, Schaltwerk worked almost completely without interference from her hosts, only requiring several reboots and a hard drive replacement over the four or five years that she spent in their home office. In 2003 we moved back to Vancouver, moving into a house on 10th Avenue.  Schaltwerk became part of a cluster of media and internet servers driving the geek house, which we dubbed 'Pod6', a reference the Adult Swim cartoon 'Sealab 2021'.  For a while Schaltwerk ran the website, but soon the site outgrew the humble 486 and we built an upgraded machine, relegating Schaltwerk to just email and DNS.

the Pod6 network operations center, Schaltwerk top left

In 2005 we purchased our first home and Schaltwerk took her new position - alongside a server from Jonnay and Shell, in reciprocation for their years of hosting - in a basement closet.  Too slow now to support much in the way of modern web services but still providing email and DNS services for dozens of domains, Schaltwerk also provided SSH shell endpoint access, allowing my friends and I to casually tunnel through even the fiercest of corporate firewalls.

In 2007 I began the long process of migrating all of the services off of Schaltwerk and onto a third-party host, Dreamhost. Many domain owners had to be notified, many small webpages had to be migrated and dozens of cryptic user scripts had to be decoded and disabled or ported. By 2008 almost all of this work was complete, and Schaltwerk remained online but rarely used until April of 2009, when I moved out of my basement and aboard the S/V TIE Fighter. I could not bring myself to just throw away a machine with such a history of faithful service, and so I brought her aboard, intending to find a way to celebrate her life.

goodbye, Schaltwerk. you will be remembered.

Schaltwerk gave me fifteen solid years of faithful work, far more than can be reasonably expected of a PC.  Her only fault was her lack of processing horsepower, and while I will admit that I entertained fantasies of one day putting her back in service as a terminal somewhere, life on a sailboat is not kind to electronics, and a slow death in a storage locker just wouldn't suit her. With a few respectful words about her life and service I sent her to her final resting place in the ocean, about a kilometer off the Sunshine Coast.

I have to admit it took a few minutes for the lump in my throat to pass.

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!

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...

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 just put the Rogers 'Rocket Stick' internet thingy to a real-world test: I went through the Massey Tunnel (a serious tunnel, under a major river) and didn't experience any dropouts in service. I was chatting with Trent at the time over MSN, even. Sweet.

Still. Sucks. I wonder if I should still try to make it down to Seattle this Saturday for CloudCamp. I'm registered, I should at least *try* to make it. *sigh*.

Anyway, as with any new technology, there's growing pains. I've been spending my last few days working with instances, building a custom instance based around CentOS 5.2, from scratch. The documentation makes it seem easy, but there are a lot of gotchas. For instance, you need to configure OpenSSH to allow root logins, which goes against both conventional sysadmin wisdom and the default configuration of OpenSSH. D'oh. That nugget right there represents a good hour of puzzling.

Another thing that I'm looking into is using Amazon's S3 storage system for backups. I've downloaded and installed 'JungleDisk', a utility that mounts an S3 storage repository as a network share. It has a very useful backup utility built in, and it's probably the first one I've used that actually works like I expected it to, and continues to work without any interference from me.

Now, the real question is how I can use a combination of these technologies to help rid myself of even more of the tethers to my household computing environment. Until recently, I've had four active computers in my house:

• my "work desktop", which has long been a laptop but for some reason I get more work done sitting at a desk, with the laptop up on a stand and a fullsize keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse attached.
• my studio desktop, a proper PC tower running Ableton Live, attached to a MOTU 828mkII firewire soundcard and a pair of Mackie studio monitor speakers.
• my "live-pa" computer, a custom-built 1U rackmount PC, similar to the studio desktop but hardened for use at clubs and raves.
• my router/gateway, aka my old studio desktop, running CentOS Linux, acting as a fileserver for the house and running an instance of Windows XP as a VMWare host, for downloading torrents and the like.

I've shut down the studio desktop PC, and parted it out somewhat. The PC itself is still sitting in the studio, but I'm hoping to either find it a home, or perhaps sell it on Craigslist. Used computers don't go for very much, unfortunately, so I don't know what I'll get for it. I'm not sure yet what to do with the household router box; perhaps I'll pull the drives and put them into portable cases, or maybe I'll just wipe the whole thing and sell it on CL as well. Ideally I'd like to leave the house with some form of internet, but that could just as easily be a LinkSys box in the laundry room.

I'd like to use the cloud for as much as possible. For instance, backups are now working just fine. My four email accounts are all stored in IMAP servers on Dreamhost, which I guess counts as "the cloud". I haven't yet signed up for Apple's 'MobileME' thingy, but I intend to eventually - perhaps after I get an iPhone. The idea is to move as much of my data off of my personal computers and make it accessible from anywhere. There's still a lot to sort out though.

Bah, it's late. More later.

Another week is ending, and I still don't have a signed contract with my new Evil Masters. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'm sure glad I stuck to my guns and didn't serve my two weeks' a month ago like I wanted to. I made that mistake once before...

When I lived in Calgary, Alberta, I was working my dream job for a few months - I had been drafted from the customer service center of a large ISP straight into the R&D department! This was unbelievable luck, and I was on cloud nine, but unfortunately it was not meant to be - the manager of the department was notorious for challenging the status quo. This was actually a really good character trait for an R&D department, but it drove the CEO and the General Manager of the company batshit crazy, and eventually something snapped. Disciplinary action was taken; my manager was made the manager of customer service for two weeks, and the four R&D guys were scattered to the wind to work in other departments for those two weeks.

My new department was connection support - you know, the guys that answer the phone and talk you through your problems getting onto the internet. The guys that know long modem initialization strings by heart, and all the different versions of Winsock. The guys that work four days on, four days off, in twelve-hour chunks, clinging to their humanity.

As an additional kick in the teeth, the best four of the eight-man tech support team had recently quit, citing poor working conditions and pay, and had taken jobs at the other ISP in town for better hours and pay. There was a standing offer at this other ISP of a job for any of us, should we choose to jump ship, but I wanted to get back into R&D more than anything, so I stuck it out. Four techs became six, with myself and another of the R&D guys joining the team.

It wasn't actually that bad - though the insidious part of the four-days-on, four-days-off working schedule is that sometimes your weekend is Monday through Thursday. There's not much to do on a Monday night in Calgary, so you end up drinking in seedy bars with people of questionable reputation, and eventually that takes a toll. Soon the schedule included work nights, and my exemplary punctuality began to suffer - I overslept on several occasions, and started to become surly with customers.

Any tech insider will tell you that the average lifespan of a technical support phone worker is eighteen months - after this period, it's likely that someone will get an earful when they call in with a simple problem, not realizing that they're the forty-fifth person that day with the same stupid goddamned one-click solution, you moronic sonofabitch idiot luser motherfREAD THE GODDAMNED MANUAL @#RT(GEW!@#@$! AAAAAAAAAAGH!!! .

One day I came in late, and was met with a bad scene - apparently out of four techs scheduled "on" that day, only one had shown up on time, and the General Manager was pissed. She and I got in a little argument over it, with the culmination being her yelling back "You can't even handle a simple tech support job, you're never going back to R&D!". That was enough for me, and I handed her my resignation letter thirty minutes later.

A friend of mine was working in the Network Operations Center over at the other ISP, and thought my resigning was great. He said, quote, "DUDE! Awesome! Send me your resume right away. You'll be in tier one tech for a day, tier two for a day, tier three for... about a week, tier for for a week or two, and then we'll promote you right into the NOC with me, it'll be rad!". That sounded pretty good to me. I sent over the resume.

I got called in for the interview immediately, and went the next day. They made me do an interview quiz, with a lot of winking and nudging, and said to expect interview number two in a few days. Lo and behold, interview two, three days later. Interview two was very similar, with a lot of "sorry to have to do this, we all know you're hired, it's just red tape..." apologies and smiles. After interview two, they said to expect interview three in a few days, with that interview being the meeting of the team and the serving of the official job offer.

Well, I waited.

...and waited.

After a week and a half, I pinged my friend, who said "Dude, I have no idea what's going on, you've been greenlighted and they should be making an offer!". So I waited.

After two and a half weeks, I started getting nervous - I didn't have any money left (who has savings at age twenty-three?) and rent was coming up. Still no word.

Finally, at almost a month, word came down - the ISP had had a hiring freeze issued by their head office, and they were not to hire any new people for at least three months! This was a serious problem - we were already a collective of five people living in a two-bedroom apartment, just trying to make ends meet. It got pretty bad there for a while - to the point that to this day I make regular donations to the Food Bank. Eventually I found a new job, and took it at pay that was faaaaar below market rate, just happy to have a paycheque again.

I don't regret any of that time - I made a few friends that I've held on to for the decade since, and learned a lot of tough lessons. The biggest one, however, was NEVER quit your job until you have the next one lined up and the papers signed!

Anyhow.

I had a meeting with my accountant. We spoke at length about the move from being a regular salaried employee to being a contractor working from "home". He told me that to be able to write off a home office, it would have to be a portion of my house used exclusively for working, and specifically for meeting clients. We'll see, I think I can handle that.

The biggest take-away I got from the meeting, however, was that as a contractor I should have any funds from the new Evil Masters deposited into a separate chequeing account, and then pay myself (and any work-related expenses) out of that account. That way should the government choose to audit my income, they can pull the account transactions and will have a clear record of all income, where it came from and where it went. It would not be anywhere near as easy if the paycheques went into my regular chequeing account...

Revenue Canada: "So, uh, where'd this $100 come from?"

Me: "My Mom. Birthday cheque."

RC: "You're a contractor, this is your work bank account, we want to see the receipts for that..."

The accountant also said that it'd be important to get the bank to send over physical copies of all cheques written or deposited into the account. This will make it much easier come tax time.

Another thing that he said that I thought was interesting:

"Every time you start thinking about hours and billing and materials and such, forget about computers completely and pretend you're a plumber. Everything you bring to the table is worth money on that invoice."

Nice. Keeping that one.

I was really hoping for some outside-the-box magic bullets regarding taxation, but I wasn't able to come up with any. He did make it clearer to me that I'm not so much starting a new job, but rather I'm starting to work for myself - and that helped me to make a big mental jump. If I'm working for myself, contracting to the new Evil Masters, I can also gather other contracts, both short and longer term, and begin to build up my own business as opposed to working to build someone else's empire.

It doesn't have to be big to start, it just has to be a start.

Anyhow, the new Evil Masters are still in negotiations with their client, from whom the money to pay for my services will flow. Apparently this client is a real ball-buster when it comes to service agreements, so they have to be verycareful with the wording of the contracts... and each change has a two-day turnaround with the lawyers. I haven't given on them yet, and I haven't served my notice - though I'm still watching Craigslist for other opportunities.

Therein lies the question... Pro or Air?

Life's questions should always be so rough.

I'm currently working on a 2.2GHz Macbook Pro, purchased for me by my current/former Evil Masters, as negotiated at my hiring. I didn't negotiate hard enough though (which is partially because I was rushing to get a job as quickly as possible to finalize a mortgage application), and as a result the terms are much less favorable: I get the laptop, but I have to stay a year before I can buy it out, and even then the buyout is something ridiculous like $1500, which drops to $500 at a year and a half and $0 at two years. What can I say, I was a bit desperate for a job, and the laptop was just a perk.

As I see it, my options are to either keep the current laptop, paying the buyout cost of $1500, or to purchase a shiny new Macbook Air.

There are pros and cons to each laptop:

Current Macbook Pro:

Pro - battle-tested and proven
Pro - has my stickers on it already
Pro - 120G hard drive, faster CPU
Pro - firewire port
Pro - replaceable battery
Con - bigger and heavier
Con - screen has the nasty finger-oil marks
Con - isn't a new Macbook Air

Macbook Air:

Pro - sexy and light
Pro - brand new screen
Pro - smells like a new laptop
Con - lose my stickers
Con - no firewire
Con - no optical drive
Con - smaller 80G harddrive, smaller CPU

For my needs, smaller and lighter is quite a value - I intend to throw it in a backpack every day and bike somewhere to work. The smaller drive is easily mitigated with fast external drives, which I already own; archival backups of all important data etc is trivial in OSX. Plus, the sheer "sexy" of the thing pleases me greatly.

On the other hand, I already have and use a MOTU 828mkII firewire audio interface - actually, based on that link, I see that they no longer manufacture the mkII in a firewire version, and that there's actually a mkIII version now. Regardless, if I have any inclination to use my new laptop for audio-related projects I should really consider the firewire port - or maybe try to trade my 828mkII for a USB2.0 model.

There is a third option - to leave this Macbook Pro with the company and purchase a brand new Macbook Pro. That would take care of a few of the cons for sure, and is probably my best bet, all told. Still, it's not a Macbook Air. For some reason this all feels like trying to decide between dating the super-hot, fun to hang out with and crazy in the sack blonde sweetie vs. the smart, elegant and beautiful brunette... the intelligent choice is obvious, but should I follow my head or my heart? When I listen to my head I usually accept short-term boredom but always win out in the end, but following my heart is invariably more fun.

I'll have to decide this soon, probably within the next week.