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.