Judging from the light pouring in over the top of my hatch cover, it’s a beautiful day outside.
Judging from the weather report, it’s going to be gorgeous for a week or more, with each day just getting hotter and hotter.
Yay!
Category: Lifestyle
Lifestyle Stuff
Fake Monday
Today is Tuesday, but it’s technically the start of the week since yesterday was Victoria Day, a statutory holiday here in Canada.
The holiday long weekend was gorgeous. I technically took Friday off of work also, so it was a four-day weekend full of sunny boat repair work. I got so much done! Where to begin…
Thursday night I went out to the Anza Club to catch a show – Tarran the Tailor was playing upstairs. Excellent time, great music as usual – afterwards I biked back to my rowboat, but as I approached I noticed a couple of bicycles abandoned at the top of the dock ramp. As I arrived, I found three 20-something folks sitting in my boat, drinking bourbon – they mistook me for a fellow Midnight Mass rider and invited me to join them. As I explained that I was actually there to kick them out of my boat and go home, they were shocked and extremely apologetic, but really, it’s not like they were hurting anything. The boat is always locked up with a padlock, and there’s nothing left in it to steal. I mean, if they’d thrown my oars in the water or tried to damage the boat in some way, it would have gone much more sourly – but as it was, they were nice enough folks, geeks even. We exchanged names and URLs, so Adam, Andrew and Rebecca, if you’re reading this, feel free to drop me a line. 🙂
Friday and Saturday I got up at 8am and worked hard on the boat – I finished a bunch of epoxy work, got hinges onto all the storage hatches finally, and made progress in getting the hinges and hasps onto the cabin hatches – that project still needs more work, of course, but the end is finally in sight. I spent a bunch of time in the engine compartment working to get the kill switch in place, and finally succeeded – but when I went to test it, it didn’t work, and in fact I’ve apparently damaged the cable to the point that I need to go and find a new one. Boo – at least now, after two visits to the marine store and one visit to Canadian Tire, I know that the cable is called a ‘utility cable’ and that I should be able to get a new one from LloydCo Auto Parts.
I also removed the traveler on Friday – ie the seven-foot-long pulleys-on-rails thing that the boom attaches to – so that I could fix a few leaks in the bedding hardware. The leaks were directly over the stove, which meant that every time it rained I’d have to use steel wool on the cast iron stove grill again to get rid of the big patch of resulting rust. The leak had, over time, caused some of the roof to rot; this led to the first cutting of a large hole in the boat roof, and the bulk of the 1/4″ of sawdust that covers everything in the galley at the moment. The hole is patched, the surface is fiberglassed, sanded, faired perfectly with epoxy and fairing compound, and the traveler is now ready to be rebedded – perhaps this afternoon, if the weather clears up for a while.
Sunday I had a few guests over helping me work on the boat – it seems unfortunately that adding more people to a project doesn’t necessarily make the project go any quicker. Still, it was nice to have the company, and a few projects got nailed down properly – though when I removed the trampolines to fix a few small cosmetic problems on the center bow of the boat, we discovered a few patches of rot that quickly grew into a huge seven-foot hole in the boat. The rot wasn’t structural, which was a relief, but all that wood still needed to be replaced. I got a bunch of the wood in, but then Sunday was mostly rainy, so I had to cover the work site with tarps and pray for the best, spending the day curled up, drinking rum and watching movies with a friend. Sunday night was more rain and a lot more wind, which picked up the tarps and blew a cold wind through the boat, though as far as I can tell not much rain got in. It’s supposed to be rainy today and tomorrow, but then it’s supposed to be calm and sunny for another five or so days in a row, so this coming weekend I should be able to completely nail down the problems in the bow, and be done with it for the foreseeable future.
Today, however, I’m back to the day job. I’m working to figure out why the bottleneck in our EC2 migration appears to be network traffic – the frontend webservers seem to handle my load testing without a hiccup, but the database server spikes to a load of over 50, even though it’s an “extra large” EC2 instance. It doesn’t appear to be file I/O wait, nor a lack of CPU time, so I’m stuck. I’m not sure what I can do about that – I’ve always been under the assumption that network bandwidth between EC2 instances would be incredible, seeing as they’re virtual instances on more or less the same physical hardware. This week I have to solve the problem, but I’m not sure how just yet.
There’s still a few holes in the boat. I still don’t have clean water, though that’s just a matter of time – a reasonable amount of time actually, because filling the tanks takes a good fifteen minutes, then the bleach should be left in for an hour or so, then fifteen minutes to empty the tanks, then fifteen minutes to refill, fifteen minutes to empty, fifteen minutes to refill, fifteen minutes to empty, and finally a final refill. The traveler is still sitting a few feet away from where it should be mounted, and I still have more research to do on epoxy compounds before I can put the hatch doors properly back on the boat. The work is tiring, but very fulfilling, and a few long days of working in the sun have topped up my stores of vitamin D and left me with a positive outlook and a fantastic tan.
Morning
Well, apart from the bitter cold (mitigated by a merino sweater) and strongly gusting winds, it’s a beautiful morning in False Creek.
Today is the first morning of cooking breakfast on the Coleman propane burner, and hence the first morning for oatmeal with cinnamon, raisins and craisins! Delicious. About time I can actually start making use of the stores of dried food in the pantry.
This morning when I was woken by the sun at 6:50am, I hung a dish towel over the window, which allowed me to go back to sleep for another two hours. Sweet – even the crow landing on the deck and caw-caw-cawing at me for twenty minutes didn’t phase me, and I slept. Good thing, too, I needed the extra few minutes after staying out until 1am watching the new ‘Star Trek’ movie with JT. For the record: movie 7.5/10, theatre-going experience 1/10. $12.50 tickets, $4.50 fountain pop and more than a frackin’ hour of commercials and previews prior to the movie! God. And they wonder why movie piracy is so rampant!
Today I have to launch a bunch of webserver instances in the cloud and start stress-testing the website with ‘siege’. I suspect it’s going to hold up just fine, but we’ll see. I really wish there were some way to pull information about the cloud cluster *from* the cloud, via CSV file or something, instead of having to remember long strings of identifier numbers, IP addresses and volume IDs.
Today I also have to go back to WestMarine to buy wire, and possibly a pair of rubber boots. It has become uncomfortably obvious that I do not own a single pair of waterproof footwear! I mean, seriously, I have three pairs of rainpants, four waterproof jackets, two pairs of neoprene gloves… and no shoes. Given the rain of the past two weeks, this has basically meant constantly damp feet. I’ve been trying to get a pair of boots, but everywhere I try they seem to always be sold out of my size.
Oh! One very interesting piece of news – I spoke with Rogers Wireless tech support the other day, regarding my RocketStick cellular modem thing. Specifically, I wanted to know what the charges would be if I were to go waaaaaaaay over my allotted bandwidth for the month. Currently I have a “scaling” plan, which gives me 500 megabytes for $30/month – should I go over 500 megabytes, it changes my plan to a gigabyte for $35/month. Should I go over that, it changes to 1.5G for $40/month, then 2G for $45/month, and so on until $85 for 5G.
So that’s where I was worried – currently I am using anywhere from 100 megabytes to a gigabyte per day, just in regular internet traffic, mostly from work stuff, and I would really rather not be stuck with some kind of $2000 cellphone bill. I called to ask if there were a bigger plan I could get on. They said no.
So I asked what would happen if I went over…
“Well, sir, we then bill you per-kilobyte.”
“I see. How much is it per kilobyte?”
“Ummm – actually, I don’t really know. I know we cap the bill at $100 though.”
“Pardon me?”
“We cap your bill at $100.”
“Soooooo… $100 is unlimited internet?”
“We… cap your bill at $100.”
“Ok, so $100 is unlimited internet, but you’re specifically not allowed to use those words.”
“That is correct, sir.”
Sweet. So $100/month for unlimited wireless internet on the boat. That smells like a tax-writeoff work expense to me.
Soon I will have to leave the relative safety of False Creek and head for unknown waters. My current plan is to head for Victoria and anchor in either Cadboro Bay or Esquimalt Harbour for a couple of weeks, then perhaps head north towards Nanaimo before coming back to Vancouver for another two weeks. I’m trying to keep my plans somewhat open, but I am starting to feel the itch to move.
Two Lists
Things That Suck:
Things That Don’t Suck So Much:
Argh.
Ok, well, it’s day… six? I guess. Day six of officially living on the boat fulltime. This is the first day with any doubts.
Of *course* it’s raining, and it’s grey and cold outside, just like yesterday. It’s also very windy out, with gale warnings last night that had me keeping an eye on my GPS long into the night. Furthermore I haven’t had any coffee for two days, because my water supply has somehow become tainted, and my stove isn’t working properly.
The water I suspect I may have had a hand in. On Saturday I noticed that an old can of paint that came with the boat was leaking from the bottom seal. The paint was “bottom paint”, for painting the underwater portion of the boat, and as such is very nasty stuff, full of heavy metals. The paint was black, but whatever was leaking out of the bottom of the can was sticky and green, and made a big mess on the carpet – given the chemicals involved, this was the very definition of “toxic waste”! When I went to clean it up (wearing heavy protective gloves, removing and throwing out the carpet, scraping the underfloor with a scraper, and laying down new carpet), I noticed that it had also leaked through the floorboards and into the bilge, where it had pooled in a small corner. Lucky for me – if the leak had been two inches to the right, it would have gone into an extremely difficult place to clean. As it was though it was contained to a small area, and so I took up the floorboards, stood on the water tank, and cleaned up the toxic waste.
As I stood on it, the tank flexed a little, though nothing terrible – the tanks are made of heavy white plastic and bulge a bit when they’re full. I suspect however that this flexing is why my water now has a distinct yellow tinge. I don’t really know what to do about this, besides flush the tanks and start fresh, and to do that I need to pull the anchor and head up the creek to the filling station. I’m guessing there might be something I could do involving bleach? WestMarine sells some kind of water tank freshener stuff, but it’s pretty pricy and who knows what it actually is. I think I’m going to try adding 1/4 cup of bleach to the tanks, fill them, flush them out, then fill them again and see what that does.
The stove I think I may have figured out – it’s been throwing a lot less heat lately and a lot more soot, but I managed to find a manual for it online and it appears that it’s pretty much half poorly configured and half me not knowing how to use it properly. There’s a fan (unconnected of course) on the bottom of the stove that needs to be powered up in order for the burner to get the right draft needed to vaporize the diesel fuel, and right now it’s just not getting that draft. I’m thinking that probably what’s happened is that the fan not being on has caused the stove to produce more soot, which has clogged the air intake, causing the stove to produce even *more* soot. I think all it will need is a good cleaning and for the wiring to be set up to provide power for the fan, but man. Have you ever touched diesel soot? That stuff is black as night, and since it’s oil-based you need soap and water to get it off of you – no amount of rubbing on your pants will suffice. I do not look forward to being up to my elbow in the stuff, but if it means I can have a hot dinner then it must be done.
…but not today.
God. Just a constant barrage of new, tangible problems. In one way it’s really nice to have to use not only my brain to diagnose problems and work out solutions, but also to get my hands dirty actually implementing those solutions. Still, it’s dirty, difficult work, and my hands are not only dirty but scraped, cut, bruised, bandaged, rough and sore.
I’ve already done so much to make the boat a better place to live, but there’s still *so* much more to do! In order of priority:
Argh. On top of all the boat work, I’ve got just over a month to come up with and practice a 45-minute talk on cloud computing for the Open Web Vancouver conference. I’m pretty confident that I can be educational and entertaining for 45 minutes, but it will still mean a lot of work to get it all together, make slides, practice, etc.
Anyhow. The stove is lit, and I’ve got some bottled water in the stovetop percolator – in an hour or so I should have coffee. Today I have to continue working on porting one of the gossip sites into the clouds – I’ve committed to having it up and running by Wednesday night, and I don’t want to blow any more deadlines, so back to work I go.