Lifestyle – Page 18 – disengage.ca

Round Two

Back on the bus, headed down to Seattle to try again. This time I have an overwhelming amount of documentation with me – carrying a copy of my last six months of gas bills, a copy of my mortgage, my home insurance policy, details about the CloudCamp conference, hotel booking confirmation, and return ticket. Hopefully that’s enough, and I’ll be able to cross the border again. Still pissed about having a permanent black mark on my record though.

…but still pretty gleeful about being able to write this entry on the bus. 😀 I think this system is going to work out just fine on the boat.

On the boat front (the bow? *groan*) I’ve managed to bounce a few more items on Craigslist, but I’ve got an awful lot more to go. Monday I have a few people coming over to grab stuff, and probably later on in the week I’ll have even more.

At Least…

…one good thing came out of it.

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*.

Aaaargh!

God. DAMNIT.

I’m on a bus on my way back to Vancouver, after spending the better portion of the day sitting in a customs office at the US/Canada border. Short version: I got turned away. Turns out, there’s a perfect formula for this; it includes:

buying your ticket online, but choosing to pay at the bus station when you pick up the ticket.

finding the ticket office closed, and having the bus driver offer to take your driver’s license and let you pay at the other end of the trip

not knowing if you’re planning to return Saturday or Sunday, so not booking a return ticket

not knowing where you’re staying in Portland, so putting “uncertain” on the customs sheet,

not carrying any cash in your wallet, and finally

not being able to quickly come up with a good way to prove that you actually live in Canada, when the officer stares you down.

Seriously, you’re supposed to travel with six months’ worth of your electrical bills and a copy of your mortgage? Nobody goddamned-well told me that, but apparently that’s what I’ve got to bring to them the next time I want to casually cross the longest unguarded border in the world.

fuck.

Embracing the Cloud

So work has me looking seriously into cloud computing, specifically Amazon’s EC2 ‘Elastic Computing Cloud’. Basic idea: virtual datacenter. Launch “instances” instead of real servers, and pay by the hour. Benefit: say you need five servers to handle your daily load, but twenty servers to handle Monday mornings – no problem.

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.

Always More Work

I spent all day Saturday on the boat, sailing around White Rock. It was eye-opening; a lot of the things that I’ve been taking for granted will need a re-think.

For instance, there was a lot more mildew than I remembered. Mostly this was because there was a lot more *water* than I remembered, due in part to the massive snowfalls of the past two months. I think a lot of the mildew will be easily taken care of with Tilex and some elbow grease, but it’s certainly changed my plans with regards to what can and what can’t immediately move aboard! I’ve packed all my sci-fi novels (well, “all” meaning “those that have survived the massive culling”) into a cardboard box, assuming that I would be moving the books aboard, unpacking them, and getting rid of the cardboard box. As it is, I’ll definitely want to keep the books in some kind of plastic tub for at least the first little while, while I track down and eradicate the leaks in the roof.

Frankly there was a lot more water than I expected – I know, that doesn’t seem like rocket science, but seriously – under one of the bunks there was a good two inches of water pooled up! That’s just not acceptable – at least the water is coming in from the roof, and not from the hull, but with Vancouver’s weather patterns I get to look forward to living in a state of perpetual damp for the next few months. Part of my original plan involved bringing my main synthesizer onto the boat, but now that I’ve seen the reality of the water situation, the synth’s soft nylon travel case seems woefully inadequate.

There’s certainly a lot of little fixes she needs – the fiberglass is cracked in quite a few places on the deck, and each place will need to be ground out and new fiberglass laid in and epoxied into place, then sanded and eventually painted. Bill, the current owner, assures me that the work is easy, just time consuming, and that she’ll be a beautiful vessel once the work is complete.

All that being said, sailing was glorious! She’s a huge boat, but she’s in no way unweildy – she’s fast and agile. I’d go so far as to call her downright nimble! We hit eight knots in just over twelve knots of wind; almost unheard of for a monohull, but no problem for my trimaran. The best part was leaving my coffee cup on the cabin roof while we hit eight knots, with no problem – a monohull would have been heeled over at four knots, spilling the coffee, but she stayed perfectly level the entire day. 😀

Tomorrow it’s back out to White Rock to spend another full day banging away at her; hopefully we’ll get some of the fiberglass repairs attended to, but I’ll be happy just to learn more about her systems and get her better ready to be my new home.