Argh.
Posted by drew
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.
Adventure!
Posted by drew
...where to start?
Wow. Ok. So, I'm typing this from the boat. It's a gorgeous Friday morning, and my view from the deck is the stunning Vancouver waterline. The feeling of contentment is daunted only by the chill in the air, but after months of living in a basement with no control over the furnace level, it's not such a bother.
I. HAVE. ARRIVED!
Less than one year after I made my decision to become a technological nomad, I have thrown off the shackles of the office, cut down my consumption until a part-time job covers all of my expenses, moved out of my home, and now I live full-time on a large, sailing trimaran!
Ok - maybe that's a bit romantic. I now live fulltime on a big, leaky, floating wooden hunting camp older than a few girls I've dated in the last year or so. She's got soul though, and with a little work she'll last me as long as I care to keep this lifestyle.
To catch up a bit - the most remarkable part of this stage of the adventure is just how much the universe reminds you that it needs to maintain a balance. For every new freedom, there is a new and daunting responsibility, something new and important to learn about.
Let's start at Saturday - a friend and I went to White Rock on the bus early Saturday morning to pick up the boat. Fortunately water had been turned on at the dock, after being off all winter, so we flushed the antifreeze out of the water tanks and made a few repairs while getting ready to sail her to Vancouver. We talked with the former owner, squeezing as much final information as possible out of him, and then set out.
The first stress was navigating the Nekomekl River, which is a tidal river that gets *very* shallow at times. As the depth sounder showed 7, then 6, then 5... all the way down to *1*, we panicked somewhat and slowed to a crawl... then figured out that the depth sounder is measured in meters. Tie Fighter drafts about 2.5 feet, so we can float just fine in a meter of water.
We had to stand for about an hour waiting for a train bridge to open to allow us through, but then we were off into open water. Unfortunately, the lovely brisk winds of the morning died completely the second we left the river, and we had to motor the entire way. We made about 7kn though, which is very fast for a cruising sailboat - during the cruise we saw dolphins, ducks and sea lions.
As it grew dark and we approached Vancouver Harbour, I had the first scare of the night. I looked over and saw that we had missed a very large bell buoy - large like two stories tall, with a 10m concrete base - by less than 10m! This cemented into my head just how important it is to keep a close watch at night - even with a huge red blinking light on the top, I hadn't noticed the buoy until we were going past it!
The second scare came as we motored under the bridges towards my final destination, just beside Science World. The Burrard and Granville bridges, no problem - but as we whipped under the Cambie bridge, I happened to glance up and noticed that we had VERY little clearance. Like, just shy of a foot I would say! As the meaning of this sunk in, we realized that it was currently low tide, but if it had been any higher, we would have dismasted the boat! That would have cost *thousands* of dollars, and might even have been unrepairable - needless to say, I am now acutely aware of the height of my mast, and will be watching carefully from now on!
Anchoring that night took seven or eight attempts, and I slept pretty well, despite the harrowing experiences with the bridge and the buoy. In the morning, I was awoken by a slap-slap-slap-slapping sound on the deck, and poked my head out of the hatch to find two Canada geese standing on the starboard wing, as if to welcome me to the neighborhood. The morning was crisp, sunny and *gorgeous*.
I spent the night on Sunday as well, with no incidents, and Monday morning I returned to my apartment for a day of work. Monday night, on the other hand, a very stiff wind blew up and threatened to pull my boat into the shore - when I arrived at the boat I found that she'd already moved a few feet, so I pulled up the anchor and reset it with another anchor (a delta instead of a CQR), which seemed to hold much better. I spent a fitful night of sleep, the winds howling above the cabin, anxiously watching my GPS to make sure I wasn't dragging my anchor. The morning was gorgeous, however, easily the nicest day of the year so far, and I played hooky from work, spending the afternoon playing guitar on the deck. What a feeling of well being!
Wednesday afternoon was a lovely brisk breeze, and so I put the word out to a bunch of friends that I'd be going sailing, and invited them to join me. Unfortunately most of them could not, but as it turned out, that wasn't such a bad thing - as we pulled away from the anchorage and motored under the Granville bridge, the engine made a bit of a funny noise. I brought the throttle down and the noise went away, but it was curious nonetheless - then it did it again, just shy of the Burrard bridge. Directly after that, the engine quit, right in front of Sunset Beach! We quickly tossed an anchor over, which luckily hooked on the first try, and started to try to debug the situation.
The short version is that we ran out of gas. *sigh*. Always the easiest problem - but what made it worse is that running out of diesel is nothing like running out of gasoline, you have to purge the fuel lines of air bubbles which is a complicated and drawn-out process involving three wrenches, a few rags, and a close personal relationship with the engine! We ended up spending the night on the public docks just across from the beach, and a mechanic showed up in the morning to get the engine running and walk me through the steps should it ever happen again. How embarrassing!
Even further to this, he said to leave the engines running for an hour or so, just to charge the batteries back up. No problem, I thought, and he left the boat after getting credit card info and charging me a whopping $150 for the visit. Unfortunately, in the next hour, the tide went out...
I was sitting in the salon when I realized that the boat was heeling a little over to port. This is a bad thing - a trimaran doesn't heel unless there's a problem, like one of the amas taking on water. When I went up on deck, the problem was immediately obvious; one of the amas was up in the air, and the main hull was sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor! I watched in growing embarrassment over the next hour as the ama rose higher and higher out of the water, leaving me looking like a toy airplane lying in a puddle. I had to sit there, in full view of the beach and a thousand apartments, waiting for the tide to go back out. Eventually it did, and I motored back to my anchorage with my tail between my legs.
So that's where we are as of now. It's now 5:15pm, and I've just spent the day actually working from my berth on the boat, getting a reasonable amount of work done while taking breaks every now and again to go up on deck to sit in the sun and play my guitar and sing a bit. Life is pretty great!
...and now I have to bill my office for the work I've been doing, so that I'll actually get paid. 
Update
Posted by drew
(posted from the couch at my Dad's place)
I'm in an airplane, headed to New Brunswick for my baby sister's wedding party. I don't know what it is about being in an airplane that makes people want to blog, but there it is.
Trent lent me a book last night, and I've already devoured half of it today - frighteningly interesting stuff, Neil Strauss (yeah, "The Game" guy) writing about survival in unstable situations. It ties in really nicely with the boat plans - he stops *just* shy of using the term 'technomadic', but references the lifestyle amid talks of hinting, lockpicking and foreign passport applications. And here I thought I'd be spending the day playing Final Fantasy XII on my Nintendo DS.
On the boat front, things are coming to a crescendo - I return from the east coast next Thursday, and will be heading up to White Rock to pick her up either Friday or Saturday to move her into False Creek. The apartment is looking more and more bare every week; Mike and Chris showed up to pick up the couch, speakers and coffee table late Tuesday night. It's a strange feeling, watching another life chapter draw quickly to a close - this one has been dragging on for a few months too long, but the excitement and trepidation is building.
Oh! The apartment is rented! Two nice young girls will be moving in, and they're raring to start gardening. Looking around the house I notice that there's quite a bit of work still to do, filling little holes in the drywall, cleaning, etc. I've also still got to sort out what to do with the remainder of my junk! Most of the bigger stuff is gone now, and the pile in the corner destined for the (unsourced) self-storage company remains more-or-less static, but there's still a bunch of stuff that I just don't know what to do with. I read a so-so ebook on the liveaboard lifestyle recently, and it had one good point to take away: when you sell your stuff for 1/10th of what it's "worth", you're not getting ripped off; you were ripped off when you bought it for ten times what it would bring on the used market.
Oh god, Toronto Airport is still fucking pay-for-wireless! Qué lame.
CloudCamp Aftermath
Posted by drew
Wow, that was great! It's so nice to finally be interested in a technology again - I was honestly starting to think that I'd never enjoy another conference. Half of the fun of a conference is discussing new concepts and ideas in technology, but the other half is meeting up with folks who have similar ideas and interests, both on a professional level but also in a social (ie: beer) environment.
It was also my first "un-conference". The idea behind this is that there's a schedule, but none of the talks are booked in advance, and people come with a talk or presentation that they'd like to give and sign up to do so on the spot. In the end it's more about discussions than presentations, and in fact I was drafted (or more accurately, "tricked") into hosting a discussion group on scaling Drupal in the cloud.
Now *that* was an eye-opener - I had naïvely assumed that most people working with cloud computing were working with web applications, as that's what most of the documentation out there seems to be. Or maybe I just pitched my session wrong, and should have stressed all web applications and not just Drupal. Or perhaps I shouldn't have scheduled the discussion at the same time as Dan Kaminski's discussion on cloud security. Regardless, the room began with approximately eight people, and as it became apparent that we were really looking for a technical discussion but most of the people were in marketing and management, the room shrank to four people.
What was awesome was that the four people were:
Wild! I got more out of that half-hour session than I have reading documentation for the past month and a half. As the session started, we basically went around the room discussing backgrounds and technical histories, and it became apparent that I was really the only person in the room with any technical experience at all working with the EC2 cloud, I began to present my experiences to date, focusing on the three big problems that I had butted my head against - how to "auto-scale" web front ends using load balancers, how to scale MySQL databases elastically, and how to share storage between EC2 instances. As I discussed these, Dean Dierickx from RightScale showed up, and had some interesting notes to add from a high-level design perspective, which we talked about at length. We then started discussing database scaling, and it became apparent that nobody in the room had any practical experience with that at all.
Right about then, Jonathan Lambert from Work Habit let himself in, and after listening to us fumble about for a couple of minutes, grabbed a whiteboard marker and launched into a fifteen minute in-depth technical discussion on different methods of scaling MySQL. This was *great* stuff, though it pretty much cleared the room of the marketing and manager types. As he finished, he validated my whole trip with one statement - he said something like:
"Now, there are three major problems that everyone attempting to scale any web application in the cloud butts their heads against, and there's no simple answer to any of these: how to launch instances automatically from a load balancer, how to scale MySQL, and how to share storage between instances. We've fought these problems hard for two years now, and we still don't have a good answer, but here's how we've managed to get everything working so far..."
...and proceeded to lay out a basic, scalable platform for Drupal on the whiteboard. Most of his layout matched my work exactly!
To top that off, just last week I downloaded a script from the RightScale website that purports to set up a basic EC2 instance to be a "RightScale" machine, and poked through the script to see exactly what they're doing to prep a machine. I was shocked to see that every step of the way, their work matched what I was already doing to setup my own EC2 instances! That may not sound like much, but frankly after fifteen years of Linux administration, I have some particular ideas about how a machine should be setup for optimal networked administration; which additional packages should be installed, which default services should be turned on or off, what changes should be made to the default shell environment, etc. Seeing two large, successful operations doing exactly the same things as I do in my personal environments, and facing exactly the same challenges, was vindication to say the least!
Anyhow - even though it was a "free" conference (with the quotes of course implying bus fares and hotel fees), I think I got well more than my money's worth.
CloudCamp
Posted by drew
Sitting in a conference room in Amazon's headquarters, in the old hospital up on the hill in Seattle, waiting for the conference to start.
Goals today: learn more about shared storage between Amazon AMIs, learn more about how to automate launching of AMIs, make networking contacts with other EC2 nerds.
Round Two
Posted by drew
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.
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- mux: ps: all this work is great for my summer body! you're all festivals and beaches, I'm all 'wax on, wax off' and drinking milk. wait and see. July 27, 2010
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