Technomadia – Page 5 – disengage.ca

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.

This isn’t working.

I am not a very good blogger.

To date, I’ve only been posting when I have something big to say, instead of when I have some new little bit of news or insight. I’ve changed the format of the blog so that it is less “story” oriented – ie, removed the ‘teaser’ part and made the full blog post appear on the main page. Now I am adopting the mindset that there is no post too small; we’ll see if that makes a difference in my posting frequency.

I just got off the phone with Bill, the guy I’m buying the boat from. We’re tentatively scheduled to go out for a sail on Thursday afternoon. I currently have no tenants lined up to take my apartment, but I’ve just posted it to Craigslist, and have several bites already. March 1st is the deadline! Most of my life is now being packed into tupperware containers, ready for storage or stowage, depending.

The Adventure Continues

TIE Fighter at sail, flying Main and Genoa

Meet ‘TIE Fighter’, my new home.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain

So yeah – after hemming and hawing for a few months, I’ve finally decided to go for it. I’ve agreed to purchase the trimaran – I’ve even paid the down payment!

She’s a 39-foot ‘Searunner’ trimaran, built in 1984. She’s fast and stable, and with a lot of work could be brought up to the point where she could undergo serious ocean voyages – yes, she is enough boat to do the trip to Hawaii. The life changes needed to move onboard a sailboat will be harrowing, I’m sure.

My thinking is this: if I can rid myself of my piles of useless crap, perhaps turning much of it into cash in the process, I’ll be better off in the long run. A friend once told me “You can never truly own anything that you can’t carry on your back at a dead run.” – we’ll see, I guess.

I’ve just returned from an epic ten-day road trip rock climbing in Nevada, and I leave again in three days for a trip to Seattle. My house is a shambles, and it’s only going to get worse as I sort everything into four piles: going on the boat, going on Craigslist, going to friends to store, or going in the garbage.

I hope it’s not asking too much, actually. I’d really, really like to get away without having to pay for self-storage somewhere, but I’m not entirely sure that’ll be possible. The thinking goes like this: if a storage locker is $200/month, and my couch takes up 1/10th of the available space in that locker, then my couch costs me $240/year to keep. Everything I read on ‘live-aboard’ forums says that people returning to their storage lockers after two or three years away take a look at the stuff they’ve stored and are flabbergasted at the amount of junk they somehow thought they’d need! I don’t want to be that person, but I also don’t want to find out in six months that I no longer want to live on a boat, only to discover that I don’t have any stuff anymore…

Fortunately, most of the really great stuff that I have accumulated over the years is very much useful to friends and family – speaker systems, stereos, synthesizers etc will all go to willing “storage” homes, for use by folks who’ll appreciate them.

It’s amazing how much utter junk I have been finding though – going on a suggestion from another friend, I’ve made a change to my clothes sorting algorithm. Previously, I’d look into my closet and pick out a few items that I no longer wanted or needed; in the new method, I’ve removed everything from my closet, laid it all out on the bed, and picked out only things that I knew I wanted to keep. Applying this technique to my closet and dresser, I’ve taken four garbage bags full of clothes to the Salvation Army so far!

Another big one, from a suggestion on the Cruiser’s Forum, was books. I know, it almost sounds like sacrilege, but the theory is sound: pick any book from your bookshelf and consider it. Will you read it again in the next year? Is it a valuable reference? Does the book itself have inherent physical value (antique, sentimental, etc)? If the answer to all three questions is no, then the book is a trophy, a decoration, nothing more. There is no room on a boat for trophies! That being said, when cruising the coastal waters, there’s an entire economy of traded paperbacks…

A really tough one for me, however, is art. I have a decent collection of paintings and sculpture that I’ve collected over the years – none of it has any inherent value, but dammit, I like it. This is tough. Where do I store it?

Lastly, my computers – there is no faster-depreciating asset than a desktop PC. My machines are stable and fast, but they’re powerful machines and they operate on AC electricity, which can be pretty scarce on a boat. What to do? Sell them for a tiny fraction of what I paid? Store them?

Anyhow. No great adventure can come without a lot of discomfort, so that’s apparently what I must do. Expect to see a lot more posts on this forum as I make the transition between basement-dweller to coastal skipper!

Argh!

I need to escape the house more often.

Seriously, it’s turning out that my “22h/week” job actually means sitting in front of my computer 40-50 hours a week, but only actually working on “work” for twenty or so hours. It certainly doesn’t help that the crazy winter weather has started – well, winter in Vancouver, that is, which means it has begun to rain and won’t let up until – oh, May or so.

Well – let’s just do an update, then. Still working for the media company, still mostly doing crazy celebrity gossip server admin stuff. Still living in the basement. Currently in negotiations to purchase a large sailboat…

Yeah, that’s right. I won’t give *too* many details, just in case I might jinx the whole thing, but here’s what I will tell you:

She’s big. Really big. Like, sleeps six people comfortably, but could potentially carry a lot more.
She’s in pretty rough shape. She’ll need a looooot of work before she looks as pretty as she can, but 90% of the work is scraping, sanding and painting.

My intention is to continue to negotiate the sale, to see if I can get the price down to something semi-reasonable. If everything works out, hopefully by the end of the year I’ll be moving out of my basement and onto a sailboat!

The downside is that there are a lot of hurdles – for instance, while she’s got a stove and a toilet, she doesn’t have a shower or a refrigerator. The shower can be retrofitted without too much work – there’s space for one – but the fridge is a bigger problem. Fridges consume a *lot* of electricity, which, on a boat, is a big deal. She does have an icebox though, and really, refrigerators on sailboats are kind of a new invention anyway, they’ve only really been possible for the past ten years or so. Using an icebox will be a shift in thinking, but one that I won’t really have to worry about for at least the next few months – I can keep things nice and cool just by putting them in a cooler outdoors.

Speaking of which, one might question the wisdom of moving onto a sailboat right at the start of winter. Well, rightly so – boats aren’t exactly known for their insular capacity. One might even consider them downright cold – but wait! This *particular* vessel was used as a live-aboard in Alaska for the past few years! She’s got dual diesel furnaces, fore and aft, and she’s been insulated against the bitter cold of the Alaskan winter. Actually though, I think I’ll probably have to rip out all the insulation and repaint her, but I’m quite looking forward to the work.

I’ve been taking a CYA (Canadian Yachting Association) Coastal Navigation class from the same guys that held the CYA Basic Cruising course I took over the summer. It’s been excellent, I highly recommend it – if you want details, feel free to email me and I’ll fill you in. The course is teaching me all about using charts and compasses and navigating the waters of the Georgia Straight – one thing the teacher said that I found particularly interesting was that the Straight (and surrounding waters) contain practically every kind of cruising waters that you’re likely to encounter anywhere in the world – if you learn to cruise here in British Columbia, you can pretty much cruise anywhere.

Anyhow – batteries are running low, and I suspect so is my welcome. I’m typing this in ‘Re-Entry’, a wicked little espresso place on Main Street. Time to pack up and go back out into the pouring rain…

hmm.

Is an office more productive because it’s an environment tailored to (or mentally associated with) working, or is it more productive simply because it’s not home?

Well, judging by the fact that it’s been a month since my last post, combined with the fact that I’m only blogging when I’m working outside the home, it would seem that my quest is not going quite as well as I’d have liked. Turns out it’s actually very difficult to get motivated to leave the house in the morning when you don’t technically have to…

Well – I guess I can’t really count it as a full month, seeing as eight (of a possible 20) working days were spent travelling to, partying in and returning from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Burning Man was amazing, as expected – really it was far, far more than that, but as our travelling crew decided on the way home, trying to describe the experience to someone who hasn’t been there is pretty much futile – you come off sounding like a cross between a religious zealot and a Pigeon Park loony. The closest I could come up with was “the universe constantly astounding me with how spectacularly beautiful it can be“. See? Loony.

Returning from my epic adventures, I seem to have slipped into a routine that isn’t at all what I was trying to achieve – in fact, I’m a lot less productive than I was in New Brunswick. This is serving to reinforce my belief that working in an office is better than working at home simply because it’s a different environment. Lately I’ve been getting up in the morning, making breakfast and coffee, and sitting at my desk for the next eight to ten hours, getting perhaps four to six hours of work done. This is wasting both my time and what remains of the beautiful Vancouver summer weather we’ve been having. There’ll be plenty of time to slack at home once the rains set in. So why can’t I seem to get motivated to get out and ride my bike to a coffee shop somewhere?

I guess the question becomes – is an office more productive because it’s an environment tailored to (or mentally associated with) working, or is it more productive simply because it’s not home? I find myself constantly distracted in my home “office”, due in no small part to my being surrounded by my favourite things.

The most productive working environment so far was working in an unused meeting room in my father’s law office in New Brunswick – basically a featureless white room. I mean, there were a few unremarkable paintings on the wall, but apart from that it was a table, a few chairs, and that’s it.

Anyhow – today I’m splitting tasks – I spent a few hours this morning working from my desk in my apartment, then showered, shaved, and responded to an emergency tech support housecall from a girl I’ve been seeing. Sweet! An actual excuse to get off my ass and get out of the house – and you know what? It’s not so bad. I’m writing this from a Blendz coffee shop (note to self: Blendz has free wireless) on Robson Street. Robson isn’t exactly the most calm, quiet street in the city, so it’s been somewhat difficult to maintain focus – but at least I’m out of the house. 🙂