disengage.ca a quest for the technomadic lifestyle

The Written Word

Posted by drew

Having no TV, no stereo and currently no sound on my laptop, my entertainment options on the boat as of late fall neatly into four categories.  On cold, rainy December nights, I can:

• play Nintendo DS,
• make music with my guitar, mandolin, harmonica and/or voice,
• derp around on the internet, or
• read books.

With the weather being mostly lousy and Christmas (ie: Visa bills) right around the corner, I've been hitting all four pretty hard lately, although some a bit more than others.  My Nintendo games collection is quickly growing stale and I'm already on the internet for at least eight hours a day for work, so I've been spending a lot more time making music (more on this soon), and I picked up a few more books at the used bookstore the other day.

I've just finished reading the first of them, Michael Swanwick's "Bones of the Earth", which was entertaining; kind of another take on the whole 'Jurassic Park' genre but with a clever take on time-travel.  I didn't think it was quite up to the level of sheer brilliance of his other novels, specifically "Stations of the Tide" and "The Iron Dragon's Daughter", but it was a fun light read and I finished it over two quiet nights on the boat.

In the wall cubby beside my berth - which no longer leaks and destroys books! - I've got Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver", the first installment of his 'Baroque Cycle' trilogy.  In the past two years I've started this book three times, but the previous two attempts I didn't manage to push through the slow first few chapters enough to develop a relationship with the characters.  His phenomenal book "Snowcrash" was lean, fast-paced and exciting, but then his next novel, "Cryptonomicon", was much larger and lumbering, coming in at almost three times the length of "Snowcrash".  So far the Baroque Cycle books are following that trend, with each book of the trilogy being at least the length of "Cryptonomicon" - and as I understand it they're all one story, split into three chapters because of the sheer size of the body of work.  But hey, I've got some hours to kill at night, so maybe this third attempt I'll actually get through it.

When I mentioned that I was catching up on past fiction that I hadn't ever gotten around to reading - in particular, I've been poring over lists of past winners of the 'Hugo' and 'Nebula' awards for exceptional science fiction writing - Trent loaned me a short stack of books that I had shamefully confessed to not having previously read.  In the past month I caught up on "Fight Club" (different enough from the movie to warrant a reading) and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (significantly different from "Bladerunner", the movie based on the book).  And, since I had mentioned reading and seriously enjoying Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle", he loaned me Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions", a bizarre story of American crazy, and "Welcome To The Monkey House", a collection of short stories.  I really need to return those four, and hopefully sign out a few new titles from the Library of Trent.

Waiting up on the shelf, I've got a couple of pulpy Heinlein novels.  I really, really enjoyed the copy of "Time Enough For Love" that Tom loaned to me, to the point that I read it twice in the span of a year - but I have to admit that a lot of his other works can be pretty campy.  I have a soft spot for cheesy escapist sci-fi, but I can only take so much before I really need a book to challenge me, or to present a new situation or idea other than "...but our hero escapes peril and wins the girl yet again, because he is a brilliant scientist who is also an amazing warrior, and attractive to boot!".

Lastly, I picked up a copy of Captain Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around The World", a hundred-year-old story of a solo sailing adventure in the days before diesel engines that was apparently required reading in many a junior high english class.  I've also got my eye out for a copy of Robin L. Graham's "Dove", the story of how the author set out on a solo 'round-the-world sailing voyage in 1965, at the age of sixteen, and returned five years later with a wife and a daughter.  Oh - and I've been told that I need to pick up a copy of Henry David Thoreau's "Walden".

Reading back through the past few paragraphs, I'm realizing that it only covers a fraction of the books I've actually consumed in the past two or three months, books that I've mostly already forgotten about and gotten rid of.  The difficult part about being a book-junkie while living on a sailboat is that books take up a fair bit of room, and if you leave a book collection to itself the books tend to multiply spontaneously.  Worse yet, they absorb the moisture in the air, first wrinkling, then discoloring and finally succombing to mildew or mold!

Getting rid of most of my books was one of the hardest parts of slimming down my possessions in order to move onboard - one of the sailing forums had a really good bit of advice though, and I took it to heart; they said (as I remember):

"If a book on your shelf does not have intrinsic value (ie, it's valuable because it is a first edition, or a family heirloom, or a signed copy), or if it doesn't have reference value (ie, it contains knowledge that you will regularly refer to), or if you are not absolutely certain that you will re-read the book in the next year, then it is just a trophy.  The book remains on your shelf merely out of vanity or laziness.  It can be easily replaced should you ever wish to read it again.  Get rid of it."

That part really helped, and I brought three large boxes of books down to the used bookstore, and traded them in for a few sailing reference books that I'd needed, saving myself a few hundred dollars in the process.  I am now a huge fan of the used bookstore - I would be a bigger fan of the public library instead, but alas, I am a slacker and do not tend to return things in a timely fashion, and I am very hard on my books.  The used bookstore is the perfect match; if I think a book that I've liked would be enjoyed by a friend, I can just give him or her my copy.  If not, I can return a box of used books and pick out some new ones.  Either way, I currently have a large stack of books on my kitchen table, and today I will sort them into three piles; one pile going into storage, one pile of books to be returned to their rightful owners and one pile going to the used bookstore, to be exchanged for fresh meat.

I don't often call out questions on this blog, but I'm curious to see if many readers here are... well, readers.  What have you read lately that was excellent?  What titles would you recommend I look for at the used bookstore?  Please comment, or if you prefer not to be public you can always just email me at drew (@) this domain.

Generator Update

Posted by drew

The generator apparently failed because I am an idiot.  Worse yet, it's a failure that has happened to me before, but I had simply forgotten about it.

In order to make the generator more handy for people lugging it around, throwing it in the back of the car, etc, the Honda EU2000i has a vented gas cap with a switch to open and close the vent.  If you neglect to open the vent, the gasoline being used up by the engine creates a negative pressure in the tank - and if living on the boat and working with diesel and gasoline engines has taught me anything, it is that any time you create a negative pressure, bad things happen.  Nature abhors a vacuum.

So yeah.  The generator wasn't working because I accidentally closed the vent on the gas cap.  In my defense, the terminology is a little ambiguous - the manual refers to the cap vent as being "a guard against escaping gas fumes", and the vent switch itself is labelled "on" and "off".  Furthermore, the cap is labelled with a "0" beside the "off", and a "1" beside the on - so does "on" mean the vent is open, or that the vent is guarding against escaping fumes?

There's a silver lining though - with my warrantee, Honda will cover 100% of any needed repairs *if* I can prove that I've strictly followed the required maintenance.  The manual says that the valves have to be adjusted and the carborator cleaned every year or every 200 hours.  I've asked that the shop do the work while they've got my generator - the fact of the matter is if the generator dies completely in, say, February, I'll be utterly screwed.  Better to make sure that it's solid inside and out, and that I will have the benefit of a valid and useful warrantee if anything terrible happens.  This visit to the dealership will likely cost me a few hundred dollars, but will act as insurance against future problems.

Tonight, the weather station has predicted the biggest snowfall of the season to date; we're due to get between ten and twenty centimeters of snow.  The sky is already cloudy as I write this from a coffee shop near Broadway; having no generator to charge my laptop battery I have to steal electricity whenever I can.  If I don't get a call from the Honda shop in the next hour, I'll be reading books by candlelight tonight, saving my laptop battery for potential work emergencies.

Education

Posted by drew

My good friend Darren was in town for a few days this past weekend.  Darren and I were close friends in high school, and with my baby sister tagging along the three of us escaped the clutches of small town New Brunswick at about age 21.  We drove across Canada in Darren's car stuffed with all of our worldly possessions, to build a new life in Calgary.  We made it, and we never looked back.

Darren and Drew in 2007 or so

I eventually found my niche in the Linux administration world, and Darren settled into a career in the oilfields, one in which he was never really happy.  He regularly spoke of quitting his job and moving somewhere warm to pursue a life less ordinary - though as his friends and family heard him say the same things year after year, each time being "just another three months" from quitting, knowing glances began to be exchanged and doubts that he'd ever take the plunge began to grow.

Well, about two years ago he proved us all wrong.  After a dozen years in Calgary, Darren quit his job, rented out his house and moved to Thailand to study scuba diving.  Since then he's become a master diver, and has spent the last few months running a diving school on a tiny island in Malaysia.  My favourite story from his recent visit was his explaining that just before he left the island he had spent two hours frantically searching for his shoes, which he hadn't actually seen in two weeks or so.

I had the pleasure of having Darren out to the boat one evening - I would have liked to have him stay a night or two, but I hadn't quite finished converting the closet back into a berth, and the furnaces are not currently working at the capacity that a visitor from the tropics would find comfortable.  His comment, after seeing the boat and hearing about some of the adventures, was along the lines of "Wow, you've learned so much in the past year!".  I found that almost funny, considering who it was coming from!

a small selection of the books used on the boat in the past year or so - the rest are packed away...

Regardless, it got me to thinking about the future, and in particular exploring some ideas on what new education I'd like to acquire in the next few months.  I think I'm kind of on a roll here for personal development, and well... why stop?

First off, I think I'd like to learn some more sailing skills, in particular I think it'd be pretty cool to know how to use a sextant to navigate.  Sure, the GPS has basically made the sextant obsolete - but there's always the possibility that the GPS won't work, and there's something to be said for learning an esoteric skill that requires fancy instruments.  Have you seen some of the sextants out there?  A cheap plastic "student" sextant actually came as part of the purchase of the boat, and it'd be nice to know how to use it.

Secondly, it seems like a wise idea to pick up a skill or two that I could use to make some money in a pinch, like say if the market for contract Linux IT mercenaries dries up.  Ideally it would play off of my natural talents (heh), but even more importantly it should be something useful anywhere in the world.  I have two ideas for this - bartender, or sail repair.

tending bar for a crowd of about 3000 dancing lunatics at the Deep End camp at Burning Man 2008

Tending bar is reasonably simple - at least in theory - but the real money comes from being attentive, friendly and social with the customers.  I'm a pretty social guy and I seem to be able to get along with most folks, so with a short night course and an exam I could have a bartender's license, and I could probably parlay that into a position at a vacation resort should I accidentally find myself stuck without cash off the coast of Mexico.  I haven't researched this further yet, but I know that when I spent time tending bar at Burning Man the past few years I had an absolute blast - and modesty aside, I was really good at it.  The outgoing, good-spirited social side of tending bar is something that just doesn't exist in Linux systems administration.

Sail repair is apparently a much sought-after skill in anchorages all over the world - all you need is the knowledge and know-how, and ideally an industrial-grade, manually-operated sewing machine.  I've heard that if you can sail into a crowded anchorage anywhere, hang your "SAILS REPAIRED" sign from your boom, and you'll never want for work.  I've been wondering if there's a sail loft in town that would be willing to take me on part-time as an apprentice - and for that matter, whether or not I will enjoy the work.  If I spend some time learning the ropes it may turn out that I'm not interested in doing it for anyone else, but either way it seems like the sort of skill that might come in very useful someday.

Thirdly, I had wondered about maybe taking a course or two at Langara, especially given that their 'Continuing Studies' program semester starts in mid-January.  I poked around a bit on their website, but really didn't see much that I was interested in.  There's a 'Performing Arts' program, but it seems to be exclusively for acting, not for musical performance.  I had hoped that their 'Health and Wellness' programs might have some first aid courses, ideally of the 'first responder' type, but it seems more directed at folks interested in Shiatsu massage.  I think I'll have to look elsewhere to find emergency first aid training.

And lastly, I think it's time to get back into a martial art.  I've been skirting around this for years, several times joining a discipline and sticking with it for a few months, then growing bored and dropping it.  I think it's time to start again, and this time around I have my eyes on Krav Maga.  My friend Ernst studies this in town, and from everything I've read it seems like the best fit.  I'm in good physical shape right now, but most of that comes from cycling and rowing; it certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to vary  my routine a bit.

I don't know where this newfound drive to learn is coming from, but I'm not going to argue with it - nothing bad can come from furthering my education, regardless of what direction I choose to travel.  Maybe it's the winter cold, forcing me into a hibernation mode - or more likely making me want to spend more time away from the boat in a heated classroom.  Maybe it's the dawning realization that I don't really want to be a sysadmin for the rest of my life.

Or maybe it's just simple frugality - Benjamin Franklin was once quoted as saying "If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him", and I definitely believe this to be true.  Spending $400 on the diesel class has already saved me hundreds of dollars that I'd have spent on a mechanic, and I'm sure it will continue to save me money moving forward.

Whatever the cause, I haven't felt the urge to learn in a while - and I'm going to take advantage of it while I can.