sailing the NorSea


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WEEK 49 2012

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Saturday 8 December 2012
Saturday - Working on this and that around the house.



In the late afternoon I drove down to Marina del Rey, to meet up the K on his Sea Scout vessel, the Spartan.

sss spartan
S.S.S. Spartan

The Spartan was a lot bigger and roomier than I expected. It's been a while since I was on a trawler type powerboat, I'd forgotten what it's like to have room to move! She was a donation, and they've put a lot of work into her. I was a little surprised to find that she actually has a wooden hull - you can actually see the strakes in the photo above. She's got a big diesel motor and stern thrusters, radar, various radio and GPS units, and even a stereo system that one can plug an iPhone into. Very nice.

They were acting as one of the safety boats for the annual Parade of Lights there, and family and friends were invited aboard. Unfortunately his parents couldn't go because of illness (food poisoning?) so it was just me. I brought a (belated, because of finals) birthday cake for K, and two large pizzas from Costco. Before we went out the skipper had everyone line up on the dock, took names and a head count, and then we all boarded and the crew cast off. It was just a short trip down the channel, then we anchored, bow and stern, and became the official outermost turn point for the boat traffic.

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This particular entrant had a nice redition of the Disney "Pirates of the Carribean" song going.

I say "official outermost turn point" because we were a ways out - near the breakwater - and many boats turned well inside us. The larger boats, with professional skippers, all followed the correct course, which was a little nerve wracking, because it's a bit like looking up at an apartment block as they passed by. But they were well captained, slow, cautious, and left no wake.

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This was one of the 'Hornblower' excursion boats, I think.

Friday 7 December 2012
Friday - "A day that will live in infamy." But of course memories fade. Dad's gone, Mom's gone, Grandpa, Uncle Bud, everyone I know that fought in that war. Seventy years is a long time, Dad and his contemporaries would all be in their nineties now. Ah well.

While cleaning out that bookcase the other day I ran across a CD entitled "WW2 Pics", in my father's rather shaky handwriting. Most I had already seen, but a couple were new to me.

my grandfather, 1944
My Grandfather, 1944.
grandmother, 1944
Grandma, 1944

Dad, 1943
Dad, 1943

uss bayfield, 1944
The USS Bayfield, 1944

I suspect that the pictures of Dad, Grandma and Grandpa were at the house he'd built in Walnut Creek, pre-war, on a little lake. It's still there - we drove by it once, a few years ago, Dad & I. I tried to get us invited in, but the person that answered the door was a (stoned?) kid of about 20, home alone and uninterested in giving strangers a tour.

Somewhere I have a picture of my brother Bob - the resemblance between him and my father is striking, I'll have to find it and compare them side by side.

Thursday 6 December 2012

Thursday - After a couple of hours at the Ventura office I headed back to Lancaster. Bright sunshine, little traffic in mid-day, so that was nice.

There wasn't much going on at home - I intercepted my cat sitter and paid her some money I owed her. We talked a bit about computers, and I suggested that she get an iPad with 3G rather than a laptop. She's a casual user, email and web surfing, so it should suffice.

I thought about trying to install the MyBook Duo drive, but decided to wait until after I've downloaded and read the documentation. To be honest I'm kind of dreading it, my experience with networked drives has been rather unpleasant before this, I've a couple and they never really worked right for me.

Wednesday 5 December 2012

Wednesday  - A long day. Junt kind of grinding through the Manifold 8 GIS map, looking for weird things in the mapping. The client had noted several issues, so I did those first; then it was just going over things, looking for wild points, gaps in channel mapping, jagged paths where there shouldn't be, and so on. I found plenty, and am only through two of the three zones.

My boss and the draftsman are busy for the next few days on another project, so I'll just gather up my stuff up tomorrow morning and head home.

Hopefully I can get the 3TB drive to work on my home LAN. I think it just plugs into the router and it should work.

Back to the boat about 10pm.

Tuesday 4 December 2012
Tuesday - I put a pot of coffee on in the morning, at the boat, and started dressing. About half dressed I realized that the coffee making process sounded odd. A quick glance showed me that I'd forgotten to put the cup under the spout, and there was hot coffee all over the counter and dripping down. Yikes! Fortunately I had the machine on the portion of the counter where there is a carving board that makes a cover over the old Force 10 stove, and the coffee simply accumulated in the stainless steel pan there.

So now I've attempted to (1) make coffee without the pot, (2) make coffee without the coffee, (3) make coffee without the water, and (4) make coffee without a filter.

I guess I'm not at my best in the early morning.



Another longish day at the office. Among other things I'm trying to get all the data on an external drive.

There was a spare 3TB 'personal cloud' drive in the office, but there were connectivity issues. It had an odd USB port, so we used a direct ethernet connection to a PC, using some free software that made that Win7 PC act as a dhcp server to that drive. It worked reasonably well, we got a sustained 250Mb/s out of the setup, which is probably constrained by the USB port on the drive we were copying from, rather than the 1Gb/s of this other drive that we were copying to. Since there was about 1.5TB of data to copy I had to let the process run over night.



Back to the boat after 9.

I did need to send someone a file in the evening, from the boat, so I fiddled with the droid Stellar until I got the hotspot thing to work, and then sent them a zipped folder OK. I also put Dropbox and Evernote back onto the new phone. They both have an option to only refresh when in Wifi contact, so I used that, which will save me on my phones rather small wireless data cap.

Monday 3 December 2012
Monday - Book #87 was Destiny's Shield, by David Drake. I'd forgotten about reading this until I saw it on the boat.

This is an alternate history science fiction book, but primarily of the "How would a good general, with knowledge of future equipment and strategies - but none of the technology itself - do against his enemies?" In this case Belisarius and his AI 'spirit' from the future against the Persians and their nefarious backers from the future.

It was OK, but not riveting.



I met with the client, and am still working using the ideas we talked about a couple of months ago. I had thought they'd take the opportunity to come up with a bigger list of things to be fixed, but they want me to do that, too. So I started with that. I'll come up with an inventory of flaws that I can find in the database, then figure out how to fix them.



The boat was OK, the bilges reasonably dry, so that was nice. I didn't get there until nearly 8pm, so I'm understandably glad not to be bailing the bilges out in the dark with a bucket...

Sunday  2 December 2012
Sunday - A decent day. Mostly spent prepping for a couple of days down below. I cleaned out a bookshelf downstairs - lots of old programming stuff. And, really, I mean old. As in 5.15" floppy disk archives old. As in Dos 3.2 floppy old. As in software I bought for my first PC, a Kaypro 286-AT! It was a little tough throwing some of that stuff out, but it needed to be done. I don't even own a 5.25" drive. I think there is a 3.5" floppy drive in one of the older systems, but that's it. I kept anything that looked like it might have personal info on it, but there wasn't much of that.



I didn't do much of anything on the iOS front, though, there wasn't much time and I've been hitting that pretty hard all week. time for a break.

Book #86
was Distant Thunders, Destroyermen #4, by Taylor Anderson. This is the continuing saga of the destroyer USS Walker, which goes through a rift in time/space to an alternate universe full of dinosaurs, and the good guys who are descended from Lemurs, and the cannibalistic bad guy Griks who sound like they are descended from Raptors - and who have their own WWII allies in the form of a Japanese cruiser. The Walker's WWII technology gives them the edge against Napoleonic era smoothbore cannon and square riggers, but there are a lot of bad guys and the Japanese cruiser is more than a match for them in a heads up fight.

At the end of Book #3 the Walker was sunk, in harbor, after defeating the Griks and the Japanese.

Here in Book #4 she is in drydock and being refitted, but various intrigues between the Lemurians, the Walker's crew, the Griks and the descendants of humans who came through the rift in British East Indiamen are keeping things hot.



The 49'ers were televised for the second week in a row, and I think my reservations about a rookie quarterback in late season were pretty justified. The Rams played well, but the game was more lost by the 49'ers than it was won by the Rams.


Picture of the Week
Ships, unknown photographer, from Tumblr
Photo Notes: Nice shot of some sailing ships, via Tumblr..


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