Sailing

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WEEK 8 2008

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Saturday 23 February 2008

Saturday - taking it easy, relaxing at Tims' place in San Diego.

Friday 22 February 2008

Friday - raining again. I went down to the boat and caulked a couple of the deck leaks. There was a ventilator box and solar vent that were dripping into the main cabin. They have been dripping into there since I bought the boat. Generally I just put a tarp over the main cabin top, but since t makes it really dark inside so I don't like to do that. Maybe this will fix them.

The good news was that the deck locker scuppers were working again - no standing water in the bottom. So that's nice to get done.

x
The locker, halfway through cleaning, with the drains, ash, and diesel vent visible.

Then I headed south on Hwy 1 to visit a friend in San Diego.

It was a nice day for a drive and I wasn't in a hurry. Down past Zuma Beach where it was an empty beach, reminding me of the old 'Boys of Summer' song by Don Henley. The rain cooperated, just a sprinkle or two on the way down. I took it as far as the I-10, over to the 405 and then down the I-5 with a stop for lunch in Mission Viejo.

Nobody on the road,
nobody on the beach.
I feel it in the air,
the summer's out of reach

Empty lake, empty streets,
the sun goes down alone.
I'm driving by your house
though I know that you're not home...

Thursday 21 February  2008

Thursday - hmm. This evening the EVDO card worked fine, a good 1.2Mbits throughput with only two bars. So maybe the problem was on Verizon's end.

It's raining again. Started up just before 4pm, and looks to last through at least part of the evening.

Down to San Diego tomorrow.

Wednesday 20 February 2008

Wednesday - rain, last night and this morning. Well, so it goes. Hopefully it'll be dry tonight and tomorrow.

I checked out Fry's for EVDO routers, but the two models they had in stock, the Airlink AR360W and the Dlink DIR-450, had terrible reviews. They were inexpensive, $75 and $140 respectively, but it isn't worth the heartburn to me. It would be nice to get such a unit, then I could use my EVDO card at home with the desktop(s) when I'm there - and not have to pay for DSL when I'm not there. The Linksys unit seems good - and at $200 it ought to be! And the TopGlobal units had some pretty good reviews as well.

Having said that, when I tried to use my EVDO card today in the laptop it seems to have developed problems. It's slow, dog slow. A throughput in the 1's of kilobits/sec, rather than the original 1.4Mbit. Most stuff just times out on me. I know it's not Verizon Broadband's EVDO service because my friends laptop, with another Verizon EVDO card, is working flawlessly. I suppose I'll have to take the card back and exchange it. Bah.



I also went down to the boat and cleared out the scuppers from the cockpit locker that has been filling and draining into the bilges through the diesel vent. Apparently the lines were clogged with ash from the fires of last year. I also took the opportunity to empty that locker. There were five kayak paddle blades in it - but only two had a matching handle to connect them. I put that those back, took out others and a miscellany of short bits of line and assorted boat debris.



Perhaps it was the local light pollution and haze, but it was the darkest eclipsed moon I've ever seen. Or not seen - it became invisible for several minutes down here in Oxnard. Perhaps I'm spoiled by the high desert, where despite some light pollution the moon remains as a copper colored disk, if dim.

Tuesday 19 February 2008

Tuesday - back at work. There were predictions of rain, but I thought I'd chance it, and it worked out. I do hate getting up at 4am though.

 Monday 18 February 2007

Monday - MLK day. No work for me as the county workers get it off.

I went over to a friends place and we upgraded the RAM in a new Vista laptop to 2GB. It now runs better, I hope. It requires, just running at rest, 902MB and was shipped with 512MB. No props for the Acer corporation there. I also upgraded all their versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader to 8.1.2, on various machines, to avoid a vulnerability that has recently surfaced with respect to banner ads.

Book #8 was Spindrift, by Alan Steele. Eh. Well enough written but rather thin, plot wise, and dependent on earlier books to make much sense. Which I haven't read, although apparently he won a Hugo for them.

Sunday 17 February 2007

Sunday - not much to say. I didn't do the work on my taxes that I meant too, so that's for later.

My brother and I went for a nice hike near Vasquez Rocks. The parking lot and the major rock formations were crawling with people, but moving away from them by a quarter mile or so it was a lot quieter. We walked a few miles of the PCT - it happens to pass through the park, and walked along some nice formations to the east of the parking lot.  Very nice. I've been in Souther California almost thirty years, the Antelope Valley over twenty, and never managed to get over there.



Picture of the Week
boat near benecia bridge and mothball fleet
Photo Notes: "Sailboat, tanker, Benecia Bridge(s), and the Mothball Fleet."

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