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.
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.
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.
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.
Grandma, 1944
Dad, 1943
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.
Thursday6 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 copyingfrom, 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 Photo Notes: Nice shot of some
sailing ships, via Tumblr..
