This blog is about my life, and has a little bit of everything. To help you navigate:
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Rebel Heart
This is only my second silverlight control so don't beat me up too hard. It gets its data from ws.eraza.org. Essentially it finds out where everyone is, then scrolls through them. I'm trying to pump some life into the forums at forum.eraza.org, so if you have any questions about Silverlight development, deployment, or the the control below, let me know!
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Over the last few months, I've been working furiously on a mobile site (eraza.org) that is now moving towards beta. A lot of it will be ready in advance of San Diego Code Camp 2009 where we'll be showing off the API and how other developers can make use of the location based services and rebrand it as they like.
If any of my blog readers out there have a Blackberry, Android, or iPhone with an unlimited data plan, and you'd like to be a beta tester, please send me an email ( radpin 'at' gmail.com ). Registration is closed on the public site, so I'll send you a separate email with a good link.
When it gets closer to launch I'll put out a real press release, but for now I just wanted to put the link out there for some of my more technical readers and see if I can get some beta users to help. Thanks guys and gals.
I've been looking forward to doing another Code Camp session, and this time around I think it will be a lot of fun. I talked to Brian and Rory, and they're both onboard.
Here's the session link; please let anyone know about it who's looking into mobile development. It's on June 27 & June 28, and I'm motivated!
We've been working on a mobile application for the last few months. It will be a commercial product, but while making it we decided to build a framework of sorts that will be free for anyone to use.
So we'll be showing off some of the guts of our systems, and showing off some of the web services that are available. I'm not doing a good job of explaining it, and honestly the format of the presentation isn't anywhere near solid. But we'll have it dialed in by then; might book up two slots if we have enough material and there's enough interest.
Vinegar as I've come to learn is an amazing product and I'm giving it a big thumbs up for boat use. Not only can it do certain jobs, but for so many jobs it really is the best option.
Additionally, on a boat everything should have at least a few uses. Mineral spirits as an example are a good thinner, but also can be used to fuel the oil lamps. Olive oil can be used for cooking, greasing your hands when making bread, and salad dressing. So on, and so forth.
Vinegar (put into a little spray bottle) is getting use onboard the Rebel Heart in the following areas:
- Cleaning the head. It's a nasty job if you let things get out of control. Use a spray bottle, and keep it in the head. Every few days, spray a bit into the bowl. You'll breakdown mineral deposits, it's safe for a holding tank, and it will clean the pipes. You should never need a cleaner other than vinegar for a marine head.
- Cleaning fruit and vegetables. Mix down 1/3 white vinegar to 2/3 water, and put into a spray bottle. There are numerous studiesshowing that this is one of the best ways to clean most fruit and vegetables.
- Cleaning grease from the stove top. Works like a champ. Spray bottle.
- Removing mineral buildups from plumbing fixtures. Sometimes this can be soaking in a vinegar solution, but I'd recommend doing the spray thing on those too.
- Antiseptic. Get a cut? Spray white vinegar on it to kill off fungi, bacteria, and viruses.
- Sun burn. White vinegar sprayed on works to rehydrate the skin.
Beyond being great for various uses, it's also cheap and environmentally friendly. Sure, it has a bit of a smell to it, but these days I equate the smell of vinegar to cleanliness and disinfection. For 1001 other uses of vinegar, check out vinegartips.com.
Rory and I were having lunch today, and I threw out there "it would be cool if there was a site that you could just put spam emails into and it would sit there and string them along and reply to the spammers on loop."
10 or so hours of development at 4:18am, the rather ghetto fabulous site is somewhat functional. And I also found a place that has a stockpile of excess spam letters, so I have lots of stuff I can test with. Woohoo.
So check it out: http://spamobot.com
I bet you wanted to know the decimal equivalent of a fifty foot separation between two lat/long positions, didn't you? Well now you do. 0.00014
No doubt this will help countless people and is a valuable addition to the Internet.
/sarcasm
I've been on a big electropop kick lately, so I'm going to share some youtube videos with you on the subject. The Knife is from Sweden; brother and sister team.
The Blow is actually just one girl (although on this track she sings with a guy). It turns into the actual track at the one minute mark.
Postal Service; this isn't an official video, but it gets the point across.
I've been hooked on this Bill Bryson book for a while. I got the recommendation from a really good friend
f of mine, but this wasn't the exact book. Either way, it's really good and I look forward to reading the other soon as well.
It's A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, and I've been reading a chapter or two every night (and some mornings if I get a chance). It's a great book, and gives you a rather amazing view of, well, nearly everything.
If you're inquisitive and curious, you'll love this book. Highly recommended for both my fellow sailors and fellow software developers.
These are two questions that I think any sailor should be asking themselves. We'll table the first question for a later blog post, so let's take the second one:
Should you spend a lot of money on a boat?
All in all, I'm estimating that by the time we get done with the Rebel Heart, we will have invested nearly $100,000 into her. Roughly $60,000 for sticker price, and probably $40,000 worth of repairs or so. That's a lot of money. And we could lose it all by having a hose break free while eating a pizza, and flooding her. Or hitting a rock, or dismasting in some horrible storm or rogue wave, etc, etc. Martians can come down and blast us to smithereens. If we were able to sell her again for $60,000 (realizing a $40K loss), we'll be fortunate.
I like taking checkpoints in my life. Moments when I stop everything in my mind and ask myself if I'm where I should be. I don't always need to be happy, but I need to know that I'm course and on the right tack. I probably get that from navigating, where you want to constantly take readings and observations, looking for indicators that conflict with what you think is going on. You should only feel comfortable that your course is true when you've exhausted all means of disproving yourself. Naturally, this can lead to a bit of self doubt. By running "what if" scenarios against yourself all the time and interrupting data through (for the purpose of hypotheticals) the most negative lens possible, you can very well start painting a less than rosy picture for yourself.
So if I zoom out any further, here are some observations I've picked up on life.
- Charlotte and I are happy. All in all, we love our life. We had (minus the massive road bump in the first few weeks) a great net gain in overall happiness when we moved onto the boat.
- Just at a financial level, I could have lost a hell of a lot more in real estate (or even the stock market) than in the boat. The idea that there's a safe investment with a great return (available at all times in all weather) is a joke.
- Back in my younger years, I didn't realize that the IRS always gets its money. I had a great year, but didn't pay a dime in taxes. I loved it, and would do it all over again. Twice. Did it cost me a lot later? Yeah. So what; I had a blast.
- For the most part, I do a lot of the work myself. Not everything, but overall I've saved tens of thousands of dollars in doing some of my own labor. Granted, sometimes I've had to go over the same area several times because of inexperience.
So yeah, I should spend it on the boat. It makes us happy, we're relatively good sailors, and there are no safe bets. Taking this beautiful boat around the world is something we've wanted to do for a long time now. If two happy people sailing a boat around the world isn't a good thing to spend money, I don't know what is.
;)
Dryroot is so rad
With the mast at the riggers, I decided "why not cause the boat even *more* problems?". I knew some parts of the cabin top were leaky, and one section was spongy. It's a wooden cabin top, so how about I just open the whole thing up and see what's underneath?
I have a 24" diameter rotten patch that needs to be scarfed in. I was going to do it by myself, but it extends into a curved section, and I just don't feel that I have the skills for that myself so I'm hitting the help button.
I got a recommendation from Fritz over at Pacific Offshore Rigging, so I'll see how well that recommendation works out. Fritz is pretty awesome, so I'm hoping his reference is as well.;)
There were some other small crummy holes that look like cracks in the paint caused the water to penetrate. I carved those out, and used CPES to stop the growth. Then I loaded in Elmer's Wood Putty. We'll see how well it works out. I'm sure it's a better approach on smaller holes than bigger, and certainly not the right thing for the massive 24" rot spot.
Charlotte's out of town for a while, so I'm going to try to spend some time on these and see how good of a job I can do. Worst case scenario I just scarf in new sections anyway, or get someone else to do it. Best case scenario I learn how to do a few things myself.
More and more I feel like the boat looks like crap these days and it's really bother me. On the plus side I'm doing the website for Murphy's Canvas, so once I get the stick back on I'll have a nice pretty dodger to look forward to.
