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You ever have one of those slow motion moments of disaster? Where you see it coming and your going “Noooooooooo!!!”, but it happens anyway. That was me today.
I had stopped at the Kwiki Oil Lube to get the oil changed on my van. After changing the oil they always ask you to start the engine and let it run for a min or two while it is sitting there over the pit. So, when asked, I reach in and turn the engine on and step back to the front of the van.
The thing about my van is that the after market remote lock system, when you crank the van, automatically locks the doors. So it is sitting there running and I had left the drivers door sitting open. Trust me I know my van… I always leave a door open or a window open so I can get back in. I’ve locked myself out before.. lol.. Maybe I shouldn’t tell on myself but, well, it has happened.
I went out with Jay on Walkabout yesterday..Walkabout Video It was a blast.. there was a small craft advisory but for us it was flat waters because the wind was out of the north and with 12 to 20 knots of wind we were hauling butt… average over the water speeds of 8.5 knots with us hitting 9.7 knots once or twice.
I decided to play with some video I had taken with my camera (canon s45 4mp digital) and compile a little movie. 🙂 here it is. Walkabout Video
This has got to be the server month from hell!!!
Not 3 or 4 days after getting the server back online from the DOS attack but the motherboard in it looks like it died (It had been running without being rebooted 745 days 🙂 Go linux.. It has been down for the last 2 days from this. Today we spent 6 hours swaping out the old server for a new one and copying the hard drive on to a new one to use as the primary boot drive. The new server and hard drive though not “new” should be a bit faster as the CPU is about 30% faster and it has double the ram now with one gig of memory. Also the new new hard drive is a 7200 rpm 8meg cache drive running at 59megs a second throughput. This is probably 5 times what the old drive was doing.. We found after the fact that DMA was probably not enable for the hard drive on the old server.. To be honest it probably didn’t matter as it was still much much faster than the available bandwidth for pushing content over the internet.
I appologize to everyone that my website has been down for the last week. One of the other websites on my server got targeted for a DOS attack.. The attacker did a pretty good job of it. He couldn’t hurt the server but he was able to crash road runners gateway for the network. Between the attacker and Road Runners slow responce time it left me without an ip address for my server for about 8 days. Sadly I would have to rate the attacker as more competent than road runner support. On a bussiness class roadrunner account, and not a base account at that, they really were not that excited about helping us. Last thursday they were not responding to calls to their support center and saturday till this morning they also were unavailable. How do you provide a business class mission critical service if they wont even answer the phones and tell you we won’t be available for you when your down. The two lower end techs I delt with were nice but pretty unreliable about calling back when they said they would. They were as far up the food chain as I could get on the phone.. According to them the guys that I really needed to talk to don’t talk to customers and they had to relay all communications to them.
I was feeling pretty anti-social yesterday and it having been a while since I had gotten out sailing, decided to take Sea Puppy out by myself. It was nice to just go sailing alone. Serious recharge the batteries time for me. It was a gorgeous day and though alone on the boat I did get over near Walkabout to get a few pictures of her for Jay.
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I got a few pictures of the water and clouds that day that I thought were pretty cool also
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I was talking With Miriam last night and I was telling her about the email spammer in England and one here in the US that a bunch of hackers signed up for hundreds and maybe thousands of catalogs, information requests etc. The end result being that they got so much mail through the postal service that they couldn’t find the mail that was legitimate… Sort of a real world mail denial of service attack. Well Miriam thought that was pretty funny and in turn she remembered a story of a guy years ago that burned his junk mail in his wood burning stove in the house. Which suddenly made me think about the implications.
It was like a light bulb going off 🙂 you know junk mail is free…. what if you turned it from an annoyance and liability to a positive benefit. What if you could just feed your junk mail to a big shredder that spit out little logs of bailed paper at the other end.. kinda like a hay bailer.
Today was one of those days where you just needed to get away and get some water time.. I went down to the boat and cleaned a bit and then got Patty and Jeff to go out with me.. we didn’t even go sailing just took the fishing poles and motored up and down the waterway for a few hours fishing. Not a single bite did we get but that wasn’t the point.. I can’t say how relaxing it was to just be out there floating on the water having left all the current crop of problems at the dock.
When we got back I closed the boat up and went to get a bite to eat at a new place in the new sporting complex in Little River. I had previously met two sisters that work there and they had invited me to check it out. I had just sat down to eat a quiet meal with them when one of my current crop of problems called me and then walked in and sat down at the table in the middle of my meal.
I have since september been involved in a business deal with a friend providing IT knowledge to him and building a website and other stuff for him. Never do business with friends!! It can lead to losing them as a friend.
This is a preview of Any Day on the Water Is a Good Day until you get back to the real world . Read the full post (1044 words, 0 images, estimated 4:11 mins reading time)
I installed the radio and failed to take one measurement into consideration. 🙁 how deep it is.. I lacked about 1.5 inches to have it flush mount.. lol and I cut the hole out for it already…..
However all is not lost… I installed it there anyway and am going to build a spacer to make it right.. this will bring it out a inch and a half but I can use the space as a storage space for sd cards with music on them and usb memory keys 🙂
Other than this it looks nice and works great.. I installed the splitter for the VHF antenna and the reception is amazing.. I get stations on it that my car only dreams of hearing. I guess having a 3 or 4 db antenna 35 feet in the air helps 🙂 The remote control is nice also. I am going to put a mirror in so that I can change stuff from in the cockpit. The new speakers were relatively easy to install also. I got waterproof speakers that matched the hole pattern of the old speakers.. I had to file the edges of the holes for the cone to get it to fit but not much.. Then new speakers sound great. I still have to hook up the inside speakers. I’m not sure how they will sound.. I might need to replace them also.. but im not to worried about that.. I can use normal car speakers in their own inclosures and just mount them on the bulk head.
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I just got a VRCD400-SDU today at wall mart.. $79.99
New am/fm/cd/mp3/usb key/sd memory card/aux in on face of it car radio
Given all the controversy over the unit I decided to bench test it before installing it in Sea Puppy.
I hooked it up to a 12v power supply I have sitting in my office for just such a need. Hooked up the RCA outs to a computer system mic in connector and then started playing. This actually gave me decent stereo sound through the computer sound system.
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I did not have a radio antenna at hand but the normal 3 or 4 strongest stations came in fine without it.
I ran some tethers and misc stuff up while dog sitting for patty this weekend. The tethers came out really nice.
The only one I have pictures of is the cutlery holder. 🙂 It’s already making difference in keeping all the little and bigger utensiles organized and out of the way.
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I also worked on remounting the radio on sea puppy. It was just bolted to the side of the chart table area. I have now flush mounted it. I is a much cleaner and out of the way install.
I went out on Angela’s boat Valkyr for the parade this year. We put a generator on the fordeck to run the lights. 🙂 not to bad for weight.. two of use were able to lift it on the boat without difficulty.
Anyway here are some pictures of parade and everyone on the boat.
Someone grabbed my camera and I actually got pictures taken of me. Here is me and Angela.
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This boat actually won the regatta.. 1500 dollar prize!!! nice..
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Solo on Sea Puppy again. I agreed to meet Patty on Pirate Girl so that we could get some pictures of each others boats on the water. 🙂 Patty took some great pictures of me being a goof on Sea Puppy
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I got a few pictures of Pirate Girl also for Patty
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