The Geek Icon: 21 Nov 2008

Hoist the Mainsail - Part 2

06-09-2008 10:06PM

Continued from Part 1

The water got choppier and choppier, and Adam and I settled in on the high side of the deck once we awkwardly helped raise the sails. We were lucky to have a crew that largely knew what it was doing. Our skipper had plenty of experience, and three of the crew had passed crew competency courses. One other passenger had once made his living on a craypot boat and his (adult) son was the only one of us who really seemed nervous.

But even as we settled in after changing into warmer clothes and huddling together on the deck, the waves got larger and larger. Finally, shivering in the wind and wet from the spray, I decided I needed to change into full wet weather gear. I was already feeling slightly queasy— an unusual sensation for me, but one I thought I could handle. But as soon as I went down into the stuffy cabin and lost sight of the horizon, the heaving motion of the ship got to me. I barely made it back on deck when the contents of my stomach (primarily a lunch of wedges with sour cream and sweet chili) made their grand exit. I hadn't quite made it to the railing and spent a lot of time later apologising to my fellow crewmates.

Although I wasn't the first one to end up heaving, I was probably the most embarrassed, this being only the second time in my entire life I could remember being entirely seasick. I managed to hold it in at that point long enough to strip off my sopping wet clothes, grab a plastic garbage bag, and rug up on a bunk until, worn out from the dry heaves, and despite still being very cold, I fell asleep.

Adam suffered slightly less severely than me, even though he was seasick as well, but he managed to keep going through his watches during the night until we got up the next morning.

We were still sailing along the Tasmanian coast, and the water was much calmer. I got up feeling like my old self after finally warming up and falling into a deep, sound sleep. As I saw my first albatross wheeling through the cool morning air, I felt like I was on the true sailing adventure I had envisioned. I spent breakfast eating a mini-box of cereal with some slightly-too-warm UHT milk, listening to stories about the wild weather the night before. Even the seasoned crew members were a bit shaken, and I was shocked to find them claiming the waves were around 40 feet high! Easily the biggest seas I remembered being in.

As we continued northward, Adam and I gradually fell into the routine of watches and chores. We continued with a good wind; unfortunately the seas were still big enough that we were having trouble finding a harbour deep enough for our boat's keel. When waves hit the shallow entrance to a harbour, the trough after the wave is much shallower than the average depth of the water. The keel on our boat was long to help keep the boat upright and stable in high winds; we didn't have a chance of making it into any of the smaller harbours we had reached so far. Finally we stopped at St Helens, but only to let out one passenger who wasn't going to be able to continue with us for the rest of his trip. After two days of severe seasickness, he was too dehydrated & undernourished so we handed him over to a rescue boat and continued on into the night.

I was up for my watch around two in the morning when the skipper came up and let us know we were finally going to anchor for the night. It was a very dark night with no moon and heavy clouds blocking the stars, and I had little sense of where we were or where we were going. I settled in next to the compass and read out our bearing as the skipper guided us in by instruments and chart only. We had to be careful as there were rocks all around the entrance to our anchorage. Somehow, with everyone carefully watching the water and the help of GPS, charts, and me shouting out our bearing every few seconds, we managed to pull in and anchor right next to another boat. Exhausted, I stumbled below and into a bunk while Adam stayed up on deck for anchor watch. It was about four am.

In the morning I woke up to one of the most amazing sights that I had experienced on my trip. Clarke Island was a low, rocky, wild looking place, crowned by the remnants of storm clouds and the bright blue morning. We were now the only people in this lonely place, and it was quiet and sheltered after the rough weather and hard night's work we had just been through. Little did I know that, in a few days when the wind changed, I would be facing my biggest challenge yet: the infamous Bass Strait.

To be continued in Part 3...

Hoist the Mainsail - Part 1

27-01-2008 01:27PM

In 1980, my mother turned thirty, and I was two. My parents sold their house and bought a brand new 38' Downeaster, custom built. They had been cruising enthusiastically for several years, and made the decision that sailing was important enough to them that they wanted to live aboard their boat. They christened the boat Katherine (my mother's middle name), and our permanent address became a slip on the end of I dock in Channel Islands Harbor, California.

In my opinion, it was the best childhood ever.

On the last day of 2007, I turned thirty. I don't have any hang ups about my age, or any disappointments about where life has led me (apart from wanting a career change I can't quite yet afford). But thirty is one of those mile marker ages, and it felt important to me to do something really significant with the date, especially since I hadn't had a good holiday in a while.

I knew that I wanted to do a sailing trip, and lucky for me it was fairly easy to agree upon that with my favourite travelling companion Mr Wiggins. In fact, it was he who led us to our eventual adventure; he was on the Manly ferry when he saw a sailboat with a web site on it. An SMS and a few minutes later and I was checking them out.

If you don't live in Australia, you probably don't know about the Sydney to Hobart, unless you're a big racing buff. It's an annual race that starts on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) and goes from— obviously— Sydney Harbour to Hobart in Tasmania. Along the way you have to cross through a notorious body of water, the Bass Strait, where relatively shallow seas, and clashing oceanic currents provide a pretty bumpy ride on a good day. In bad weather, it can be deadly.

Usually you need some kind of racing experience to participate in the race, but once the boats are all in Hobart, they need to get back to their home ports, and since no-one's in as much of a hurry, the newbies can join in the fun. That's where we came in. Getaway Sailing had 2 boats in the race. One was an impressive Volvo 60. But the cheaper fare and the synchronicity of the smaller Sydney 38 won out for me. So we signed up as two clueless crew members, and desperately sought out the last remaining accommodation in Hobart for New Years Eve.

We arrived in Hobart by plane on the morning of my birthday, and since we were staying at Battery Point, we were right in the middle of all the action. We enjoyed as much we could the two days we spent in Hobart, which largely meant eating fabulous food, but also went on a bus tour and watched a couple of performances in the International Buskers Festival.

On the morning of the 2nd, we got up bright and early, checked out of our B&B, and headed for the docks with some trepidation. Since the race boats had been docked at the wharfs for several days, we had already scoped out where we were going and which ride was ours. We met up with the skipper and a few of our fellow travellers, and began loading our baggage on to the boat. Our trip was precipitated by me promptly dropping our toiletries bag into the water. Not off to such a good start.

Toiletries recovered and mostly dry (we were smart enough to put things in plastic bags), we had a look at the bunk situation.

Thank goodness neither of us had any problems with claustrophobia.

Our skipper, Paul, took us through a safety briefing & general tour of the 38' boat that would be our home for the next (we thought) four to six days. He later mentioned that he deliberately tried to say things as scarily as possible to gauge our reactions— obviously, we were bad listeners, as we were quite undeterred!

Packing, fueling, and lunch seemed to drag by. I was anxiously looking forward to getting out on the water and under way! I felt confident and at home, trusting my childhood and my university sailing courses to carry me through the trip with aplomb, soggy toiletries bag notwithstanding. Finally, we began to motor out of Hobart's harbour on the Derwent. Many of the other racing boats were leaving at the same time, including our "big sister", Getaway Sailing's Volvo 60. Most of them left us in the dust as we slowly chugged away from the protected waters of the Derwent toward Tasman Island.

And that was where my confidence started to falter.

To be continued in Part 2...

Gone Pro

07-09-2007 06:51PM

So I haven't been writing here much, but one piece of news was that I got a promotion at work, with a nice hefty raise. Of course, I promptly decided to use my flush new funds on new hardware (don't worry, I'm also prudently paying extra on my student loans and putting a good chunk into savings as well; I'm still a mostly pragmatic geek).

At work, a lot of people were surprised at my choice, but that is only because by day I am a Microsoft-centric developer, bravely forging ahead for the Empire. But when I come home at night, I spend all my time with my first computing love, Apple. Those who know me have probably heard my stories about my very first computer at age seven, the Apple //e, and my wacky antics developing in Apple BASIC. I've pretty religiously had some type of Mac for personal computing after that, starting with a Mac Classic II, through an LCIII, to a clamshell iBook, a Mac Mini, and now, a sleek, smokin' 15" MacBook Pro.

It is teh awesome!

Even though I've been using OS X on my Mac Mini for a while, the new machine gave me the momentum to hunt down some good new software to play around with. A big hat tip to a coworker of mine (he's a designer, and fits the stereotype that all designers love Apples) to pointing me toward Open Source Mac where I had a troll through the list and grabbed a few nice looking downloads to try out.

The first one I tried out was Camino, and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. It feels very responsive and I like the fact that it's just a simple, straightforward browser the way Safari is. At the moment it's winning slightly over Safari for its rendering capabilities.

Some of the other apps I've downloaded to check out:

• Cashbox - I've had a hard time finding a good, free, personal finance app to replace GnuCash (and even that had its annoyances). Maybe this one will pleasantly surprise me.
• Handbrake - the laptop is now in part replacing the Windows small form factor machine I had for multimedia. A good DVD ripper means I can archive & catalogue our movies for instant access (no more fumbling around with disks and risking scratches).
• Miro - has a lot of good reviews as a media player and video podcatcher. I don't really watch video podcasts at the moment, but now might be the time to start since I have a portable 15" widescreen at my disposal.
• Pixen - looks like fun for pixel doodles & art.
• Senuti - means I can migrate the music on my iPod quickly over to the new machine.

I'll need some time to take a look at each and maybe I'll even write a little review. In the meantime, I'll keep playing with the new toy! Here are a few Photo Booth snaps of me having a blast on the couch, just my MacBook Pro and me, generally being a huge dag:

Wait, What?

24-08-2007 05:56PM

Is that a-- is there a blog here? Oh! So that's what I did with it.

At the Rentals of Madness

30-01-2007 12:00AM

Note: for some reason I didn't publish this months ago when I actually wrote it back in January. This post has been backdated appropriately.

I haven't been posting much of anything lately since I just moved a couple of weeks ago and have just finally got things to state where I can resume some sense of normalcy. Moving is stressful enough for the average person, but when you add in the craziness of housing in Sydney and a hard deadline for moving (because, for instance, the friends you are house sitting for are coming back from Manhattan), then you are bordering on total nervous breakdown territory.

Long story short, it has not been a fun couple of months.

Rather than relive my full experience in all its horror by recounting it to you, I thought I might give you the impression by comparing the experience to the many dark and fantastical tales composed by H. P. Lovecraft.

Early Obsession

Lovecraft's stories are usually told in the first person, and his protagonists often begin their tale with a peculiar and compelling obsession, some sort of scientific study into strange and forbidden knowledge. In my case this obsession was looking at rental properties on domain.com.au. It started with a few searches, then escalated into a full-blown mania, refreshing every few hours, making endless lists. Strange noises and colours were emitting from my computer.

The Awful Discovery

Of course, as Lovecraft's protagonist delves deeper into the unknown, he makes a discovery of some dark, disturbing truth. Late nights poring over old tomes. Research into forbidden knowledge. A burgeoning sense of unease. Then, it becomes starkly, horrifyingly clear: Rent had gone up by over 50% in just three years!

Non-Euclidean Geometry

In several Lovecraft tales, non-Euclidean geometry was the mechanism for pulling the protagonist out of the ordinary world into the cold uncaring dark voids of the elder gods. In one story, a mathematics student rents an attic room in a house that supposedly used to belong to a witch. He keeps staring at a weird angle between the wall and the roof. Something about it seems not quite... possible. And then he has horrifying dreams and eventually dies of unknown causes. I was starting to feel the same way after viewing apartments that were advertised with photos that were strangely much, much larger than the place actually appeared when you visited it in person.

Eventual Madness

Many of Lovecraft's protagonists face severe insanity (if not some sort of horrifying death) by the end of their stories. After my own foray into the world of Sydney suburban real estate, I am still attempting to recover. It's a quiet night, deceptively peaceful. Occasionally I hear a train roll off toward the western suburbs. But I know the dark, noisome horrors that lurk behind every "For Lease" sign in front of a renovated Federation terrace. I know the secretly muttered ejaculations to Nyarlathotep that are made by real estate agents as soon as the Saturday inspection is over. I know--

Did you hear that noise? That strange noise like a haunting screech across the vast emptiness of space and timearghghghghghghhhhhh!