The Geek Icon: 27 Jan 2008
Living in the dark dungeons of the internet
Hoist the Mainsail - Part 1
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!
Last Year v This Year
30-12-2006 10:30PM
Last year I resolved to:
- Learn a new language. Grade: F-. I did not even improve my English
skillz. Bad geek!
- Pursue an art. Grade: B+. Only a B+ because it's arguable whether something
crafty like spinning is really an art, but I think it is. Also only
a B+ because I started something completely new and completely neglected older
pursuits, which is typical of me.
- The ol' Get Organised! ploy. Grade: C-. My organisation really slumped
until the end of the year. I did manage to keep up with moderate to light
blogging. My spending tracking went OK, but I had a few bad weeks. Applying GTD
was a total failure. I did OK in general, but did nothing
groundbreaking.
- Political/Social involvement. Grade: A. I got my dual citizenship! And I
sent an email to try to save
the 3801 Limited.
Some other good things that happened this year that weren't a part of any
specific resolution:
- Mr Wiggins and I took up a fun hobby together that expanded our social
group: Knitting!
- Lived for yet another year broadcast & cable TV-free (vive le DVD!). No, I
do not miss the hours of commercials that suck out my soul.
- Started up a new job that fitted my needs & wants better.
For this year, I'm just going to do some standard style resolutions (no
multiple choice decisions left up to the masses).
- Seriously, like, really get back on the wagon with the damned writing.
Mr Wiggins wants to do some writing too, for fun. I am going to run a pretend
Creative Writing course with both of us as the students. It's called Mistress
ARJ's School of Creative Writing (I know, not that creative).
- Get some damned exercise. Ever since the Council closed down my gym
(jerks!), I have been getting flabbier and flabbier. I'm thinking of
this.
- Regular spinning practice (this will be the easiest). This will be
facilitated by my corollary resolution: make more gifts for people. I was kinda
slack on the gift giving (for birthdays and holidays) this year.
- Go to some career counselling. I like my new job, but it's time for me to
get out of IT as a career. It's just not where my head & heart are.
Approved!
26-11-2006 10:22AM
On Dec 6th I will take part in my Australian citizenship ceremony*. You're
all invited!
*Warning: Mr Wiggins told me his was incredibly boring.
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