Rants and Revelations

After Saturday’s paddling with Rob, he decided to buy the Tampico XL. Tonight was his night to pick it up, so we agreed to meet at Baycreek and break the new boat in.

When I got there, he was getting fitted out with paddle and PFD. He got a really nice PFD - one of the triangular ones that give you lots of room around the shoulders. Much nicer than mine. He also had a very light paddle with a carbon fibre shaft and composite blades. Extremely light, with a blade shaped for high angle paddling (which is my style). I figured it was about a $250 paddle. He said it was used, and he was getting it for $80! I was jealous as hell, especially since there was no visible sign of it being used. But the guy behind the counter corrected him - he said it was $80 off, and so it was $160. Rob recoiled visibly, and started to put it back on the rack. I quickly grabbed it for myself.

I took my old paddle and broke it down and slipped it under the straps on the back of the kayak, and went out for a spin with the new one. The more agressive blade shape meant that every pull rocketed me forward far more than the old paddle. And the lighter weight meant that I could paddle harder for longer.

Rob and I paddled for about two hours, up almost to Browncoft and back. His kayak seems as good as the Merlin he tried on Saturday when it comes to ease of paddling, but maybe with a bit more initial stability. It also seemed like it might be a bit easier to turn, without a pronounced keel line and a bit more rocker. He seemed very happy with it, and I think it’s a good choice for him.

I was very very happy with my new paddle, too. At the end of the hours, it still felt light in my hands, and two quick strokes would get me up to a breaking wake on the bow. I had lots of energy at the end.

Last night, a big storm ended a very long drought. Today the temperature is down under 70 degrees, after weeks up over 90 with high humidity. And you want to know why? Because today Taylor Heating came and installed central air conditioning in our new house. I’m predicting that the temperature will stay low for the rest of the year.

Recently, I noticed that a significant percentage of my web site traffic was for a single image of Blobby the Blue Lobster, all with referrer strings indicating a particular web board. Sure enough, I went there and found that one functional illiterate was using this picture as his avatar in his conversations with a bunch of other functional illiterates.

If you don’t believe me about the functional illiteracy, here is word for word one of his posts to that forum:

OMFG that was so fucking funny i cant belive that people belive that shit haah…john malm wow im so happy hes gone again after reading this.

But i msut say between reading all of that and the XMF interview the romm is freaking spinning ive read alot today including a bunch of video games ahah well tt you all alter

Anyway, I don’t like picture leeches much, and I especially don’t like illiterate ones. So I put the following in my /etc/http/conf/http.conf:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.echoingthesound.org/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*blobby.*\.jpg http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/pork.gif [R,L]

Amazingly enough, he’s changed his avatar, but he’s still leeching - the image he’s using is on somebody else’s site.


This morning my cow orker Rob and I went kayaking. He’s thinking of buying a kayak, but he’s had numerous knee surgeries so he needs a big cockpit so that he can get in and out. He also wants something that’s not too hard to lift, so he probably doesn’t want a rotomoulded kayak like I have. But he’s in luck - this year there are new materials that are as cheap as rotomoulded, but nearly as light as fibreglas. Almost makes me wish I’d waited a year.

First he tried a Swift Adirondak 13.6 (yes, he’s a Swift Boat Veteran now) which is certainly an easy boat to get in and out (almost canoe like) but it’s short and beamy and not very fast. We took it easy and had a nice slow paddle. We went up past the weir and turned around at the same place where Vicki and I turned around the first time we paddled up the creek.

On the way back, Rob was starting to notice how much easier it was for me to paddle than for him. And when we got back, he asked for something sleeker, and they suggested he try a Hurricane Tampico XL. But the only one they had was out already, so they said he should wait. While he was poking around looking at what they had, I picked up the paddle he had been using. It was carbon fiber, and very, very light. I took it out for a quick paddle around, and it was beautiful. It was like getting a second wind. Unfortunately it costs $290. I know what I want for my birthday next year.

Rather than waiting for the Tampico, we went across the street to check out Oak Orchard. They have a big selection of kayaks as well. At first, Rob and I found the guy manning the store a bit odd, and not very “together”. But after a while we warmed to him as he seemed to get it together, or we figured out what he was getting at, or something. He put Rob in a Eddyline Merlin XT, which is longer than the Adirondak, and also had a more pronounced V-hull. Rob found it a bit more difficult to get in than the Adirondak, and also because of the more agressive hull shape it felt a bit “trembly”. The guy gave him some really good advice about dealing with the lack of stability, and I think it worked. Rob and I paddled a bit around the bay, so he was dealing with a boat with a lot less initial stability than the one he’d been using before, but also waves and wake and wind. We paddled up and down a bit, and it was obvious that the boat was way faster than the previous one, and pretty close to the speed of mine. Obviously a nice boat, and a good choice for him.

Rob didn’t want to make a decision right away, so we went out to lunch afterwards, and afterwards I went home and he went back to BayCreek to try that Tampico.

I’m trying to get some entries ready for the Entertainment Imaging employees photo contest. The entries I’m considering are at Gallery :: Photo Contest.

The contest categories are

• Nature
• People
• Photojournalism
• Architecture
• …uh, there are one or two others, I think
• Open

Open is used for things that don’t fit other categories, but it’s also supposed to be where we put pictures that have lots of effects applied. You’re only allowed two entries in each category, so you have to be careful that the ones you enter are the best ones you have in each category.

photo_contest/whale_jump_sharpenedI’ve got this one as a pretty strong entry for the Nature category. The only problem with it that I can see is that it’s a small picture - the judges like pictures that take up most of an 8.5×11″ page. I worry that blowing it up will make it too fuzzy.

photo_contest/baiyunAnother candidate for the Nature category is this picture of Baiyun. Yes, they specifically cautioned that pets go in Nature not in People. I took this picture of Baiyun in direct sunlight with the room behind him normally bright, so in contrast it came out very dark. I actually manually darkened a bit of the background where some light splashed in, and when you look at it in full magnification it doesn’t come out very well - I’m going to have to fix that, I think. I was using the “Clone Stamp” tool I think it’s called. But it would be better to select that area and just paint it black, I think.

photo_contest/kayakI had this picture that I like, but I wasn’t sure it was photo contest material. So I played with it a bit, and came up with this somewhat surreal picture, which I think I could enter it in the Open category. I like the idea of masking out Vicki and the kayak, and doing something with the rest of the picture, but I’m not sure that this “something” is the right “something”. I kind of liked it when I inversed the colours instead. Maybe I’ll put that up in the gallery and let you decide.

photo_contest/007_4ASince I have what I think are two good candidates for the Nature category, I’m not sure what to do with the remaining pictures, except this sculpture, being man made, could go in the Architecture category.

Is anybody else out there using Gravatars? I saw Barry Price using it on his blog and read the page, and it looks like a damn cool idea.

How long do they take to “approve” your submitted picture, and do they give you any way to switch between a couple of them?

The night before last I slept in the new house, and with Vicki away there hasn’t been any cooking or dish washing going on, so this morning’s shower was probably the first time anybody but Laura has used the hot water since the engineer’s inspection on Tuesday. And this morning I discovered that the water in the tank was stone cold - the pilot light was out. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pilot light went out because of something the inspector did. I don’t know if Laura had had any hot water during the last couple of days - this wouldn’t be the first time where something wasn’t working right but she never bothered to tell anybody in a position to fix it - or if the tank just cooled down overnight.

I’ve got to say, though, that crawling around on my hands and knees lighting the pilot light, and then taking a sponge bath with tepid water, is not my favourite way to start the day.

I went kayaking tonight. I’m sure I could figure it out from this blog, but it feels like I’ve only been two or three times so far this year, and it’s all because of this move - I’ve spent my daily allotment of elbow pain on shifting boxes or packing or any number of other things. I hadn’t planned to kayak today, but I went to the old house and realized I’d left the keys for the old house back and the new house. So I went to the new house to look after the birds. And I suddenly realized here it was, a not too humid day, still a long time before it gets dark, and I didn’t have any pressing need to do anything to do with the move, plus I’d had a big lunch so I was in no hurry for dinner.

So I quickly threw the kayak on the rack (first test of the new pulley system in the garage) and headed out to Bay Creek Kayaking Center. Good thing they know me there, because I realized just as I was pulling onto I-590 that I’d forgotten my paddle. But they let me borrow one of theirs, so no problem.

It was a great paddle. I got up past the reeds and into the closed over woods in Ellison Park, and there was a lot of wildlife. The usual swans and Canada geese and swallows, but also muskrats and kingfishers and bitterns. In one place I came around a corner and there were approximately a dozen Canada Geese together feeding, many of them obviously this year’s young, but nearly in full adult colouration. Another place, two muskrats froliced on the shore. The river was kind of low and choked with weeds in places. Below the wier it felt like it wasn’t moving at all, but in the narrow and shallow spaces up further you could feel it on the way up.

As usual when I haven’t paddled in a while, I over did it. I went all the way up to the Browncroft Bridge, because I’d heard that there was a put-in there and if there was, it would be very handy to the new house. My right elbow started hurting on the way back downstream, and I’ve taken my usual two Alieve but it’s not helping. But it was worth it - it felt really good. Paddling hard and fast through the straight bits, finessing through the twisty bits where you had to be on the outside of the corner because it’s not deep enough on the inside.

I discovered some fun little things about boat handling. I found that when I got into the shallow water on the inside of a corner, and I could see my wake breaking just behind my boat, it seemed that the wake was sucking the back end of the boat towards the shallow water. Maybe a coincidence, but it sure felt like that. Another discovery was that with the skeg down lower than I usually have it, I could turn the boat just by leaning it. It started when I leaned out to sweep and discovered that I didn’t even have to put the paddle in the water. A bit of experimentation, and I could turn just by pushing up with the inside thigh.

I discovered this nifty little Google Maps application, and if you click here, you can see my route up to the bridge (I took the same route back, of course).

Regular readers of my blog remember that back in April I bought a Linksys WRT54G wireless router to replace my Belkin router, which had this annoying habit of sometimes showing you the configuration interface on the external port 80 even though it’s supposed to be forwarding the external port 80 to my Linux router’s port 80 and even though it’s configured to not allow external access to the configuration interface. That was a dismal failure because every now and then, at first every couple of days and later several times a day (and definitely more likely to fail if you were doing a large file transfer), it would stop allowing wireless clients to access the outside world, even though wired clients (like my Linux box) were still working fine. Often the only cure was to power cycle, because a soft reboot from the web interface wouldn’t do it.

Because of all that, I continued to use the Belkin at home, in spite of that annoyance. But when they installed cable at the new house, I dug out the Linksys and brought it over, figured that even if it needs to be power cycled once in a while, it would still allow us to use the net when we were over at the house.

So that was my plan for this evening - come home from work, cart out the 7 or 8 bags full of garbage that Vicki and I filled over the weekend, tend to the dog, watch a bit of the Tour de France on TV, then come over to the new house and take care of the birds and keep them company while surfing the net wirelessly down in the bird room. But it didn’t work out that way, because when I got to the new house, I found the Linksys unable to get a DHCP address from the cable modem, even after power cycling both of them. The Linksys actually smells a bit “cooked”, so it’s probably completely ruined now. So now I’m sitting in my office in the new house, on an uncomfortable wicker rocker, connected to the cable modem with a patch cord, and wishing I could be down with the birds on the comfy sofa.

Oh well, it’s cooling down now, soon it will be time to go to bed and not get the sheets too sweaty. (Vicki warned me not to get them sweaty, because they’re new and expensive.)

I am driving a car, I am not competing in the Tour de France. When travelling with other cars at the same speed, it is not necessary to peel off and go back to the back of the line occassionally for a rest. It’s not necessary to signal to the other cars that it’s their turn up front. When coming up to pass another car, it’s not necessary to pause behind him to catch my breath so that when I pass him I can blow past him so quickly that he’s not tempted to follow on my wheel. And I definitely should not be tossing my water bottle out the window at the feet of pedestrians. Oh, and those pedestrians aren’t holding that water bottle out for you, they’re just standing at the cross walk with a drink in their hand.

That is all.

Once again the organizers of the Tour managed to put the most exciting stages on the weekend. And once again Team Discovery, the supposed best team in the tour, managed to get caught flat footed on the first climbing day after a couple of flat days, just like last Friday. And once again, Lance Armstrong proved himself capable of answering any attacks from the other Big Men of the tour, and dishing it back.
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I slaved over a project to upgrade version 3.3 of our software to version 3.6, and get it done by the end of last month, because it was absolutely vital that it get delivered to customers at the end of this month, and QA needed to test it. “The future of the project depends on it” sort of thing. I even only took a week of vacation over holiday even though I felt like taking two so I could be there to fix all the bugs they were going to find. So I’ve been sitting here wondering why QA hasn’t touched it yet, being as how half the month is over.

I just got the word - QA ran their first test of it, and it worked 100% correctly. Woo hoo! I’m the man.

That was the most amazing stage of the Tour de France I’ve seen in years. The peloton falling to peices, all the Big Men being shelled off the back, and Lance pulls up to Popovych and tells him to launch him, and Popovych destroys the three T-Mobile pretenders to the throne, and launches Lance. Five guys left at the front, and Lance sets the pace for a while, and goes to the back of the five to take a quick look, goes back to the front, raises the pace again and slowly kills Basso. Rassmussen, Valverde, Macebo? Who picked them to be up there with Armstrong?

Can Lance keep this up? Can any human challenge him?

You know how your brain will suddenly dredge out of nowhere a memory that you would prefer if you never remembered ever again? (I only have the courage to admit that this happens to me because Dave Barry mentioned it, so I know I’m not the only one.)

I was just sitting there minding my own business when the following memory popped into my head. As explanaton, I should mention that I’m not the best person with faces in the world. I see strong resemblances between people who everybody else says don’t resemble each other at all, and I’ll not recognize people after they’ve changed “their look”.

It was back when I worked at GeoVision, so some time before 1993. I was cutting through the conference room that sat squarely between the front entrace and my desk, and I usually did. The lights in the room were quite dim. Coming in the other direction were a man and a woman I worked with, he a sales person and the woman a developer who spent most of her time in (what was then) recent years working at customer sites and training. The woman was normally attractive, but had the most boring hair style in the world. Today, it appeared she’d done a complete 180 in style, and she was looking really good. So as I blew past them at a fast pace, I said “I really like your hair”. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I saw Allison with her normal straight hair. And then it hit me, that the woman whose hair I’d complemented was a complete stranger, and probably a customer or potential customer. I bet she was baffled. I tried very hard to avoid the conference room and training areas for the rest of the day.

Is it just me, or does getting eye drops put in your eyes rank just below “assault with a deadly weapon” or “trying (unsuccessfully) to explain to your ex-wife that your daugher’s version of events isn’t correct” in stress levels?

I had an eye exam today, and when they put eye drops in your eyes I have to strongly resist the urge to kick the doctor in the balls and run the hell away. The doctor has to clamp open my eyes with his fingers, but I’m sure if he’d had that device they used in “A Clockwork Orange”, he probably would have used that. It’s a wonder I didn’t bite his fingers as they approached my face. Afterwards I’m panting and sweaty.

I can’t understand how people can practically touch their own eyeballs to put in contacts. I’ve never in my life managed to put eye drops on my own eyes - any good I get from eye drops occurs because some of it stays on my eyelids afterwards and gets into my eyes after the eye dropper is gone and I open my eyes again.

After the exam, I couldn’t see anything close up for hours afterwards. Luckily my distance vision was barely good enough to drive. I had a useless morning at work, even compared to my normal slow Monday mornings.