Rant – Page 14 – Rants and Revelations

Death of a Thunderbolt

Today is a tale of one smart thing and one stupid thing.

Smart thing: I got a dry suit.
Stupid thing: I got too close to the ice blocking the river

Let me back up a bit.

Yesterday (Saturday), Jim and I paddled on the river, and when we got to where the river was completely blocked with ice, we could see it a long way off and turned well before it. Jim remarked that since it was going to remain well above freezing, it should be clear further down today (Sunday). And sure enough, it was.

We were cruising along pretty nicely, there was ice on both river banks but plenty of room in the middle. We were both warm and dry in our Kokatat semi-dry suits and enjoying life. There were a few chunks of ice in the river, and nothing bigger than a foot or two in any dimension, and mostly so thin that you could bash through them in your boat. I was in my West Side Boat Shop Thunderbolt, which has become my “beater” boat for spring paddling because it’s so tough and stable and because I don’t really care much what happens to it.

Up ahead, we could see what looked like a very large floe in the middle of the river. It was only about 10 or so feet long, and I couldn’t tell if it was moving with the current. But we both agreed to head over to the right side since that looked clearer. But as we got nearly to the “gap”, I crunched up partially onto ice that was just below the surface of the water. Jim and I both back-paddled. He had no problems turning around, because his Epic V8 has an understern rudder with lots of rudder authority, but my boat is longer and has an overstern rudder, so it doesn’t turn anywhere near as well. I misjudged how far back I had to back-paddle before I started turning, and I ended up crunching sideways into the ice.

Now I’ve got a problem, because I need to paddle on the right side to turn, but there’s ice there. And the ice is pretty thin, so you can’t push down on it very hard. I don’t know exactly how it happened – either the ice gave way when I was trying to push it with the paddle, or I was trying to push myself away from the ice with my hand and I overbalanced. Either way, I ended up in the water. Immediately I realize that my dry suit is working perfectly, and no water is getting in, but I also realize that the cold water is still pulling heat out of my body. Also, I’ve freed my hands from my pogies and they’re utterly freezing. The boat is upstream of me, and it’s bumping into me. I ignored it because I know that there is no way to remount it until I can get onto solid(ish) ground. I tried pulling myself along the edge of the ice to get closer to the shore, but the ice kept breaking. I also tried pulling myself up onto it, but again, as soon as I got my upper torso onto it it would break. The current was pulling my feet under the ice and I was starting to get concerned. Jim had been trying to rescue my boat, but I called to him that I was having problems and he dropped the boat and came over. He couldn’t get in too close, because he didn’t want to end up in the same predicament, but he backed towards me, and as he got close enough I left my paddle up on the ice and swam over. I grabbed the handle on the back of his V8 and held on for dear life.

My hands were frozen solid – I kept thinking of Howard Blackburn purposely freezing his hands to the oars so he didn’t let go even though he couldn’t feel them. I was in a similar state – I was afraid to adjust my hand position for fear of not being able to grab back on. Jim paddled furiously, and I kicked, but we seemed to be just barely moving up stream. Jim’s goal was a bridge that was a hundred meters or so upstream of where I’d fallen in, but it seemed like the far side of the moon to me. Every now and then my neck would go below the water and a small trickle of water would come in – that’s the difference between a semi-dry and a full dry suit – but it wasn’t enough to chill me any more than I was. Actually, truth be told, besides my painfully cold hands, the rest of me wasn’t feeling cold. Maybe I was too worried about goal to think about it.

After what seemed like forever, we got to the bridge. Jim was trying to get around to the upstream side, but there was ice in close to it. Also, the current got really fast around the abutment because the water flows around it, and with me on the back acting like a gigantic rudder he didn’t have a lot of maneuverability. At one point he suggested I swim for it, so I reluctantly let go of the boat and swam – I wasn’t moving any faster than he had been towing me, and my hands were now fully in the water. But I grabbed the nose of his boat, and then the concrete of the nose of the abutment, and managed to pull myself around the nose and get into shallower water. And once I was in the shallow water, I was able to break the ice and climb up onto the bank. I think we were both pretty exhausted at that point.

Once I was up on the bank, Jim headed back to see if he could rescue my paddle and/or my boat. My immediate problem was my hands – now that they were out of the water and warming up a bit, they were extremely painful. Just unbelievable amounts of pain. Last time I felt something this bad was the time in Sudbury when I got frostbite on my penis. I wanted to put my hands in my groin or my underarms to warm up, but I couldn’t grasp the dry suit zipper cover. I knew that even if Jim managed to rescue my equipment, I wouldn’t be able to get back to the put-in under my own steam because I didn’t think I could hold the paddle. I looked downstream and saw Jim had my paddle, but he didn’t have a place to stow it and so it kept digging into the water and falling out. He left it, and I guess he tried to reach the boat but couldn’t reach it safely.

He came back up to me and we briefly discussed what to do next. The bridge I was under was the New York State Thruway (I-90) so I couldn’t very well get picked up there. And of course, for the first time in a long time I forgot to bring my phone so I couldn’t call anybody. Jim pointed out a house on the other side of the river, and he said he was going to look for a rope. I walked over the bridge and the man in the house came out wearing a loose bathrobe and boxer shorts, and a woman was in the background looking equally casually dressed, so I worried that I interrupted something. Anyway he let me use his phone, but suggested I stand outside to do the calling because several dogs were barking at me. But of course since I was calling from a number Vicki didn’t know, she didn’t answer. (We’ve been getting a lot of calls from local numbers that are usually the “we’re calling from credit card processing” scams, so we don’t usually answer when unfamiliar numbers show up in the caller display). I left a message, hoping that she’d call back. But by then Jim was out in the water just offshore of this place asking for a rope. The guy and I went to look for one, but by the time we got back it was obvious there was no hope – you could see my boat was sitting in the water nose down with the stern in the air at about a 70 degree angle from the horizontal. Obviously the boat had tipped over and bow had filled with water, which meant that even if Jim could get a rope on it, it would be impossible to tow with several hundred pounds of water in it – West Side Boat Shop boats don’t have bulkheads, so when water comes in, they’re freaking heavy. Jim reported that he could also see my paddle had slipped under the ice. Maybe somebody will find them when they pop out the other side of the ice floe, but it’s more likely somebody will wonder what the strange shape is going over the weir near Dinosaur BBQ in a few weeks.

Craigslist “Lost kayak” listing

Anyway, Jim said he’d go back and get his car and come back and pick me up. I told the guy in the house that I’d walk to the end of the driveway (because I was already feeling like I was interrupting their Sunday afternoon). And once I got to the end of the driveway I kept walking to keep warm.

It’s now 3 or 4 hours later. My fingertips are still all pins-and-needles even though they’re not cold – hopefully it’s nothing permanent, because this is really annoying when typing.

My take away from all this? Well, I haven’t paddled in icy rivers in a number of years because I was afraid of what would happen if I got sucked under the ice. Today proved that just because I had on a dry suit, that’s still a major danger. I got over confident and got into real danger because of it. The dry suit is going to be great in the spring and fall – and if we do a downwinder at the TC Surfski Immersion weekend, but I’m not going to paddle near river ice ever again.

Come on Garmin, why is this so hard?

I use Garmin Connect to record and track my workouts. Since this is winter, mostly I’ve been doing workouts on the kayak ergometer (“erg”). Every now and then it gets warm and I can get out for a bike ride, but when it’s too cold I do three workouts a week on the erg. I put them into Garmin Connect as “Indoor Cardio”, because it’s the closest thing in their list of activity types to what I actually do. But Garmin Connect can’t seem to decide what to do with that. The list they present is semi-hierarchical – it shows “Running”, then a list of sub-categories of running (like “Street Running”, “Track Running”, etc., then a line, then “Cycling”, then a list of sub-categories of cycling, then a line, then “Fitness Equipment” and a list of sub-categories including “Indoor Cardio”, then other categories and sub-categories. Paddling is in the “Other” category.

On my dashboard, there is a graph called “Activity Time” that shows my daily activity time. And this is the thing that drives me up the wall. Because in spite of the fact that “Indoor Cardio” is in the “Fitness Equipment” category, if you look at this graph for any time up until the beginning of this month, my erg time shows up as “Other”:
Screen Shot 2016-02-18 at 15.35.10
And then for a couple of weeks, they seemed to have gotten it right and started labelling it “Fitness Equipment”:

But this week they suddenly just decided to break things entirely, and now my erging activities don’t show up on the “Total Activity Time” graph at all:
Screen Shot 2016-02-18 at 15.36.43
And strangely, not only does it show up in the “Active Calories” graph, it’s there as “Fitness Equipment”:

Way to go guys.

This week in tech

So for several years now, I’ve had two cameras protecting the front and back of the house. It looks like I got the first one in February 2013. Both cameras were very similar even though they were from different companies – it looked like they’d licensed the firmware from the same source, but one got a much later build of the software. Either that, or being Chinese companies, they probably just ripped each other off.

But both of them had just about every feature I wanted in a camera. They had Pan/Tilt/Zoom, a simple web interface which worked on every browser on every OS I cared about, IR night mode, motion detection alarms that would send you email or ftp pictures to a server, and both wifi and wired ethernet. The one on the front wasn’t near a power source so rather than running power out there, I ran an ethernet cable and did Power Over Ethernet (PoE), but the one in the back was near power but not somewhere I could run ethernet, so it’s transmitting over wifi. Both had a few minor quirks, but for the most part they were exactly what I wanted – I keep a couple of windows open on my monitor showing both video streams and I have an app on my iPad that will do the same. It’s very handy when I’m working to see people coming to the front door because I can’t hear a door bell up in my office. Their biggest flaw was that they were pretty low-resolution (640×480). Unless it’s close up, it would be pretty hard to identify a face at 640×480.

So I’ve been looking for replacements that do everything these ones do, except do it in high def. And I’ve run into a shitload of problems. Evidently the “Server Push Mode” that made these things work on Linux browsers has gone out of fashion or something, because I haven’t found anybody who has it. Even if the screen shots on their downloadable manuals indicates they have it, they don’t. That option is not on the screens you see in the shipping product.

Another problem is that evidently I’ve become incapable of reading product descriptions in detail. I ordered a really nice D-Link camera that did a weird “920P” resolution (somewhere between 1080P and 720P), but which worked on Linux browser. The only problem with it, which I didn’t notice until I was installing it outside, is that it’s not advertised as an outdoor camera. I thought it was. It lasted several months but a rainstorm a few weeks ago seems to have finally killed it. Lesson 1: Check to make sure it’s weatherproof before ordering. I also ordered one that when it arrived it turned out it didn’t do Pan/Tilt/Zoom, even though NewEggs’ search function returned it when I’d specified that as one of the required options. Lesson #2: NewEggs’ search function is crap. I eventually got one from Foscam that was advertised as working with “any standard browser”. It turns out that to them, “any standard browser” means IE or Firefox on Windows 8 or below. Lesson #3: People who write product descriptions are a bunch of liars.

After I returned that one, I got a similar camera from Ipcam Central. Once again, their downloadable manual showed a “Server Push Mode” that was not present in the actual product. Once again, their promise of “Supports Mac OS X” turned out to be a lie – they claim that they will have an application that will be available in a few weeks or months, but I’m not holding my breath. But I decided that since all the cameras seem to have the same problems no matter the vendor, I was going to do my damnedest to see if I could make it work. With with a lot of help from their tech support I’ve got it pretty workable. First they recommended I download some Linux software to do ONVIF – the software is called OpenCVR and it didn’t work for shit. But then they told me the secret undocumented rtsp stream names, and so now I’ve got a VLC window displaying the lower resolution version of the video and audio feed on my monitor (vlc rtsp://admin:password@backcam/12). I tried the high resolution version and it froze up after a while. Not sure if that was due to network problems or what. I’ve also set up a job on my Linux box that uses VLC to continuously grab 10 minute movies into files (vlc rtsp://admin:password@backcam/11 --sout=file/ts:/backup_2/backcam/backcam-$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S").mpg -I dummy --stop-time=600 vlc://quit). I figure that breaking it up into 10 minute chunks will help restart it if it freezes up, and also it will be easier to provide files to the police if it sees anything.

The web interface doesn’t display the actual video (except on Windows), but it does allow me to control the pan/tilt/zoom features and do much of the setup. The only thing it wouldn’t allow me to set up is the motion detection, because it wants visual “zones”, and it won’t display those except on Windows. Fortunately I have a Windows laptop that I hardly ever use that I was able to drag out and dust off to do that one piece of setup. It didn’t work at first because Edge, the new browser in Windows 10 doesn’t support plugins, and it didn’t work at second even after switching back to IE11. Eventually tech support figured out that I needed to tell IE to run in the dreaded “Compatibility mode”. Once I did that I was able to set up the motion detection, and this morning I got emailed a series of pictures of me letting the dogs out for their morning pee. I also got pictures of a few points in the night where nothing happened, but that’s par for the course with these things – even the old cameras sometimes go nuts when it’s raining or snowing and send me hundreds of these emails in a night. As well, each of these motion alarms saved a nice little short movie to the on-board storage of the camera.

Oh yeah, remember how I said that every camera vendor lies? Well, another sort-of lie these guys tell on their web page is they describe the on-board storage as “an SD card”. Except when you ask tech support, there is no way to get to this SD card to remove it or replace it with something bigger. If you can’t replace it, then while calling it “an SD card” might be technically correct, it doesn’t matter to the end user how you implemented the on-board storage. You might as well have called it magnetic core memory for all the good it does me.

But the upshot of all this is that I’ve managed to cobble up a system that works for me. I’ve ordered some PoE adapters, and when it comes I’m going to move this camera to the front door position, and order another one for the back door.

Update: So I moved the camera to the front door, and about 3 hours later the camera started slowly going out of focus, and the focus buttons on the interface don’t work. Tech support remoted in and said “we can make it focus”, so I said “well, if you can make it focus, how about putting it back in focus and leave it like that?”, and then they admitted that they hadn’t made it focus. Fuck.

Update 2: I got the second camera, and replaced the first camera with the second camera, and got it set up nicely. Then I took the first camera and set it up for the WiFi so I can put it in the back yard, and noticed it is now completely in focus. So I guess when I power cycled it last time and did a factory reset, I didn’t leave it off long enough. Fingers cross that it stays that way.

Foscam FI9828W – Don’t buy this POS

I’ve had a security camera on the front door for a couple of years now, and as well as giving a bit of piece of mind at night, it’s also really handy during the day to watch out for delivery people. It was so successful, I decided I wanted another camera to watch the back door and the garage. That was motivated at least in part by the number of garage break-ins we’ve had in our neighborhood and the fact that at least one neighbor was able to give the police some nice pictures of the perp from his security camera.

Unfortunately the company that made the front camera (Airsight) had stopped selling them (it appears they’re back now), so I bought a Wancam camera. It had all the same features as the Airsight (Pan/Tilt/Zoom, controllable through any standard web browser, weather proof, infrared for night vision, motion detection, email, ftp, etc). I liked it at first, and the interface seemed very familiar but after a few weeks I noticed a problem – it needed rebooting at least four or five times a week. And since the power plug is in the garage, it often didn’t get rebooted for a few days, especially in winter. So it’s now sitting in my junk box.

I then bought another camera – I decided this time to get an HD, at least 720P. The camera I’m using up front has only one flaw major flaw – I wish it was better resolution. This one is a D-Link DCS-52222L. Unfortunately, because NewEgg.com’s search function sucks balls, I didn’t noticed that while I specified I wanted an outdoor camera, most of the ones the search returned, including this one, are indoor cameras. It turned out to be damn near perfect, except I’m sure any day now it’s going to succumb to the weather. Also I haven’t figured out how to get the motion detection working – I told it to email me snapshots but instead if emails me a text file.

In preparation for the inevitable, I bought another camera. This one, the Foscam FI9828W, advertised that it was “920p” (which is a non-existent resolution standard, but obviously somewhere between 720P and 1080P) and all the other stuff I wanted, like pan/tilt/zoom, weather proof, and most importantly, “viewable over the internet using standard browsers”.

Well, it turns out that that last one was a complete 100% lie. It only works on Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows (and on Windows 10, it doesn’t work on the standard browser Edge, and you have to find the “Open in Internet Explorer” menu item) and supposedly on Macintosh. You have to install plugins to make it work, which means it won’t work on Edge and Chrome because they don’t accept plugins, and it won’t work on Linux because they don’t make plugins for it. Now on Linux I can display the actual video using vlc with a rtsp url, but I can’t control the camera. Also I’ve discovered that if I leave it up and running for a few hours, it’s likely to freeze up and then I have to re-open the stream in vlc. The only light at the end of this tunnel is I can view and control the camera with an iOS app. Not as good as just having a browser window open like I do with the Airsight and D-Link (and formerly the Wancam) cameras. Another thing that changes is that with the other three cameras, there was a simple “curl” command I could do to grab a snapshot from the camera. I had that running on my Raspberry Pi to grab snapshots every second and store them in case I needed to review. However, I did find a work-around using “aconv” – avconv -i rtsp://userid:password@192.168.1.16:88/videoMain -r 1 -vsync 1 -qscale 1 -frames 86400 -f image2 backcam%09d.jpg – unfortunately it’s too processor intensive and can’t run on the Raspberry Pi, so I have to run it on my desktop. Or I could have the camera take snapshots at regular intervals and FTP them to the Raspberry Pi. So I guess with these two work-arounds I have a functioning camera, although I’m not happy with it.

And if the blatant lie about “woks on standard browsers” wasn’t enough reason to hate them, here’s some other reasons:

The setup for daylight savings time is broken – if you enable daylight savings time, you have to choose the offset, but if you choose 60 minutes it changes the time by two hours, so you have to set it to 30 minutes to get it to offset by an hour.
I set up two video streams, with the “sub” stream being lower resolution one, but if you open the “sub” stream using rtsp in vlc, it actually still shows a full resolution stream. The secondary stream works on the D-Link
When you set up email, it asks for the sender and one or more recipients. But for some odd reason, it sends a copy of the email to the sender as well. So for the other cameras, I can use the camera name as the sender, but I can’t for this one because it has to be an existing email address.
When you set up ftp, you have to give an FTP url like ftp://192.168.1.4/uploads but if you give the trailing slash (like you would expect to do when you’re specifying a directory) it fails with a message that says the login credentials are wrong.
If you put the IR LEDs on “Automatic” mode, it doesn’t work. The IR stays off, and consequently the captured images are all black and the motion detection doesn’t work. If you want to see in the dark, you have to manually set it to “Night Mode” and remember to set it back off in the day.

So obviously whoever wrote the user interface was a moron.

Next couple of weeks

This coming Sunday, I have to go down to Owings Mills for work. The following Saturday, I leave for British Columbia. The Saturday after that I participate in the Canadian Surfski Championships in Squamish, British Columbia. The Saturday after that, I participate in the Blackburn Challenge in Glochester, Mass. I would not be exaggerating to say that these are the two most important and highest prestige surfski races of my life.

I obviously need some way to stay in shape while I’m down in Owings Mills, which is why I’m going to drive down with my bike on my roof rack. There are practically no paddle options within a reasonable distance of Owings Mills, except “Liberty Reservoir”. There are only two problems with Liberty Reservoir:

I’d have to buy a yearly pass from the City of Baltimore. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve given enough money to the City of Baltimore and I would be happy if they never saw another cent from me.
They require you to sign an affidavit that your boat will never be used anywhere except their reservoirs. I’m not about to sacrifice a boat for them, not even my ancient V10 Sport club which I haven’t paddled in two years.

Also, because I’ve got an early flight on Saturday morning, I’ve put my colleagues at Owings Mills on notice that I’m leaving no later than noon on Friday. I repeated this over and over again when we were planning this visit, and I’m still anticipating a fight when I need to leave, because 2 out of 3 times I go down there nothing actually gets done until the Friday afternoon. That’s going to be their problem, not mine.

My problem is that even if I leave on the stroke of noon, I probably won’t be home until nearly 8, and I’ve got a 6am flight the next morning. That doesn’t give much time to get all my kayaking and other shit together for the flight. And also I want to get some last training paddles in this weekend including the Sunday before I leave for Owings Mills, which means it’s going to be tricky pre-packing my kayaking gear *and* making sure it’s somewhat clean.

As well as the logistic problems of getting back from one trip and immediately leaving on the other with completely different packing parameters, I also worry about the fitness aspect.

I’ll probably get a couple of long paddles in before I leave for Owings Mills. Then when I get there, really the only option for fitness will be bike riding, as I’ve said before. Bike riding isn’t great preparation for paddling, but it will at least keep my cardio fitness up. I’ll bring some rubber bands and I think the fitness center at the hotel has some hand weights, so maybe I can do something for my core. I have this mental picture of me taking my paddle into the hotel pool and trying to do stationary paddling in the pool, but I doubt they’d allow it.

Then there are going to be two travelling days, Friday and Saturday. Then family visiting (and the fun and logistics of trying to visit two close family members who live an hour apart and refuse to get together at once place or the other) for several days. I pick up my rented surfski and have a short race on the Tuesday before the champs. Then I’ve been promised that there is some sort of down-wind paddle going on on the Wednesday in North Vancouver, and I’m hoping to scout some or all of the course on Thursday, then a rest day and then the race. Then Sunday I’ve signed up for a clinic with Sean “Prawn” Rice. Then Monday travel home, and get ready for Blackburn the following Saturday. Phew.