Category: Route

Big RV trip

I’ve finally finished booking all the campsites (and the ferry) for our big Northern Ontario trip. It roughly follows https://maps.northernontario.travel/best/trip/10-day-ontario-provincial-park-rv-route/15589 but I’ve stretched it out to 18 days by adding adding a bunch of double and triple nights and also breaking some of the longer travel days into two.

With the price of diesel, this might be our only long trip this summer, but we’re still planning some short ones and a few medium length ones (like this year’s version of the Keystone Cougar 22MLS Great Lakes Regional Rally (Part 1?))

Progress in the new server

As I wrote about in And for my sins…, I’m moving a bunch of stuff from the linode I set up back when Debian 5.0 was the current over onto a new server which I set up with Debian 13. And so far, it’s gone pretty well.

Moving the “alink” site took a bit of trouble, mostly because I made a mistake as where I put the git repository and so I had to change any URLs from $HOME/alink to $HOME/alink/alink. Unfortunately “alink” involves scraping flight data from another website, and currently the users of that site don’t have any flights on the other website so I can’t make sure the site is working right.

Moving the “navaid.com” site was easier, because it’s mostly written in Perl and nothing changes in Perl these days. The biggest change was that the new version of Debian uses a newer version of PostgreSQL, and a new version of PostGIS.

The next task was setting up email. That was mostly no big deal, except I decided to use rspamd instead of openDKIM to do mail signing. It took a few attempts to get it right, mostly because I wanted to use different signatures for the different domains and subdomains I send email from. I had a bit of a setup glitch because rspamd allows you to sign messages with a ED25519 key, but the tool I use for verifying DKIM signatures doesn’t understand them, so Ihad to switch back to RSA keys. rspamd will provide spam filtering on incoming mail as a bonus but I doubt that will be an issue. I left off all the filtering I used to do in postfix for now, figuring that rspamd will handle it instead.

The latest thing I did was move the news spool over to the new server. I’d anticipated that I’d have to rebuild the history and/or overview databases, because I’m pretty sure I had to last time I moved them. But in actual fact, I just made sure I used the rsync option that respected sparse files, and I didn’t have to rebuild. I did get a few errors about inode discrepancies which I fixed with tdx-util -F. I didn’t bring over my cleanfeed implementation because I hadn’t updated it since 2002 so there’s probably a better version out there.

The last thing I need to do is migrate the Mailman mailing lists over. This is the one I’ve been dreading, so I’ve put it off until last. I’m going to have to do more research on how to do it. But the biggest problem is I don’t want to shut down my mailing lists for too long.

2018 Racing Calendar

I don’t think I did one of these last year. This year, because of the extended unemployment and the fact that I’m currently underemployed, I’m thinking of staying closer to home to save money, and just doing the NYMCRA kayak points races plus the USCA Nationals and Lighthouse To Lighthouse. One thing is that some of these races are far enough away that I’d really want to stay overnight the night before – I wonder if I should buy some camping equipment to save money? I’m also worried about my extended illnesses so far this year – I’ve gotten less than 13.5 hours of training so far this calendar year, and last year at this time I had nearly 55 hours.

So here’s the preliminary schedule.
May 12 – Round the Mountain
June 2 – Tupper Lake 8 Miler
June 9-10 – Madrid Canoe Regatta
July 7 – Armond Bassett
July 14 – Electric City Regatta
July 29 – BluMouLA – BuFuRa
Aug 10-12 – USCA Nationals (The website isn’t clear about what day is what, but I’m thinking of doing Unlimited and Touring this year)
Sept 15 – Lighthouse To Lighthouse
Sept 22 – Long Lake Long Boat Regatta
Sept 30 – Seneca Monster

The ones in bold are the ones I did last year. Last year I also did the “Onandaga Cup”, which was a test run for the USCA Nationals going once around the course. This year we’re doing it twice, and I believe we’re not going to start out in the lake like we did last year.

I’m thinking I might continue to use the V-12 on races where I know it’s going to be very flat, like Armond Bassett and USCA Nationals. I’m thinking about buying or borrowing a V-8 to race the Touring class at the USCA nationals. I’m also toying with the idea of maybe doing the V-8 at Lighthouse To Lighthouse to see if it means I don’t slow to a crawl in the rough bit around the second lighthouse. Either that or paddling the short course in my Sport. Otherwise I’ll stick to the Sport.

I’m hoping this will be a good year for videos. I’m going to set up a public Dropbox in hopes that other paddlers will share their videos – maybe I can make a big overview one showing multiple viewpoints instead of just my own.

2016 Racing Calendar

Last year, I posted my 2015 Racing Calendar and I ended up doing most of the races I’d predicted (I missed Ride The Bull and didn’t finish the Blackburn Challenge). So here is my idea for this year (ones I’m pretty sure I’m going to in bold, ones I’m not sure about in normal):

May 14th: Round the Mountain
June 2nd-5th: TC Surfski Immersion Vacation
June 18th: Ride the Bull
June 26th: Black River
July 9th: Armond Bassett
July 16th: Canadian Surfski Championships
July 18-23th: Gorge Downwind Champs
August 11-14: USCA Nationals – Northfield MA
August 20: Buffalo Paddle Festival
September 17th: Lighthouse To Lighthouse or
September 17th?: Baycreek Kayak and SUP Cup
September 24th: Long Lake Long Boat Regatta.
October 2: Seneca Monster

Last year I used my Thunderbolt for Round The Mountain (RTM) but then put it away and didn’t use it afterwards. I used the V10 Sport for most races, except for Armond Bassett where I used the V12. This year I’d like to try the V12 for RTM, but I need to be more comfortable in wind and waves with it first. Considering how much time I lost getting out of and back into the Thunderbolt on the carry, a ski would be a big advantage for me. I don’t want to risk the V10 Sport on RTM because there is a slippery downhill and I’ve dropped my boat at least twice on it, and the “ultra” layup is fragile as hell. But the V12 is the tougher “performance” layup and should be able to take it.

A thought about EVs (Electric Vehicles)

It’s probably going to be 5 years before we need to buy a new car, but Vicki and I were talking about the new Nissan Leaf and other EVs. With our current driving pattern, we could definitely get by with a two seater EV with 75 miles or so of range, as well as a hybrid or whatever they’re calling the Volt these days. Obviously the state of the art will have advanced by then, but in theory we could get by with what’s available now.

But one thing that gives me pause is heating the cabin. Hybrids and gas engined cars get worse mileage in the winter here in the temperate zone. Part of that is that engines aren’t as efficient in the cold, but also in the case in hybrids, they run the gas engine more often to heat up the engine and the cabin. But EVs are on a pretty limited power budget, and electric heaters suck up electricity like nobody’s business. So what I’m wondering is if EVs currently have the option, or whether I’ve just invented it, to use house power to heat the cabin up before you use it. So if you plug your EV in overnight, it charges the battery, and then an hour or so before you’re scheduled to drive it somewhere, it starts using house power to heat up the cabin. That would save the power in the battery for the important stuff, like driving the wheels and powering your iPod.

Hey, you could even use a peltier cooler to use the house power to cool it in the summer, come to think of it.

I guess for the drive home from work, you’d be stuck using the battery. But no idea is perfect.