• 1 tsp peanut oil
• 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 Tbsp minced peeled fresh ginger
• 1 jalapeno pepper, minced
• 1 Cup water
• 1 (28 ounce) can no-salt-added diced tomatoes, undrained
• 1 12-ounce can light beer
• 1/4 cup unsalted, dry-roasted peanuts
• 3 Cups chopped, skinned turkey (or chicken)
• 1/2 Cup light coconut milk
• 1/2 Cup finely chopped parsley
• 1/2 Cup finely chopped cilantro
• 1 Tbsp fresh lime juice
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Steps:

• Heat oil in a dutch oven (or a big pot)
• Add onion and garlic, sauté 2 minutes
• Add ginger and jalapeño sauté 30 seconds
• Stir in water, tomatoes, and beer.  Bring to a boil and cover.
• Reduce heat, simmer 20 minutes.
• Place peanuts in spice grinder, grind until fine.  (you can substitute peanut butter too)
• Add peanuts, meat, and coconut milk to pan.  Stir to combine.
• Increase heat to medium, bring to simmer, cook 5 minutes.
• Stir in parsley, cilantro, juice, salt, and black pepper.
• Garnish with cilantro sprigs if desired.

For the Rub:

• 1 Tbsp curry powder
• 2 tsp paprika
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp ground pepper

Mix these together to make a rub.

For the rest:

• 1 3 pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces (or 8 chicken thighs or similar)
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 2 Onions finely chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, chopped
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1 28 oz can ready-cut peeled tomatoes
• 1 1/2 Cups chicken stock or canned broth
• 1/4 cup chopped green onions
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 2 Tbsp unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 cups long grain white rice
• 3 cups water
• 1/2/ cup chopped raisins (optional)

Steps:

• Preheat oven to 350
• Rub the mix you made at the top onto the chicken.  Save 2 Tbsp of the rub for the rice later.
• Dip chicken into flour, shake off excess.
• Heat oil in large heavy skillet.
• Add chicken and brown well, turning frequently.
• Transfer chicken to paper towels and drain.
• Ad 2 onions, bell peppers, garlic and cumin to skillet and sauté until onions brown a bit.
• Mix in tomatoes, stock, green onions and 1/4 cup parsley.
• Arrange chicken in large baking dish.  Pour sauce over chicken.
• Bake until cooked through, about 35 minutes, or longer to tenderfy the chicken even more.

Grab a beer, then make rice…

• Melt butter in heavy pan
• Add rice and remaining 2  tsp of spice rub.  Cook 2 minutes, stirring constantly.
• Add 3 cups water and bring to a boil.  Cover, reduce heat until rice is done…blah blah blah…you know how to make rice….
• Mix raisins into rice if you want (I don’t).
• Spoon rice onto platter, top with chicken, devour.

• 1/2 C currants of raisins
• 1/4 C Dry Sherry
• 3 Tbsp Butter
• 2 Tbsp finely chopped Onion
• 1 C Milk
• 1 Med Apple
• 3 T flour
• 1 1/2 tsp curry powder
• 6 boneless chicken breasts

Steps:

• Soak currants in sherry
• Melt butter in heavy skillet (low)
• Add onions – saute.
• Add flour and curry
• Whisk in milk
• Bring to boil
• Add currants and apple
• Remove from heat
• Salt to taste.
• Put chicken in buttered pan, cover with sauce
• Top with almonds
• Bake @ 350 for about 30 minutes.

Ingredients:

• 3 Tbsp Olive Oil
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 pound boneless chicken, cut in strips
• 1 1/2 6oz jars marinated artichoke hearts
• One 7 oz jar roasted peppers
• 1/2 Cup black olives
• Salt, pepper, Parmesan
• 3.4 pound Tri-color Fusilli

Steps:

• Cook onion and garlic in oil until clear
• Add chicken, cook about 5 min
• Mix in Artichoke hearts, peppers (with liquid) and olives.  Heat through.
• Season with salt and pepper.
• Pour over pasta and serve with Parmesan.

Chicken Curry

From a reddit post, placed here so I can find it quickly later

INGREDIENTS Basmati rice or naan

Chicken, 1.5-2 lbs, preferably with bone

Onion, 1 red or 2 yellow, about fist sized

Potatoes, 5-6 medium ‘size B’ (red skin)

Tomatoes, 2-3 Roma (twice as much if out of season)

Garam masala

Bay, 1 or 2 leaves

Green or Black Cardamom, 3-5 seeds

Thai Chilies, 5 or 6 or chili powder (Cayenne, 90 KHU works ok)

Cinnamon, 1 large stick or 2 medium

Garlic to taste

Ginger root, fresh

Salt, kosher, 4 tsp

Turmeric, 1 tsp (be careful, it will stain everything)

PREP Slice onion, tomatoes, and potatoes. Onion should be smallest, somewhere between dicing and chunking. Tomato and potato approximately into twelfths or sixteenths. Grate a handful of ginger.

COOK

1. Heat a capful of oil until it is fluid but not popping/smoking.

2. Add cinnamon, bay, cardamom, and heat briefly. –Crack green cardamom before adding, add black cardamom as is. –If these begin to burn, just continue immediately to next step.

3. Add onions, turn down the heat. Add ginger (and garlic). Caramelize the onions—not fully, just until they are a deep brown.

4. Add tomato and stir occasionally for several minutes. Continue until tomatoes are cooked and slightly limp.

5. Add salt, turmeric (chili powder goes in here), mix thoroughly.

6. Add potato and fresh chilies, and approximately 2 cups of water, stir occasionally, cover. –Slit chilies and remove stems before adding, and wash your hands. –Potatoes take forever, maybe nuke for 1-2 minutes before adding. –Water will continue to reduce as potatoes cook, add ¼ – ½ cup as necessary.

7. After the potatoes are finally done, add chicken to cook fully and finish the flavour.

8. You forgot to make rice.

Sailing Maina - Pointing Well Up To Concarneau

Sailing Log of Maïna

What follows is the log of our trip to France sailing on Maïna, a Beneteau Oceanis 411. The convention is pretty easy to follow, sections starting with “(A)” were log entries written by Andrew, sections beginning with “(D)” were written by Dad (Jim). Truly an awesome experience!

Also, you will see reference to “bets” between dad and I.  This is an idea we stole from a book “My Old Man and The Sea” where the son and father use large, fake bets to make the trip more interesting. (The book is a good read and I recommend it to anyone who likes reading this kind if stuff, which, if you’re reading this (and like it), you probably do.)

Anyway…on with the show!

21 August 2003 – 1230 – The Adventure Begins

(A) Sitting in the Westerly train station waiting for the train. Hmmm I guess that’s what you do at a train station.

“Where you guys headed?” ”Nowhere, just hanging at the station.”

Yeah right haha…

I guess the train’s running a little late. Dad and I entertained thoughts of going over to the bar next door for a couple of “eye openers” but thought better of it. Maybe not such a bad idea though since it’s 6:30 pm where we’re going. What better way to adjust to the new time zone? I wonder if all train stations have bars next to them. That would make a kind of neat book (and a lot of fun to write too). Take a long train trip and ….accela just went by…..man would it hurt to get hit by that. Of course TGV can blow that thing away.  Anyway, back to the topic of the train-bar-hopping trip. That would be a pretty neat I think.

22-August – Paris to the Marina

(A) We’re here!  Boy, I need a shower. Ooh, I almost forgot.  What would a trans-continental flight be without a baby crying for the ENTIRE trip? Granted, sometimes it wasn’t crying as much as at other times, but it was always there.  And a baby crying most of the time might as well be crying all the time.   Then the guy sitting behind us, he had a case of the plague or something, he kept blowing his nose and stuff…that’s nice.   But as usual the Air France crew was very nice and the food was good – supper and breakfast.

While waiting at the Mount Parnesse train station a couple of interesting things happened. While Dad was getting the tickets, a nice looking, well-dressed lady came up to me and started speaking in French. “Je ne parles pas Françoise” I replied. So she repeated whatever she has said so I repeated what I had said. This time she realized what I was saying so she tried a third time except this time she just held out her hand and said “Money …. my child”, while pointing to the child strapped into the carriage in front of her. After awhile I managed to convince her I wasn’t going to give her anything.

After that we got a bite to eat and then sat by the “Big Board” waiting to see which track the “St Nazair” train left from. I had to take a leak so I struck off to find a bathroom.

TOILETTE

Ahhh, I read the sign and walked to the right.

Confused….hmmm, I suppose that that’s men’s bathroom. I entered the door not quite sure which way to go. I finally saw a sign for “Hommes” and went that way. There was a set of turnstiles there like you see in a subway (should have been my first clue, but I was tired and being a stupid American).  A voice behind me started yelling so I turned my travel-weary body in the direction of the voice to see what’s up. The guy said something in French and, seeing I had no idea what he was saying, switched to English.

“Do you not see the countere? You must pay. You do not know you must pay?”

“No…I mean…Non, Je’n sais pas”.

I think he lectured me for a bit longer, I really don’t remember. I just wanted to go to the bathroom. I eventually gave the lady at the counter a ½ e piece and she handed me back 10 centimes and a token. I turned and went back to the turnstile, put in my token and pushed on the stile to the right. No go!

“Outré – outré!” the voice behind me called.

Ahhh, the other one of course, man do I feel like an idiot (imbécile, crétin), and yes it worked. Anyway, I went in, did my business and got lost on the way out too. This is not going well!  I better just go back and sit down.

Back on the bench…

We saw a dog crap on the floor too (we’ll see another dog do this later). Then me and the old French lady beside me waited eagerly to see who would step in it first.  No words were exchanged, but I’m sure we both understood the game we were both playing.

Travel does strange things to people.

(D) Words from Pop.

We’re floating through the French countryside on a bright sunny day. Ahhh, the TGV; a world apart from the flight with a record breaking 6 hour crying baby. Lunch was jambon and buerre on a crusty petite baguette – and a Lipitor to address all the buerre.

Armed with the knowledge that a cab ride from Charles De Gaulle to Mt. Parnesse was 40 euro we weren’t too alarmed at the seemingly circuitous route the driver took through Paris. But we arrived at 38 euro and had an early morning glimpse of the city without crowded streets. It’s a pleasure to see a population absent the fat families of home.  So, I’m wishing the train good speed as I will be “up $1000” on my bets with Andrew if we arrive within four minutes of schedule.

Oh yeah, another thought from a tired mind. We honestly declared the three CO2 cartridges in our luggage for our life vests and had them promptly confiscated. Two hours later as we watched the safety video showing how 300 passengers could each inflate the lifejackets under their seats by pulling the CO2 inflator, we realized we’d been had!  I hope they sell the right size replacements at the marina or we’re screwed. Two strikes with Frederique – no boots et non flotation.

At 4:16 pm the train stops at Le Croisic, “Sweet” another $1000 in the betting bank but moderated by -$200 because Eric and Catherine were alone to greet us. We make a quick stop at Batz to shower, meet Francois, Lawrence, Eve and Jean; drink a bier and then pile into two cars bound for La Trinity–sur-Mer where we will be introduced to Maïna, our home for the next week. And what a home! She’s nearly new with only three prior trips and she’s well fitted out for cruising.

Francois takes charge of stowing a huge pile of provisions and I wonder if we will be able to take everything. Included, just to highlight but two items, are 12 bottles of wine Uncle Bernard has chosen and 12 dozen eggs which Eric will use to introduce the American breakfast egg sandwich to the French at each port-of-call. Then we’re off to a wonderful dinner of mussels and frites (steak Pouivre for Andrew). At about midnight we return to Maïna, bid farewell to Jean and Francois and begin to plan our first leg. Andrew and I crawl into the port quarter berth. I am tired but unable to sleep.

Oh yeah – Flip, should you read this, we’ll sail with the companionway slats OUT and put the transom seat in the DOWN position in port – there’s actually a slot in the seat section which fits in the rails just for this purpose!

23 August 0700 – We’re on a boat, and it’s Freakin Awesome!

(D) The smell of coffee and creaking of the companionway stairs announces the start of the day. Frederique and I lay out the course to Belle Isle separately and find we agree –nearly exactly.  So Andrew puts the waypoints into the GPS via latitude/longitude and finds that two are fifty miles from the intended location…boy, tough getting used to writing longitudes that begin with 003 degrees instead of 071.

A quick trip to town produces a single pair of sea boots (size 41) which Andrew and I will have to share and hopefully we’ll fool Frederique by taking separate watches if we need to appear properly fitted out. No CO2 cartridges for me but Andrew scores. 1145 and the voyage and excitement begins.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the Charter representative who spoke fluent English (ha-ha) who checked us out. He got our checklist and couldn’t figure out why I kept asking where the fuel/water separator was located. Catherine translates “It’s a new boat so you won’t need one. Just call us if you have a problem and I’ll come out and fix it for you.” C’est-la-vie.

Back to 1145. Fred gives the order to get underway and I back $250,000 worth of fiberglass into the channel – and to the sudden discovery of French sailing psyche. “Gentlemen raise your sails and race to Belle Isle”. Never mind the green crew, reversed buoys, unfamiliar boat (yes, the sail cover does need to be opened and the reef lines eased out).  But we make it to the mouth of the channel in a fresh breeze, with pounding hearts and big smiles. Tensions ebb and flow as we encounter a regatta, lose the wind, gain a current and are startled by a VHF radio which periodically sounds a repeating alarm (we’ll figure out that soon).

Ahh, but the reward is sweet! At a mooring outside Sauzon Harbor we have perfect weather and a good swim – uninhibited people. Maïna has delivered us to a cruiser’s paradise in 3 hours 45 minutes.  What may become the routine of the cruise sets in. Sail, moor, swim, aperitif, “annex” into town dock (annex = dingy), shop for souvenirs and bread, annex back to Maina, wine, dinner, plan for tomorrow, check the Meteo (weather) and to bed. No matter that it is 2400 – 0100!

24 August – Port Tudy, Sauzon – A Dog Craps

(D) Quick entry as it is ten past midnight and we must arise at 0300 for trip to Le Glennan.

First night – windy at the mooring, early departure and good sail in force 4 wind till noon. Then anchor and break for lunch. Then Frederique wants to practice raising the spinnaker (la spi) in light winds and heat. Then to Isle de Groix (just look at Eric’s pictures to see what a cool place this is). To town and an ancient style shithouse (see sketch) which prevents Eric from dumping. But a dog does crap on someone’s annex.  Beer at a great bar – party boat in annex singing great songs while we eat huitres, Country chicken and red and white wines. Plot course on paper and GPS, abed for three hours sleep. “Don’t forget the tale of “The Jesus People”!

Port Tudy - Beverages

(A) I have to expand on the whole dog crap thing.  This was absolutely one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.  We’re just sitting at a table outside the bar, enjoying our frosty beverages, when we see this wharf dog appear and begin to trot around.  This dog actually backs himself up to an overturned dinghy and proceeds to lay a deuce right on top of it!  I wish we had a video of it, because I’m sure no one will believe that it actually happened…but it did!

25 August – The Overnight (sort of)

(D)  At 0300 the neighboring boat has a person standing by for our departure but no plan. A great and rapid exchange in French with Fred has us underway and them adrift at the bow end.

“Too bad for them” says Fred.

We put into a stiff breeze and slight swell and the man overboard light keeps falling and flashing. Andrew at the helm, me Eric and Fred on the winches. Hoist the main, unfurl the Genoa and fall off into an exhilarating 7-8 knot sail. All in PFD’s, harnesses and lanyards.

Our charted course and GPS coincide and we begin to relax. Fishing boats abound and we see a possible submarine appear astern with flashing amber light.  Sunrise approaches as we race to Isle de Glennan for Eric’s planned sunrise photos.  We are to turn toward Glennan at first light and tension regains its hold. Andrew is still at the helm but goes to “triboard” instead of “baboard” saying “There’s combers breaking over there!”

Across the top we practice coming about “Paree a virer” “Envoyez”

Fred describes the entry point and we tack towards “Pei” and the anchorage beyond. Eric gets his photos but confusion on maneuvers results in Andrew coming about much to Fred’s dismay. This was her sailing school and she wanted to enter under sail in grand fashion. But we had lowered sails and motored in.

Perhaps this was a result of language confusion but I think Fred misjudged where we were. We had agreed on an approach but ended up in a blind cove filled with boats. Andrew was cool and we got back to open water.

Couse Into Glenans

(A) Ok, a little more on the excitement upon entry.  I drew an example of the course we took on the way into Les Glenans (click the image at left to see a larger version, I traced it from the Google Map Satellite View).  The top of the image indicates where we came in from, that’s all nice, safe, deep water (we even did a loop while trying to figure out exactly where the entrance is.  One thing we did not want to do was run aground in our nice shiny new boat.

Upon entering we saw a lot of masts so we headed that direction (where the red line juts downward.  The only problem was that we didn’t realize there were two harbors, one that we were entering and one behind that tiny strip of sand which just so happens to be awash at high tide.  This second harbor, the one behind a beach, was our intended destination.  At the helm, I realized what was about to happen (we were sailing full-bore, both sails up and engine off, into a dead end packed with boats).  We were literally forty seconds from either going aground or having it get very exciting as we try tack and jibe our way through a full mooring field back to safety.

I turned hard to starboard, yelled “Tacking!” and pulled a 180.  I remember someone asking me “Where are you going?!”.  “Back the way we came in!” was my reply.  Much to Fred’s dismay, the crew decides to drop sail and continue on power (she was hoping to come in under sail alone like she learned at sailing school, and really who could blame her?  But after a near-grounding, safety was more prominent on our minds).  It all turned out well though.  We found our way around to the other side and found a spot to moor.

(D) First an omelet, then a nap for all. Eric stays aboard for another nap and our shore party departs for a swim and to visit a café for our aperitif (see sketch).

Fred recounts how, when here at sailing school, they could only get to the café for a beer when the tide was low enough to cross the bar. The islands have become a tourist attraction and, like Block Island, several ferries disgorge crowds of people who go to the beach, have something to eat and drink and then return on the afternoon boats leaving things peaceful once again.

{picture off Eric’s preacher dive}

{sketch of Glennan beach}

Most of us, well perhaps not Bernard, feel we have pushed hard enough and would like to chill out here and then head back but Fred has in mind to see Point Raz and Isle de Seine as she puts it “for Eric’s pictures”. We defer decision.

Dog story #2. A family coming back from the beach has a cool dog and also an ankle biter. The incoming tide is rushing across the bar so the guy is carrying the little dog like a kitten by the scruff of its neck. I think he heard Andrew and me commenting, but for whatever reason he drops the dog into the water saying “Je fatigue”.

(A) …cool dog?

26 August – Up The River Without A Paddle!

(D) It rained last night but the dawn breaks clear and breezy as we slip the mooring under sail alone. We tack through the narrow rocky channel and into the open water while others leave under power. Frederique’s reputation is restored at la Glennan Cole Antique!

Our spirits are soon moderated as the wind clocks around and drops to force 1. On with le meteor for an eight hour leg down the coast.  Dolphins and picturesque lighthouses offer moments of fascination as we work our way toward St. Eves and Audienne. As we approach the final set of cardinal buoys (we’re really getting to like these aids) Fred offers up another surprise.

“We go up the river to town to buy fresh fish and baguettes”.

Andrew’s attempt to negotiate a mooring with “We can get everything we need at the marina” bears no fruit. So with me at the helm we proceed up an unknown river with a quick look at the guidebook. The picturesque town is worth the stress but we have only 1 ½ hours as the tide is falling.

(A) In other words…we’re afraid of running aground in the middle of a river!

(D) We shop for supplies and go to the post office. Then Catherine and Fred go to market, Eric for film and Bernard and I to la poissonire for the fresh fish. He doesn’t know what to buy so he lets me order while he coaches me with the language as needed.

The triumphant hunter-gatherer returns from his expedition with a baggette in hand.

Andrew and I get back to Maïna first. A Swedish boat is rafted alongside which could delay us past our required departure time. We’re worried that we can’t communicate our dilemma but we are greeted in English by the woman aboard who says she saw our (American) flag flying.

Time to depart and an old tactic proves successful to communicate my level of stress.

“Fred, you will take the boat off the dock and out while I tend lines”

“I’ve never sailed a boat with a wheel helm.” her nervous reply.

So I back her out and conciliations are offered as we maneuver to a mooring.

Only Eric’s pictures will be able to convey the beauty of this coastline and the natural and man-made features upon it.

Bernard and I forgo the annex trip to the marina for douches and aperitifs in the now cool and breezy evening. I fillet the turbot while he prepares the potatoes for the chowder Catherine plans to prepare. Three Coronas later we are jesting our way across the language barrier. Our annex arrives. Andrew will have to cover that trip and relate the tale of the hot chicks.  Now it approaches 9:30 pm and all is in complete French order. Aperitifs, dejunier and wine late into the night.

(A)  Too tired to write very much. Good food has been constant. I’m not sure which was better, the country chicken, or the chicken pasta meal. I had two big helpings of both of them.. I think the country chicken may take the prize just because the night was good overall. This was when we were in Port Trudy. One that’s pretty cool in that boats tie up to big moorings front to stern, and then others raft up till there’s no more room.

(Editorial note: Apparently I didn’t write down the “Hot Chicks” story, and now, 7 years later,  it has faded from memory)

(attempt at map)

27 August – “The Muntiny on the Maïna” and Onward To Concarneau

(A) This place is cool. It’s just the kind of port we needed after a long and sometimes stressful sail. The day started with kind of rough weather and a mutiny of sorts. We were sailing towards some island to the north and had a couple of “almost broaches” with the spinnaker and accidental jibes.  I was on the mast and spent one terrifying moment hanging on to it, looking at the water racing by below me as the boat heeled over fifty degrees.  After that we decided to force the idea of turning around and heading towards Concarneau as it was > 20 miles away and getting further all the time.  Our captain was not happy about this, but the crew was quite insistent.

Sunset on A Glassy Sea

We ended up having a great upwind sail and actually putting reefs in the main and jib when the wind approached 20 knots. Of course after we put in the reefs the wind dropped to 14 knots, mother nature is always messing with you.

We arrived outside Concarneau just before sunset.  The wind had dropped and the reflection of the sunset upon a mottled sea made for an amazing visual.  The sea looked surreal (perhaps the fatigue was setting in too.)  However, we were treated with this fantastic sunset on the same day we had also witnessed an amazing sunrise.  Perfection!

Anyway, when we finally reached Concarneau and made it ashore I was amazed. This place looks like Disney World I said.  Well, actually Epcot Center Dad added which was actually a better description. I think the thing that makes it seem so surreal at first are these blue neon lights that run along the edge of the wall. They were there I assume to prevent drunk sailors returning from the bar from walking off the edge into the water.

At the end of the wall is the entrance to an old castle whose wall still extends around the harbor and is lit at night. Inside is a street of shops, ice cream stands and restaurants. We stopped for dinner and my steak came very red in the middle (how I ordered it I think) but it tasted so good. It came with fries too which I had been craving for awhile.

Is This a Dream?

Anyway, I really like this town and wish we had a couple of days to explore before we must depart tomorrow, probably for the same harbor we stayed at our first night which is fine by me because they had nice big, easy-to-catch mooring balls. Docking a 41’ boat that you’ve only docked a couple of times before can be very stressful. We’ve had no time to see how the boat reacts in slow maneuvering. Anyway, until next time.

(D) Well Andrew covered the “mutiny” and that part so I’ll comment about the dangers of fatigue. We’re having a great time so it seems strange to realize how tired we’ve become – more mentally than physically but certainly both. Good thing we’ve become a team because we’ve been able to cover mistakes as they’ve come up –plotting errors, winch mistakes, missing cardinals, going the wrong side of a red buoy (not the Americans). I got to the point at the end of yesterday where I was nearly in a trance. We’ve all gotten to feel comfortable in Maina – she’s a fine boat and once we give the Grand-Voile blocks some of the same olive oil we gave the rudder post she’ll stop making so many annoying noises. We spent some time putting things back in order – the boat really got pretty well trashed the last two days.

28 August – Back to the Future

At the helm during a rolling sea.

(A) We had a cool sail…. I mean motor…from Concarneau to Sauzon, a 30 – 40 mile steam.  There were a couple of cool things. One was an abundance of dolphins with one big pod and a number of other small ones. One of the smaller ones hung out for awhile at our bow. I’m not sure if I got a good picture or not – we’ll see. (Editorial Note:  The answer is no.)

There were also huge rollers out in open where we were today, probably 12-15 feet I guess. The peaks were above my head while I was standing at the helm which is a few feet off the water already.  Anyway, these were the largest waves I’ve been in yet (in a boat that’s not a ferry or something) and it was cool.  Any time you’re in a boat looking up at the water you know there are some major forces at work.  You can’t help but gain a little more respect for the ocean and its power.

There’s a hard decision that you have to make while living on a boat. Would you rather have a cool, fresh, damp cabin or a hot, drier, smelly cabin? We aired out all our sleeping bags and pillows today in a vain attempt to dry them, but something still smells funny in the boat. So I would like to open some windows and air out the smell but I don’t want more wet salt air and dew to get in. I guess the approaching thunderstorm may decide for me.

After taking 3 hot showers each, the crew spotted this sign in the distance....

(D) Back to Sauzon and all realize the end is near. We eat dinner at a local café rather than aboard. It was OK but since this was our last night I think the close camaraderie in Maïna’s salon would have been more fitting – besides, we still have 5 bottles of Bernard’s wine!!

Fred slept most of the trip back since we put up the “iron jib” when becalmed outside Audienne. Fred draws no energy from anything but true sailing. So the motor, plus the offshore route offered nothing of interest.  Big swells and pods of dolphin were nice but nothing to see since we were well offshore until approaching Grois where Eric started taking pictures of big breakers with his telephoto lens.

Fred wants “to learn the motor” so we give her the helm once in the lee of Sauzon Harbor. Full astern for 30 seconds – full ahead – full astern. “OK enough.”

29 August – The Final Sail

(D) Late sleep today (0700) as we have only a short sail back. Café, toast with butter and jam and we’re off. Perfect sailing conditions and Fred is at the helm enjoying every moment.  Andrew’s GPS course adjustments take us safely through the narrows and we’re blowing past everything, including a catamaran that should be whipping us. We sail into La Trinite channel under full main and Genoa.

“It is more impressive that way”, says Fred.

Future Sailors Enjoying the Day

Closer, closer, closer and finally down with the sails. On the way in we pass six classes of sailing school flotillas with kids from age 8-9 through teenagers racing annexes, sloops and catamarans. No wonder the concern about image. As Fred maneuvers in the marina however, things are different and Catherine’s call for us to help gets our attention.

Finally, tied up at “M” dock. Bernard produces the bottle he has been saving for a celebration – red Bordeaux, ‘89 I believe. Many a toast to Maina, then beers followed by rum punch. None of us want to leave emotionally (but a shower and a dry bed would be fine). We spend three hours putting Maïna in Bristol condition and unload just in time to meet Jean, Francois, Anne and Eves.

Eve’s first reaction when coming aboard is “It’s a Parisian boat – electronics, electric winches, auto helm and GPS.” But now Fred took issue with that. Like the rest of us she doesn’t want to leave her.

“Tired?” No matter – aperitifs at local café, then a walk to dinner. Andrew and Eric have convinced most of us – Six steak poivre and frites!

During the hour plus drive back to Batz, Fred and I talk about her experiences at La Glennan School.  It immediately becomes clear why she feels and behaves as she does. All the sailing at the school is done under sail alone – no moteur! She’s sailed in and around Glenan in all weather, day and night and up the coast to the Channel Islands, Ireland and England all in a 27’ boat with a crew of 6-7. Their only concerns weather, wind and current. So they sail when they need to no matter the hour and adjust as they go. Whatever it took to beat the weather, wind, currents and the other boats.

(A) We head back to La Trinite to return the boat. Kind of mixed emotions about that. I’m half ready to get off and half wanting to keep sailing. But I know that I’m ready to get off because my navigating is starting to suffer. I think a day or two off with out 12 – 14 hours of sailing would solve that. If there is another trip I’d like to stay longer in port. I bet there’s a lot of cool places to go exploring. Oh, one more thing, we finally found the CD player!!

1. Heat 3/4 C oil and mix in 1-2 teaspoons vanilla
2. Toss with dry ingredients
3. Bake 375 F on an oiled cookie sheet for 20-30 minutes, stirring to mix every 5-10 minutes

Some additions I’m going to try:

1. No coconut
2. Add chocolate chips after it’s out of the oven.
3. Add Brown sugar or honey or something.

We left Key West at daybreak on the 18th (I think). We had some nasty rollers off our bow that was causing the boat to roll upwards of 50 degrees. That’s an estimate, but when the sailboat’s prop is coming out of the water because of a roll, you know it’s pretty dramatic. We slowed down a few knots and this helped to alleviate some of the rolling. It was still an uncomfortable night trying to sleep though. We pulled into Ft. Lauderdale Tuesday morning, April 20th. My dad took a taxi to his flight back home (the surgeon would be the same one who did his hip) and the remaining crew (Archie, Larry and myself) took showers and relaxed dockside. We had dinner at a nice restaurant on the water, then the next morning we set sail again for Charleston, South Carolina, which would be my final leg of sailing (the boat is continuing to Point Judith). The sail would take about 3 days of offshore sailing ( 2 nights), and with only three people on the boat the overnight watches were a little long. I was on deck (alone for the most part) from 6 – 9:30 PM and then back up on deck from 2 to 6 AM.

However, just because the sailing was over didn’t mean that my adventure was over. My cousin who was deployed in Iraq was going to be home for the week, and there was a party for him on the coming Saturday. So I canceled my flight and instead rented a car. But not just any car, a Cadillac SRX. It was only $140 for 24 hours, not bad really. It was a really nice ride, and the 70 MPH speed limits in SC, and NC make the miles go by fast. It had a Bluetooth-enabled radio that allowed me to hook up my phone’s MP3 player, so I was all set. Windows down, tunes cranked and singing along, and loving going 80MPH (sometimes 90) instead of the boat’s 8! I made a stop at South of the Border for some “gifts” for my cousin and continued on to Maryland where they live.

Party on Saturday, where I finally got to try a Texas “Shiner Bock” beer that I’ve heard so much about. Then do the DC tour thing on Sunday with my brother, his wife and kids. I bummed a ride with him on Monday back up north, and he dropped me off at the Old Saybrook train station. I bought a ticket from there to Westerly (only $13) where my mom picked me up and drove me back to their house. I was full from road food, but she was making my dad’s birthday dinner of Lamb chops, and they smelled so good I couldn’t resist. Three lamb chops, a baked potato and two glasses of wine later I was an extremely satisfied man.

This morning she drive me back to Johnston (where I live now), I picked up my truck and drove to work….The end.

Whew, that’s the “condensed version” believe it or not.

Vampires

Had a cool dream about vampires:

• Being chased through a flooded town.  Lots of people were vampires, just not sure who.
• Hide underneath a car, but something large lands on top of it, crushing the car into the mud (a la Jurassic Park)
• I punch up through the floor of the car, hoping to kill the vampire I guess, but I hit the transmission fluid line by mistake.  The fluid then starts running over my face and I get some in my mouth (it also happens to look a lot like blood, not sure if I knew it was transmission fluid in the dream.)
• Dream switches to a mall scene.  I’m running through the hallways trying to get to an electronics store.
• I finally get to the store and find someone I know, a powerful vampire, waiting for me.
• He asks if I drank the transmission fluid.  I realize that he wants to know because it determines weather or not he can bite me.
• I play coy and say “maybe, maybe not”.
• He decides to bite me and immediately turns has a blue glow around him.
• He frantically searches around the store, consuming other vampires that were there.  This keeps him alive.  However, he soon runs out of other vampires to kill and dissolves into nothing.
• The entire mall goes crazy, realizing that the “big head vampire” is dead.
• Immediate chaos and looting ensues.

The Old Friend

This was a very short dream.  I was playing with my old dog Ena.  Good times!

The Magic Forest

• I’m running through a forest, in Maine I believe.  But there’s also an abandoned building that looks familiar.  It  is on the side of a river and is old, and beaten.  I think I’ve seen the building before (in the dream).  It looks like it belongs on a deep-south river or something.  There’s probably crocs in the water.
• I’m back on the trail in the forest and realize that we’re climbing.  My aunt Laurel is there and we come out into the large path heading up a steep mountain.
• Flowers start to bloom all along the trail around us.  It looks like one of those stop-motion films of spring where the flowers pop out from nothing to full-bloom in ten seconds.  They’re also very pastel and bright primary colors.
• The dream switches to an overhead camera shot and I can see that this is happening all along the trail, both in front and behind us.
• Even where there are large boulders they soon become mountains of vegetation.
• I have my camera, but every time I try to take a picture of one of the flowers or plants that is growing, the color fades out of the viewfinder.  No joy!
• We take a left between two especially large rock-hill-things and we find ourselves back at the building on the water.  Except this time it is full of people and candle-driven yellow light, and a large feast.

saw a cool color in the sky that I’d never seen before. went from powder blue by the sunset to deep navy blue opposite. not a cloud in sight, just a single star (or planet I’m presuming). I wish i had my real camera…

saw a cool color in the sky that I’d never seen before. went from powder blue by the sunset to deep navy blue opposite. not a cloud in sight, just a single star (or planet I’m presuming). I wish i had my real camera…

Love’s a battle
can’t never be won
just let it alone
so she can have her fun
she’s out on the town
all the misery-o
if you’re goin out again
just give me a call

she’s a mystery
to me and herself
she might like you
but she loves herself
in her eyes all anger and fear
she ain’t gonna show it
won’t shed a tear

Pre-release version:
No Love

Give it some time,
let nature take hold.
Forests ‘r like hearts,
they like to grow old

And he played the fiddle
while she would dance
short skirt twirled ’round corduroy pants.
Old age, new age,
we’ll meet in the middle
Singing the song of forbidden fiddle

Old rusty dinghy,
brand new cell phone
Best thing about
those they always see you home

He rows his boat
like she goes to the store
Buyin’ brand new clothes
she can’t afford

And he played the fiddle
while she would dance
short skirt twirled ’round corduroy pants.
Old age, new age,
we’ll meet in the middle
Singing the song of forbidden fiddle

Pre-Release Version:
Forbidden Fiddle

Beach full of sand
Aint nothing planned
One thing on my mind

Jump in the ocean
Sun tan lotion
want me to apply?

wet bikini
dry martini
anchor over the side

gonna have ourselves a time tonight

find a cove
that no one knows
listening to prine

cookies and gin
put the hendricks in
another slice of lime

coke and whiskey
chicks are frisky
stars are out tonight

Huggin Kissin
Bathing suit missing
Better close the blinds

gonna have ourselves a time tonight
gonna have a sandy bed tonight
gonna have a sunburn tonight

Alternate version:
Have Ourselves a Good Time Tonight (5)

Kegstands in the air
shotgun or funnel a beer
ice luge
with a shot of jaegar

Short skirt and makeup on
showing off a sexy thong
tramp stamp
that says i’m easy

all the guys think im hot
showing off what I got
and that aint much
but i’m horny

Red plastic cup
gonna go and fill it up
aint going home alone again

Red plastic cup
30 grand just to fill it up
But I’m hooking up again

I won’t call her in the morning
He’ll call me in the morning
hungover looking for
self-esteem

Listen Now!

Ribs in The Oven.PDF

And I pay my bills
Changed the will
Living the divorced life
I can’t live without a wife

Kids are changing schools
You make up the rules
with your dime store book advice

I can’t live
With you anymore.

With broken vows
nights out on the town
You went and left it all
Are you the same anymore

The young guys tell you
‘What you doing here’
I’d sleep with you tonight

Tomorrow your age
wrinkles on the stage
of celebrity from the night before

So just stop asking cause when i’m talking to you
I’ve probably already had a few
and if  you aint careful
the next song
will be about you

He’s my grandpa
And I love him
I can’t wait
to see him again
I want to talk
bout the trip we had
And tell him that I love him

I was a boy with a mind so so wild
I ate pancakes
too many for a child
but I felt like a man
with my grandfather-man

I got sick and he understood
Just like the man, that I knew he was
yes he was
perpetually kind,
give his sight to the blind
yes he would

He’s my grandpa
And I love him
I can’t wait
to see him again
I want to talk
bout the trip we had
And tell him that I love him

Every day I wake
I know that he’s with me
watching my path looking out for me
and I know someday we’ll meet again
cause he’s my grandfather man

the killer bees are gay, we’ll find a place a to stay
a hundred miles more
and we can pray

A steak and shake a change of clothes
they’ll be on our toes
but we’ve got a stone to take and I know we’ve got to go,

cause he’s my grandfather man

Listen To It Now:
grandfather_man

Sometimes I feel so sad
‘Bout the girlfriend
That I don’t have
Sitting home alone again
I want one by my side
A woman through the night
Sometimes I feel it so strong

[chorus]
And then my friend calls me
Bout the troubles he has had
And suddenly
I don’t feel so bad

She aint ever mean
smells so nice and clean
always wakes up with a smile

Ice skating in the snow
Taking off those winter clothes
Making love by the fire

[chorus]
Put on a sexy dress
Your makeup is a mess
Because we’re kissing in the rain

Buying you new clothes
Manicures and pretty toes
That shade sure looks good on you

[chorus]

She tells me she loves me
Want to meet her family
Watch the sunset on the beach

My thoughts all pretty things
Churchbells and wedding rings
Two kids and a house

Listen To it Now:

Had a beer, just aint feeling right
Wont get me in jail, get me in a fight
Wont make me fall asleep somewhere I don’t know
Wake up in the morning Wearing all my clothes

[chorus]
How Many, How many have you had
How Many, Still Feeling Sad
I need a Stiff Drink
I need a Stiff Drink
I need a Stiff Drink Tonight

Ordered another Draft , Put It on my tab
Won’t end up throwing up or Hailing a Cab
Won’t make me grab the microphone or Start to Dance
Won’t Make me ask her If I Have a Chance

[Chorus]

Hey Bartender, I’ll Have another Pint
Sure as hell Wont, Get Shut Off Tonight
Won’t End Up Yelling, “The Bouncer is a Jerk”
Won’t End up Sleeping In and Calling in to Work

[Chorus]

Another Round of Pitchers for me and my Friends
We’ll be here all Night Long, Till The End
Won’t End Up On The Steps Talking to a Girl so Fine
Won’t Buy her friends a Shot or a Bottle of Wine

[chorus]

Listen To It right now!:

And the original version recorded the night it was written:

“A new search engine! OMFG!!!!”

That seems to be the reaction that a lot of people have whenever a new search engine comes out. There’s a huge fuss about it; Digg, Slashdot, and eventually CNN and MSNBC pick up on it, and everyone holds the new engine up for inspection and dissection. Which is exactly what I’m about to do.

Cuil has received a lot of bad press. Almost everyone has the opinion that “It’s totally not Google.” I don’t think it was their intention to be Google, but to provide something different. Their main focus (at least for now) it seems to me, is to allow you to research something. If you want to find the address of Joes Barber Shop on Main Street, go use Google. If you need to learn about something that you have little knowledge of, use Cuil.

The Name is Stupid

You hear this a lot from people who are bashing Cuil. From the Cuil site:

“Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge.”

I’m fine with that. In fact, I’m surprised that domain name wasn’t already taken and populated by one of those annoying domain sitters that just buys a domain and puts up random advertising links hoping you’ll click one. In this state of Internet affairs, if you can find a four letter domain name, and it happens to have actual meaning related to your intended business, good for you.

But how do I spell it? It’s pronounced ‘Cool’ but spelled ‘Cuil’.

Personally, since the first news story I saw about it I haven’t forgotten how to spell it. I didn’t have to Google for “new search engine spelled like cool” to find it. I just typed it in. Digg has two Gs, flickr is spelled wrong, yet these sites are doing fine.

Their Search Algorithm Sucks

This is another common complaint. Their search algorithms do provide some random failures, you don’t always gets the correct results, or any results at all, when you search for something that you know exists. You can always tweak the algorithm, and I’m sure they will. However, I think this lack of results might be in part intentional, or at least part of the plan; a way to differentiate themselves from Google.

“Lack of results is a feature?”

Yes. As part of my hypothesis that Cuil is meant for research about something that you know very little about I decided to research the “History of South Africa”. Deciding on a topic took a long time as I am quite knowledgeable on very many subjects. However, on a recent adventure I met a bartender from Cape Town, South Africa. I knew very little about South Africa apart from its geographic location (hint: It’s in Southern Africa, no need to jump over to Google Maps yet). This will be a perfect test for my comparison I decided.

First Search

I typed “History of South Africa” into both Cuil and Google. Cuil provided 129,408 results, Google provided “about” 15,700,000 results. Already the culling (Cuiling?) of the results is apparent. I wonder what could possibly be relevant to the History of South Africa on the fifteen-millionth Google result? To be fair, the one-hundred-twenty-nine-thousandth result is probably not much better, but the point about culling is still made I think.

The presentation is obviously different. Cuil uses a magazine-type layout, while Google uses their tried-and-true list of results, along with advertisements on the right. Both have similar results, with the Wikipedia article “History of South Africa” being near the top (top-middle column in Cuil, first result in Google).

However, the research-oriented approach of Cuil becomes apparent immediately. In the top right is a category suggestion box that lets you see some recommended categories. Are you looking for “Afrikaners”, “South African Politicians”, and more. Curious what an “Afrikaner” is I hovered over that. The category popped open with more search suggestions for Afrikaners like “Boer Republics” (some type of wild pig party association I’m assuming), “Voortrekkers”, and other creatively named items.

The point anyway, is that Google does not provide this. There really is no way for Google to suggest avenues of research about your topic. Maps of History of South Africa? Sure. The first result there is a map of the United States, the first pushpin being “University of South Florida – Center for Africa and Diaspora”, whatever. I had more luck with Google images, one provided a nice 1024 x 1220 map of South Africa. However, the utility of random images during a research task may be fairly low. I’d have to visit the sites that these images are coming from, it could very well be “Joe Shmoe’s PhotoShopped South Africa Map”. You can also search for news. Although in this context I don’t think there will be very much “News on the History of South Africa”

Conclusion

I’d better have a conclusion an a blog entry about research eh? I’m curious to see where Cuil ends up. When their initial investment cash dries up will the VCs be willing to invest more? We’ll see. Personally, I think it would be nice to have an alternative to the Google Monster, but getting a piece of that market share is like trying to eat away at Microsoft. I don’t hate Google by any means. I have a gMail account, I’ll keep using Google maps to get directions and spy on my neighbors, and for the time being I’ll probably keep Google as my home page. But if I need to find out more about Voortrekkers, I might head back to Cuil.

C
I can’t Sleep

F
In this bed

C
Wait for a woman

G
She’s in my head

C
Perfect soul

F
Wait for me

C
I will wait

G           C
For eternity

F               G        C
I am the lonely Man

——————

Restless nights

I toss and turn

Fans do nothin’

To ease the burden

my country girl

long brown hair

I’ll wait for you

If you still care

——————

[CHORUS]

F               G        C
I am the lonely man

F               G         C
I am the lonely man

F
I’ll wait for you

C
Wait for me if you can

G                        C
I am the lonely man

——————

I walk to the yard

And I look to the night

I can see you

Up in the sky

I still think of you

Every night

I still see you

In moonlight

——————

[CHORUS]

——————

F               G        C
I am the lonely Man

F               G        C
I am the lonely Man

1 Cup chopped peeled apple

3/4 Cup chopped onion

1/2 Cup chopped carrot

1/2 Cup chopped celery

1/2 Cup chopped green pepper

2 Tablespoons flour

1 Tablespoon curry powder

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper or cayennne pepper

1/3 Cup mango chutny (hot)

2  14 and 1/2 oz cans chicken broth

1/4 Cup tomato paste

Chopped parsley (optional)

Saute Chicken…remove

Saute veggies – add chicken and other ingredients.

Eat and enjoy!

But now I sit
Just me and a ciggarette
Makin’ love to the night
And I don’t know why

[chorus]
I’d [G] rather be with someone
who [C] makes me feel at peace
who’ll [G] grab me and hold me
And [C] tell me it’s ok
A [G] woman who’ll be there
When [C] I come home too late
And [D] I don’t want to fight
a[G]bout it anymore

I thought I found a friend
Lonely men always do
We search far and wide
Turn our hearts inside out for you

Can’t you see what I’m tryin’ to say
We howl at the moon
But we don’t mean it
We’d rather come home to you (and we do)

[chorus]

I got my first allergy
Somethin’ bad happened to me
I think it’s somethin’ you’ll understand

Makin’ dinner for one
Lord knows it ain’t no fun
Drinkin’ my beer all alone

[chorus]
[F] I never thought I’d [G] see
The [C] day where I would [Am] be
[F] I’m doin’ the best I [G] can
As a solitary [C] man

Footsteps sound so loud
When you’re the only one around
And the fridge just won’t quit

Thunderstorms are much less fun
When you’re the only one
Countin’ down the time

[chorus]

I got a garbage can
I got pots and pans
One of everything

I got a ceiling fan
for a solitary man
None of which I need

[chorus] (repeat last line)

This was taken with a D300, 1 shot per minute, from about 10AM to 3PM

One of the problems is that my PC can’t handle all the plugins at the same time.  For some reason, the bass (which is actually a guitar emulator) takes up HUGE amounts of resources.  What this boiled down to was that I could never listen to the song in the software, I had to mute some tracks to be able to listen to something, then unmute, render to MP3, and listen to the MP3 to see if the change I made sounded good.  Very annoying to say the least!

Link:
Eastern Wind MP3

Anyway, here’s the link:

SELECT CONVERT(nvarchar(20), GetDate(), 101);

or

SELECT CONVERT(nvarchar(20), CAST(’2008-04-04 16:07:07.920′ AS DateTime), 101);

If you need to use it in a comparison you can easily do something like

WHERE CONVERT(nvarchar(20), MyDateColumn, 101) BETWEEN @DateFrom AND @DateTo

Enjoy!

Unscrew the retaining ring (I think it only needs about a quarter turn), pull out the bulb and detach it from the wiring harness, replace with the new bulb, re-insert it back into the housing, and secure it in place with the retaining ring. Now you have to wiggle the light housing’s threaded rods (there are three) back into those tabs that you released to get it out. The threaded rods can be moved around to make this easier. When the housing is back in place, you’ll be able to see these little plastic things sticking out of the tabs, push back down on the tabs to lock the housing into place. Make sure that the housing it secure and doesn’t move around, if it does it means you didn’t get it back into place well enough. Replace the plastic plate on top and you’re done. The procedure for both headlights is essentially the same.

At first I was thinking to myself “This is so stupid and typical of newer cars.” But after I figured it out, it’s pretty easy to do. The second headlight only took me about 5 minutes.

Clinton’s current notion that Michigan voters will be disenfranchised if Obama doesn’t agree to a re-vote in Michigan is ridiculous. Its transparency is so blatantly obvious, how can anyone not see right through it?

• She didn’t seem very concerned with it back in New Hampshire. (Reference needed: Basically “I don’t see Michigan as making a difference”)
• Do you think she would be so concerned if she wasn’t in desperate need of those delegates?

Besides:

• Not every State has primaries anyway (Which ones?)
• It’s Michigan’s democratic party that screwed its own voters by moving the primary date.
• Allowing Michigan and Florida to re-vote or something similar is a typical Democrat reaction. They (Michigan and Florida) broke the rules, and so were penalized. Now we should let them re-vote because “It’s not fair”?

McCain

McCain had one of his “Senior Moments” as people call it. Making a misstep involving Iran, Al-Qaeda, and Shiite militants A lot of people say “Oh, that’s just McCain. He doesn’t get bogged down in the details.” I’m sorry, but I think this county has had enough of a president that can’t get facts straight, and who the entire country has to sit cringing during every public appearance. “Oh please don’t let him screw up again” we think collectively to ourselves.

Obama

The fallout over Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright still continues, although his speech on Tuesday does seem to have helped, and was seen by many as one of the best speeches made in a long time. However, many supporters of Obama and his pastor say that those types of comments made by Wright are just part of black culture, and black church culture in particular. If you haven’t been to a sermon then you just can’t understand. Why does this make it ok? Just because these types of comments happen inside the context of a church sermon it’s now acceptable? I don’t think so. The good news is that I believe Obama when he says that he doesn’t believe in that type of language either; I certainly hope so.

How to Build a SharePoint Development Machine:
Long list of steps and tools to getting a development SharePoint server up and running. This takes the approach that the develpoment tools should be kept local, and to use remote degugging:
http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/archive/2007/02/23/build-a-sharepoint-development-machine.aspx

How to create a MOSS 2007 VPC Image, the Whole 9 Yards:
20 steps detailing the entire process from start to finish:
How to Create a MOSS 2007 VPC Image: The Whole 9 Yards

Andrew Noon: SharePoint Web Parts:
Including remote debugging:
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/andynoon/archive/2006/06/20/sharepoint-2003-creating-web-parts.aspx

Custom Configuration (VB Version)

Enjoy!

First the tools that you WILL NOT need. I discovered this through my adventure:

• Pipe Cutter
• Dewalt cordless drill and bits
• Bench Vice (to hold the microphone while you attempt to drill it)

The tools you will need:

• Something to loosen the retainer clip (that’s what I call it). I’m sure there is an official tool that can into the little cutouts on the ring, but what I used was a pair of slip-joint pliers.

Your microphone should look like this (http://photo.killfly.com/displayimage.php?album=77&pos=0) if it does not, you do not have a Behringer B5, and these instructions will not be of much help to you. Also, the image of mine has a deep gouge on the XLR end. Yours will not have this because mine is actually in two pieces. The picture was taken after my first disassembly in which I cut off the end with a pipe cutter thinking that I needed to free up the screw at that end. It turns out that the screw that is under the decal near the XLR connector does not need to be removed. (I also attempted to drill out the screw in a fit of disassembly rage).

Take off the cardoid or omnidirectional capsule, whichever is on there, and you will be presented with something like the following: http://photo.killfly.com/displayimage.php?album=77&pos=1. See the threads that are now exposed? At the tip of the threads (also visible in the picture) you can see two cutouts. This is where you should probably use a special tool to get into those cutouts, and be able to unthread this ring. The ring is actually what’s holding the contents of the microphone into the case.

Unscrew the ring: http://photo.killfly.com/displayimage.php?album=77&pos=2 (I’m using my fingers in the picture, but in reality I had to loosen it with a pair of slip-joint pliers.) One thing to note, there are two holes in the top of the microphone that look like they’re custom made for being able to unscrew the tip. This is not what you’re looking to do, you want to actually unscrew the threads themselves.

The desired result is better explained by seeing all the pieces together in a picture (or two):

• http://photo.killfly.com/displayimage.php?album=77&pos=12
• http://photo.killfly.com/displayimage.php?album=77&pos=4

In this picture you can see the case, the ring, and the capsule in the top, and the guts of the microphone in the bottom of the picture. In order to remove the guts, you’ll have to push down on the attenuation selector switch to be able to get it past the cutout on the case. When you pull out the gut, it will come out on a sled. You want to pull it out straight, because there’s a key that the XLR connector preventing it from twisting. Both halves of the key are visible in these two shot

• http://photo.killfly.com/displayimage.php?album=77&pos=5
• http://photo.killfly.com/displayimage.php?album=77&pos=6

Now that you have the sled out, you can see the contents of the microphone. If, like me, you were hoping to see a wire that might be loose, and that you could fix, you will be sorely disappointed. But it’s still kinda neat. Feel free to check out all the pics over at the photo site: http://photo.killfly.com/thumbnails.php?album=77

Huevos Rancheros PDF File

Huevis Rancheros ZIP (contains original ODT file)

[Chorus]
Have a Guinness on me my friend,
Drink it fast or slow,
Finest stuff that’ll touch your lips,
This I know for sure
And if you’ve had quite a few
You’ll be bangiiinnnnn…[slow down then pause]
Doors down all around town
Jus’ ta have some more.

`

[Last Chorus]
Have a Guinness on me my friend,
Drink it fast or slow,
Finest stuff that’ll touch your lips,
This I know for sure
And if you’ve had quite a few
You’ll be bangin whores’
Doors down all around town
Just to have some more

CodeGen Logic in seperate assembly. This will make lots of things easier (for me), but most notably it will allow easy creation of other projects that use the ADAL library (like a web-based version).

Option to save password with project file. You shouldn’t be using a high-level account anyway!

Option to prefix “Item” object property names with a string if they are a member of the primary key. This makes knowing what field must be populated for an Insert easy.

I omitted the installer for now until I get the auto-update working right. Who wants to have to uninstall an application when it’s just an update.

Other stuff I can’t remember, it’s been a while since a release.

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/adal/

Here’s the link to what I think is a fixed version of the Coppermine 1.3 demo package, which I have called 1.3.1. Here’s what I did to fix, that way someone can tell me if it’ll cause any problems. It seems to work for me, but I’m not a coppermine expert…

• Start Demo 1.1
• Attach MySQL Administrator to the MySQL instance, and backup the coppermine database.
• Stop Demo 1.1
• Edit Demo1.3 ‘pms_config.ini’ file to not mirror database to local directory.
• Start Demo 1.3
• Attach MySQL Administrator to the MySQL instance, and restore the backup from 1.1.
• Stop the Demo1.3
• Zip up Demo 1.3 as 1.3.1

http://www.killfly.com/uploads/Technology/CoppermineLiveDemoFix/cpg_live-demo_1.3.2.zip

Assemble Your Ingredients:

• Olive Oil – You won’t need much.  For my single serving I think I probably used around four or  five tablespoons.
• Tomatos – You’ll be cutting them up (I used one for me)
• Garlic – However much you want.   I used three average-sized cloves for mine.
• Basil – Fresh or frozen.  You can see in the picture below how much frozen basil I used.  I suupppppose you could use dried too, just use your intuition as to how much to use.
• Chicken Broth – I used probably about a teaspoon of chicken boullion disolved into about a 1/4 cup of water.
• Your Favorite Pasta – I always recommend ziti!
• Some Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese to grate on the finished plate.
• Salt and Pepper

Water Heating and Preperation  

Get your pasta water heating up.  While you’re waiting for that to boil, you might as well start cutting up those tomato(s) and garlic:

Now would also be a good time to cut up your basil.  I didn’t go too crazy here, but you want to make sure there’s no really big pieces.  Hopefully around this time you water has begun to boil and you can add the pasta to the water.  The next steps don’t take very long, so your pasta should be ready just about when you need it.  Obviously this will have to be adjusted depending on how much pasta you’ll be cooking (and how much water needs to heat up to 210 degrees).

Start Cooking

Add the chicken broth and olive oil to a nice wide frying pan and set the heat for high, you’ll be adding your pasta to this pan later, so make sure you’ll have room.  This part is where you’ll have to use some judgement.  You want the final sauce to be reduced enough so that the end-product isn’t too watery, but you obviously want it to be able to coat the pasta too.  Speaking of pasta, have you checked it lately?  You also don’t want to cook the tomatoes too much, the’ll fall apart if you do.  You really just need to get them hot.  So once the Oil/Broth mixture looks close, and the pasta is nearly done,  add the tomatoes, garlic and basil.

Dump in the Cooked Pasta

Dump the cooked pasta into the pan with your other ingredients.  Salt and Pepper to taste.  Remember, the chicken broth probably has a lot of salt in it, so you might not even need any more salt.  Toss it around to get all those good flavors covering the pasta.

Plate it Up!

Dump the finished product onto your plate, and grate a little fresh cheese over the top. 

Enjoy!

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Introduction

This is the journal from my experience on the Betty Ann sailboat during a delivery from Annapolis, Maryland to Point Judith, Rhode Island.  This would be my first of many trips aboard this fine vessel.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did living (and writing) it!

After reading (or during, whatever your preference), make sure to view the pictures of this trip over at photo.killfly.com!  There are also some pictures of a more recent southbound delivery, which are even geotagged, a new feature I was trying out.

Eventually, I’ll get my pictures of yet another northbound delivery, this one from Tampa, Florida to Charlestown, South Carolina.  We had a stopover in Key West, which was, obviously, one of the highlights of the trip.

So grab a glass of your favorite beverage, light a fire if it’s cold out, and prepare to go on an adventure with me and the crew of the Betty Ann…

Sunday, May 20th : 8:38 PM

Whew man, long day. Today started at 5:30am in Quonny, RI. I cautiously opened my eyes to reveal a day starting much darker than I’m used to. “What is this daylight savings?”, no, just dawn AM, or the butt crack of morning, whatever you want to call it. No one cares about this part of the trip so I’ll just get right to the point so we can get to the good stuff:

• Drive to George’s house
• Park dad’s truck and Jerry’s car at some logger’s log storage area (what else would be in a logger’s storage area?)
• All pile into George’s car with his wife Maime.
• Get to KPVD, and unload the bags. The frozen Italian Country Chicken dinner made it through the x-ray scanner ok. This was slightly surprising, we expected to be asked at least a couple questions about it.
• Dad got the full security scan because of his steel hip parts. “I’m sorry sir, but you’re going to have to leave your hip here, I can’t let it on the plane.”
• Land at BWI, and all pile in Eric’s explorer and head for the marina where the Betty Ann is waiting for us.
• We sat down for some breakfast and Archie joined us. His breakfast turned out to be the best, the Crème Brulee comes highly recommended.
• Say goodbye to Eric who looked like he really wanted to come with us.
• Shove off into the Chesapeake.

Ok, now we’re getting to some boat talk, after all that’s why you’re reading this right? Let’s back up a little bit to breakfast. We all watched in detached pleasure (pleasure because it wasn’t us) as a sailboat attempted to depart its slip only to realize that the turn was too tight, and they weren’t ready for the wind that was going to blow them down towards the pier wall. I bet the wish they had a bow thruster (we do, ha ha ha). After watching the mini-drama unfold we took our first crew-vote on what to do today. There were two options:

1. Leave tomorrow morning, and go visit the surrounding area.
2. Leave right now.

We all chose option 2, let’s go sail!

Our departure was decidedly better than the one we had witnessed just minutes ago. We had the wind in our favor and a bow thruster to help our bow across, but I still think we looked pretty sharp, especially for a crew that had just come together. Jerry, who was tasked with getting our lines off the pier, almost didn’t make it back on the boat, but one quick leap from the edge of the finger pier landed him square on the boat’s deck. I think every landing/departure has to have at least a little drama associated with it.

We motor-sailed through the day, up the Chesapeake all the way to the beginning of the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal (CD Canal). The first thing you notice on the Chesapeake is the water; brown. I made a silent mental note to keep track of the water color and watch it turn from brown to blue, which is the color salt water should be in my opinion. The second thing you notice about the Chesapeake is how big it is. I’m sure this is the same feeling that sailors get the first time they venture out onto any of the Great Lakes.

Eric had told me weeks before that the average depth of the Chesapeake is four or five feet, or something like that. When you’re in a sailboat you can’t help but think about the keel underneath you, slicing through the water just waiting to hit something. However, after getting out into the larger part of the Chesapeake, most of those fears melted away; we had plenty of water. The fear-melting was accelerated by the pinpoint accuracy and information-laden GPS chart plotter we had on board (more about that later).

I was able to take a nice spate at the helm, and used that time to get the main functions of the GPS unit under my belt. I can now pretty quickly plot a new course, and get the autopilot to track towards it for me. Autopilot is cool, but I still prefer keeping my hand on the wheel. I think there’s no better way to learn, and remind you that you are in control of, the boat.

Because this waterway is trafficked by commercial vessels, it is heavily populated by one of my favorite navigational aids, the range light. I think there is absolutely no better way to stay on a straight line course then to keep two range lights on top of each other. For those who don’t know, a range light is two lights that you use to keep your vessel in a channel. One of the two lights is set in front of, and below the other. Using this simple setup you can see if you are drifting off course. Assuming that you’re driving towards the light, if the bottom light begins to move to the right you know that you are drifting left of the channel and need to adjust to the right.

We had planned on a stop at the Chesapeake marina, which is just inside the canal on the Chesapeake side. Archie called them on the radio and we were informed that they did indeed have space for our boat, but not until 9:00 that night. “Well, we’ll be by you by then.” said Archie, and we continued on deeper into the canal.

The canal itself isn’t all that exciting, you really feel like you’re just driving through a long breechway, which I guess you are in a way. After motoring around another few bends, we found another marina in the cruising guide that appeared to have depth enough for us. There was some brief confusion on the radio and in the cockpit about where exactly we should bring our boat in, I’ll try to recreate as much as I can remember here:

“Midway marina, Midway marina, this is the Betty Ann.” Archie said into the microphone.

“Betty Ann, this is the Midway Marina, go ahead.” the Marina replied.

“Yes, we’re fifty feet long. Fifteen and a half foot beam. We draw five and a half. Do you have anything available for us tonight?” Archie said.

“Roger captain we can accommodate you. Continue into the marina, you’ll see docks on your right, and some finger piers on your left. You can pull into the first finger pier you see.” the marina replied.

Meanwhile we are about a minute from the first set of docks, and the depth gauge is steadily dropping from the canal’s sixty feet towards our draw of five and a half.

“Did any of you understand what he said?” Archie asked the crew. In text the conversation on the radio is perfectly clear, but in real life it is often much more difficult due to static, other background conversations, and various other communication-inhibiting events.

“Hello, Midway Marina, can you repeat please?” Archie asked. The marina replied with essentially that same information, but worded slightly different.

“The first pier on the left?” Archie replied.”

“Yes sir captain, that is correct.” the marina replied.

This is where the main confusion aboard the ship commenced. A quick discussion between George and Archie went back and forth between whether we should pull into one of the slips at the entrance to the marina, or continue further up into the harbor.

The first slips were now just beginning to glide by on our port side, and the depth was very close to our keel (remember what I said about always thinking about the keel under the boat?). There were some red markers along the channel, but even with those on our starboard side we began to feel the muddy bottom tugging at the Betty Ann. Our speed slowed a knot or two, and Archie added some RPM to compensate.

“See those docks on the right up there? He wants us to take a slip across from those.” George said.

“No, I think he might want us to take a slip right here.” Archie replied, looking off to port at the empty slips sliding by. Another tug an the keel. More RPM. I can imagine his nervousness, his 48 foot Island Packet is slowly coming to a halt in the middle of the channel as the keel digs itself into mud. I’m sure the thought in his head was “What’s wrong with the slips right here?”

“Try coming left a little, towards the docks, I think the water’s deeper over there.” George said. Archie spun the wheel a little to the left, the depth improved slightly and the bottom released its grasp on the keel. We accelerated up the channel.

With our newfound depth we continued up the channel towards the transient docks. There were some good sized boats on both sides, so we knew that we should have enough water. It was low tide however, and a quick glance to the starboard side revealed a muddy beach reaching well out into the water towards the channel. We reached the transient docks and pulled left into the first pier next to them. With lines ready we prepared ourselves as Archie judiciously used spurts of bow thruster and rudder to spin the boat and back her into the slip. The deceleration sensation reappeared; the mud was again reaching up at us. However with some hard backing, tugs on lines, and some courage, we were able to get the Betty Ann into her slip. Success!

The slip itself was in fairly poor condition. They still had the winter water agitators lying around (these devices keep water in motion during the winter, helping to prevent freezeover), and the small-diameter blue nylon line to support the agitators was heavily coiled around many of the cleats that we now needed. It’s a funny irony that the mud actually helped us in this case. I needed at least thirty extra seconds to unwrap the pile of line on my cleat before I had enough to get my line around it. Had the slip been deep water, and the wind high, the landing could have had an entirely different outcome. In addition, one of the cleats on the dock which we were using for our stern line was barely attached to the dock!

Archie jumped off to go talk to the marina, pay for the night, and inquire about the location of showers. Perhaps the most important piece of information to the crew, apart from the location of beer, is the whereabouts of the closest shower. You never know when your next one might come.

The marina itself was pretty unique. It’s a long rectangular-shaped piece of water, with a small line of land to shelter it from the canal traffic, and a steep hill on the other side. Crawling up the hill is a series of long switchback ramps that Archie was now climbing to get to the office. We busied ourselves organizing lines and equipment while we waited for his return. A short amount of time later, he did return.

“Man, you had to climb those stairs all the way to the office?” Someone asked.

“Well, yes and no. I went up the stairs, and asked where the office is. They said the office is down. So I came back down.”

Quickly the important information of shower location was relayed and George and Jerry ventured off to go clean up. Dad and I prepared our shower equipment and waited for them to return with intelligence on the showers (I think it’s always a good strategy to go to the showers second, this way you can learn about any showers that you might not want to use…think cold water, dirty, no pressure, etc).

When George and Jerry returned they told us the exact location of the showers (up the switchback and look for the only lights up there). Jerry mentioned that their condition was “OK”. Dad and I disembarked and headed out towards the hill. At night, which it now was, the marina looked a lot better, there were lights lining the docks to guide you to and from your boat, and at night you couldn’t see the piles of blue nylon line everywhere. We continued up the lighted path and began our accent up the switchbacks towards the showers. I was wearing my flip-flops, and immediately remembered why I hate them. There’s something about that rope-type thing pressing into the webbing in between your toes that just drives me nuts. Plus they’re always threatening to fall off (usually because I’m trying to keep the rope-thing from pressing into my toe webbing). I just don’t like them at all. Not one bit.

Upon our arrival at the showers we realized that we had only brought one set of shower supplies. We quickly devised a plan, I received a single-use portion of shampoo in the cap of the shampoo bottle, and we would cut the bar of soap in half, Solomon style. It turns out that breaking a bar of soap in half without any tools is more difficult than it sounds. Dad tried slamming it into the edge of the deck, and the door, and only managed to put a dent into the bar. This was enough of a wound to the soap that we were able to tear it in half. I never would have guessed it, but soap is actually pretty strong stuff.

We finished out showers, called mom on the cellphone to check in, and walked back to the boat. Before getting on the boat I gave her a push to see if she had come free of the mud below. To my surprise the boat began to rock back and forth slightly. I was about to relay the good news to the rest of the crew when I realized that it was not the boat rocking, but the dock under my feet.

We made plans to leave early the next morning hoping that the tide would be high enough for us to leave.

Monday, May 21st – 5:00 AM
We awoke early in the morning to plenty of water under keel. We hastily readied the Betty Ann and shoved off towards the mouth of the harbor, and eventually the Delaware river. Rounding the corner into the canal I noticed a neat sign. Much like a highway amber-alert sign this had a pair of yellow lights and text that read “Lights flash when commercial traffic nearby” Thankfully it was not flashing when we came around to the east and back into the canal. Since it was still early morning, the lights along the canal were lit. Both dad and I had wanted to see these lights. We were both expecting something like the lights on a highway, or maybe even a ski trail. However these lights were more reminiscent of the lights lining a driveway. They would still let you see a vessel coming at you from the other side I suppose, but they were not what I was expecting at all. It didn’t matter anyway, we were heading into the sunrise, and the view of the rising run behind some of the bridges over the canal made for some beautiful pictures.

We tracked our progress down the canal against the charts, counting down the bridges and power lines remaining until we hit the Delaware river. Looking at the chart, the Delaware appears more treacherous than the Chesapeake. If you turn downriver too soon out of the canal you will run right into water that is only two to four feet deep. We motored well out into the river, found the range light upriver, and began cruising down.

As we went further downriver our speed continually increased until our speed over ground read 10.3 knots. The tide and river current were sweeping us downriver much faster than we had planned for. At this speed we would reach the river mouth just after noon. Along the way we had a few container ships pass us going up river. These ships are hundreds of feet long, and take a long time to stop and turn. Obviously we made sure to give them a wide berth as we passed.

There also had recently been a lot of rain in the area, so this translated into tons of wood, logs and various other floating objects in the river. At the helm I was constantly changing course to avoid running into these, the last thing I wanted was to hit something and take the chance of destroying our prop, rudder, or worse.

Further down the river, where it opens up and looks more like a large bay, Jerry popped up out of his seat and began taking great interest in one of the ships anchored in the area.

“I think that’s the Integrity.” he said. He related a story about the ship, and his daughter who used to be first mate on the ship. He switched the radio to channel 13, a common frequency on commercial vessels, and tried to hail the Integrity. He was eventually able to make contact with whatever radio operator was on watch. He relayed a short version of the story he told us to the Integrity. I couldn’t understand a lot of the conversation that occurred back and forth, but apparently the radio operator assured Jerry that the would relay his greeting to the ship’s captain. Afterwards, I took a few pictures of the ship and of Jerry with the ship behind him.

Since we had made such good time down the river, we now had another crew vote to make:

1. Stop at cape May for the night
2. Continue overnight and make New York harbor in the morning.

Again we all chose option 2. Sail! I like this crew.

Archie drew up the watch schedule for the night which looked like this:

I come on at 10 PM and take the wheel from Archie, Archie then moves to the lookout seat to help spot traffic and buoys. At midnight dad comes up to take the wheel from me, I move to the lookout seat, and Archie goes to bed. You keep rotating like this until the sun comes up, or in the case of an extended cruise, until you get to where you’re going. We were only going for tonight so this would suffice.

My first watch was at 12PM which was when were were just getting ready to make our turn to the north, around Cape May, and up the Delaware / New Jersey / New York coast. Both dad and I had been practicing sailing without the aid of autopilot. In this case it was actually better for sailing because we were sailing downwind, and our course was right on the edge of the jib’s ability to stay on the starboard side. Having a human brain making decisions about the boat’s direction helps out in this case. Even so, we ended up intentionally jibing the jib so we could sail a few degrees more to the north. In the end we ended up making our turn to the north a little sooner than we planned because we were tired of the jib constantly being a pain, and it would save us some time. We sailed towards an outer marker for a while until we had cleared the point off our port side, and then turned north to 060 degrees from 110 degrees, this would be our course until our next waypoint somewhere off New Jersey.

I sailed through my watch without much action. I continued to practice sailing without the autopilot, getting used to the boat and how she reacts to different conditions. For a while, I even tried steering based upon feeling and not sight. Once you get into the rhythm of the waves on your current course, you can do this fairly well. It’s good practice for when you might be distracted later on and need to instinctively know when to bring the wheel around to keep the boat on course. At 2PM dad came up and I moved to the watch seat. At 4PM I went down into my cabin to attempt a few hours of sleep before the night arrived, I wanted to be alert for my overnight watch.

The night at the marina in the canal I didn’t sleep very well. The air conditioning was turned on, and my cabin quickly became very cold. Since I only had a little blanket to use, I also quickly became very cold. Anyone who has read the Appalachian trail journal will be reminded of the same thing I was, my night at the base of Mount Washington with a blanket not large enough for the job. My night in the canal was very similar, and I woke up countless times throughout the night. Now at 4PM the next day, I laid down in my bunk and got a couple hours of half-sleep. The same kind you get on a beach where you still hear things going on around you, but you dream a little bit too.

I think it was around 6:30 PM when I came back up on deck. It was close to dinner time so dad and I broke out the Italian Country Chicken dinner that was now thawed out enough to make it out of the container it had traveled in. For those who don’t know, Italian Country Chicken is made from:

Chicken (obviously) – small pieces cooked in a frying pan with a little oil, and pepper.
Onions
Garlic
Artichoke Hearts
Italian roasted peppers
Your favorite pasta (I recommend ziti)

It’s a simple recipe, but tastes really good when you get it all together. This would be the first time we had tried freezing it though.

Cooking on a sailboat underway is always interesting. Archie helped us find a couple pans for the chicken-sauce and for the pasta water. Stoves on sailboats are on gimbles, so that when the boat heals over under sail, the stove stays level. It takes a lot of faith in the system though when you’re facing a pot of boiling water on a stove that from your perspective appears to be angled at fifteen degrees. We somehow managed to cook the ziti, and heat the chicken sauce so that it all came out at the same time. We passed the plates up to the cockpit and then sat down to eat. By this time we were directly off of Atlantic City, and the sun was beginning to set. We investigated the city with the binoculars and chowed down on chicken and bread. We saw a number of wind turbines, as well at the Taj Majal and other Atlantic City buildings. The Betty Ann quietly slipped past the city, and continued her journey northward.

After cleaning up in the galley I went up in the cockpit to get used to the night sky, and keep track of our position. Jerry was going down below and asked if I wanted anything to drink.

“I’ll have a Coke if you can find one.” I replied.

After a while rummaging around in the fridge Jerry returned, “The only carbonated beverage we have is Sprite.”

I was really looking for caffeine in anticipation of my upcoming watch, but a Sprite would be good too. Jerry passed the drink up and then sat on the other side of the cockpit next to me. I opened the Sprite and heard the plastic seal crack, but there was no hiss of escaping carbon dioxide gas. My first sip confirmed my suspicion; apparently we didn’t have any carbonated beverages on board. I didn’t have the heart to mention in, and it didn’t taste all that bad, so I just drank it the way it was.

At 10 I took the wheel, and Jerry went below to catch some sleep, he would have to be back up at 4AM for his next watch. The GPS display was still in daytime mode, and annoyingly bright. Archie had just been leaving the cover on, but I wanted to play with it a bit. I asked Archie how to dim the display (answer: multi button, then up/down), then began to play with one of the more advanced features of our GPS unit, something called MARPA. I’m not sure what MARPA stands for, but I think it’s probably something like Magnificently Awesome Ridiculously Powerful Astonishing feature.

MARPA allows you to set markers on radar targets so that you can track them, its origins in military technology are obvious. Essentially you move the display’s cursor on top of the target’s radar echo and select ‘Acquire Target’ from the menu. This begins the unit’s tracking of your target, which now has a box around it on the screen. A quick press of another button labeled ‘Show MARPA Info’ brings up additional information about your target:

Range
Bearing
Target Speed
Target Course
Closest Point of Approach
Time of Closest Point of Approach

I couldn’t help but repeat the Top Gun quote to myself: “I’ve got good tone! I’ve got good tone! I’m firing!” Unfortunately I couldn’t find the “Fire” button on our GPS.

To our starboard side was a tug pulling a barge that had been on the same course as us since we turned up from Cape May. I “put a MARPA on him” so that I could easily keep track of where he was. I referred to this many times throughout my watch to quickly see where he was in relation to us. I could then quickly turn my head in that direction to get visual confirmation of his position.

At 12 AM dad came up to relieve me at the wheel, and Archie went below to go to sleep. I mentioned our course (018 degrees), the current configuration of the GPS unit, and our current position to dad as he came over to relieve me. After he was up to speed I unhooked my life vest’s snap ring from the boat, and moved out of the way so he could attach himself.

The moon was out, and there were bright lights on shore, so I showed dad how to brighten the GPS unit’s display with the Multi button (we never did find out what other purposes the ‘multi’ button had). Later after I had gone to bed it would again become dark and he would forget how to dim the display. “I was sure it was the ‘display’ button”, he would relate to me, “I tried it twice I was so sure.”

Dad wanted something crunchy so I went below to find something to munch on. I found a box of Wheat Thins and brought those back up. Even though Archie had earlier brought me an apple and some chocolate, the Wheat Thins proved too appetizing and we were soon both digging handfuls of them out of the box. For me at least, it helped to drive away tiredness. I guess if you’re sitting there chewing on a crunchy chip, your brain needs to stay awake.

Somewhere off the Jersey coast we noticed two bright lights up ahead. They appeared to be on a reciprocal course to our own (opposite to ours, 198 degrees). At night it is even more important to take action early, so on dad’s request I grabbed the glasses (binoculars) and inspected the lights up ahead. What I saw was like no other ship I had ever seen. It looked like some overgrown white spider, floating around the ocean. I also thought I saw them pick something up over the side.

Dad asked what they were, “Well, it’s either some sort of wacky fishing boat, or an alien spacecraft over there”, I said pointing to the white object up ahead. Spacecraft or not, we would need to get out of its way, so we adjusted our course to the east a bit so that we would miss the closest of the two vessels. Another peculiar thing about the ships is that they weren’t showing any lights to indicate that they were fishing (squid was our guess because of the bright white lights surrounding the entire ship).

In order to pass the time, dad told me about a dream he had been having right before he came up on watch. In his dream I asked him “How do you see the logs in the water at night?”. Of course, there is no way to do this without an absurdly bright light on the top of your mast. I’m sure this dream was in response to my concern earlier that day about the wood and logs in the Delaware river.

At 2AM George came up to take the wheel. It was finally time for me to go to bed. I had been counting down the minutes until this time. I hadn’t had much sleep lately and desperately needed some. I left instructions to be awoken at 4AM, which was our expected arrival time at the entrance to NY harbor.

Tuesday, May 22nd – 4 AM
I awoke to the sound of dad’s voice, “Hey, sunrise over NY harbor?”

“Mmmmnnnm blababbhbab.” I mumbled.

“Well here’s the ‘bug blanket’” The bug blanket was a blanket intended for use to keep bugs out of the boat when off New Jersey. We didn’t hit them this trip, but both George and Archie told of times where, somewhere off New Jersey, the boat would suddenly be covered in flies. Sometimes little black flies, sometimes house flies.

I grabbed the blanket, a nice soft fleece thing and replied “I guess I could sleep a bit longah.”

Even after having only a few hours sleep I was still good for an improvised Monty Python joke. I drifted of to sleep again, the last thing I heard was dad joking about trying unsuccessfully to get another ‘sun to rise’.

I slept for another hour until 5 when the smell of brewing coffee stirred me. I wanted to sleep more, but I told myself that this could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I wanted to join the ranks of few who sailed into New York harbor with the sun rising at their back, and gaze at Lady Liberty as we glide by.

I poured myself a cup of joe, black, and went up on deck. Maybe it was the excitement of coming into port after a long sail, but I felt surprisingly awake for the amount of sleep I’d had in the past 48 hours. There was some joke that I had missed from the early morning hours, because Archie grabbed the empty Wheat Thins box and called out to George “Hey George, give Jerry his empty Wheat Thin box! Ha ha ha ha.”

We motored up the river, laughing at the poor commuters on their way into work. It’s times like this that you start to think to yourself, “Boy, wouldn’t it be sweet if this was my job? Sailing around on a boat?” Conversation dropped to a trickle as we all admired the beauty of the city’s skyline on our way in. Under the bridge and around the corner the Statue of Liberty appeared. I ran down to get my camera (I did this run a lot on this trip). It’s one of those pictures that you know has been taken millions of times already, but you just can’t help yourself. On Jerry’s request, I snapped on picture as one of the orange NY Transit ferrys passed between us and the Statue.

“See if you can make her a passenger on the ferry Andrew.” said Jerry.

I set up and snapped a shot as the ferry went by. Thanks to the miracle of digital photography I was able to review the picture right away. There she was, standing on the front deck of the ferry. Thanks Jerry, that’s a pretty cool shot, and one that I’m sure hasn’t been taken millions of times.

We made our way up the Hudson, posing for pictures in front of the Manhattan skyline until we turned left into the Liberty marina on the New Jersey side. A brief discussion with the marina revealed our final berth on pier E. We motored down, turned left, and backed her into her new stall without incident.

Shore leave!

We didn’t even bother with showers, we all wanted to go see New York, the 9-11 memorial, and drink beer. Jerry secured some info on the water taxis that run between the New Jersey side and New York side every thirty minutes. For five bucks you can get a ride to one of three locations, what a deal! You’d pay that much in tolls, never mind the amount of time it would take to drive.

George, Jerry, dad and I walked over to the taxi loading dock. There was a water taxi there, almost ready to leave. Jerry wanted to take that boat, but George and I needed to use the head (bathroom) on the lightship next to the taxi loading dock. I had been holding this particular need at bay since I woke up. One of the rules on a boat is you don’t use the on board head for #2 if you don’t have to. There are two versions of this story from here. Jerry maintains that we didn’t want to ride on the ferry with him out of fear that we would get beat up for associating with someone wearing a Red Sox hat (Jerry). We maintain that he just really wanted to get to the other side and didn’t want to wait. We settled on the plan that we would take the next ferry, and meet him on the other side. I think we were all pretty sure that we would not be able to find him among the millions of people in New York.

George and I ran to the lightship (an old ship that used to be stationed at the entrance to the harbor and acted as a floating lighthouse) and occupied the two stalls inside. When I went to wash my hands I made the mistake of looking into the mirror. Wow, what a scrubby looking dude! Even though I had a short buzzcut, my hair was still all messed up and greasy. This look might work on Block Island, but I was pretty sure the chicks in New York wouldn’t go for it. I decided that a quick wash with water and soap from the sink would fix the problem. One of the advantages to a short buzz cut is you can do things like this. After wetting down my head with a few handfuls of water, I reached over to the soap dispenser only to find that there was none. “Oh well, at least I got it wet, it’ll have to do” I said to myself. Of course there were no paper towels either, so I squeegeed out as much water as I could with my hands, used my jeans to dry my hands, and went back outside. It was a sunny and bright day, so I wasn’t worried about being a little wet.

We stepped off the ferry-taxi, or whatever you want to call it, and looked for Jerry. He wasn’t anywhere nearby so we headed off to look for something he described as ‘a big green atrium’ thing that you could see the 9-11 site from. We couldn’t see anything from where we were (I later noticed that we would have been able to see it from the water-taxi), so George went to ask an information booth where the 9-11 memorial was. Armed with a destination we headed off in that direction, which was sadly away from the ‘big green atrium thing’ where Jerry was waiting for us.

We walked around the 9-11 site, which for the most part now really resembles a construction site, just a really massive one. The fence along most of the route isn’t really conducive to viewing, there’s chain link fence, with another green mesh nylon fabric that prevents any really good views, and certainly any good camera shots. It didn’t matter anyway, I had left my camera on the boat. I was anticipating a barhop and didn’t want to drag that around, or risk losing it.

At the back side of the site (back side from the water) the actual memorial sits with pictures from the day, and a long list of names.

We continued on around the site, and ended up back near our original location, and consequently standing right in front of the ‘big green atrium thing’. We took a walk around inside, but were unable to find Jerry; by this time he was off on an adventure of his own. There was an ATM inside the atrium, so I loaded up on cash (I was still expecting a barhop), then went back outside and continued our search for Jerry. There was an outside restaurant, which I remarked to my dad and George was serving beer, and which my dad remarked might be a good place to sit and wait for Jerry. We passed it by however, and ended up back in the water-taxi en route to Liberty marina and the Betty Ann. There would be no bar for me tonight.

Back on the boat we cracked a few beers, threw in the sailing CD I had brought with me, and lounged in the sun. We occasionally looked up towards the gate at the top of the gangway to see if Jerry might be there, needing to be let in (the gates are locked my magnetic keycard). It was still too early though, we didn’t expect him back until much closer to the time of the last water taxi.

Dinnertime came around and dad, Archie and I went off to the restaurant nearby to get some dinner. I had eaten a sandwich a few hours ago, but the lure of a restaurant meal was too strong to overcome. Upon entering I realized that I was way under dressed for the the atmosphere. This place expected casual to formal, I was in a hoodie sweatshirt and running pants. As we sat down I heard someone remark behind us, “Well, that’s sailors for you.” Yeah, you’re right, we are sailors and proud of it.

One of the specials on the menu was a ribeye steak. We all ordered that, and just that. No salad please, just three steaks, all medium rare, two gin and tonics, and a corona. The steaks came, and were really good. Then the bill came, and we remembered that good steak is usually followed by a large bill. After tip I think it came to around $175. We settled up, content with our full bellies of beef, and walked back to the boat.

Somewhere around 8:00 we were surprised to see Jerry walking down the dock towards us. He was smiling. We’re not sure how he got in, I suppose he must have met someone coming out of the gate by chance. He related to us the quick version of his adventure. A few martinis, a walk around Battery park, a few martinis, talking his way into a “Running with the Bulls” road race tee shirt, and meeting someone in a bar (whose wife was running in the race). This new acquaintance said he’d be able to take a picture of our boat from the 59th Street bridge the next morning. We all shared a round of rum and cokes, and watched as the setting sun painted the New York skyline various shades of blue, yellow and red. A while after sunset we all began to get ready for bed.

I retreated to my bunk, planning to write in my journal for a while. However, Archie had a legal story about a couple named Bobo and Vivian that he wanted Jerry to read. To Archie’s surprise, Jerry began to read the story aloud, and soon was laughing nearly too much to continue reading. Additionally, at the end of every paragraph Jerry would call over to George who was in his sleeping bag trying to get to sleep.

“George? Are you with me?” Jerry would ask.

“Mmmmm” would come the faint reply from the sleeping bag.

“Ok, we don’t want you going to sleep on us now.”

Another paragraph read.

“George, are you still with me?”

“Mmmmmm.”

This continued for at least a half an hour, and soon became much to entertaining to ignore. I put down my journal and listened to the story of Bobo, Vivian, and the stolen motor home unfold.

Wednesday, May 23rd
The tides in and around the Hudson and East river are notoriously tricky. We slept in a little today because we knew that we couldn’t leave until around 10:00 anyway, and we could all use a little catch-up sleep after the overnight sail the day before. We had to time our departure so that we would hit Hell’s Gate at the right time. Hell’s Gate is a spot where the East and Harlem rivers come together. Taken together with a strong tide, the currents at this location can be tricky at best, and dangerous at worst. Add in the presence of barges and other commercial traffic in the river with you, and this spot can become exciting very quick.

Around 10:00AM we pulled in our lines and made our way out towards the Hudson river. We were greeted by a police boat telling us to turn around. We initially figured that they must be looking for Jerry, some untold portion of his story from the night before. Thankfully it was something much more benign, there was a Naval parade coming up the river, and we were not to cross in front of it.

“Everybody knew about it.” the police officer yelled. Well, I’m not too sure about that. Apparently neither the marina, or anyone who we talked to about our departure, knew anything about a parade. Archie spun the Betty Ann around and pointed her back to slip we had left just minutes before. We pulled out all the lines we had just stowed, and set them up to ready ourselves.

I was on the stern line, and as Archie rotated the boat in front of the slip I jumped off to the dock to get the stern line back to the cleat in the rear of the slip. As the boat was backing in George called out for me to fend off. I looked to my right and saw that the beam of the boat was going to hit the corner of the dock. I leaned into the boat to try to keep her off the dock but was unable to overcome the inertia of the heavy boat. I called out “A little help!” to no one in particular, just anyone who would listen. The beam ended up hitting the dock and rubbing for a bit. It’s one of those communication breakdowns that happens in the blink of an eye, but that you kick yourself for later. You always want every landing to be perfect, and letting the boat hit the dock on the way in is not the way to do it.

After we secured the lines, we ran off to the end of the nearby park to watch the naval parade. It was pretty neat and included an AGEIS cruiser, helicopter aircraft carrier, some other type of cruiser, as well as a couple fire boats and flybys by an AWACS, C-130, and fighters that I think were F-16s. I took a bunch of pictures, wishing I had brought my zoom lens. While the parade was neat, I think we were all thinking more about Hell’s Gate and the tides more than anything else. After the last ship had gone by upriver, we made our way back to the Betty Ann.

The parade was a two part affair. The ships would go up the river, turn around, and then come back. This meant there was a window where we might be able to get across the river, if given permission. Dad got on the radio and attempted to hail the police boat at the mouth of Liberty Marina.

“Police boat at the entrance to Liberty Marina, this is the Betty Ann, over.” No reply.

“Police boat at the entrance to Liberty Marina, this is the Betty Ann, over.” Again no reply from the police boat.

“Betty Ann, this is the Coast Guard cutter Chinook.” The cutter replied, trumping the State police boat who hadn’t responded.

“Yes, we’re wondering if we have time to make it across to the East river, we’re currently docked at Liberty Marina.” Dad sent across to the cutter.

“Betty Ann, what is your maximum speed ?” The Coast Guard voice responded.

“Seven knots.” I suggested for an answer, this is pretty close to our cruising speed. Dad relayed this to the Coast Guard cutter and awaited a response.

“Betty Ann, sorry but your speed is not sufficient, there is a Naval escort underway in the Hudson river.” The cutter replied.

“Shoulda said faster.” Archie said.

By one o’clock the parade was over, and were were able to head back out into the Hudson, and begin up the East river.

The tide was still with us, and we pushed 9+ knots the whole way up. Archie took the helm the whole way through, and dad and George followed along with the chart, keeping track of our position and calling out the buoys as they passed. It’s a strange sensation motoring a sailboat through a city. We had Manhattan on our port, and Brooklyn on our right. We soon made a turn and Rikers was on our right, as well as a big blue barge on our left. George said that he thought this was a prison barge, to handle the overflow from Rikers I suppose. We also passed a replica of the Niña, which was closer to 30 feet instead of the original 70.

We continued to pick our way through the buoys until we made it into the beginning of Long Island Sound. It was around this time that the wind started to pick up. We brought out the jib and main and were soon sailing along at around 8 knots, with the aid of the engine. Dad and I were up on deck at the time, and everyone else was down below. We had both been eying the third staysail that had remained furled the entire trip. Dad asked Archie if we could bring it out and Archie agreed. The staysail operates a little differently from the main jib. There is an outhaul and an inhaul that are both operated from the same winch, and a sheet that looks more like a downhaul. We wrapped the outhaul around the port side small winch and began to crank. The staysail came out easy, and we were soon flying three sails, something I had never done before. The wind had built to sufficient strength that Archie killed the engine and we sailed at seven knots with sail power alone.

Throughout the day the wind continued to build, and we made good time towards Port Jefferson. We each took turns at the wheel and soon a competition emerged as to who could get the highest speed at the helm. Jerry was the first to hit 9 knots, and George bested him by getting 9.1 knots at his next turn on the wheel. I took the wheel for the last four miles to Port Jefferson and I’m proud to say that I was able to reach 9.4 knots on a set of particularly strong wind gusts to around 19 knots. The only problem was that the boat was getting an enormous amount of weather helm (when the boat wants to turn into the wind), and at times I had the wheel hard over just to keep her on course. A sail adjustment helped some, and I think if we had eased the main and jib some more the problem would have been eliminated. Our only other option was to reef the sails, but neither of us wanted to do that just yet.

Around 7:30 PM we dropped our sails and motored into Port Jefferson harbor. We wanted to go int the town and have a look around so Archie called the launch service on the radio.

“Port Jefferson launch service. Port Jefferson launch service. This is the Betty Ann, over.” Archie called into the microphone.

“Betty Ann, this is the Port Jefferson launch service, go ahead.” The reply came back.

“Yes, ahm, what time is the last launch?” Archie asked.

“We run until eight o’clock.”

A few seconds of silence ensued while Archie looked at the clock which now read close to 8:00.

“Is there another launch service?” Archie asked. Again my Monty Python and The Holy Grail script popped into my head, I couldn’t help but think of King Arthur asking ‘is there somebody else up there that we can talk to?’.

Denied our shore leave, we resigned to a night on a mooring. For the last hour there had been a lasagna that Archie had put into the oven cooking away and sending up tantalizing odors that sent my stomach rumbling. We were all hungry so after securing the boat we quickly set up in the cockpit for a fabulous dinner of lasagna and toasted garlic bread. I was so hungry that I went for seconds, had three pieces of toast, then ate the morsels leftover in the lasagna pan. For desert Archie brought out fresh cut melon and chocolate. I ate quite a few of these, and washed it all down with the remains of my Yuengling beer. For this display of self-gorging, I was given the appropriate nickname of “Dispose-All” by Jerry. Of course anyone who knows me knows that in normal life I tend to eat small portions, but in normal life I’m not living on a boat. I don’t know what it is, but being on a boat always gives me an appetite.

Soon after sunset we all went to bed. I wrote as much as I could in my journal, and then drifted off to dreams of that day’s sail. It’s days like this one that irreversibly addict you to sailing and its way of life. It’s the ultimate freedom, and an equalizer between you and the Earth. It gives you such a great respect for nature, and for the good fortune of being there to enjoy it.

Thursday, May 24th – 5:00 AM
We rose early again today to catch the tides down Long Island Sound in an attempt to get through Race Rock in New London before the outgoing tide changed to incoming. We cast off the mooring lines and headed out of Port Jefferson at twilight. There was very little wind, so we motored most of the way down the Sound. With the benefit of the tide we were again moving along at around 9 knots.

Today would be our last day on the water, and the first day that we would be in home water. It’s always a nice feeling when you get to your home waters. You know where you are, you can put away the charts for the most part, and you can relax in your knowledge of the area and take in the sights. I took the opportunity to savor the feeling of being on a boat, moving through the water towards a destination. One of my favorite parts about boating, and sailing in particular, has always been the journey.

Our GPS showed the tide changing at Race Rock at 11:20, we made it through by around 11:40 but I think we still had tide with us. It certainly felt like we were being pulled through, and the difference between the boat’s course over ground, and our compass course was enough to prove it. Shortly after lunch Jerry asked me if I wanted an English Muffin – Fig Newton sandwich. I replied that there were certain things that even Dispose-All wouldn’t eat.

By 2:00 we were inside Point Judith, and coming in to the fuel dock. There were two young girls waiting to take our lines. I passed our bow line to one of the waiting girls who used it to slow the boat down. Satisfied that she knew what she was doing I went about getting the fenders placed to keep us off the dock. She tied the line to the cleat on the dock about midship. The bow began to drift away from the dock so I ran up to pass one of the fuel dock’s lines to dad. I threw the first one I saw which it turned out was way too short. He was able to get it to the cleat, but it wasn’t ever going to make it around the cleat. I found a second line that was much longer and threw it over his shoulder. He was able to get it tied off and the bow stabilized. After we tied up she remarked that this was actually her first day on the job. That must be a little stressful, first day and your tying up 40 to 50 foot boats.

We filled up with 101 gallons of fuel, pumped out what was in our holding tanks, and then brought the Betty Ann back over to her home slip.

“Am I clear?” Archie asked.

“No, you’re not clear. More to port.” I replied, motioning with my arm which way we needed to move. Archie rotated the boat more and aligned the stern with the waiting slip. As we backed in I jumped off and observed our final movement into the slip.

“Watch the beam.” We backed her up slowly. “How far back?”

“So you can jump off onto the dock” Archie replied.

We gave the Betty Ann a good wash down, and unloaded all our bags and gear. This is always a tough part of a cruise like this. You’re glad to be home, but you don’t want to leave what has been your home for the past week. And not only has it been a place to live, it has carried you across seas, winds, currents and open ocean. In the end you have to leave the boat behind, and wait to sail another day.

The install went ok (it creates a virtual directory for you, and copies the files to your inetpub folder). However, when I opened the site in Visual Studio 2005 it was prompted with the conversion utility to upgrade it to the new 2005 format. “No problem” I thought, go for it. I navigated to the IIS directory (using the Visual Studio IIS browser in the conversion utility) and clicked ok.

I was letting it run and glanced down at the status bar to see files names from a lot of my other projects flying by. “Oh crap!”, said to myself…actually that wasn’t exactly what I said. I clicked cancel, which didn’t work. I guess they didn’t use enough application.doevents in their code.

Long story short, a lot of my applications that used to be stored in my inetpub folder are now hosed. Thankfully all the real project are under source control so I just have to pull fresh copies out, but a lot of little test projects are now broken.

Maybe I have something unique about my environment which caused it to attempt to convert my entire inetpub folder, or maybe I fat-fingered the “open from IIS application” browser and selected the IIS root. Whatever it was it’s a very good reminder lesson that:

• Conversion utilities are dangerous things
• Source Control is awesome
• Backup procedures are critical

Now I’m off to try and salvage as many applications as I can……

-Andrew

ADAL Version 1.0.7 was released today. Additions and fixes are included are:

- Fixed bug in PopulateFromReader that caused an error when calling the SELECT method of DAL objects. The call to PopulateFromReader was not inside a Do While Reader.Read.

- Supports SQL Server IMAGE and MONEY datatypes. Image is mapped to a Byte array on the .NET side.

- Added detection of IsNullable and IsComputed when building the DAL.

- IsComputed detection is used to fix the bug that resulted when ADAL tried to update computed columns. Also, the ClassItem object’s property is set to read-only on a computed column. So there is never even the illusion that the end user could try to update that column themselves.

- IsNullable is used to reduce the amount of code generated in the .NET Insert and Update methods.

- We added screenshots to the SourceForge website too!

Download?

I spent a lot of time trying to find a solution to this, and never really found a perfect one. The method I describe here is the best solution I could find at the moment.

Firts add a PlaceHolder Control, right before the end form tag. We’ll use this to write the <SCRIPT> tag so that it appears almost at the end of the document:

<asp:PlaceHolder ID=”plhJavaScript” runat=”server”></asp:PlaceHolder>

Then you can modify the master page’s Page_Load event to create a generic control, which will end up as the <SCRIPT> tag that is our goal. Once you have it, all you have to do is add it to the placeholder:

‘create generic html control

Dim JS As New HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl(“script”)

JS.Attributes.Add(“type”, “text/javascript”)

JS.Attributes.Add(“src”, HttpContext.Current.Request.ApplicationPath & “/js/MyJavascriptFile.js”)

plhJavaScript.Controls.Add(JS)

That’s pretty much it. I think the code above might need tweaking to get the path always perfect if you’re down in a sub-directory, but you get the point.

Options:  Download now, or read and then download at the bottom.

 ADAL 1.0.6 has been released.  There is a new feature in this release for anyone doing their own extensions, PopulateFromReader!  Basically this method that is available on every Item that ADAL creates will accept a SQLDataReader and auto populate the properties of the object for you.  Yes, that’s right, no more:

 IIF(MyReader(“ColumnName”) Is DBNull.Value, Nothing, MyReader(“ColumnName”))

Now isn’t that nifty?  This allows you to create an extension in a Partial class without too much worry.  Just make sure that the reader has all the fields the object will need or you’ll see a yellow screen of death.

 The code that ADAL creates for a Select Now looks something like:

Public Function [Select](ByVal ColumnName As String) As Classes.TableItem
Dim retObject As New Classes.TableItemTry

Dim MyReader As SqlDataReader
MyCommand.CommandText = “ADAL_usp_TableItem_Select”

With MyCommand.Parameters
.Clear()
.Add(“@ColumnName”, SqlDbType.VARCHAR, 2).value = ColumnName
End With

SqlConnection1.Open()
MyReader = MyCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)retObject.PopulateFromReader(MyReader)
MyReader.Close()Catch ex As Exception
Throw
Finally

If SqlConnection1.State = ConnectionState.Open Then SqlConnection1.Close()
End Try

Return retObject
End Function

The new PopulateFromReader is in bold. 

There’s also a bug fix in this version.  When ADAL was creating code to check for the length of strings during Property Sets if failed to check if the value was not nothing, and ended up causing an exception if it was (it was just using If MyString.Length > 0 Then).

Maybe you want to head on over to SourceForge and give it a Download?

Having seen too many Simpsons and Family Guy episodes, we have a sense of humor and started imagining all the different plans for thr future he must have, like

• Caprio IV – A deep space probe to broadcast his message to potential voters in the Galaxy.
• Martians For Caprio!
• 2008! Caprio for President of the Moon!

We also noticed that his CaprioTV website has a “Thank you” movie in it with an interesting choice of music. It sounds like the end to the Lord of the Rings or something. Way to epic for a “thank you for electing me treasurer” webcast movie. Soooooo….we then thought how funny it would be to make a parody of the movie using the ideas mentioned above. On the drive home I started thinking what the soundtrack might sound like.

This is the first draft of what I wrote when I got home. This is also a test of a cool new embedded MP3 player that works right inside of WordPress. Click the little blue “play” icon to play the mp3, or right-click the link and choose “save as” if you really want to save this MP3 (not sure why you would).

– Frank Caprio World Domination.mp3

• Uses an .msi installer
• Has “File Save” and “File Open” commands that write the current configuration to a custom XML file so you can reload the settings you had last.

There’s also a quick bug fix. When a table is all primary keys, ADAL used to generate a “GRANT EXECUTE ON” for the UPDATE stored procedure, even though it didn’t generate the CREATE statement for the update, so it generated a SQL error when you ran the SQL script. This has been fixed.

Plans for the future are:

• Templating – Develop a templating system so that users can create their own VB code templates that ADAL should generate around. this will be quite hard to get right, so I wouldn’t expect it too soon.
• Use embedded (but still paramaterized) SQL. This would remove the need to create the stored procedures, which can be nice to keep the use of ADAL fairly simple.
• Take a look at Paul Kimmel’s Ideas about a Data Acces Layer and see how much of that can be used in ADAL (http://www.developer.com/net/vb/article.php/3650241)

Don’t be afraid to use the SourceSorge forum and feature request system either…

 Have fun!

What is it?  35 seconds of a bass and organ playing together.  It’s yet another “proof of concept” song that is completely useless.

Here’s the file (now in mp3 format instead of ogg):

————————————————————-

::FileDeleted::

After listening to it again I decided that this sucked too much to waste space on my hosting plan for it.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

———————————————————–

Enjoy! – Penny Stop Motion Movie.

Wood Pile

If you can belive it, this one’s even better!  Time-Lapse of my  dad and I at the wood splitter for a couple hours:
Wood Pile Time Lapse Movie

• Whole Milk – Enough to cover bottom of pan.
• Butter – Around 3 Tbsp
• Cream Cheese – a couple good knife-fulls
• Pecorino Romano and Asiago Cheese (this is just what I had, but you definitely want at least one of these cheeses. Go by what you like in terms of the strength of flavour).
• Ground Cayenne Pepper – a dusting. Again, season to taste. I like the pepper to be just in the background, not so heavy that you notice it too much.
• Black Pepper – A grind or two.

Assemble your ingredients

Here’s all the main ingredients for the sauce. Not pictured is the pepper grinder, wups. Also notice that I don’t add any salt, the cheese has enough already.

Add enough milk to a saucepan to cover the bottom, set to low heat and add the butter to get it melting. You should get your pasta water heating up too.

While that’s melting and heating up, grate a bunch of cheese. Keep an eye on the milk so it doesn’t get too hot and boil. Give it a stir every once in a while.

And then add your grated cheese and cream cheese to the pan. You should probably add your pasta to the now-boiling pasta water around this time.

After the cheese has melted, you can add some spices. I actually added too much cayenne here. It wasn’t bad, just too “up front” in the flavor for this particular meal (another pasta meal I make I really load up on it). Probably half as much as is pictured would have been perfect.

If your sauce is getting too thick you can add milk to thin it back out again. Conversely if it’s too thin you can just cook it a little longer until it thickens up. When it cools from boiling it will thicken a little too, so keep that in mind.

Right before your pasta is done, add whatever else you want to the sauce. In this case I have chosen tomatoes and chicken (the chicken was previously slow-boiled in bay leaves, rosemary, thyme, tarragon, black pepper, and garlic cloves).

I like my pasta hot, so I always have (or try to have) everything ready to go before the pasta is finished cooking. Below is the final plated meal.

This is a really easy meal, it’s quick, and it’s easy to clean up. Best of all, it tastes really good too! Even my mom said it was “awesome”.

You can see all the pictures from this post (and a lot of other cool pictures) in one place.

Now With Options!

• Options menu item opens options form!
• Change root namespace (defaults to ADAL)
• Put the item classes and DAL classes in the same or separate namespaces (Defaults to “Classes” and “DAL”)
• Customizable stored procedure prefix. This allows you to easily identify which stored procedures belong to the ADAL objects (in case you need to delete either the ADAL or your own it’ll help prevent what I did when I deleted a few custom stored procedures because they all looked the same).
• Option to generate “GRANT EXECUTE” statements on the stored procedures created. No more “Execute permission denied” errors!
• Option to include validation code on varchar property gets and sets for length. ADAL throws an exception if you enable this and you try to set an items property with a value that’s too long.

Still With Problems

• There are still data types (like tinyint that ADAL doesn’t know what to do with). I’ll get to those eventually….

Download: ADAL Version 0.3 

CMS Search
I also checked out some CMS packages yesterday and think the one that looks the best so far is CMS Made Simple It has a nice simple interface that allows me to add new categories, and pages under the categories. It offers links between pages, but does not keep track of what pages are linked to what. So it allows me to delete a page that is being linked to from another, that’s the only part I don’t like so far…

For a free demo of CMS Made Simple, check out http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=452

I’ll keep looking on http://opensourcecms.com/ for a CMS, but so far this one’s out front.

1. Get a CVS source control solution that works with Visual Studio I believe this will consist of either a local cvs server, or sourceforge projects (and their cvs server). Hopefully I’ll get something like http://www.jalindi.com/igloo/ to work so I can connect Visual Studio to cvs and feel like I’m working with VSS.
2. Finish varnishing my boat’s wood pieces. Also maybe fill the inner cabin with epoxy / filler to make it look nice inside, then I can paint it too.
3. Change the oil in my truck.
4. Delete this crappy linux OS.

I was starting to feel bad for the guys I was playing against until we played Halo later on in the night (around 1:00am).  They took their bowling frustrations out on me by completly kicking my ass.  Even with major handicaps on their part I was still only getting 8 kills out of 20 or whatever.

Programming

I’ve still got my homework list of programming chores for home.  With the nice weather it’s hard to motivate myself to do any programming at home, but the current list is:

• Fix some of the problems with ADAL
• Start work on MASS (Multi Author Story System)
• Start work on Mage (.NET port of coppermine…sort of)
• Start work on the AGI Application Gateway Interface
• Maye install an open source CMS on the killfly root (http://www.killfly.com).
• Delete this shitty Linux OS from my laptop and put XP back on.

ADAL (Auto Data Access Layer) is a utility to generate the stored procedures and .NET classes needed to get up and running with a basic Data Access Layer.

License

Currently ADAL may be used for free by:

• Students
• Government Agencies
• Educational Institutions

ADAL may not be used:

• For Commercial purposes
• By BFFs

v0.2 Means Not Ready for Production

The code that ADAL generates has been tested by me for a total of about 10 minutes.  As such I would not recommend running the tool against a production database.

ADAL does not encrypt its communication with the server, so unless you know the connection between you and the database server is reasonably secure, I wouldn’t use it for databases or data that you are really attached to.  You never know who’s listening to your wire looking for a database username and password to go flying by.

ADAL also has trouble with some datatypes right now, it can generate the Stored Procedures all right, but translating some SQL server datatypes to .NET data types gives it a headache.

Is it Really That Dangerous?

No, but i’m covering my ass.  ADAL itself only issues SELECT statements against the database, you can actually run ADAL with a very low-priviliage account.  It seems that as long as the account is a data-reader, it can get the information it needs.

Of course, ADAL does generate the CREATE statements to DELETE information from your tables.  So if you were careless, you could run one of these stored procedures and delete a row of data.  That’s about the worst that can happen.

How do I use it?

• Download the ADAL .zip file below, and unzip the .exe inside.
• Run the .exe.
• Fill in the server, username, and password.
• Click Connect
• Select the database you want to generate a DAL for.
• Check the tables you want to generate a DAL for
• Click “Make A DAL!”.
• Copy the SQL from the “SQL Output” tab into query Analyzer and run it.  Make sure to select the correct database first!
• Copy the VB code from the “VB Output” tab into a new vb class file in your project.
• Compile.
• Have fun.  Enjoy not writing that crap by hand.

How Do I Download?

ADAL v.01

ADAL 0.2

Changes

ADAL 0.2

• Added color highlighting to VB tab.  Only bug is that you have to click in the VB textbox and hit a key to trigger the color highlighting.
• The account you use to connect with used to require that it have “master” as the default database.  This has been fixed.
• There is a bug that was introduced as well, there is tome text (“test”)included at the end of each of the VB and SQL code windows.  You’ll have to delete this text before or after you use it.

Š

First Create A Class
We need to create a class the items of which we will add to our custom collection.  This one’s pretty simple, it’s a car:

Create The Custom Collection
The important parts to note are the first line where we inherit from System.Collections.CollectionBase.  This provides all the basic functionality of the collection to us.

The next thing we do is to re-implement the Add and Item properties.  This is what makes it so cool.  Later on when you access these properties the intellisense knows that your adding a “CarItem” object and you have all the properties of the “CarItem” available.

The Microsoft article made the Item property ReadOnly.  I’m not sure why, I decided to implement the Item property just like the Base object’s Item Property (allowing Get and Set).

Using The New Collection
Now that we’ve created our new collection we can use it.  The code below shows an example of how you might bind the collection to a datagrid.  Obviously you’d probably be adding the data from a database and not manually, but this is good enough for example.  The last line also shows how you can use the item property to inspect the items within the collection.

Here’s an Example of The DataGrid After Being Bound

Pretty cool eh?

Here’s the original Microsoft Article which I basically re-implemented here

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon/html/vaconCreatingYourOwnCollectionClass.asp

DSC_3446

Originally uploaded by firstdivision.

Found a cool place to take pictures of planes coming into TF Green Airport in Rhode Island. It was getting dark when I got there so this shot was taken at 1600 ISO, that’s why it’s so grainy. I’ll go back someday a little earlier to get some better shots (hopefully).

DSC_3402

Originally uploaded by firstdivision.

Taken on New Year’s Day as we drove to breakfast. Ice on the windshield was slowly melting.

I like the different shapes that the ice crystals create.

For those technical people out there, here’s what I did:

Backup Current Site

• Exported database from MyPhpAdmin as SQL file in case I needed to restore.
• Downloaded all the files from the blog.killfly.com subdomain to my local hard drive.

Get New Files And Prepare Upload

• Downloaded and extracted the new WordPress2 ZIP file to my desktop.
• Copied the config.php and php.ini from my local backup to my downloaded copy (so I can upload one big folder).

Do Actual Upload and Update

• Deleted all the wordpress files from the blog.killfly.com server (made sure to leave my stats folders).
• Upload new files.
• Ran the /wp-admin/upgrade.php file as per the instructions.
• Opened http://blog.killfly.com/ in my browser.

I realzed my custom banner was missing (my fault)…

Fix Missing Banner

• Uploladed my personalHeader.jpg file from my local backup at wp-content\themes\default\images
• Uncommented the line in header.php using theme editor to re-display the custom header.

Done!

Granted, my blog is fairly small, and I didn’t have any uploaded images. But I was very happy at how easy the upgrade was.

-Andrew

I like how the steam gets blown around a little. It was a 3 second exposure so there was enough time for the wind to move the steam around.

Standing straight and watching
Spoken words go flying by.
Concentration blurs, and eyes drift off,
My ears have said goodbye

Waiting on my own two feet,
With patience gazing far.
I close my eyes, and breathing deep
I fly out to the stars.

Wishful thinking of our youth;
It’s so easy to forget.
Waiting on the stairs of life
Remorse and fear, regret.

Is there reason in the world?
Is there a joker in my hand?
Is there a reason to even try?
Should I even make a stand?

We punctuate our lives with work.
Does quality even matter?
From all I’ve seen it surely doesn’t,
At least that’s what I gather.

If no one cares or wants to try,
Then I’ll just pack and walk.
I’ll find a place inside this world,
Where I’m not afraid to talk.

The first is the time I wanted to see how fast I could run. I ran alongside a car while the driver kept pace with me tracking my speed. I started slow but quickly built speed until my legs were a blur of supernatural running power. Somewhere around thirty-five miles per hour on the car’s speedometer (I’m pretty sure I remember that speed correctly), I disappeared from the driver’s view.

“You were right there…and then you were gone.” said the driver, “I looked into the rearview mirror and saw you behind the car.”

What the driver saw is what I wish I had a picture of; my body rolling and bouncing down the road. I had attempted to slow down and ended up locking my knee by accident which caused me to “spin out of control”. I landed on the pavement hard, rolled a few times, and eventually came to a sliding stop, which is where most of the damage to my skin came from. Don’t worry, nothing permanent.

Why do I wish there was a picture? Because that must have been one of the funniest things in the world to see…and i didn’t get to see it. I can only hope that someone saw it from their house and now has an awesome story to tell about the “day they saw this dumbass roll down the road.” I know we tell that story at least once a month in my house because it’s always good for a laugh, but if we had pictures it would be so much better.

What’s the second time I wish I had a camera? I’m not going to tell you because it doesn’t sound nearly as funny as the story I just told. I’m going to ammend my answer, I can think of only one time I wish I had a camera, but I’m sure there’s more.

largest_garlic_clove

Originally uploaded by firstdivision.

The largest clove of garlic I have ever cut into. Keep in mind, this is just one clove of an entire head!

This was actually a clove of garlic tha was inside a gift basket that we recieved. Since we were cooking up some chicken that was also in the gift basket, I decided to take on the garlic.

I minced about 3/4 of this clove and quickly fried it in butter,making sure not to burn or even brown it. This was added to a pan of fettucini with fresh-cut tomatoes and the garlic. This pasta/garlic mixture served as a bed for the chicken.

Yummy! Almost (but not quite) as good as Chicken Cordon Blue from Mama T’s.

A group of scaredy-cat ducks takes off just because I walked out on the dock.

Hey, it’s a D70 not a 12 gauge.

Expressionless and stern, the rowboat captain dips the oars into the water and takes another stroke. He pulls hard and the boat rushes forward, gladly accepting the captain’s direction. Friends forever, the boat and man’s trust in each other is complete. One would never fail the other.

The shore is gone; enclosed in a shroud of fog they continue their journey.

“Trust is important.” The captain says to the boat. The boat agrees and accepts another pull of the oars. In fog there is no time, only gray suspense, and the sound of your motion.

A shore appears ahead, a black smudge in the gray. It becomes a beach and the captain takes the boat there. The beach is sand, not stone.

“This is better.” The captain says to the boat. The boat agrees and lets itself be pulled up onto the sand which feels better than the rocks of their old beach. The captain walks away and the rowboat waits for his return, it waits for their next journey into the fog.

Photo of hthe day (so far). Walked around the yard with my new lens…

—————————————————————————————
“So Andrew, what about you?” John asked.

“I guess I would have to say agnostic.” Andrew replied.
—————————————————————————————

Discussions on religion, like politics, are ones I tend to do my best to stay out of, partly because of their ability to so quickly divide a group. I realize that submitting a typed document on the subject is directly opposed to that behavior, but my answer has been bothering me and I think it needs clarification. Since I tend to write better than I speak, this seems like a good way to submit that clarification.

As I spoke aloud my original answer to John’s question, I felt like I lost standing in John’s eyes, and possibly Jane’s as well. This is certainly what bothers me about my response most, enough so that I had to get up out of bed and work out this explanation. I definitely feel like the answer I gave was incomplete, and that I need to fill in the gaps.

A better, but still incomplete answer to John’s question would have been to reply that I’m a non-practicing Congregationalist (Protestant). This is how someone else at the table responded to the question, although for a different faith. Basically, Congregationalism has as a defining characteristic no select Priesthood; the Ministers and Deacons are “leaders in a community of equals” ¹. This is the religion I was taught and baptized as a child; I just haven’t been to the church in a while except for the occasional wedding or funeral, thankfully more of the former than the latter. In fact, as is obvious from the footnote above, I had to do some research just to make sure I had the correct definition of Congregationalist.

In order to begin my search for more information, I first need to see exactly what it is I said in my original answer to John’s question. My first stop was a few Google searches, the first of which led me to a page defining agnostic as:

An agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned. Or, if not impossible, at least impossible at the present time. ²

I agree with those two sentences. Actually, after reading that entire page it turns out that I agree with a lot of what is said. However, that’s just one person’s view on agnostic beliefs.

I suppose that’s what bothered me a little about my original answer, the fact that I was compelled to place beliefs after agnostic in that last sentence. Also, agnostic seems to carry with it a negative connotation, which is why I felt like I had lost some standing in both John and Jane’s eyes. Being labeled agnostic by my own answer to a question, I begin to feel constrained already by the limits of a definition.

One day I took one of those “See what religion you should be” tests. One of the religions that came to the top of the list was Buddhism. Another Google search led me to the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order web site where they offer a definition of Buddhism as:

Buddhism is a path of practice and spiritual development leading to Insight into the true nature of life. Buddhist practices such as meditation are means of changing oneself in order to develop the qualities of awareness, kindness, and wisdom. ³

Another definition I can agree with. Who can deny that awareness, kindness and wisdom are things that we should strive for? However, I again run into the same problem of feeling constrained by the boundaries of one particular system. Why should we have to force ourselves into one definition when most religions contain things we believe anyway? I have a feeling I could probably continue this exercise of investigating different religions and find that I agree with a lot of what is said, but there may always be a few things here and there that make me take pause.

I suppose the conclusion I’m starting to arrive at is that I have no answer for the question “What is your religion?” because I shy away from anything labeled as such. I definitely have a personal set of beliefs and principles that I try to follow to the best of my ability, but I cannot say that they all belong to one religion. So the real answer to John’s question is that I have no answer, and yes, I realize that that’s a lousy answer.

Footnotes:
1)
http://www.haverfordwest.freeserve.co.uk/cfwales/beliefs.html

2)
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/humftp/E-text/Russell/agnostic.htm

3)
http://www.fwbo.org/buddhism.html

The duck says “What are you looking at?”

To find the user that the application runs under, insert the following code into a page of your application:

Response.Write(Environment.UserName)

The user that Windows XP uses (in my tests) is: ASPNET
The user that Windows Server 2003 uses (also in my tests) is: NETWORK SERVICE

Another factor to consider is that the above accounts were found with the application running with “IMPERSONATE IDENTITY” = False. If it were set to true, the account would either be IUSER_MACHINENAME or the domain user if IIS has authenticated them.

Keep these issues in mind if you need to allow the end users elevated permissions (such as uploading files). You will have to give permissions to different accounts depending on what version of IIS you are using.

Not one of my pictures….

Just a reminder to everyone…..WINTER IS COMING!

Needed a new picture so I posted this one that I took tonight. We’ve got one of our first fires going of the year, and it signals the beginning of fall and winter….and snow soon!!

I originally started taking pictures of the fireplace itself, but then thought that maybe looking at the firer through the glass would be more interesting.

Test post of a picture from http://flickr.com to my blog.

Here’s the caption from flickr:
Photo taken of a book and bowl of grapes. I came home one day and the table was set like that, “Hmmm” I thought, “That will make a neat picture.”

The only drawback about VSS Reporter is that the generated files aren’t very pretty. Fortunatly one of the output options is XML which we can make to look pretty using XSLT and CSS. And then, as long as we’re in there, let’s add some functionality to integrate a home-grown issue tracker with changes made in SourceSafe. Then we can answer the question, “What bug or feature required that this file be changed?”

XSLT
The XSLT file essentially builds an HTML page out of a supplied XML file. It was a little tedious to get working a first, but after a little bit of trial and error I was able to get the layout I wanted.

Another thing that the XSL does it to look for an occurence of “ID=” in the comment field. When files are checked into SourceSafe, we have to make sure that we use a comment that includes this string. Without it there will be no way to correspond changes made to files with the issues submitted in the issue tracker. This part is optioal to you, in fact if you don’t have “ID=” in your comment, the XSL will just ignore it and not try to build a link to the issue tracker. This brings up the first modification you have to make.

If you want to use the functionality to integrate your issue tracking system with SourceSafe, you’ll have to use a comment like the one I describe above. In addition, you’ll have to change the line in the XSL file that builds the link to the issue tracker, since I’m going to guess that your URL to your issue tracker is not the same as the one I made up for the example.

Look for the line that looks like:

and replace it with the URL to your own issue tracker. The comment itself is appended to the end of whatever you specify here, so keep that in mind. Either your issue tracker will have to be smart enough to extract the identifier for the issue from the comment….or you’ll have to get fancier with the XSL to have it pass in only the ID number of the issue. Since my VB.NET skills are much better than my XSL, I chose to make the IssueTracker page the smart one.

CSS
The CSS file is nothing special, it just makes the display a little easier to look at.

The Final Product
An example VSS Reporter XML file shows how the three files work together to produce something that both looks nice (I think), and is useful.

If you look at the source for the XML file, you will see a line at the top that is not included in the XML file that is originally generated from VssReporter. This is a line that tell the XML processor where to find a XSL document to use (I hope I’m not lying about what is going on). In any case, you’ll need to add this line to the top of the XML file.

There’s also a ZIP file that contains the three files mentioned in this article. Just unzip all theee to the same directory.

Conclusion
Hopefully someone will find this useful. VssReporter is a really powerful (and free!) tool. I think Visual Studio 2005 Team System might make this unnecesarry in the future, but probably not for a while.

The first is BCWipe which allows you to securly delete files, or entire drives. I haven’t used it, but I’ve talked to someone who has and they say it’s pretty cool.
http://www.jetico.com/

The second tool is Daemon Tools. This is a nice utility that allows you to mount ISO images as drives in Windows. I’ve got an ISO mounted right now, took a few seconds to click the icon in the tray, select my ISO image and then navigate to to my new “F” drive. Pretty slick.
http://www.daemon-tools.cc

The DataSource wizard has been expanded too. You can now specify an external URL to fetch an XML file for a datasource, that was pretty neat. I’m not sure, but it also seemed that all the “auto-generated” connection strings were maintained in the web.config file auto-magically, even though the presenter was generating a new datasource on each page. There’s also a way to specify a stored procedure to use as the datasource. If this option is chosen, Visual Studio will read the parameters required and prompt you for where to get them (querystring, control, object, etc). Also pretty cool.

The other major feature is something called master pages which lets you specify a template-file for the entire site and control the layout with that file instead of having to keep track of includes all over the place. There’s also “skin” support that lets you define how each control should appear (i.e. all calendar controls should have a grey background, 12 pixel font, etc…). Unfortunately, the skin support doesn’t extend to regular HTML controls, so you can’t use it for things like an H1 tag…I don’t understand why not. This means that CSS is still required for these.

It will also validate the HTML for a particular browser, and will do it for section 508 compatibility if that’s required.

They didn’t cover much about Team System, which I was interested in, but they did give us a DVD of Team Foundation Server that we can install to check out the new features. They also gave us a DVD with all the presentation details on it, you are welcome to borrow mine if you want.

Just thought I’d mention that. lol

Earlier….
When I was coming back from work I stopped by the boat club to see if anyone was down there. Nobody was, but I did see my dad moored off Bill’s Island. I also noticed that the inflatable raft was still in with the dinghies but in need of air……a plan was born.

I drove back to the house. Threw a 12-pack and a bunch of ice into a cooler. Grabbed the air pump for the inflatable and launched the canoe with my supplies. I paddled out in the canoe to meet my dad who was moored on the “saff-tee” mooring off Bills Island. The plan was to be a hero and arrive with a 12-pack of ice-cold beer and hang out there for a while. However, when I rounded the point I realized he had already left the mooring to go back to the boat club. Since I was already out there I figured I would paddle over to the club (long paddle into the wind). This would have to substitute for my excercise, no running today.

Getting closer to the club I realized that he was getting ready to leave.

“You THIRSTY?” I yelled. Of course he was. I tied up my canoe to the boat club dock next to Tresta, cracked two beers and handed one to him. Now properly equiped with a cold beer I began pumping up the inflatable which I would be using for the return trip. When it was drum-tight we slid it into the water and I side-paddled it over to the waiting canoe. We tied the canoe the inflatable hip-tow style (side-by-side), I started the engine on the inflatable and I was off.

I couldn’t turn! We had tied the canoe too far to the front of the inflatable and even with the engine turned 90-degrees to the side I couldn’t turn one degree. After re-adjusting the lines I regained control of the two and was able to motor out of the morring field and made my slow downwind journy across the pond back home.

However, suddenly IIS stopped being able to serve classic ASP pages (.NET still worked fine). It just returned a “500 Internal Server Error” The symptoms were exactly the same as an article on MSDN, (two events in Event Viewer, one for W3SVC and one for DCOM) but we couldn’t get the suggested fix of making the passwords the same in both the IIS metebase and Windows.

It turned out, the easiest solution was to uninstall and reinstall IIS. It takes about 20 min and you’re done. Take lunch between the two and you barely notice what’s going on.

1) Copied VSS\Win32 directory from sourcesafe server to local client machine in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VSS\Win32.

2) Ran SSINT.exe

3) Opened Visual Studio 2003, opened a project from source control. It works.

4) Deleted everything from the local C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VSS\Win32 except: ssint.exe, mfc70.dll, msvcr70.dll, ssscc.dll, and ssus.dll. This is the same file list that is present on a workstation that had the integration installed from the SourceSafe CD.

5) Opened Visual Studio 2003, checked out a file, checked it back in. Works!

One comment that both the posters stressed is to make sure you have SourceSafe licenses for the machines the machines that you install the integration onto.

Actually, this was a test to see how hard it would be to get a picture from http://photo.killfly.com/ to show up. I always like this pic, I guess that’s why it’s in the Nikon d70 category.

Eventually I’ll get some posts up in the technology section…..hmmm, maybe I’ll do that right now.

Here’s a backed-up post from earlyer in the month. I had set up another blog but deleted it in favor of this one. Anyway, here’s theold posts:

Friday – Saturday – Sunday: River Rafting
This was an awesome trip. I drove up to Millinocket Maine and spent the night at a campground. In the morning we headed over to the rafting place to gather our synthetic jackets, life preservers and paddles.
The day starts off with a 13 foot waterfall. The waterfall empties into a large area so the consequences for falling out are pretty low. That’s why I think the company uses this spot to get almost every boat to flip at least once. You might as well see what it’s like now.

The rafting itself is strange. The rapids are unavoidable, you know you’re going through it and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. The horizon line gets closer and the noise from the rushing water gets louder. Then (for me anyway) something strange happens. You go into super concentration mode and before you realize it the rapid is behind you and you can’t remember exactly what it looked like. At least this is what it is like from the perspective of a couple days. Of course the one highlight that will stay fresh in everyone’s minds for a while is Exterminator.

Almost everyone in our raft fell off in the Exterminator Class 5 rapid. Not exactly the goal in a huge boiling cauldren of bron water. Everyone except for one person made it back into the raft, he was forced to navigate the majority of the rapid using only his life jacket. He said later that he thought to himself, “There’s a pretty good chance I could die.” This was absolutely true.

Monday (today): Vacation Day (Victory Day)
Helped install some speakers on Mike’s boat.
RROL practice at Indy – Wrecked out.