purgatory

Fortune from the usual - Master Fung at Smith’s:

• Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?

“In order to check for updates, you must install an update for Windows Update.” I should have gotten a screenshot.

That man really needs to shut up.

I set up the boat today so I could get pictures. I’ve got five shots that I felt were worth sharing. The first is a wide-angle shot showing the boat next to our van. The van is Chevy’s 15 passenger beast, about 20 feet long. The boat’s specs say it is 11 feet long.

The second picture looks at the boat from the bow end. If you blow the picture up to full size, you can fuzzily see the batteries under the transom seat.

The third picture is a view of the interior of the boat from the side, looking towards the bow. The tripod chair was something I picked up this afternoon for $9 at Sportsman’s warehouse. It looks promising, we’ll see how well it works when the boat is actually out on the water. I have my eye on a thing or three from Cabelas, we might pick up a set early next week.

The fourth picture is the motor. Although I wish that either it were a 12V motor or that I had a single 24V battery, it’s worked out very well. You can see part of the transom seat and the transom motor mount itself in this picture.

The last picture shows my anchor, its chain and rope, and the chair bag I am using for rope storage and delivery.

Kathy has told me that she will shorten the bag for me - the rope only takes up about a third of the space inside it, so the bag could be cut in half and still work perfectly. In the long-term, I believe I need a single larger bag that can hold both the anchor and the whole rode. I’d like to put a large grommet in the bottom, which would serve two purposes. One purpose is drainage, so the bag can let water out easily. The other is to let a short section of rope hang out which would be tied to the boat. That would ensure that I never lose my anchor on the bottom of the lake due to carelessness, but not interfere when rope is deployed or stored.

I just got my property valuation and tax notice for the house. What I found therein amounts to a mixed bag of good and bad news.

My land value went up somewhere in the vague neighborhood of 33.3333333333333333333333333333333333 percent. The value of the house itself went down by about 26 percent. This makes for a loss in value of the whole package of about 11.3 percent. Those of you who can still remember beginning algebra now have a story problem - what percentages do the land and the building comprise of the total? Please show your work!

The good news is that the property tax burden for this year is now lighter by nearly $400. The bad news is that my house value has dropped by quite a lot. There is a good side even to the bad news, though. It simply means that recently inflated property values are coming back in line with reality. I hope that the housing bubble is completely burst and things will now level off.

Perusing the taxing entities is interesting. More than half of my taxes go to the Jordan School District. The next biggest chunks go to the county and to the city. Much smaller chunks pay for the county library system, water infrastructure, mosquito abatement, a multi-county assessment, and a county assessment.

A few weeks ago, we bought a couple of innertube-y towable things that came with the tow rope, but I’m completely at a loss as to how it attaches to the inflatable, or to the boat. The tube has a cover with a loop made of strap material, and the two ends of the tow rope have loops spliced into them. How do I deal with this? I can thread the whole rope through the loop for one end, but what do I do for the other after I’ve done that? I can’t pass the tube or the boat through the loop!

Every two years or so, we organize a reunion of Kathy’s family and friends and descend on a campground. The last one was two years ago in the Island Park area near Yellowstone. You can read a little about it here. This year, the craziness is happening at Pineview Reservoir, for five nights, from August 6th through August 11th. We’ve got six campsites and nearly fifty people confirmed.

The important thing for us at these reunions is the inclusion of close friends. Everyone in life has two kinds of family - the relatives they are born with and the family they choose for themselves. For Kathy and me, these relations are much closer than the ones we have with our true family members. No offense is meant to either of our families in saying this, but it’s true. Relationships with family members come pre-packaged with certain obligations that are not required in the early stages of friendship. Deep friendships have obligations of their own, but in most cases you’ve been able to vet them before those obligations are assumed.

Our cat, which has the name Sparrow, has always been an avid bird watcher. She’s also tried many many times to catch the birds, but without success. Suddenly, two days ago, she figured out what she was doing wrong. We found some feathers and a head on the floor.

Yesterday, she brought in three more birds. The last one was still alive when we saw it, and we haven’t actually located it yet. It may be the same one that she’s chasing around the house this morning, or that may be a new one.

I’m not sure what to make of this. We are probably going to have to close the cat door so she can’t bring them in the house after she’s caught them.

Today I am finally back to work after our Mirror Lake vacation. The time off started on July 17th, so I was off work for 11 days counting weekends and holidays. The actual trip was July 18th through the 23rd, five nights.

My wife has two posts about our trip, but I did want to write some stuff of my own. Some of what I’ve got here is a little disjointed if you don’t read her posts, so consider doing that before you continue here. It may even be a little disjointed if you do read them.

First thing to say - to say I love my boat (River Tam) would be a grand understatement. It’s great fun to putter around the lake. The batteries for the trolling motor lasted far longer than I could have ever expected. We put several hours of runtime on the motor, and the batteries never showed below 75% capacity. I did charge the batteries partway through the trip, but I believe I could have skipped that and had no issues at all. I have been remiss in the realm of pictures - I’ll get the boat set up with all its accessories and snap some.

Fishing is a whole different experience from a boat. When we got back from the campout, my oldest child informed her mother and stepfather that shore fishing is no longer good enough, a sentiment that I must echo. On my first fishing foray, I used the batteries as a seat and my daughter used one of the wooden plank seats. Over the course of an hour or so, we brought back five good-sized rainbow trout, and had thrown back at least that many for being too small. I had tangled rope problems with the anchor on that trip.

We went back out again the next day and caught five more. That time, I still had tangled rope problems, but the depth was shallower and I was able to get anchored. On our last full day there, I had finally found a way to keep the rope tangle free - I fed it into a bag from a camp chair, loose end first.

For the last fishing trip, I went out with our friend Joe and one of his kids. Between the three of us, we pulled in more than 20 trout, of which we kept 9, releasing the rest. Joe’s daughter caught most of the fish, so she is now a complete convert to the church of ichthyology. Since many of the fish were hooked deeply, most of them were released with the hooks still inside. The latest information from the DWR says that deeply hooked fish have about an 80% chance of survival when released quickly by cutting the line, versus about 30 percent if the hook is removed before release. The hook will dissolve in many cases, and in others the fish will manage to work it loose and spit it out.

Also on that last trip, we used camp chairs as seats, supported by the marine plywood floorboards. This worked pretty well, except that we couldn’t twist around to change positions. I was in the back of the boat facing starboard, Joe was ahead of me facing port, and his daughter was in the bow on flotation seats. I have some ideas on how to fix the seating, and a little over a week before the next campout to get them figured out.

The kids had a blast in Flubber, the smaller boat. Because there were so many very small kids, they were allowed to putter around a little bay at the southeast end, not the deeper water of the main lake. There was some disappointment at this, but they still had a ton of fun.

The rain we had during the trip was not fun. It all worked out in the end, and we didn’t get personally drenched, but thunderstorms during a campout tend to put a damper on spirits. There was also the extreme problem of mosquitoes. We dealt with that problem, at the cost of feeling grimy all the time from the double-whammy of bug spray and sunblock.

I would strongly recommend to anyone visiting the Uintas that they take a free tour of the Kamas fish hatchery. Lots of information that I found very interesting, not boring at all. I’d definitely go camping up there again, but I would probably do it at one of the other lakes for some variety.

Today while I’m at work, my new boat is arriving. On Friday evening while we were out fishing, the trolling motor arrived. It turns out that the particular model I bought is not quite what I was expecting - it’s a 24V motor rather than 12V. This means that I need two batteries instead of one. I was prepared for a 12V scenario, as my trailer adventures a couple of years ago left me with an extra marine battery. WalMart will come to the rescue there - their batteries are cheaper than elsewhere and their core charge (which you pay when you don’t exchange an old battery) is only $9. I’ll get a matched set of batteries that will also work for the trailer in a pinch.

The real fun begins in four days. I have from July 17th through July 25th off of work. A plan that’s been a full year in the making will come together (shut up, Hannibal) on Friday July 18th - five nights in two campsites at Mirror Lake with another family. If you don’t reserve the campsites the moment they become available, you basically don’t get one, so we reserved ours last summer.

It turns out that there are two roads to Mirror Lake. There’s the way that I’ve always gone, which goes through Wanship, passes Rockport Reservoir, hits Peoa and Oakley, then finally Kamas, where you make a left turn onto 150. I got a different path when I put it into Google Maps, though - take 40 towards Heber, but turn onto 248 before you reach Jordanelle, which puts you straight into Kamas. You then make a right turn onto 150.

It was that right turn that clued me into the fact that this was a path I’d never seen, as I very clearly remember the left turn. The “new way” is about 9 miles and ten minutes shorter, but (after poking around on Google Earth) it looks like a road with more hills and not as much scenic countryside. I’ll be pulling a trailer, which makes hills bad, and I’ll have kids in the car, which makes boring countryside bad. Do any of you have experience with both roads, and if so, which way would you recommend?

The paint man at Home Depot gave me the information I need to get boat names painted on inflatable boats. I put it into practice by inscribing a name on the little inflatable boat. This is not the best picture, because the flash resulted in a lot of light reflection on the letters.

I made this by printing out 525 point letters using the font named Informal Roman (from Office 2007), aligning them onto some contact paper, and cutting out a stencil with an X-acto knife. I then used it with black spray paint made for vinyl. You can see some overspray at the top of the picture where the paint sprayed beyond the stencil. I should have put saran wrap or newspaper under the edges of the stencil to fully cover the boat. I made a few other mistakes that aren’t as easy to see, I hope to correct them all when I put the name on the new boat.

The boat naming thing is hard. I got several great suggestions in addition to the ones I got here. In the end I chose to name her “River Tam.” It’s female and watery, two things that make for good boat names. It’s also deeply rooted in sci-fi, which is important to me.

I just know that there will come a time when someone other than me is using her and I’ll be scanning the water saying “Where are you, little boat?”

Yesterday we went to Cabela’s for some gear and trolling motor information. I love that store, but it sure makes my wallet lighter. I bought a 15 pound mushroom anchor, 50 feet of anchor rope, and a 5 watt solar cell. The solar cell should keep our boat and trailer batteries charged when AC power is not available from either hookups or the generator.

Last night after we got home, I did some research about anchor ropes and how to properly set them up. The kind of rope that we got at Cabela’s, which is composed of at least 12 separate bundles of nylon braided together, is about the strongest type you can get. The problem is that all of the instructions I could find online for setting up anchors applied to either 3-strand twisted or 8-strand braided rope. Also, it turns out that you should have a shortish section of chain attached between the rope and the anchor, to help pull the anchor horizontal for better grip.

Tonight, I went to Home Depot, another store that I love, and picked up 100 feet of 3/8″ 3-strand twisted nylon rope, seven feet of 5/16″ chain, and a couple of shackles. I then spliced the rope and the chain together to create my own achor rode, and used one of the shackles to connect the chain to the anchor. The whole rode was $43. It’s not as pretty as it could be, but I believe that it’s spliced correctly and it seems to be holding without unraveling against all the force I can give it with my arms. If I did it right, and I understand what I’ve been reading, it will get tighter and stronger when subjected to working loads. A picture of the completed splice:

I’ve also picked out the trolling motor I want, and I will be buying it from an eBay seller. It’s a Minn Kota Vector 65. It’s a discontinued model, but I don’t expect that to be an issue, as it says it’s new in the box. The Vector series has an advantage over the Endura series, which is what I could afford if I bought it retail. They’ve incorporated something they call “digital maximizer” which helps it use less battery power. The blurb is “up to five times longer runtime on a single charge.” I think the first two words of that claim are the important ones, but it should still help, even if it’s not as amazing as they are trying to make me believe.

I need a little more assistance from you, my readers. I’ve been using all the Google-fu at my disposal to figure out the right way to coil and store my anchor rope so it can be deployed without tangles, but I’ve come up empty. Do any of you have experience with stowing rope for easy re-decployment, and if so, can you explain in simple words how to set it up? Also, does anyone know what kind of materials and methods I can use to inscribe the boat with her name? The website says it’s made out of “38 mil Polykrylar.” The marine guy at Cabela’s figured that the pre-cut fancy lettering they sell wouldn’t stick right, and didn’t have any other suggestions for me.

Not even the slightest pretense at being prophetic, mysterious, or cryptic here. Fortune cookie from Smith’s at 8th and 9th:

I literally laughed out loud when that came out of the cookie.

Tonight I learned that I can do a far better job of putting new monofilament line on my reel than the shop at Sportman’s Warehouse. I don’t know whether they chose substandard line, put too much tension on it, or both, but I loaded new line myself by hand-cranking from a purchased spool and had it work perfectly in front-yard test casts. Kathy’s finger provided the tension. Even after several casts, the line was still in awesome shape. The line that was professionally loaded felt bumpy and rough. If this turns out well after our next trip, I’ll redo all our reels.

I chose a red fishing line, 6 pound test. I find that I see strike activity on the actual line before either my bobber or the rod, so I’m hoping that the red line will be more visible above the surface, particularly near dusk. There is supposed to be an advantage below the surface too. The theory is that red light is highly absorbed by lake water, and the blue and green spectra are what gets reflected or transmitted, so red fishing line becomes invisible at a shallower depth than other colors.

In the end I don’t expect the supposed invisibility advantage of the red line to make any difference. I fish with completely different line (2 or 4 pound test) for my post-swivel leader, which is where invisibility really counts. I’ll be trying some of the 6 pound red line as a leader on my next trip, just to see what happens.

Here’s the setup I use, in the order that they get loaded onto the line. All of the tackle is free-moving:

• balsa wood slip float
• small bubble float (about 5/8 inch diameter), completely full of water
• Bullet or barrel sinker, 1/4 oz or larger
• large enough swivel to completely stop the sinker
• 3-5 feet of very thin leader, either regular 2 pound or fluorocarbon 4 pound
• size 8 or 10 single hook, occasionally treble
• just enough powerbait so the hook floats

What this rig does is sink everything except the balsa float to the bottom, but lets the baited hook float a few feet up. The extremely light leader ensures that the fish is unable to see anything except the bait. It turns out that trout can actually see quite well and get spooked by fishing line. When the fish strikes, the line can slip easily through all the tackle, so the fish may not realize it’s tethered until you’ve had a chance to set the hook. The float sitting on the surface of the lake can act as a visual strike indicator, if the strike is strong enough or the fish is very well hooked.

The bubble float filled with water gives you enough weight to really increase your cast distance. I used to only use a large bubble float filled about halfway with water, but I found that the slightest tangle in the tackle would keep the whole rig from sinking. This left the bait floating useless on the lake surface, requiring a re-cast. The balsa float rarely gets tangled, because the rest of the tackle sails ahead of it due to density. If the bubble float or the sinker gets a little tangled, the rig will still work as long as the hook is loose, because the whole tangle goes down together.

This year Utah opened the second pole permit to all waters, and I purchased one, so I will have more opportunity to experiment with different rigs. What rigs do the rest of you find effective, and what kind of fish do they catch?

The wife and I have been brainstorming a bit and have come up with a few more contenders. Give us your opinions and any other suggestions!

• T’Pau
• Rosie Cotton
• The Purl
• The Crochety Purl
• Katydid
• Kobayashi Maru
• Kaylee
• River Tam
• Gray Havens
• Tar Valon
• Dante’s Sixth
• The Amyrlin Seat
• My Squishie

Last night very late, I bought a boat. It’s a Sea Eagle 9 , the Fisherman’s Dream Package. We got the last used unit they had, which saved us $50, so I added a few accessories to the order. The expected delivery date we were given by the automated system is July 9th.

We plan to pick up an anchor and a trolling motor after we do some research. It’s looking like Minn Kota is probably the motor brand we’ll be after, but I want to really delve into it. If anyone has some recommendations and the information to back them up, let me know. The little I’ve found from poking around a couple of sporting goods stores tells me that boating is a HUGE world of stuff and accessories. I’m looking into the idea of a cheap fish finder, too.

Although we do realize it’s slightly silly to christen a rubber raft, we believe that she needs a name. We are even going to see what we can do about breaking a bottle of cream soda for the event. The small and flimsy rubber raft that we already own has been christened “Flubber” by our youngest. We would like opinions from everyone on what her name should be. Some ideas we’ve thought of so far:

• Puddle Jumper
• Firefly
• Minnow
• Little Dipper
• Tardis
• Bloat

A fun idea might be a play on words involving inflatable, blow or something like that … as long as the word “doll” doesn’t also come into it. Yes, Chuck, I am speaking to you! There are some names we don’t plan on using because we feel the boat is not majestic enough. Some of them are too reverent for us to ever use. These include Serenity, Enterprise, and Surprise.

Conjured up a little new coke for my website.

When did it become acceptable for installation programs in Windows to have completely inaccurate progress bars? It’s become universally acceptable for an installation program to lie to you about how much of the installation is complete. Some programs install quickly, others give you enough time that you could have a bathroom break, or go down the hall to get a drink.

I can think of two cases off the top of my head that do not exhibit this trait - Mozilla programs like Firefox and Thunderbird, and Cygwin. For nearly everything else, the progress bar is meaningless. As soon as it reaches full capacity, it empties and starts filling again. I’ve seen programs that repeat this farce dozens of times, until suddenly without warning, it’s done. The worst offenders will start the progress bar over several times without changing the label that tells you what phase of the install is taking place.

Mozilla’s installer is beautiful. When that green stuff reaches the end, the installation is done. It’s worth a side mention that it’s also about the fastest program installation I’ve seen lately. In general, installation times seem to be on the rise.

If you’re running Vista, you’ve probably noticed that some programs take MUCH longer to install, especially if it was released before Vista. I haven’t researched this phenomenon, but I believe that Vista positions part of itself between any install program and the actual system so that install programs can’t destroy the OS. If the installer is vigilant about making sure that every change is actually being made, it might introduce a small delay for each micro-step it takes, which adds up.

Software installation in Windows is a complicated business that requires a lot of things to happen in a very controlled way. It has to be broken into several phases, and it must be aware of itself at every step. I get that. So, why not do what Cygwin does? Have two progress bars - one for the current phase and one for the installation process as a whole. Mash them together with each one taking half the vertical height if you’re worried about screen real estate.

Installation is only a tiny flicker in the life cycle of a useful program, so this is not a highly visible thing on most people’s radar. It’s more important for the software developer to spend time working on his GUI and his program’s functionality than to cater to the Admin guy who sees installation progress bars for half his workday. I understand that too. The problem with this easy dismissal is that most software these days uses a third-party install product like InstallShield. It seems unfathomable to me that the InstallShield developers are unaware that people want to know how far along the install is.

I am in general opposed to registry bloat, but it would hardly take any space for InstallShield to store statistics in the registry that later installation programs could use to more accurately estimate their total installation time. If you knew it was going to take about 3 minutes for the installer to boil, you’d be able to take a mental break from watching the pot. You could either close your eyes and let your mind rest, or you could do a little work on another task.

Kathy found this awesome watercraft [warning - PDF]. It’s a FoldCat 440fc. This is the fishing boat we’ve been looking for. Anyone got a couple thousand dollars they don’t need?

Just FYI, the immediate issue that led me to seek a server replacement was a lack of backups for the data. I host stuff for other people, and although in theory they should be backing up their own stuff, the reality is that they probably aren’t.

My initial survey of my storage situation led me to believe that I didn’t have adequate resources to back things up, but I started digging deeper and found several gigabytes of useless data I could delete. I have now set up a backup solution that ensures only one day’s worth of data is lost in the event of a problem.

There are still some improvements that I want to make to the system to enable direct snapshots, but to do it I will have to completely rebuild all the filesystems. To do this without downtime means I need another server, so if someone happens across an awesome deal, let me know.