Now that I’ve completed stage 1 of my mission and bought the boat, I need to get cracking on stage 2 and get it ready for crossing the Atlantic. Odyssey is structurally sound but needs new rigging, instruments, radar, wind-vane self-steering gear, autopilot and lots more bits and pieces. It’s far too much for me to do on my own so I’ve been enlisting the help of everyone I can think of to find me a yard which can do the work in time for my planned departure date of mid-June.
I’ve tried loads of places but most are full, busy, or not interested. However I now seem to have found somewhere that looks perfect – Pier Seventeen right here in Fort Lauderdale, just down the canal from where Odyssey is moored. Their rigging chap has come up with a quote that looks reasonable and they can do all the other bits, starting next week, so it’s all systems go. I went along to see the yard this morning and was very impressed. It seems to be well-run and staffed with friendly people who seem to know their stuff, so I’m looking forward to working with them.
One problem I was dreading was reversing Odyssey about 500m down the narrow and very shallow canal where she lives at the moment. It’s lined with expensive-looking boats on either side and since I’ve never handled her under power in close quarters I feared the potential for disaster was high. However, the yard have said they’ll happily move her for me and their dockmaster keeps his boat right next to Odyssey’s berth so knows the canal well. Phew! I can just stand around looking pretty while they do all the work – fab 🙂
After arranging to meet them on Monday morning to bring her round I went home for a celebratory lunch before setting off to find a nice beach. As I think I’ve mentioned before, the entire coastline from Miami to beyond Palm Beach some 70 miles north is backed by relentless developments of hotels and apartments. However the map showed a little state park (Red Reef) in Boca Raton which is only 20 miles north, so I thought I’d give it a go. Apparently there’s a reef which is good for snorkeling so it sounded promising.
Unfortunately I found it was just a half-mile stretch of sand backed by a neatly manicured golf course, and the beach itself was dotted with lifeguards and notices listing prohibited activities (just about everything, really). The sea was rough, murky and full of seaweed, so snorkeling would have been a waste of time. Somewhat disappointed, not to mention poorer by $16 for the entrance fee, I gloomily nibbled at an apple before giving up and heading back to Fort Lauderdale where the water is clear and not so rough, even if it is backed by hotels.
WARNING: I’m about to start nattering on about techy computer geek stuff, so read on at your peril. Don’t blame me if you fall asleep…
Anyway, back at the apartment this evening I decided to have a go at running a web server on my shiny new Mac PowerBook, which for those who are into numbers is a G4 1.67GHz with 15″ screen, 1.5GB of RAM, 80GB HDD, DVD/CD writer and more bells and whistles than you can shake a large stick at. Lovely machine, and highly recommended if you’re into that kind of thing. I’ve just upgraded it to the newly-released Tiger, the latest version of Apple’s fabulous operating system known as OS X (as in the number ten, so don’t fall into the trap of calling it oh-ess-ex!), and have found it to be the most wonderful computer in the world. I’ve named it Orac, after the rather annoying talking semi-portable computer in the classic sci-fi series Blake’s Seven.
But I digress. You will have noticed that my website contains a blog (because you’re reading it now!), which is powered by the free WordPress framework, written in PHP with a MySQL back-end. After rummaging around on the web it seemed to be the one that most suited my needs, and I’ve found it easy to install on my ISP and use. Hopefully you’re also finding it OK to read, but I’d welcome any feedback.
My picture gallery is driven by another piece of free software, namely Simple PHP Gallery, which as the name implies is also written in PHP. I felt it was time to teach myself some new skills while away and PHP is proving to be fascinating and useful.
So, now that I’ve got it all working on my website, the problem I have is that I don’t have a local copy on my Mac as it’s all done online. This means that all my blog entries are kept on my ISP’s servers, so if they die then so does my diary. As we all know, backup is king, and if you don’t back up your data regularly then you’re a fool who deserves to lose everything.
Not wanting to be a fool, I decided to spend this evening setting up a web server on my Mac to mirror my site, thereby enabling me to restore it to my current (or any other) ISP in the blink of an eye if it all goes horribly wrong. For those of you who are into these things (probably not many), you’ll understand that it was a slightly daunting task as it meant installing and configuring Apache (the web server software), PHP and MySQL, then getting my site into it.
Luckily Apple’s OS X is built on Unix, namely a BSD-like derivation known under the covers as Darwin. This means that there are lots of clever programs that can easily be ported to it from other flavours of Unix – all you need to do is get the source and compile it.
To cut a long story short, I sat down at 7pm to start and was up till well after 1am, by which time I’d pretty much got it cracked after having to download, compile and install countless packages required by PHP to do the clever graphics stuff like resizing images on the fly to generate the thumbnails in the gallery.
It was great to spend some quality time programming again, and I realise now that I do actually miss it. Not being at work, I hasten to add, just programming. Being able to do it under a starlit sky next to the water with crickets chirping and lizards scuttling at my feet is wonderful.
However, all good things come to an end, and it’s time for bed now.