A Sailboat

March 27th, 2006 by pohodo

Karen and I went down to the Miami Strictly Sail boat show back in February. We went down there to look around at some of the boats and dream about sailing away. We figure that new boats this year could possibly be good used boats in coming years.

I’ve always been pretty partial to monohulls, mostly because that’s pretty much all I’ve been exposed to. Yeah, yeah, I did a lot of sailing on Hobie Cats back in the day, but never on any kind of cruising boat. At any rate, we decided to check a couple of them out just to see what they’re all about. I think I’ve been converted!

We ran across the Manta 42 MKII and it’s just plain incredible. It’s truly amazing how much living space this thing has. Manta is one of the few manufacturers that builds a boat to be more or less cruising ready at delivery. It comes fully rigged with dingy davits and all. Of course, you need to upgrade some of the electronics and decide about A/C, water makers, etc., which can add quite a bit of expense.

So here’s what I’m thinking 0:-)… All I need is for some kind-hearted megamillionaire to take pity on me and help me out :) . The Manta has a base price of only $359,950! heh. Add on a few extras and I’m only asking for a mere $400,000 – just daily interest earnings for some. For such a small amount of money for the extremely wealthy, I could disappear off into the sunset and live a dream.

It’d be great, I could put together a Web site about our travels and allow some rich and famous person an opportunity to live vicariously through the average, non-famous life I offer. Heck, stop on by at some of the exotic destinations and hang out with us – at least for a little while! ;)

Is this too much to ask? I guess that question is all relative. heh.

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I’m Moving!

February 16th, 2006 by pohodo

Sorry you can’t see my poorly updated Web site at the moment. I’m in the process of moving the site to a real hosting server run by real server admin type people. No more messing around with my own server, database, etc.! But most importantly, it will no longer be restricted to the crazy-poor upspeed connection of my home DSL line. So you’ll be able to read my crappy content even faster! Well, once it actually gets moved over. Of course, the domain transfer and all that junk conveniently coincides with me leaving town for a few days, so here this sits until…

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British Virgin Islands

January 22nd, 2006 by pohodo

I finally got around to putting some pictures together of our trip to the BVI last November. Of course, I haven’t written much about the trip, but you can see part of the trip stuff here.

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Taxes!

January 15th, 2006 by pohodo
So I’ve got to tell you that I really don’t like paying all of these taxes for school when I don’t even have any children. What burns me up even more is the fact that people who decide to have children actually get a tax BREAK for each kid they have, even though they’ll consume way more services than me. I just don’t understand how I should pay MORE than somebody with a basketball team of kids for the services that they’re consuming and I’m not.I feel very strongly that people who decide to have kids should certainly pay more since they consume more things like public education. For every kid somebody has, they should have to claim another NEGATIVE 1 on taxes and pay more housing taxes. Certainly more than somebody who is consuming very little.

Yeah, yeah… sure, I don’t necessarily mind paying a little here and there to enable people who are less fortunate to send their kids to school, but a normal family should definitely be pulling more weight than me – not getting breaks.

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Quite Brief 2005 Recap

January 6th, 2006 by pohodo

Wow, it’s been an awfully long time since I’ve done anything with this. I’ve been busy busy! Between all of the travel and work and relationship stuff, 2005 flew on by. I started dating Karen back in May, and I’ve been on a whirlwind tour ever since. I only get 3 weeks of vacation, but somehow I managed to make it to Key West for my friend Scott’s wedding, a week sailing in the “out islands” of the Bahamas getting my Bareboat Charter Certification, a trip to Las Vegas to finally meet some of my online gaming buddies, a trip to Connecticut to meet the parents, a week in Boston for a conference which was a lot of fun, a couple of trips to the beach in Florida, a week sailing on a chartered yacht in the British Virgin Islands with a night in Puerto Rico on the way back, and a very long weekend in Jamaica. All in all, I’d have to say this was a great year!

Work got a lot more interesting, too. I got to do some engaging work with AJAX this year on several projects, as well as some much more interesting DHTML interactive user interfaces. It looks as if future projects will also be much more interesting to work on, assuming all goes well with the next release of jazzy interface stuff.

My roommate and I (okay, mostly my roommate – I have NO skill) have been adding another room onto the house, which will eventually consume a totally renovated kitchen and dining room. New hardwoods and all! We’ll be removing two load-bearing walls to open up the space a lot more, which will be great for hosting even more grill nights. The outside is more or less complete so the exciting inside part will begin very soon. Now I have to climb around the ladder to caulk the siding and paint (the lesser skilled tasks, of course). Hopefully we’ll have some warmer weekends soon!

So that’s more or less it. I’ll try to be a little more verbose in coming months

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Oops!

July 12th, 2005 by pohodo

Well, things happen and they don’t always go my way. My DSL router decided it didn’t want to slave away any longer, so it gave up. I was having some trouble with my ISP and I’m just plain lazy about things sometimes, so it’s taken a while to get this back up. Hopefully, I won’t have any more hardware failures and I’ll be able to keep this server going.

A lot has been going on since my router died and I’ll try to catch up. So with any luck, I’ll soon tell you about my new car and my trip to Las Vegas, as well as more information on my Bahamas sailing trip and my newly forming plan for a Tortola sailing trip later this year.

Anyway, glad to be back!

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Bareboat Charter

June 9th, 2005 by pohodo
I just got back from the Abacos, the “out islands” of the Bahamas. A friend and I spent a week on a 40′ sloop sailing around the islands for 6 solid days, and a couple of days just hanging out in Treasure Cay. We went down there to get our Bareboat Charter certification through the American Sailing Association. I guess this means that we’re better prepared to charter up to a 50′ yacht without a captain.It was a great trip and we learned a lot. We got a couple of SCUBA dives in, and snorkeled almost every day in a new location. We got to see a bunch of different little harbors and did a lot of sailing along the way.I’ve got some pictures and more information about everything we did, but as usual, it’ll take a bit to get them organized and online.
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The Smoking Ban

April 16th, 2005 by pohodo
I’ll be one of the first to say that smoking is truly nasty. I don’t care for the smell of smokers and I certainly don’t like being around when somebody is smoking. So on the surface, banning smoking in public places seems like a really great idea to me. But then I started thinking about it a little more.

There are many small freedoms being lost at a seemingly faster pace than ever before. Just think about all of the legislation after 911. This is just one more example of our freedoms being eroded away. Why should the government dictate to a business owner such a thing? Sure, it’s great for the non-smokers like me, but if a business wants to cater to smokers, then that’s their, well, business. What about the owner of a “cigar bar?” Is the government saying that they have to become something different to protect the non-smokers from such an evil enterprise? Perhaps it’d just be better if non-smokers didn’t go there.

I absolutely hate sitting in a business filled with smoke, but ultimately, that’s my choice to be there or not. In the end, it’s my own fault if I get some horrible disease because I choose to sit in those kinds of places. I have choices because of the freedom of our great nation. But someday, new law after new law, I may not have that freedom.

If a restaurant owner wants to cater to smokers, then that’s his business, and his right. If a restaurant owner wants to cater to non-smokers, even better, for me. Now, if the government wants to prevent smoking in places like government building and such, great, because that’s owned by everybody (tax payers). But they should lay off of private businesses.

Before I keep babbling on aimlessly even more, I think my point is, where does it stop? How many new laws are too many before we’ve lost what our nation was founded upon?

At least I’ll be able to enjoy a smokeless atmosphere, but maybe I won’t get any enjoyment at all out of the next law.

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Evil Empire Google?

April 2nd, 2005 by pohodo
I’ve largely felt that Google has been a huge benefit toward shaping the future of the Web. They seem to be pushing the envelope faster, farther and better than anybody else; creating great, useful tools and generally being a good netizen about it.

I came across the new beta version of the Google toolbar for IE through a colleague. I only use IE to verify my work looks as expected, so I would probably have never seen it otherwise. There is an AutoLinks “feature” in this version that disturbs me about the future of things to come from Google. I’m okay with the google toolbar looking at search terms or even what URL the user is currently on and displaying generic advertising type content in their little toolbar space, but they’ve really crossed the line now. This new feature uses actual content of sites to produce links to other places by either making plain text a link on the site, or by using that exact content in links in the toolbar (or both).

On the surface, it doesn’t seem all that bad. After all, if you could click on an address and be wisked away to a mapping site for directions, or have a book’s ISBN number link you to a place to purchase that book, you could argue that it’s just making life easier for the user. The problem lies with Google profiting off of content which isn’t their own, specifically when competing businesses are involved. For example, if you’re browsing the Barnes & Noble Web site looking for books and then the Google toolbar inserts links into a Barnes & Noble page linking the user to a place like Amazon.com, that’s undermining the ability of Barnes & Noble to effectively do business – which is why they have their site up and running to begin with. In that situation, Google would be profiting by hijacking content authored by a business and taking users to competing sites. It’s one thing for Google to run competing ads and such on a Google search page they own, but it’s an entirely different animal doing that on somebody else’s page.

Fortunately, this is still just in a beta version of the toolbar. Hopefully, it won’t ship in the final release version. But it makes you wonder how drastically the vision of Google could be changing with the new-found money from their successful IPO. Until this, I was a pretty big Google supporter, but if this is where they’re heading I’ll have to change my position. Perhaps it’s inevitable, given the growth of Google, that they’ll become more inline with the Microsofts of the world.

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Bareboat Chartering

March 27th, 2005 by pohodo
I spent much of my youth on a barrier island in Florida pretty much immersed in anything revolving around the ocean. I knew several people with various sailboats, so I was fortunate enough to put in a lot of time under sail. I mostly just sailed in Hobbie Cats and Sunfish boats, but had the occasional sail on a smaller cruising boat.Last year a friend and I were sitting in a tiki bar at a marina. There happened to be a sailing school right next door, and that got us talking about sailing. We were talking about how great it’d be to go anywhere in the world and be able to charter a boat without a captain. It had been a while since either of us sailed, and we figured having some certification of sailing skill would improve our chances of chartering boats. For once, rather than just talking about something, we signed up for the first basic sailing class offered by the American Sailing Association.

We took Basic Keelboat on Lake Lanier just north of Atlanta through the school next to the tiki bar. We could have had a bit more wind, but overall the course was great.
A few months later, we signed up for Basic Coastal Cruising through Chapman School of Seamanship located in my home town of Stuart, Florida. The second hurricane that made landfall directly at Stuart came ashore the same day our class was supposed to start. We rescheduled for a week or two later and everything went fine. It was an interesting experience because many of the channels had become more like sandbars due to the two hurricanes. We had to rely heavily on reading the surface waters. Grounding a 45′ boat didn’t sound too appealing, and fortunately we avoided that for the most part.
We just signed up for Bareboat Chartering through an instructor/captain living in the Abacos, Bahamas. We’ll spend a whole week living aboard the boat sailing, fishing, diving, etc. Assuming all goes well, we’ll have our Bareboat Chartering certification, which was a primary goal when we started the sailing classes.

I spent a week on a boat in the Abacos during my senior year of high school and had a great time. It will be interesting (and perhaps disappointing) to see how much has changed in the *cough* 19 years since.

I started the ASA program primarily to get the credentials to charter – basically have somebody say I know what’s going on. After a couple of classes, it was a lot more work than I expected and I now realize how much I underestimated my abilities. It’s been a great experience so far. And I’m looking forward to learning even more in the Bareboat Charter class. I also plan on taking Coastal Navigation and Celestial Navigation before taking any longer trips. Something about not relying on technology (gps, etc.) in a water environment seems rather comforting.

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