Angry Man Without Pants

It has been 125 days since my last post. So sue me. Should any of my millions of sycophants take issue with my posting frequency (or lack thereof), all I can say is: If the scraps of my life on display here aren’t enough for you, I suggest you go get one of your own.

How’ve I been? Just fine. Simply dandy.

November: Father-in-law has stroke that puts him in hospital for two weeks.
December: Same father-in-law, recovering from stroke, occupies my spare bedroom until three days before Christmas.
January: Co-worker gets H1N1 flu and is off work for two weeks. I work like an S.O.B. trying to keep up.
January: Wife has mis-carriage. ’nuff said there.
February: Life’s shitty. Let’s run away to Cuba for a week of sun and sand. Cuba experiences all-time bad weather. Out of 7 days: 2 days sun, 3 days rain, 2 days overcast & windy. Snorkeling and boat tours canceled due to 20+ knot winds.
March: Co-worker (the same one) suffers from immune system collapse. Will be off work for god-only-knows how long this time. Me left doing the S.O.B. overtime shtick again.

As usual, the only bright point in all of this is Mrs. Angry. Marrying her was the best thing I ever did and is probably the best thing I ever will do. How can you top perfect?

Haaseltons just lost a customer forever. I will never again set foot inside that place for the rest of my days, which is saying something, as I’ve been a loyal customer for over a decade. I’m aware the place had been getting dingy in recent years, and they’d instituted a strange, petrol-station-like policy of making you request a bathroom key on a stick before using the loo, but the place had nostalgia for me, and I really like their chai lattes.

That Asian guy, who I can only assume is either the manager or the owner, pissed me off big-time today.

I was attending the weekly NaNoWriMo write-in and went to Natas by mistake: the write-in was being held at Haaseltons. I didn’t realize I was in the wrong place until after I’d ordered something to eat, sat down and checked the NaNo site on my cell phone. So I gulped my chai and asked for my cake to go and then dodged up to Haaseltons. I was promptly informed by the owner that I was not welcome to eat my Natas dessert in his establishment. I told him I understood, but that I’d gone to the wrong place by mistake, blah, blah, and that if I could (please and thank you) eat my one little piece of cake I’d be in Haaseltons for at least the next two hours during which not only would I be buying multiple drinks and another dessert, about a half dozen of my acquaintances would be showing up to do the same.

Dude didn’t believe me — all but called me a liar by saying that he’d heard my “story” many times before (from students, I can only assume). He said absolutely no way would he let me eat any food I didn’t buy there. How he intended to stop me, I’m not sure, but I didn’t feel like pressing the point in the face of his obvious hostility. In summary — I was told to get out. Now, I’m a 40-year-old employed professional and bear as much resemblance to a cash-strapped student as Tipper Gore does to Summer Glau. Hell, I could afford to buy everyone in the joint a free coffee (at Natas) out of petty cash — which I was momentarily tempted to do in an extreme act of comeuppance, but I didn’t because when I’m that mad my oratory skills abandon me and I clam up.

(Note: For me to regain my eloquence you have to push me beyond mad and into homicidal, at which point you will find me belting out scathing iambic pentameter whilst simultaneously bludgeoning the object of my wrath to death with the nearest handy blunt instrument.)

Anyway, I don’t like being called a liar, not one little bit, and especially not by some self-righteous fucktard who’s at least my age and should know better than to break the Prime Directive of the service industry — namely, that the customer is always right.

So now I’m pissed and will *never* set foot in Haaseltons again.

Ever.

So fuck Haaseltons. I’ll be spending my money at Natas and Dreams of Beans from now on, where the floors are cleaner, the bathroom isn’t locked, where there’s nice art on the walls, and where the staff know when to shut the fuck up and be polite.

I had a problem.

The tale I was working on for Scary Stories night was getting too long. Sadly, many of my stories suffer from this kind of creeping featuritis. I get a good, simple idea, start working on it, and then somewhere along the way I realize my treatment of it is going to consume far more space that I originally expected. A few examples: “Maeve” – originally projected to be ~8000 words, now at ~15000 and climbing; probably at least another 10k still to go. “Camera Obscura”, my first scary story, originally intended to be ~3500 words, now sitting at ~4000 words with at least that much left to go.

Usually I’m not too unhappy about this, as I think the longer treatments benefit the tale, but this time I have a problem. Scary stories night is a “once-round-the-campfire” kind of thing, so the stories have to be short or people will fall asleep in their Hallowe’en nog before you finish. Not to mention that there is a limited amount of time in the evening and everyone who brings a story needs to be allowed their 15 minutes of fame. You see my problem, yes?

Enter “Double Vision”. I had a great little idea for another scary story (while in the shower, if you must know), and wonder of wonders, the whole thing is only ~2500 words from start to finish. Yay! So, that is the story I’ll be reading for Hallowe’en. I’ll post the first half of Camera Obscura on wordmasons for those who weren’t at the last reading night, and hopefully have the rest of it done for the November reading night. Where it concerns reading nights, having become so used to feeling like a man constantly late for an appointment, this new sensation of being done early is strange, yet pleasant.

Quite addictive, in fact.

It’s a quarter to pi, and the streetlights are out; glowing dreams and burning desires are the only light. Follow me, through the crack in the floorboards, behind the walls, into that land beyond the back of the cupboard. We’ll slide down midnight ways, into deep hidden realms, diamond dust prints through the mushroom forest to the shore of a sundered sea. Take my hand and we’ll dance up a ship of crystal and chimes, adamant sails to caress the night and draw us onward, onward, to forgotten empires, ghostly shoals, and the burgeoning, beckoning endless surf.

Then up, up, up the winding stair, now stone, now wood, now sparkling air, treading the path of a hundred billion souls who never were. A sacred sign beneath your feet, a lighted way in darkness deep, and fearsome death to left and right. Fear not. Hold tight. A synergy of power preserves, protects, propels, and soon all is light, and stardust, moondust, the dust of dreams and the cold pressed oil of wonders beyond our ken. A hundred singing towers upon the blue sands of distant everlen, a shivering symphony of alien tones, isolate one, then another, yet more, until the song is yours, and the door to the next mystery opens, beckons, a bright and shining gate, and we’re through, red giant eyes and comet tail hair and hand in hand and a kiss longer than the milky way and deeper than the sky.

Then down, down, through moon rings and sun beams and clouds, a rain of laughter, tears, iridescent motes of finely cut longings and the essence of desire, a powdered mortar of a million timeless moments, drifting, drifting, drifting, to this tiny space, this sliver of time, and the pi is only apple now, and the streetlights are back.

Well, maybe not, but the resemblance is uncanny. And look what he’s writing with, dude!

Yes, I’m still alive. No, I’m not posting anything today. I’ve been busy with work, home and writing. I hope to have two short stories finished by 30th October, a novelette finished by 30th November, and another short story finished before Christmas. I’ll post here when I have the time, energy and inclination.

I mentioned in an earlier post that with IPv6, you could “…give out a gazillion addresses a day every day until the sun becomes a cold dark cinder and not come anywhere near running out“. You might have thought I was kidding, or at least exaggerating for dramatic effect.

I wasn’t.

Let’s do the math.

IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, which means we have a total address pool of 2¹²⁸, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. Yes, that’s 340 undecillion addresses. I know that’s a weird sounding number, but I’m not making it up. By comparison, our current addressing scheme, IPv4, uses 32 bit addresses, which gives us a pool of 2³², or 4,294,967,296 addresses. (I’ll bet that may be one of the first times a number just north of 4 billion has looked small…)

Those of you who are quicker of mind might be thinking – Gee, we’re running out of addresses. Does that mean there are almost 4 billion people using the Internet already? That’s half the planet!

Actually, no. There aren’t anywhere near 4 billion people on line. Due to various historical quirks and design decisions, 605,422,592 IPv4 addresses cannot be allocated for general use. Yes, 15% of the total IPv4 address space is unusable. Also, because network and broadcast addresses must be reserved for every subnet allocated (and there are a whole lot of subnets on the Internet), about 2% of the remaining addresses are also unusable. That leaves about 3.6 billion usable addresses. Remember, however, that every single piece of Internet equipment out there consumes at least one address — every router, every web server, every mail server. You get the idea. Also remember that many people use the Internet both at home and at work, from two different IP addresses. In actual fact, world wide there are only 1,668,870,408 people using the Internet (as of June 30 2009).

Kinda sucks, eh? We’re just about to exhaust a 4.2 billion IP address pool, and we’ve only got a paltry 1.6 billion people on line. That means that, on average, each person on line is consuming 2.1 IP addresses. This means that, if we’re lucky, by the time we actually run out of version 4 IP addresses we’ll have about 2 billion people on line. That’s 50% efficiency folks.

That sucks.

That also means that we’re not likely to be any more efficient with IPv6, so lets adjust our numbers for that reality. Dividing 2¹²⁸ by 2 gives us 2¹²⁷, or about 170 undecillion addresses.

Now, how long until the sun burns out and becomes a cold dark cinder? I looked around on line, and the general consensus is that ol’ Sol has about 5 billion years left before it runs out of hydrogen and expands to a red giant, burning the Earth to a crispy cinder. However, this site goes into a little more detail. The bottom line being that the sun won’t actually achieve anything approaching both cold and dark until about 50 billion years have elapsed. I did say cold dark cinder in my original post, so I’m holding myself to that.

So, if you’ve got 50 billion years to give out 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,728 addresses, how many can you give out each day? Well, 50 billion years would be 18,250,000,000,000 days. That’s 18.25 trillion. So lets divide 170 undecillion by 18.25 trillion and see what we get.

We get a big number. We get 9,322,804,573,176,396,259,270,537. We could give out just over 9 septillion addresses each day for the next 50 billion years. So, as long as we can agree that a gazillion is somewhere south of 9 septillion, my original statement stands.

Postscript: I have IPv6 service via Hurricane Electric’s tunnel broker service. Current IPv6 allocation policy means I get a whole /64 subnet allocated to me. That’s 2⁶⁴ or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses. (18.4 quintillion addresses just for me seems a bit excessive, but that’s committees for ya. Maybe some day I’ll actually have a need for each individual cell in my body to have it’s own IP address. Who knows what the future may bring.)

How does this effect my earlier calculations? Are we giving away IPv6 addresses too quickly? I did the math and, surprisingly, we’re probably OK with this policy, as we can afford to give out 505,390 /64 subnets every day for the next 50 billion years.

I think I can live with that.

Today was officially a Good Day^TM. We finally got the boat out on the water, in a lovely light breeze, put the sails up and sailed. (The wind was too light to resolve my mast rake issue mentioned in the previous post, so the jury is still out on that one.) As you can see in the pictures, it was a lovely blue-sky day, about 20°C. Perfect weather for our first shakedown cruise. All told we were out on the water for just over three hours.

Click the previews for larger images.

Waiting at the dock

Note that our hull number is 393

Leigh says I look nautical, but I think I simply look clueless.

Playing lookout

Main and jib sail while underway

Ain't she pretty?

It is only fitting that my wife and I spent Talk Like a Pirate Day working on our Sirius 21 sailboat. I bought all new clevis pins for the standing rigging since the old ones were worn and scored in a rather scary way. In fact, getting the standing rigging up to snuff has not been easy. The previous owner had used incorrectly sized clevis pins to secure a number of the shrouds. Also, and this is the scary bit, the forestay quick-adjust was being held together by a 3/16ths diameter machine screw wedged lengthwise where the clevis pin should go! When I first discovered this, my testicles immediately retreated to somewhere just below my ribcage. A machine screw!

For those of you not in the know, the forestay quick-adjust is that is that bit at the front of the boat where the wire coming from the very top of the mast attaches to the prow. It is only the most freakin’ important fitting on the entire boat! When underway this little fitting takes all the strain generated by both the main and jib sails. If the forestay breaks, your mast immediately comes crashing down, plain and simple, because on a bermuda rigged boat of this size there is only one forestay holding the mast up. (Bigger boats have multiple forestays, and cutters of just about any size usually have two or three of them). Except for the forestay and backstay just about anything else on your boat can break and you’ll at least have a minute or two to try and fix it before you’re screwed. Not true with these babies, and someone had stuck a plain old mild steel machine screw in there – shear strength unknown.

So I took it out and replaced it with a proper sized clevis pin for the hole (1/4″) only to discover the the swage fitting on the forestay only has a 3/16ths hole. Probably why the machine screw was in there in the first place. Thus ensued a long search for a thinner clevis pin of the appropriate length to fit inside the quick-adjust. I finally ended up cutting a longer one down to length with a hacksaw. Which highlights another problem – that swage fitting should be 1/4″. The fitting at the masthead is 1/4″, so it would be stupid to use something smaller at the other end. Two other problems with the forestay are 1) it’s too long, and 2) the original owner’s manual for the boat does not mention a quick-adjust.

Here’s what I think happened: Sometime in the past, either the old forestay broke (eep!) or someone decided they wanted to PRHC race this boat (which is what the quick-adjust is for), so they removed the old forestay turnbuckle and swaged on a fitting for the quick-adjust. They either didn’t know better or didn’t have the right parts to hand, and attached a 3/16ths fitting where they should have used a 1/4″ one. Also, they didn’t shorten the forestay enough to compensate for the extra length added by the quick-adjust. The owner’s manual says that for optimum handling the mast should be raked about 6″ to the rear. Even with the quick-adjust cranked all the way forward my mast is still raked 18″ to the rear. Yikes! Unless I’m mistaken, she’s gonna show some killer weather helm in any kind of breeze.

We’ll be taking her out for a test sail tomorrow, now that the machine screw has been replaced by a proper piece of 316 stainless, and we’ll see how she goes. I could be brewing a tempest in a teapot. Or maybe I’m right. Time will tell.

On a lighter note, and in keeping with the nautical theme, I thought the pirate keyboard (below) was rather funny.

R Mateys!

To wrap up, a picture of my money pit beautiful baby finally ready to go, mast raised and sails bent on. Yarrhhh, mateys!

Ain't she beautiful?

A friend sent this mp3 file to me. Listen to it. It is so absolutely hilarious that I think I broke something.

Sadly, it’s a fake, inasmuch that it was never a live messsage on any school voice mail system anywhere in the world. Ever.

Nevertheless, I have a whole passel of friends in the teaching profession whom I know would absolutely love to use it.