Saturday, 19 May 2007

IT stuff and water point etiquette

Thursday 17 May

The plan for today was for me to catch the bus to Rugby to visit the T-mobile shop, while Sheila stayed home on the boat doing more crochet. Having finished the crochet for Braidbar 100, she's now doing a new set of porthole doilies for Sanity. The existing ones are a bit stained from condensation mould, and the new ones will take the new method of fitting them into the windows using synthetic whale bone, as previously described.

I caught the 9 o'clock bus. The fare has gone up - it's now a swinging GBP1.60 for the 15 minute journey.

The staff at T-mobile were very helpful, and said that they'd sold a lot of these new USB modems. I explained that the recent article in Waterways World which emphasised the good value of the T-mobile Web 'n Walk deal might have something to do with it. I did a few other bits and pieces of shopping, caught the bus back to Newbold and was back on the boat by 10.30.

After a coffee break, I set up the modem. With a Windows machine it would be a case of just plugging it in - the necessary software is on the modem - and then going through some installation wizards. With the Apple Mac, there was a CD that provided both an install manual and the needed drivers.

I quite quickly (10 minutes max) had the thing up and running. The modem found a G3 connection and off we went. As with all mobile internet connections, the speed depends first of all on the signal quality, and then on how many other users are are on-line at the time. Measuring the speed at lunchtime gave figures of 60 - 90 kbps - much faster than the GPRS connection, or a domestic dial up modem, but not lightning fast. Later in the afternoon, I got up to 200 kbps.

This means it's still worth using the OnSpeed accelerator for web access. It'll be interesting to see what sort of numbers I get at other locations, especially Braunston in a few days, Braunston being a notorious blackspot for mobile connections.

After lunch I spent most of the afternoon playing with the new toy. Well, it was cold and wet out, and these things repay familiarisation. Later on, the weather did improve enough to open the side hatches.

Friday 18 May

We wanted to get a lot of shopping at Tesco on our way to Hillmorton for the night, so we made an early start, 7.30, and were at Tesco by 8. The Rugby Tesco is open 24 hours anyway, so it was already quite busy. We did a large shopping, since this is the last supermarket we'll see for a couple of weeks. We half filled a big trolley, then pushed it to the edge of the car park nearest the canal. We filled both daysacks, and had a few carrier bags too. In addition, we'd bought some potting compost, but hadn't found any plants for the new planter.

After lugging all this back to the boat, I wanted to see if we could find the Curry's store I'd glimpsed from the boat as we came in to moor. I've been backing up the laptop's data to a 20 Gbyte portable hard drive, but there's now so much of it (photos and music, mostly, as well as this deathless prose, of course) that 20 gig isn't enough.

Initially we went round the wrong retail park. This did mean we found the plants we wanted, at a Homebase, so it wasn't wasted effort. Sheila took those back to the boat, while I slogged on, finally tracking down the Curry's in another park. It's amazing how far you have to walk to get from one of these places to another - they are all designed for the motorist, of course, another way in which we persist in emulating American trends.

The guy in Curry's was very helpful, though he couldn't quite suppress a smile when I said I was thinking of something like an 80 gig drive. Seems they just don't make them that small any more. In the end I bought a 400 gig drive for GBP85.

Back at the boat we set off again, Sheila steering while I played with the latest toy. By the time we got to Hillmorton, I'd partitioned this huge (to me) disk into three, and cloned the entire laptop drive onto one of the partitions. My disaster recovery logic goes like this. I use the MacOS X clone feature to make a total copy of the main drive every month or so. Then, on a weekly basis, I do an incremental back up of the data files. This means that if I lost the entire hard drive on the laptop, I can replace it, clone the copy back onto it, and then bring the data up to date from the incremental back up.

This still leaves a huge amount of this new disk spare, of course, so I'll use it to store archives of stuff that's no longer likely to be needed.

By now, we'd arrived at Hillmorton, half an hour before lunch. Sheila planted out the surfinias we'd bought, and we watered. At Hillmorton, there is a long length of visitor mooring, then a good length of mooring for the double water point. Both of these were in use, but the VM just before them was free, so we tied there, and when the boat in front had finished, ran our hose out to the tap and filled up.

Just after we'd eaten, another privateer arrived and tried to get onto the water point in the now empty space in front of us. The wind was now strong enough to be a problem, so I popped out and gave them a hand, assuming that they wanted to water. What they did was tie up with three lines, and proceed to eat lunch. It soon became apparent that they were planning to spend the rest of the day there.

This is, of course, very poor boating, unless there's really no other option (ie it's last thing at night, and all the other moorings are full.) They seemed to be comparatively new boaters, so we didn't interfere - the other water point was free after all. A bit later, a boat we know well turned up - Michael and Val Lee on Thistle. We were still busy in the cabin, so it took a while to realise that Mike was busy organising the first boat to pull right back onto us, so the our bow fenders were overlapped. Meanwhile, he went and moored at the far end of the water point length, leaving a bare boat's width between the two boats for anyone who actually wanted to use the water point for its intended purpose.

Since there was now a bit of space (30 feet, maybe) behind us, we pulled Sanity back out of the way. Out of curiosity, I walked back down the length of the VM, thinking it must have filled right up, but no, there was a load of space back there. I'd hardly got back to the boat, when Mike was up and about again, making this poor chap in front of us pull back onto us again. All this rather than back up to the empty VM himself, a feat of which I know he is quite capable. Oh well, it takes all sorts, I guess.

Meantime, we polished brass and got on with our lives, which are too short for picking fights. Meanwhile, for the record, I'm getting a GPRS connection here at the foot of Hillmorton, so not as fast as at Newbold.

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