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Companionway Seat/Table

I first saw this table/seat in a newsletter I get from Steve Roberts of the Nomadnes report (his http://nomadness.com ) I modified it slightly to fit how we wanted to use it, by doing a cutout on the right side as you face it in the companionway. This allows for someone to climb up or down the companionway with the table installed. Our companionway is fairly wide so it still left plenty of space for a usable table surface. In mounting it we drilled holes at every step from bottom to top so that the table could be used for multiple tasks at different levels.

So far we have used it for several things

It has freed up the space over the fridge that normally holds utensils, mixing bowls of ingredients etc.. and has given me much better access to the fridge when working in the galley. Mostly I use it in the top step of the companionway for this. For me it is at chest height. My wife who is shorter might use it in the step below that to be more comfortable for her. I intend to install some removable fiddle boards for when at sea eventually so that we will be able to use it then also. It works as an extra seat in the second from the bottom step. We haven’t created a cushion for it yet but intend to create one that has flaps that fold down and under the table to attach to some velcro or snaps on the bottom of the table. This way the attachment won’t affect the work surface on top when the cushion isn’t in place. I had to replace a filter under the galley sink that faces the companionway. At 6’2″ it has always been a very difficult process […]

What I wish we were doing!!

So I had a few seconds this morning to check out Jason Rose’s website.. (actually I didn’t have the time but I took it anyway 🙂 I was so jealous looking at the picture of him under spinnaker sailing that I decided to inflict it on everyone else. 🙂

 

Also I noticed a picture of his dodger he was commenting on and it struck a note with me as I am currently in the midst of building the top for my new Hard Dodger. It is huge and we love it but it is huge.. I am thinking I might have gone way overboard on the size. Here is a picture of Jasons. I’m not sure it is the final version as his comments seemed to indicate that there had been a few versions.  Maybe we can talk him into doing a write up with the full progression of what he has tried. Anyway here is a picture from his site of one of the dodgers he has tried and soon I will have a full write up on building ours with pictures.

Server side caching performance issues

We have recently had a user report issues with new posts not showing up for him and I wanted to give a brief explanation as to what is happening.

For a long time the website was being slowed to a crawl because google and other search engines would just about hammer the website to a stop as they indexed the sites on the server. I enable server side caching of the websites as static pages to allow them to index the site without causing the database which the site is normally created from to get hammered. I think everyone will notice the the website is a bit faster in the last month or so. (when the server has been up 🙂

So what happens is that if you are not a registered member of the website and are not logged into the website/forum then you will get the static pages. If you log in you will get served up pages directly from the database. The static pages don’t update instantly so if your not logged in you might not see a new post on the forums for a few hours to a day or so. If you are logged in you will see new posts instantly as you will get the latest page from the database.

This was a compromise I had to make to still allow search engines to index the website so that people searching for Downeaster Yachts or other terms relative to our site to find us while still giving reasonable performance to our members.

Website down

I know that a lot of you will have noticed that the website has been down. Well actually it hasn’t been down, but the DNS server that tells your web browser where to go to open the website has been down. We think it was a bad power supply but when we replaced it with another one the server went down again a few hours later. Since since that was a used power supply we are still hoping that it is a power supply issue. I installed power supply number three today. If the server goes down again I will have to rebuild the server or move it to a new computer. The end result is that the server has been down since sometime this past weekend and if this last power supply doesn’t fix it could possibly be down for another few days. Hopefully that doesn’t happen and it is fixed as of now. If not please be patient.

If it is down and you need to contact me you can call me at 843-465-6555 or email me at audeojude@yahoo.com

My company and personal websites as well as all email for them depends on this server also so if it is down all my other infrastructure is down also. Use the above contact info in that case.

Scott Carle

 

Update as of 5/8/12.. we are still experiencing issues with the DNS server. I am going to have to put a new server in. Hopefully that will happen today or tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.

Second update 5/8/12 I have replaced the server. Hopefully this will fix the issue. 🙂 We weren’t able to determine what was causing it to power off. After replacing the power supply twice we think it is something in the Motherboard/CPU/Memory. I didn’t feel like […]

From Dock Queen to Offshore Cruiser by Sailing Seabird

Thankfully we have had a mild winter here in Portland and Seabird has had very few adventures “sailing” on her dock.. Aside from one experience just after we finished wrapping her. I was able to deduce that I, or more likely one of the kind folks that helped me shrink wrap, failed to properly hitch my bow line. A few days later when the wind piped up to 30 knots the line slowly payed out as it was merely wrapped a few times around the bitts. I have never heard a story of a boat misbehaving that didn’t happen in the middle of the night when the operator was in the nude. Seabird must have read this book as I was woken up in the early morning when the electric heater turned off. It does turn off from time to time but I happened to be looking at it out of the corner of my eye and I could not see the little red light. Reluctantly, I got out of bed to find we had no power on board at all and my reverse polarity light was on to boot.

Frankie was very helpfull

I didn’t even know the reverse polarity light worked, let alone ever see it on. I sprung into action. When I opened the shrink wrap door I noticed that my boat was slightly out of position and in fact her nose was about to start hitting our neighbor. This move to starboard had pulled our shore power cord out of the receptacle but only a little. It was enough to cause problems but an easy fix was figured out and life returned to normal shortly thereafter.

this is a Camrea Phone picture taken of the new larger sleeping area

Sophi and I are planning to sail to […]