carwreck.com: around Boston harbor...

A few months ago I decided that I needed to replace my lost passport in case I had an unexpected opportunity to travel outside the US. A passport is a good thing to have, just in case. I had been keeping my ears open for possible boat delivery work, maybe in the Caribbean during the winter so I went ahead with the annoying process of getting a passport. I never ended up traveling and ever since my passport has been sitting at the upper right corner of my desk staring at me, sneering, daring me to actually use it.

What the heck is this all about?!

www.redbullflugtagusa.com

This is some crazy stuff where people get to build these rediculous contraptions and try to see if they will fly. All in the name of Red Bull. What maniacs! What imbiciles! What moronicals!

I want to do it.

I have two batteries for my Canon Powershot S100 Digital Elph (damn, what a long name). It seems as if neither of the batteries is holding a charge. At least it seems that way. I am considering that maybe the camera has some sort of fault which is drawing the batteries down at an unusually fast rate.

Does anyone have a battery for a Digital Elph I can borrow to experiment with? If I try a third battery and it too goes flat quickly then I be certain that the camera is at fault. Otherwise I will just get new batteries.

I am broken and battered because at work today I got beat up. Sort of. The fight started at about 0850 when I got underway for a 36 foot Hinckley picnic launch which was disabled twenty-eight miles northeast of Boston at Stellwagon Bank. We fought our way against the wind and seas for an hour and fifty minutes before arriving at the stranded boat. For nearly two hours we fought, but she fought back just as hard. She managed to shake everything loose in the boat. She broke off one of our radio antennas. Then she managed to throw me clear across the cabin of the towboat and nearly dislocate my shoulder. The canvas door to the cabin saved me from hitting my head on the deck but gave up its own live in the process; I'm not sure what my ankle hit. Nonetheless we arrived on-scene and passed over the towline to the patient delivery captain and towed the hapless boater to a repair facility.

It was a long fight, just over six hours, and there were no clear winners. You could argue that by making it safely home, I was the winner, but I opt to view each day at sea more of a draw. We both come out as winners because we each gave it our best shot.

Two years ago this weekend I began racing regular cars at very high speeds on closed roads. The sport, known as rallying, has had it's share of deaths of both competitors but in Europe in the late 80s some spectators died when rallycars left the roadway. This prompted new and stringient rules in the US to keep people away from the roads.

Unfortunately this weekend, in the same rally I competed in two years ago, a car left the road at speed and killed two spectators. This is a very sad moment and will have lasting repercussions on the sport in the country.

http://www.stargazettenews.com/local/Molocal7.html

I hadn't had a chance to see what the webcam looks like at night until just now. This is beautiful!

One of my projects over the past few weeks was installing and setting up a camera high on the radio tower above my office. After some wrestling with Verizon to make some changes to our DSL connection, our webcam is now live on our site. Currently we are feeding live video but have not enabled camera controls yet. That might happen at some point. For now you can go to our site and see live video of Boston Harbor. We'll move the camera around once in a while to vary the views. :-)

seatowboston.com/harborcam.html

Enjoy!