Amateur Scientists and Explorers

It is no secret that I enjoy my job at Sony. I love what I do and my work conditions could not be any better. However that doesn't keep me from thinking about changing careers every now and then. I've thought about being a high-school teacher and even spent a week as a substitute one. Unfortunately kids treat substitutes with an insane amount of disrespect. The morning of the first day of class a kid walked in and said, "You must be a total looser if this is the only job you could get." Little did he know that I could afford to be a substitute teacher because of my successful career in the tech industry.

I've also thought about making my passion my career. I could follow my youngest daughter's career path and be a ski instructor or work at a ski resort. My fear is that skiing would then become like work. Right now when I head up to the ski resort before work, it doesn't matter what the weather is like, I will only be there for an hour and don't mind skiing in storms. If skiing became my job, I might learn to detest snowy days instead of embracing them like I do now.

I've also thought about doing something relating to sailing. I currently have a sailboat that I keep in the Great Salt Lake and love to take it out as my schedule permits. The only problem with a sailboat is that it is a hole in the water you pour money into and there are not a lot of ways to make money with them. Sure I could try to offer tours but that requires getting a captain's license and that takes a lot of work.

I was thinking along the lines of how to make money with a sailboat and came up with a new idea related to our planet's oceans. It doesn't require a sailboat but tiny submarines instead. Imagine a spherical submarine the size of a softball or large grapefruit with 3 or 4 fins and a propeller. When it sits in the water, it barely floats so that if it loses power, the submarine would automatically rise to the surface. Now put a solar panel on the top of it to charge the device's battery. You could include a number of sensors such as GPS, pressure, and temperature. You may even put a 4K camera on the front of it with some sort of low-power LED illumination. If you do it right and control costs, my guess is you could keep the price under $100. That would allow all sorts of amateur scientists and explorers to use them for any number of purposes.

I think the idea has merit and am looking for feedback. No I don't plan to leave Sony to create such a device nor do I think they have any plans to create one, though I could always ask. Instead I would like to open source the idea and get feedback on what sensors should be included and how it would be used. Some simple ideas might be tracking the changes in ocean currents or using AI and the camera to have the device follow specific marine life without attaching a tag. Who knows, it might best provide a platform to improve current marine research technology.

Let me know what you think and if there is use for such an inexpensive robot submarine. How do you think it would best serve the marine research community? With an idea like this, feedback is always appreciated.

Experience Matters

Several years ago my wife and I wanted to bring our sailboat from the Antelope Island Marina to the South Shore Marina on the Great Salt Lake. We knew a storm would be blowing in the next day and wanted to get the task done before it came. We staged a car at the southern marina and then drove to the northern one. We loaded up the boat with ourselves and some winter-weather gear because of the month, February. Then we rigged a few safety devices to help protect us just in case something surprised us. Adding a preventer to the mainsail help ensure we wouldn't break the boat in a sudden wind shift.

The first 15 minutes of the trip went well and the wind filled in nicely. While sometimes you have to use the boat motor on such trips, it looked like we would be able to sail the whole way. At about minute 16, the weather changed dramatically, the storm arrived 15 hours early, and we found ourselves in 60 knots (about 66 miles per hour) of wind pushing us in the direction we wanted to go. Unfortunately our sailboat is not built to handle such wind and things got crazy. We ended up dropping both sails and still scooted along at a blistering 16 knots. That doesn't sound very fast but is 3 times the speed we normally sail.

One would think we had our excitement and once the wind died down all would be well. The wind did die down but then a snowstorm rolled in. I had planned to navigate visually but when the snow started falling, we couldn't see more than a few feet in front of the bow. The large smokestack from the smelter at the south-end of the lake that we aim for quickly disappeared. I had never bothered to install a compass in the cockpit and so I couldn't use that to help me. Ultimately I used the direction of the waves to guide me for the next several hours.

Eventually I could see a vertical line of blinking lights in the distance and hoped it to be the smokestack from the smelter as I knew it had aviation lights to warn low-flying planes. When the depth-finder on the boat went from 20 feet of water to 8 in about 2 feet, I knew I was off course and had to decide between turning hard to the left or hard to the right. I guessed and went right. The guess paid off and we quickly saw the breakwater for the South Shore Marina. We had blindly made it within a couple hundred yards of our final destination. As we continued I could see the expected lights on the smokestack and realized I had been heading towards a radio tower I had never noticed before.

We got into the marina at the south-end of the lake and quickly tied up the boat. I think my wife even kissed the dock once safely off the vessel. We both felt glad to be unharmed and relieved not to have to file an insurance claim for running the boat aground.

The moral of the story is that there is no substitute for experience. Sometimes we think we know something, like navigation but it isn't until we are tested that we know for sure. Since that day, I now know there are two tall objects at the south end of the Great Salt Lake with flashing lights. More importantly I know that the radio tower has brighter lights but the smokestack has 2 lights per row instead of just one. These are things you don't pay attention to on a sunny day. After all, why would you?

The Latest News Updates

Every once and awhile a news story captures your attention yet it doesn't seem that important to others. Fortunately we have the Internet that allows us to stay on top of the latest developments. That happened for me this week.

Two days ago, I received an e-mail from one of the sailing magazines I read regularly. They shared a story about a fellow sailor having problems off the coast of Mexico. He is in the process of bringing a record-breaking sailboat to Baltimore where he will begin to make some records of his own. Unfortunately he had some problems with his boat and is now considered lost at sea.

This is a story close to my heart as once I embarked on a trip from Honolulu to Los Angeles in a 37-foot sailboat. I left Hawaii a day or two after a hurricane came close to the Big Island. Once outside the reach of mobile phone service the only communication I had with my wife was via expensive satellite phone or e-mail using ham radio. One night early in the trip, she awoke panicked that my boat might be in danger and she waited anxiously for my daily e-mail. I'd spent 3 days sleeping off sea sickness and really didn't do much other than my 2-hour watches every 6 hours. Otherwise I was fine. 21 days after leaving Hawaii, I landed in Los Angeles and quickly caught a flight back home to Salt Lake. My whole family was very glad to see me.

Having crossed an ocean in a small boat, I know what Donald Lawson is going through as he tries to sail his boat on a vast body of water. Fortunately for me, I had 3 other guys on the boat with me and we all worked together well. Donald is alone and we don't know his fate yet. I keep an Internet search page open with several key words and update the search every hour to see if there is any news. I'm hoping he is still alive, as I'm sure his wife and family do too.

So far we know that the Mexican Coast Guard has found his overturned boat, which is a good starting point. The US Coast Guard has joined the search and as of several hours ago has confirmed they are also near Captain Lawson's boat. Unfortunately we don't know any more than that. I keep hoping there will be good news.

Normally I would go to major news networks like CNN to catch updates on the story. Unfortunately this is such a niche story, they are not even covering it. The Baltimore Banner has regular updates but they seem to keep repeating the same information over and over. They also have a cap on the number of free stories you can read from their site without subscribing. As this is the only time they will have a story I am interested in following, I don't feel the need to pay money.

I looked at the US Coast Guard's official site. They have a number of daily press releases but nothing yet on this story. I have also scoured Twitter without any luck. Usually they are a great resource for the latest updates and I use Twitter during ski season to find the latest updates on snow-induced road closures.

I sincerely hope there is a happy ending to this story. Unfortunately as each day passes, those chances diminish. I hope that when we do find the outcome, whether good or bad, it is not something that appears as a footnote instead of a headline, which it deserves. Until then, I'll be looking for updates.

Road Trip in a Ford Escape

Yesterday I boarded a plane and flew to San Francisco where I rented a car and drove to my boat at Coyote Point Marina. As Monday was my last day at Sony, at least for now, I had to clean out my sailboat so I could sell it. I pulled all of the big stuff off the boat and loaded into the back of the rental car and then sold the boat to an old coworker. His one request was that I help put the sails back on the boat so he could start using it on weekends. I obliged and showed him how to get everything set up. I also showed him how to start the engine. Then I got in the car and made the 11-hour drive back to Salt Lake City. The flight was much easier than the drive.

When I made my rental car reservation, I had the option of several rental car companies. Ultimately I settled on Hertz as they had cars available and also the best rate. I set the rental pickup at the airport and then gave myself until 10pm this evening to return the car to the location 2 miles from my house. Talk about convenient.

National has always allowed you to select the car you wanted when you arrive at their lot. This is something Hertz recently started doing and I really appreciated it yesterday. I knew I had a lot of stuff to bring back, including a generator, 2 televisions, and a mountain bike, so I passed on the Ford Mustang. While it would have been a fun car, not everything would have fit. I also wanted something that got great gas mileage as I would be responsible for filling the tank multiple times. Ultimately I settled on a very new Ford Escape. I put the back seats down and the bike fit nicely. Then I just loaded stuff around the bike. The generator rode in the front passenger's seat next to me.

Lately all of the cars I have rented have had key-less starts. You just have the key in the car and press the start button. It is a feature I really like. I also quickly connected the car's sound system to my phone so that I could use all of the hands-free features. It came in handy as I talked with my wife and other family members while driving. That kept some of the boredom at bay. It also had satellite radio that I started using just outside of Lake Tahoe when the traditional radio stations started getting scarce. I began with music but by the end of the drive, I was listening to comedy to help pass the time.

I turned the car back into Hertz this morning and saved myself $50 by not doing it this evening. I have to say that I really enjoyed all of the electronic features in the Ford Escape. Before I connected my phone to the car, its own navigation system did an excellent job routing me and also giving me an ETA into Salt Lake. Of course it didn't take into account the hour nap I would need outside of Elko, Nevada but it did factor in stops for gas and that soft-serve ice cream cone from McDonalds at midnight. Ultimately my favorite feature in the rental car was the fact that I averaged 30 miles per gallon of gas while mostly doing 80 miles per hour (the legal speed limit for most of the trip . . . once you get outside of California). My mother-in-law is looking for a good all-wheel drive car and I highly recommend this one. Full disclosure: I own a Ford F-150 truck and also own 190 shares of Ford stock. While both of these may influence me somewhat, I still liked the car a lot for my California-to-Utah road trip.

Plan A is Usually Not Enough

I read a very interesting article this weekend in one of my sailing magazines. The story could be summarized in a couple of paragraphs but the author lengthened it by talking about the problem-solving process while on an extended sailing trip. The article talked about 3 boats sailing together and one lost its rudder in about 15 feet of water. Now a rudder for a large sailboat is not something you can just swim down and pluck off the bottom. The crews of the 3 boats gathered together and developed a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C. Why? Because plan A rarely works on its own. In the story, the crews ended up using a combination of plans A and B.

Last week I had my own sailing problem to solve and also came up with multiple solutions in case my first choice didn't work. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking due to years of drought in the American southwest. It is now too shallow for sailboats and so I need to pull mine out. Fortunately I have a trailer to put the boat on but I needed to prepare the trailer to receive it. The last time I used the trailer, I put the boat on it and the tires all went flat. We pumped them up and they held air long enough until the boat went back in the water. With the tires being 20 years old, I figured they needed to be replaced.

So how do you replace the tires for a boat trailer? My first thought was to just bring the trailer down to the local tire store and have them do all of the work. An alternative is to pull the wheels off the trailer and bring them to the tire store. Finally I had the option of just inflating the tires to the proper pressure and hope they would continue to hold air. So like the story I started with, I had 3 plans that I could use.

My preference, or plan A, was to just take the trailer to the tire store. My justification for this is that I have submerged the trailer in the Great Salt Lake and I convinced myself that the lug bolts had welded themselves to the hub and would require serious work to remove them. The downside to this plan was that I would have to do the necessary work to make the trailer safe on the road. That means making sure all of the lights work (questionable because of trailer dunking) and that the hitch lock worked correctly.

The night before getting new tires, I couldn't sleep. Ultimately I prepared to execute all 3 plans before heading to the marina where I keep the trailer. The simplest solution was to just pull the wheels off and so I started with that. The trailer surprised me and the lug bolts came off without too much difficulty. It only took 30 minutes to jack up the trailer, remove the wheels, and put them in the back of my truck.

I easily got the wheels to the tire shop and they thanked me for not bringing the entire trailer. They installed the new tires in just a few hours and I had them back on the trailer that evening. Now my trailer is prepared to receive the sailboat. Once the boat is on the trailer, we will store it at the marina until the lake level comes back up enough to put it back in the water. There is no need to take the trailer on public roads.

So why is it that I always come up with multiple solutions for sailing but only one for computer issues. Part of that may be that when you have a sailing problem, failure is very expensive and sometimes lethal. With a computer, you can always turn it off and think about other solutions. If you find yourself constantly frustrated by your computer problems then it might make sense to come up with multiple solutions before starting any work. While it may seem like an inefficient use of time, it will force you to think more about the issue and your plan B or plan C may actually be more efficient in actually solving of the problem.

YouTube: It is not Just for Fixing Cars

My family always has a tradition of taking our sailboat out on the Great Salt Lake every 4th of July, anchoring the boat, and swimming/floating for hours. Sometimes we also actually get the sails up and go sailing. The Great Salt Lake is very shallow and is only 35 feet (10 meters) at its deepest. That means you have to walk a long way from the edge of the lake to get to where the water is deep enough to float. Taking a boat is the best way to get to where you can relax and float.

Unfortunately we thought we would have to miss our annual outing as I could not fix the engine on the boat. We really need the engine to get the boat in and out of the marina. Yes, it is a sailboat and we could use the sails to move the boat around but that is very difficult and best done only during emergencies. I have sailed the boat in and out of our slip and the process taught me a whole new list of cuss words I shouldn't use in front of small children.

As the name of the lake indicates, The Great Salt Lake is full of salt. Right now it is about 3 times as salty as the ocean. We often joke that if you drop a wrench into the lake, it will rust to nothing before the wrench lands on the bottom. That salt is not harmful to the sailboat as the hull is made of fiberglass. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the engine. Our little outboard engine slurps up water from the lake to help cool the engine. At the end of a day of sailing, we run fresh water through the engine to clean out all of the salt. After 19 years of sucking in salt, our engine clogged and I needed to take it apart to clean it.

We had the engine off the boat over the winter and had a local marine store service the engine. One of the things we asked them to do is replace the water pump. They did but they didn't replace the thermostat in the engine and I felt it might be the issue. When we put the engine back on the boat, it ran fine for the first 2 sailing trips and then gave us all indications that it wasn't being cooled properly.

Having replaced quite a few automobile thermostats, I knew the job is not that difficult. I got to the boat early one day over the recent break and pulled off the thermostat housing. Sure enough the 19-year old thermostat looked more like rust than any usable part. I pulled out the old one only to discover the new part didn't fit. I actually wanted to test if water was running through the engine and so I left the thermostat out, put the housing back on the engine, and started it up. There is a telltale that sprays a stream of water out of the engine and into the lake when everything is working correctly. Nothing came out. Knowing that you don't want to run an engine very long without a working thermostat, I shut the engine down, rinsed it off, and headed to the marine parts store. I worked with the manager there to use the serial number of the engine, which I had taken a picture of on my smartphone, and found the correct part. The correct part cost $6 less and so they refunded me the difference.

I didn't want to go back to the boat as the Utah sun was blazing away and being outside felt like being on the surface of the sun. Instead I came home and tried to take my mind off the fact I still hadn't fixed my engine. The next morning my wife and I got ready to head back out to the boat and see if we couldn't get it working. Before leaving home, I found a great YouTube video about fixing the cooling system on outboard motors. The guy narrating the video was from Australia and had an engine with a similar problem to mine. He tried a few things that I always try and had similar results. Then he gave me a small piece of information that I suspected but didn't know: not all of the water that cools the engine exits from the telltale. This effectively said that my engine might be cooling correctly and that the clog could be in the Y-valve where some of the water is diverted to the telltale and the rest exits the engine near the prop.

My wife and I headed to the boat armed with new information. I pulled off the thermostat housing and thoroughly rinsed the cooling path. I also followed the telltale hose all the way to the Y-valve and used compressed air to clean that out. I put the new thermostat back in and it fit perfectly. Then I started the engine and everything worked perfectly. An hour later, our children arrived ready for our annual tradition. YouTube is not just for fixing cars.

The Downside of Staying on a Boat

People are amazed at how inexpensive it is for me to stay on my boat in the Bay Area. They think I have things figured out when it comes to beating the high cost of housing. What they don't know is that there are some sacrifices you make when you stay on a boat instead of in an apartment or house. Most of the time I am fine with those drawbacks. This week I came down with a mild cold and the illness made my life a bit more difficult.

While I have Internet, electricity, and water on the boat, I don't really have a toilet. I do, I just never use it. If I do, I have to empty the holding tank immediately or the boat starts to smell. Instead I just make a long walk to a restroom on shore. The round trip is only about a quarter of a mile but after drinking liquids all day long, that can get to be quite a walk every 20 minutes. It is just my personal observation but warm liquids run through you much faster than cold ones.

Another difference is heating the boat. Tuesday evening I had a serious case of the chills because of my mild fever. While I have 2 electric heaters on the boat that both work well, it still takes about 10 minutes or so to get the boat from below 50 degrees Fahrenheit up to a comfortable 70. I sat with my hands outstretched towards one heater like it was a warm fire. Then I shook uncontrollably as I made one last round trip to the restroom for the evening.

There are also some benefits to staying on a boat when you are sick. For instance, everything is really close at hand. I didn't have to reach very far to get my warm soup from the stove to the dinner table. In fact, I didn't even have to get up. I also could continue playing my video game while I ate the soup because my TV and PS4 both sit on my dinner table. I just have to eat carefully and not spill anything.

My wife always encourages me to check into a hotel when the nights are stormy or I am not feeling well. This week the thought crossed my mind but I opted to stay on the boat. I like my living space and it is very comfortable. I just need to not get sick.

Black Friday

Tomorrow is Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season officially begins. As for me, I will refrain from shopping tomorrow. Instead I plan to spend the day outside and will officially be supporting REI's #OptOuside movement. I will ski in the morning and then spend the afternoon on my sailboat. No, the lifts are not running in Utah and so I will have to hike up the hill in order to get some turns in.

Unfortunately I have two daughters that work retail and both are being asked to come to work this evening even though it is Thanksgiving. They will come home well after midnight and then have to head back to work tomorrow to work the Black Friday specials. So if you are fighting the crowds in the stores tomorrow, please be nice to the salespeople. They are someone's son or daughter who don't get to spend time with the family so you can get a good shopping deal.

Split-Screen Coop Mode

I did not get as much time as I would have liked to play video games this Thanksgiving break. I spent a lot of time skiing and while video games can be fun, skiing is much more fun. About the only spare time I had was yesterday afternoon when the family was done skiing and everyone but my oldest son and I was tied up with other activities.

We had some good father-son-bonding time and so I pulled out Star Wars Battlefront for the PS4. Some of the missions have three different modes to choose from: Solo, Coop, and Split-Screen Coop. While I have 2 PS4's, the 2nd one is in a different part of the house right now and so I didn't want to play coop mode. While we would be playing together, we would be far enough away that it really wouldn't count as father-son-bonding time. So we opted for split-screen coop. I took the top half of the screen while he took the bottom and held our own wave after wave of bad guys. It was a lot of fun.

We spent a couple of hours playing together and my son did much better than I did. At the end of each game, it would give statistics. We were pretty even except when it came to kills. I would get about 45 per game while he would get 75. Naturally I will have to concede that he is the better player but what is important is that the both of us had a lot of fun playing together.

When we were done, we headed to Target and picked up a 2nd copy of the game. Now when I am in California, I can play coop mode with him in Utah. I just need to bring one of my PS4's out there for when I am on my sailboat during the week. That will happen after Christmas.

Airport WiFi

Lately my WiFi has not been working on the boat and my new Android phone has a security policy that doesn't allow tethering or being turned into a Hotspot. That means if I want to use the Internet on the boat I have to use my phone. I'm not too upset as it won't be too long before one of them starts working again and I am enjoying the peace and quiet that a lack of the Internet provides.

I am at the San Francisco airport right now and discovered there is free WiFi. That discovery prompted me to pull out my laptop and start doing some things I have not been able to do on the boat, like write in this blog. I didn't think that I was going through Internet withdrawals during the week until I got to the airport. Now I am going crazy getting stuff done I haven't been able to take care of on the boat. You would think I would have taken care of all this while at the office where there is no lack of Internet connection.

The downside is that Airport WiFi is only good for about an hour. Then you have to watch another ad or click a terms-of-agreement button. Oh well, as long as I am not trying to stream a movie before my flight it is only a minor annoyance.

Real-Time Websites

I got up this morning and went skiing up at Snowbird. It has been a while since we have gotten any new snow so I was glad to look on their website and see we had 4 inches of it overnight. My wife and I had a good morning of skiing while it continued snowing and then we came home. I was eager to see how much snow fell while we were skiing. Imagine my surprise when Snowbird's website still registered the same 4 inches. I kept checking throughout the day as it continued snowing only to see the same number.

Snowbird is not the only website that has a problem keeping their website updated. I was trying to get real-time weather reports this last Thursday as the San Francisco area was pounded with a storm. All I wanted was a live picture of the marina where I keep my sailboat. The yacht club located in the marina claimed to have a webcam pointed in the general direction of my boat. Unfortunately I couldn't find the page with live pictures. They did have an automated feed of the anemometer in the marina so I could see the strength of the wind. That let me know that my boat was fine.

The secret to having a real-time website is not having to manually update it. There needs to be some sort of automatic feed to keep the website up to date with the latest information. Something like an anemometer or web camera. I think the people responsible to input the latest snow totals were out skiing instead of doing their job. I can't say I blame them though. I would be too.

My Old Boat

I got an e-mail today from an old friend. He is a yacht broker and helped me buy and sell my old boat. They say that the two happiest days of a boat owner are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells it. In my case, I was very sad to have to sell my beloved sailboat. The problem was that I couldn't justify owning it when I no longer worked in San Francisco at the time. The purpose of my buddy's e-mail was letting me know my boat is for sale again.

Looking at the photographs on the Internet brought back a flood of old memories. Most of them were good. I remember sailing her up the coast from Dana Point to San Francisco. We went through the mother of all storms and had to pull into Monterey to make repairs. I remembered how the family used to spend time on the boat and we called it "Camp Sail and Swim" because we would go out sailing or swim off the back of the boat in the marina.

Everyone I have shown the pictures to has asked if I want to buy the boat back. While there is a part of me that loves the idea, there is also a reason I chose a smaller one when I bought my latest boat. It sure was fun to see the old pictures though.

Bad TV Reception

It is tough watching TV this evening. On the sailboat I don't have cable or satellite and have to pull my television signals from the airwaves.

When I set up my HD television, I was surprised at how many stations I could get. On a good day, I can receive about 75 channels. Tonight I am getting 4. There are a number of factors that contribute to good television reception. I would expect to have great reception this evening and then I remembered I walked down a steep ramp to get to the boat. That means it is low tide and I am sitting about 8 feet lower than usual. Antenna height is probably the biggest factor for good television reception.

When I look at today's tide tables, I can see that low tide was at 5:48 pm (or 17:45 as it is listed on the table) and that it was 0.9 feet below the average low tide. No wonder the ramp down to the boat seemed so steep. Now I just need to figure out a way to get my antenna higher in the air. If only I had a large pole connected to the boat with a rope on top that I could use to raise and lower my antenna . . .

Internet on a Boat

Living on a boat a couple of days a week has some advantages. Take last night. There was a lot of wind and so I was gently rocked to sleep. It also has some disadvantages. Take last night. There was a lot of wind and the halyards (ropes used to raise and lower the sails) kept slapping against the mast all night making a lot of noise.

When people find out I stay on a boat, they ask about my living conditions. I actually have most of the comforts of home. There is a bathroom on board as well as a kitchen and two bedrooms. I also have running water and electricity. I even have high definition television (HDTV) that gets great reception with the help of a powered antenna. The boat is situated so I get about 75 different stations and don't pay any monthly fees for it.

The only thing missing is an Internet connection. When I first started staying on the boat down in Marina Del Rey, near Los Angeles, there was no free public Wi-Fi Internet connection. I didn't mind because I was working for a slave-driver and spent all of my time at the office. My new marina up near the San Francisco airport is much more rustic. I have a golf course in my back yard and the front yard is literally on the San Francisco Bay. I expected that there would be no Internet connection and was correct when I first started staying on the boat up here.

Since I didn't have any Internet connection, I decided to go get one of those mobile broadband cards for my computer. Rather than just get a card that works with a single computer, I decided to get one that works with five wireless devices. That way I could connect multiple computers on the boat to the Internet without having to resort to fancy networking. It took a while to get working but is a magnificent device.

Yesterday I came home from the office and started working on my computer. I noticed that there was a strong Internet Wi-Fi signal from the yacht club nearby. I gave it a shot and it works pretty good. Now I don't need the mobile broadband device. It is a good thing I have 30 days to return it. More importantly I can save myself $60/month. Now if I had my family with me and didn't have to eat my own cooking, life on the boat would be nearly perfect.

Yet Another New Job

I have just changed jobs (again) and am now working in the San Francisco area. While I have spent the last decade of my career working for small startup companies, I now work for one of the largest consumer electronic companies in the world. I have to say that it is a refreshing change. At the last place I was working, I started at 7:30 am and worked until 8:00pm every day. They also expected me to work weekends. My new company has much more reasonable hours.

I work in the research and development group of the company's video game division. My two boys think I have the coolest job ever. I would have to agree. Yesterday my boss told me it was OK to play video games while I am at work. He told me it was kind of expected and so I should not be shy about sitting down with a Playstation 3, checking out a few games from our extensive library, and playing them during the week. When I told that to my sons, they got jealous.

While my job seems awesome, it does come with one downside: I live in Salt Lake but work in San Francisco. That means I fly out on Monday mornings, live on my sailboat during the week, and fly home on Friday nights. Everyone asks how that works with my family. My wife hates it, but my kids that are still at home don't want to move. My oldest daughter is in college and so she doesn't care. My oldest son will be in college this fall and so it doesn't matter to him either. The two youngest ski for the Snowbird Ski Team and so they don't want to leave Utah. I have given them the choice of skiing every day after school or being with Dad and they would rather ski.

I guess that means I will have to rely on technology to help me continue to spend time with my wife and kids. Hopefully that translates into some interesting BLOG entries. Until then, I'm just glad to be away from the dog.