Making progress

My poison ivy has finally started going away, so I'm making progress on the boat again. Not sure when I'll start painting, but I've been working on getting the deck nice and smooth and it's looking really good. I'll make a couple more passes today and see how it goes.

However, we're in the middle of another heat wave, so I can't do as much as I'd like. I heard a report on the radio that this is officially the hottest summer on record for this area -- an average of almost 5 degrees hotter than normal. Guess I didn't pick a great time to work on the boat outside.

We're also right in the middle of hurricane season. I don't think it'll be too bad here, but with the streets flooding out in front of the boat yard all the time, I'm a little concerned about the potential for heavy rains. I'm on the North side of Long Island, so the winds won't be as much of a problem, but flooding might. My boat is in the back of the yard at the highest point, so I should be okay. I just need to make sure I've got plenty of provisions, just in case. With a supermarket only a couple hundred feet away, I pretty much walk over and get whatever I need on a daily basis, so I haven't been keeping much on the boat. I'll make a run this evening after it cools off and buy a weeks worth of supplies. It'll be a good test anyway, and I think a week is a good measure since most of the trips I'd like to make are easily measured in weeks (not months or years).

Star watch:

I've been using the Stellarium program I downloaded to help identify stars in the evening. It's been working out well, but with all the lights around in both the yard and the supermarket next door, I can only see the really bright ones. I'd like to be able to pick out and name the ones normally used for navigation. I think that's around 25 or so. My nautical almanac lists 57, but I'm not sure how many of them will really be that useful. However, I wouldn't be able to see over 50% of the ones list at any one time anyway. There are also a few planets, as well as the sun and the moon that navigators use. When I was a kid, I learned to find polaris. Back in Houston, it was pretty low in the sky, but up here on Long Island, it's right at 40 degrees from the horizon.

Radio watch:

Right now, I'm working on learning Morse code. I'd never really thought about it before, but when I looked online for some resources, I found a Morse code parse tree -- parse trees are used in computer science, and I've used them to help parse regular expressions. Morse code is designed to be as efficient as possible, so the more common characters are higher in the tree, i.e., require fewer "dits and dahs." It also makes it easier to learn it that way, because I can envision the tree and follow it to find the character, digit or symbol I want. Anyway, it's pretty cool.

I know it probably sounds sorta weird to say it's "pretty cool," but it really is. I taught myself how to parse regular expressions and wrote programs using flex and bison to parse fixed format fortran, which is an early language that's not very easy to parse -- it came along before much of the research in languages had been done. I got to where I could parse about 99%, but there were still some cases flex and bison couldn't handle well (at least not in my hands, however, most experts say it can't be done with those tools anyway). I'd looked at the gcc parser before I decided to use flex and bison, but since it was hand coded and deeply embedded in the action code, I figured writing my own would be easier and more instructive. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to work on it again someday. Basically, I'll take what I've learned and start over.

Call sign watch:

I finally decided to go ahead and request a shorter call sign. I put in the request yesterday, and I think it'll be granted, so I should have the new, shorter one in about 3 weeks. I requested NV5L, which was available and is a heck of a lot shorter, and easier to remember, than KF5HBT.

Boat watch:

I'm going to do a little to the deck today, but will probably spend most of the afternoon under the boat working on the portholes. I'm going to see if I can use some epoxy putty to fix the places where the aluminum has corroded away -- most of them are fine the way they are, but a few of them won't seal properly due to the corrosion and missing metal.

Zoe watch:

She doesn't know it yet, but it's about time for another bath. To simplify things, I combine her bath with her heart worm and flea medications, and try to do all three around the first of the month. It's going to get up to around 90 this afternoon, so that'll be a good time to cool her off. I might even wash some clothes while I'm at it.