I went sailing on my Hobie Getaway with Suzette and Megan about three times last year. The first time, the winds were light and variable, and Megan didn’t like it; we spent too much time rocking in calm air. The subsequent times there was a better breeze and we made headway all the time. She was calm and happy enough that she even fell asleep on the boat.

Having first one, then two small children hasn’t left me much time to sail this year. I got out once early in the season (before Luke was born) on a blustery day. Suzette was lobbying me to take Megan out, but it was windy enough that I decided against it.

Eventually, there was a breezy day with no other pressing plans, and with Zette’s encouragement I took Megan out on the boat. She had a ball! The ducks and gulls were out and other boats, and she really seemed to be having fun. The Getaway an easy boat to sail, and can be single-handed while watching a toddler. Or so I thought….

Discrection being the better part of valor, I had deciced to stay in the small cove near the marina, since the winds were a bit gusty, and I was a but rusty. This was, after all, only the second sail for me of the season. Long-story-short, at some point I blew it, and we went over.

Like most of my capsizes, it seemed to happen very fast, but also had some moments of time-dilation. I was trying to heave-to, which for non-sailors, is sorta like parking the boat. To do it, you sheet in the mainsail, furl or backwind the jib, and throw the rudder over to turn the boat windward. What that all means is that you put the boat in a condition where wind will push the boat forward, but also turn her upwind. Once the boat turns far enough upwind it is "in irons" and the boat slows down. When it slows down, it will naturally turn to leeward, which puts wind back on the mainsail, and the cycle repeats. Eventually the boat finds a balance, and should sail forward at 1-2 knots, with a lot of downwind drift.

I tightened up the main, and was reaching to uncleat the jib sheet, but Megan was sitting on it. So I shifted myself forward and leeward to pick up Megan, and realized we were starting to heel over too much. I reached back for the mainsheet, but it was too late; we were going to capsize. I started to climb over the hull, like I’ve often done in a capsize, and had one leg over the gunwhale when I realized, "Hey! My toddler is going into the water on the other size of the boat!" So I let go and fell in the water on the leeward size, and made sure Megan was okay.

She was scared and crying a little, but took it pretty well. Her lifevest worked great. We swam around to the underside/windward side and I put us both up onto the hull, and gave her a hug for reassurance.

Some other boats came by to help, one of which was a couple with their small child (about Megan’s age) who took care of her while I got the boat righted. It was much harder to right the boat than it needed to be because I forgot to loosen the mainsail. The righting bag (a big nylong bag that fills with water for additional ballast when righting) worked well, but it’s hard to get it attached to the shroud when the boat is on its side.

So Megan had her first capsize, and I had a learning experience about both sailing and parenting. Once the boat was upright, I took Megan back aboard and we ended up drifting downwind into the wet slips (which is the wrong side of the marina for me), and I had a hard time getting back underway to get over to the ramps because it had become very gusty. Megan was not happy about going back out under increasingly windy and gusty conditions, but we made it back to the dock okay.

Update: She’s been out three times since then (every day of Memorial day weekend) and loved it each time. She now says "Boat! Boat!" excitedly whenever we are in the Jeep, so I guess some of it stuck.

This is a placeholder for an article about endoscopy.

This is a placeholder where I’d like to write about the birth of my son.

I think I’ll mention growing a mustache and beard in this article too.

I went to Rolling Thunder this year on my moped, which was fantastic. I only saw one other moped in the sea of motorcycles, and it was another Kymco. Here are the pictures.

Ironically, after waiting around for hours to start the procession, I followed the group of cycles that I was with right past the national mall, and proceeded to get lost in DC. I wasn’t planning to stay too long at whatever events were planned at the mall, but I would have stayed around long enough to check it out.

If I go next year, I should definitely remember to bring a hat and some sunglasses.

So, I guess I’m not doing so hot at this blogging thing. It’s been almost two months since there was an entry in the blog, and that was Suzette slipping in an entry.

I’m busy. Getting very nervous about the imminent arrival of my son.

We went yesterday to the U. S. National Arboretum. Which, incidentally is not same as the U. S. Botanical Garden.

I’ve been thinking more and more about doing some work blogging. To do that, I’d need to build an secured blog that would be readable by .mil hosts and folks with DoD PKI certs. I took a few moments a while back to research how to get Google to index a page without caching the contents, which I think is fairly essential for the effort to be worthwhile.

I’d also like to write some about my thoughts of the boat project one of these days, but maybe not tonight.

it was assembled last night. we will see the change in 30 days. ha

Women’s lib activists complain that there aren’t more female CEOs, and other high paying jobs, but they don’t complain that there aren’t more woman trash collection people. "trashwomen"

Saw the U.S. Botanical Gardens today. Note that this is not the same place as the National Arboretum.

Let the record show that I agreed to a pact with my brother-in-law, Jeff, to not buy each other christmas gifts.

Oh, and happy new year.

I meant to report for anyone else who wants to do this that I managed to get the SSP / Litronics NetSignCAC middleware to work with Firefox and Mozilla. ‘CAC’ is an acronym for the Common Access Card, and it’s the ID card for all Department of Defense personnel (both military and civilian). It’s a smartcard made by Schlumberger that stores DoD-issued x509 certificates that can be used for all the regular things that x509 certs are for: signing email, authenticating to web sites, etc.

The frustration was that using the CAC requires some ‘middleware’ that enables the client application (i.e. the web browser) to extract the certificates from the card. There’s an industry-standard API for this called PKCS #11, and SSP has built middleware that implements it for the CAC. My IT support folks loaded the appropriate middleware, but it only worked with Internet Explorer.

So, to load the middleware with Firefox or Mozilla, I stumbled around for quite some time trying to use the ‘Manage Security Devices’ tab under the preferences dialog. That didn’t work. What worked was bringing up the page file:///C:/Program%20Files/SSP%20Solutions/NetSign%20CAC/CryptoInstall.htm, which the contained some magic that the browser needed to install the middleware. Poof!

Alas, that wasn’t enough. Once I’d done that, Firefox would pop up a dialog requesting the PIN for my CAC, but I still couldn’t authenticate to web sites that require a client certificate. The problem, I believe, is bug 154246 and bug 154255 in Mozilla/Firefox Network Security Services; it can pull a client cert from a smartcard, but doesn’t pull the entire chain. Until this has a better solution, the workaround was to explicitly load my certificate authorities into Firefox. I did this by sending myself a signed email, examining the certs on the email, exporting my Root CA and Intermediate CA certs, and then importing those into Firefox as trusted CAs. Viola! I can use my CAC with Firefox.