Happy Anniversary Babe!

Just a quick note to my beautiful bride of 13 years:

Thanks for everything! For your love, patience, support (through good times and bad - though we've been lucky enough to not have very many bad times) and for just being my best friend.

The first thirteen years have given us three wonderful kids, and I look forward to watching them grow with you by my side.

Love,
Me.

Friday's Encinitas Double Shot Surf Report

Just a quick post before I head home for the weekend. I went out this AM, and was rewarded with an extremely low tide, small waves, and inconsistent sets - ack! At least it was quiet and peaceful!

By lunch, the building southwest swell was showing, and the waves had picked up in size to the 4 ft. to 6ft. size during the sets. Unfortunately, the heat drove a majority of Californians, residents of Arizona and Nevada, and perhaps even parts of Utah to the beaches. To say it was crowded in the lineup would be a severe understatement.

If only the swell had arrived 6 hours earlier!!! ;>

Have a great weekend, and try and catch some of this soon to be fading swell. By Monday, it will probably have finished expending itself on our coast, so get it while you can!

Wednesday Afternoon Encinitas Surf Report

The swell over last weekend has come and gone, and what remains after its passing is fairly small (but clean) surf. The water temperature has risen drastically in the last few days, to the point that I am quite comfortable trunking it. Today, the weather was perfect - sunny, very little wind, and small, peeling waves - now if only the crowd would vamoose! Fat chance, I know. When the weather gets gorgeous, people flock to the beach. Such is the curse of living in North San Diego County!

My New Board - The "Lemon Drop"

It has been almost one year since I last ordered my 6'4" Bulkley thruster, and I've enjoyed the heck out of it. It is maneuverable, fast, and paddles extremely well. However, during the spring and summer months here in North San Diego County, the waves get pretty crap-tacular and mushy.

Thus, I felt it was time to try out a new shape - one that can catch waves on autopilot, and zip through the mush sections so common this time of the year. In short, I was ready to try a fish-like board. I contacted a local shaper (Gary Hanel) and asked him if he could shape me a post-modern quad finned fish, similar to the twinzer shape he did for a friend of mine. We briefly talked over dimensions, my size and age, etc. Approximately five days later the blank was at Moonlight Glassing, waiting for me to come in and fill out an order card.

To make a long story short, I met up with Jp at Moonlight and he walked me through all of the glassing, color and fin options for my new board. I settled on a yellow resin tint, and for fins I decided to give the LokBox Turbo Canard Quads a try.

Moonlight is probably one of the most well known glass shops in San Diego, due to their attention to detail and the fine craftsmanship and artistic talent they posses. Thus, I knew it would be several weeks or months until I set my hands upon the new board.

A few days ago, Jp sent me a few images of my new board being laminated, in all of its glory. Looks beautiful to me, and if I get any more pictures of it I'll be sure to post them up so you can follow along with me.

If all goes well, I should have my new board in a few more weeks and get to try her out on during the last few weeks of summer!

Cleaning Up Your Debian Box

If you use Debian GNU/Linux, you know that it has a solid reputation of stability and durability. I just recently upgrade a file/print server here at work from the "Woody" distribution to the newest stable release - "Sarge". The upgrade proceeded without a hitch, and it was all done by editing a single file and then issuing one command from the bash shell. It doesn't get much better than that for the ever-stressed out network administrator! Furthermore, Debian provides extremely timely security updates which are likewise installed in the same painless manner as the distribution.

For those who would prefer to be more on the cutting edge of Debian development, there are also "testing" and "still in development" distributions which provide more recent packages. These meta-distributions are actually the workplaces for the next stable release, but are constantly upgraded as packages are improved, fixed, etc. These testing distributions are also pretty damn stable, but there is more package-churn here than in the stable branch, where packages are updated only for security issues.

The only downside to Debian's stability is that over the long period of time in one of the testing distros, you can get some unused packages left behind. Today, I found a useful package in Debian called deborphan. As you might guess, deborphan scans the list of installed packages, searching for orphaned libraries that are no longer needed. Using the list it prints out, you can then remove these orphaned packages and free up some disk space.

If you don't have deborphan installed yet, install it:

apt-get update
apt-get install deborphan

Of course, you could use aptitude as well - whatever you prefer. Next step, run deborphan and see what packages it thinks you no longer need:

deborphan

Look through the list carefully, and make sure that nothing seems out of the ordinary. If you want to fully remove all of the listed packages, then try:

deborphan | xargs apt-get --purge remove -y

This command will purge all of the packages listed in the previous step from your system. I just did this a few minutes ago on my Debian sid workstation, and it freed up around 106 MB.

Thursday Afternoon Encinitas Surf Report

The wave sizes have slowly risen throughout the week, almost as if they know about the southwest swell we are expecting today. On my lunch this afternoon, some of that swell showed up - the long period (but small) vanguard of what is to come.

I caught a couple nice sized waves, but they seemd few and far between. Those that I did ride, however, were nice and meaty. Waves of substance, if you will.

I expect that the swell will continue to fill in throughout the night and morning, so let's hope for some stacked up lines come dawn patrol time, Friday. I may even have to break out the camera and take some surf pictures, which I haven't done in quite a while.

Saturday Morning Oceanside Surf Report

Starting out the weekend doesn't get much better than sleeping in on Saturday, and then heading out for a two hour surf session. I paddled out about 1 and a half hours after low tide, and for the first hour some decent set waves rolled in every 5 minutes or so.

Oceanside Harbor

I caught a couple of the largest waves of the summer so far (which says a lot for the pathetic conditions we've had as of late, and not much for the waves themselves), and found a couple nice shoulders to carve up after the bigger drops.

The red tide we've been experiencing for the last three weeks or so seems to have started to clear out, which is nice. There is something about surfing in rust color water that smells slightly fetid which isn't as appealing as our normal sea-green and odor-free oceans.

I surfed until my body told me it was time to head back in. On my last wave, I popped up and both calf muscles seized up and cramped with amazing ferocity. Note to self: start eating more bananas!

This tail end of the approaching week looks very promising, as it looks like San Diego may get its first good sized south swell from a storm originally in the southern hemisphere. Time to get those paddling arms in shape!

Kindergarten Graduation

I've been slacking off as of late in regards to my blog, not updating pictures, surf reports, or anything. Well, now I'm going to try and do some catch-up with stuff that's happened over the last month or so.

To start things off, my middle son graduated from kindergarten in June, and it was a momentous occasion indeed. One worthy of family members taking the day off and viewing the ceremony, followed by a feast afterwards and then a leisurely stroll around Oceanside harbor.

The Graduate

Triple Trouble

After lunch, it was such a nice day out that we decided to take a walk around Oceanside harbor and enjoy the weather.

Gramms & Aunt Susie

Just Missing One!

Alan had a new camera, and was trying his hand at photography for the first time. We have not yet developed the film, so I'll have to let you know how his pictures turn out later.

A Boy and His Camera

Future Photographer?

A couple of picturesque, er.... pictures from the harbor:

Monterey Bay Canners restaurant

Tri-Fold Symmetry

Finally, it was time for us all to call it a day. Dropping off our relatives at the train station, we waited until the train left the station and made out way home to recover.

Oceanside Amtrak Station

Oh We're Moving On Up...

I've decided to move my blog to Blogger due to some of the very nice features it has, especially in regards to integrating with Picasa2 and my digital photo library. While Blogger does not have all of the features that pyBlosxom does (such as categories), it makes up for it in the convenience of day to day administration and ease of use.

The old Alan's Place will still stick around for archival purposes, but any and all new content will be posted to this site in the future.