Rondam Ramblings

The Japanese sure know how to roll out the welcome mat. We arrive in Tokyo to another retinue of water-spouting boats (no colors this time,...

We arrived in Sendai on the main island of Japan to another warm welcome, including a troupe of students in traditional Japanese outfits doi...

The crew of the Mariner does a very good job of managing expectations. Once again the immigration process was not nearly as bad as I had fe...

We sailed from Kamchatka straight into the biggest fog bank I've ever experienced. It was thick as the proverbial pea soup for about 40...

Good news is lawmakers are converging on a health care bill. Bad news is they seem to have completely forgotten why we need a health care b...

We've been informed that the Japanese do not allow boats in their territorial waters to use satellite communications links. Why this is...

Russia wins the prize for the port of call that most exceeded my expectations, and not just because my expectations were set pretty low. We...

Greetings from the future. It's September 22nd here, even though it's still the 21st in California, and will be for another eight h...

(With apologies to Don McLean .) We left our last American port of call today, Dutch Harbor, home of the Discovery Channel show The Deadlies...

There's nothing like a day at sea to stimulate some philosophizing... The last time I wrote a dialog I picked on the theists, so I tho...

I don't think I've ever seen so many smart people miss a point so ironically. YVain wrote up an analysis of fashion from a geeky ...

We were on Kodiak Island today. We were told that we were the last cruise ship of the season, and that the previous three had all cancelled...

The weather here in Alaska seems to turn on a dime. Yesterday was gorgeous, today is once again gray and rainy. Fortunately, we didn't...

After taking a one-day break our ten-year-long winning streak with the weather while traveling seems to be back. With a vengeance. A disas...

... may fall mainly in the plain, but in Alaska it rains along the coast. About ten years ago, Nancy and I visited Europe. We landed in Mun...

We're at sea today, cruising the Alaskan Inside Passage so there's not much to report trip-wise. So I thought I'd take a vacat...

They say that the worst experiences make the best stories. If that's true, this is going to be the worst story ever, which is fine by m...

I finally convinced myself that my new eSATA drivers were working, so I switched my two main external drives back from USB to eSATA. Everyt...

This is what my Google Groups admin page looks like since I upgraded to Snow Leopard: If Google can't get CSS layout right what hope is ...

Imagine a car company with a successful line of sports cars. One day it decides to introduce a new model with new, clean lines and all the ...

No, that's not a typo. David Wong takes a crack (in Cracked , which seems like an odd venue for this sort of thing) at brokering peace ...

Just as I was starting to really fret about how to get rid of the horrible gloppy mess left behind by the fireproof gel we put on our house,...

PDF display is broken in both Safari and Firefox. Most of my files have lost their proper application bindings. And my external SATA drive...

Now that I've had a chance to put a little mental distance between myself and the immediate prospect of losing my house, I thought I...

Time lapse video makes the fire look pretty gnarly. When you're as close as we are, it's every bit as ominous in real time.

This post is the one that I wish someone else had written that I could have read before yesterday. The first thing you need to know about br...

6:45 AM, got about 4-5 hours of sleep. Woken up by the cat, who can tell that something is not quite right, and despite the fact that I...

Tonight for the first time in my life I am involuntarily not sleeping in my own bed. We've been evacuated. This has been quite a day. ...

The fire turned around overnight. Mandatory evacuations are in effect 100 yards from our house. Fresh layer of ash on the ground, tons of ...

Yesteday I took a drive to reconnoiter the brush fires near our house and heard an interview of Quentin Tarrantino by Terry Gross of the NP...

It's about a quarter to ten and we're still here. Looks like we dodged the bullet. But that was as close as I ever want to get. ...

The Station Fire is burning about a mile from our house. They've apparently started to evacuate some of the nearby neighborhoods. We...