I’ve posted a new blog entry over at Abrevity which talkes about some of the new issues with the recently ammended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and how they might make your text messages and other types of web communications available for e-discovery if your company gets sued, you know, the ones that you sent while you were at work.   Check it out.

I setup a new blog today, for use in my e-marketing class at sjsu. The URL is FAIL check it out. I’ll be blogging there about all my boat related activities.

The boat trailer has been a pain in my ass for quite some time. It always seems that whenever we want to go sailing, something on the trailer doesn’t work, and its usually related to the lights. If you’ve been reading my blog you would know that I completely broke the trailer earlier in the year trying to pull the boat out of the water at Lexington Reservoir. The steel damage has since been fixed, but the remaining work to be done has been to get the trailer sandblasted and painted. Before I left last weekend for the lake, I took all the electrical and wiring off of the trailer, took off any interchangeable parts (such as the hand crank wench) and dropped it off to get painted and sandblasted. Monday morning I went back to pick it up and it now looks like a brand new trailer, painted black, with no rust at all except the wheel bolts. Now the work begins. Over the next three days I spent a total of 16 hours working on the trailer to bring it back up to a working state. The next weekend was my last weekend at the lake and I needed to have the trailer ready to pull the boat out of the water. After I picked up the trailer, I made myself a list of parts that I needed to put everything back together. This included 2 x 8 foot boards, carpet, stainless steel hardware to hold the wood onto the steel frame, new wire for the lights, black spray-paint, new wheel bolts and I’m sure a few more things I’m just not thinking of right now. I first went to Kragen in Los Gatos to pick up some new wheel bolts, some trailer electrical wire, a new connector to connect the lights from the trailer to the car. They didn’t have the bolts I needed or the wire in long enough lengths, so I just picked up the connector. Previously we had a little 4 pin adapter on the trailer, then a converter to connect it to the round 9 pin connector on the car. The adapter I picked up was a screw on connector of the 9 pin variety to directly hook onto the wires on the trailer so I no longer need the adapter. Next I went to Ace Hardware in Los Gatos, just to see if they had the wood boards that I needed. I was instructed to pick up some 8 foot lengths of pressure treated 6” wide boards. These boards are to mount directly to the steel frame and then get covered with carpet to actually hold the boat on the trailer. After Ace didn’t have the type of boards I needed, I went to Home Depot. It took me a little while to find the exact type of boards to get, but I found them, and luckily too, since they only had like 6 boards the length that I needed. At Home Depot I also picked up the carpet that I needed, with some glue to hold it on the boards. I looked for the bolts that I needed, but apparently nobody carries a selection of Stainless Steel hardware (nuts and bolds etc). Next I went to West Marine to look for my stainless steel hardware. They had quite the opposite effect, only carrying stainless steel hardware. I found what I needed and went home to start putting it together.
Cutting and putting this stuff all together took way longer than I expected. I already spent about 5 hours shopping for parts at a variety of places, and now the rest of the day was to be spent putting it all together. I had to counter sink the washer and bolt heads into the boards and mount them on the trailer before I could cover it with carpet. One issue I ran into was one stupid lock-nut that worked too well. I put the holes in the boards first, and hooked up the hardware to make sure it would fit, then I would counter bore the hole for a flat finnish. Well one of the bolts wouldn’t unscrew. First it broke my socket wrench adapter, the one that lets you put a smaller socket on a larger wrench, it just snapped. I found another socket that would fit directly on the wrench, tried to unscrew it, and boom, the bolt snapped in half. Back to West Marine again to buy more hardware. By the end of the evening I successfully connected the wooden boards to the trailer. No carpet, no electrical. The next day I put the first layer of carpet on the boards, and started to work on the electrical. It was a pain to cut the carpet to the right size, but I figured it out after a bit of trying. I ended up using the old carpet as a template for cutting the new. It took longer than expected to staple the carpet on the underside, and stretch it to fit evenly across the whole thing. And I had to do the process twice, as expected the second one was much easier.
Wiring the electrical was a breeze without the boat on the trailer. I had all new wire to use, and I recently already rewired it after the welding work on the trailer was done, so I was quite familiar with the process. After the electrical was done the only thing left to do was connect the riser that holds the front rubber bumper and the winch to pull the boat up onto the trailer. Another issue came up. Since the trailer was painted, I had no idea where exactly, closer to the car or closer to the boat, to mount the thing. Luckily i got it right on the dot, and didn’t have to mess with it at the lake. when all was said and done, it took me about sixteen hours over three days to complete the trailer. This would not have been possible if i was still working full time. I do enjoy my free time now.

This week I had a lot going on. For starters, I took the boat trailer to get painted and sandblasted in santa clara and went on a nice bikeride to the top of St. Joseph’s Hill where I saw a very nice sunset. I went up to Sausalito again to help out my friend Alfonso with some computer stuff, as well as worked a bit for Cybermanor. Later in the week I went to the Control4 Real Tour off highway 92 with Gordon from Cybermanor. This was a small demonstration of the Control4 system and how they will integrate into homes of the future for home control and automation. They presented some cool aspects of home automation that I just never thought of before, including some major safety features. Some of these safety features include shutting off central air if there is a fire to stop the spread of smoke, and the flashing of exterior lights in the event of a fire to help firefighters find the location, if for example the flames and/or smoke are not visible. The whole control4 system communicates via 3 methods. It will use Ethernet, 802.11, or Zigbee. Zigbee is the slowest but also the coolest of the three, and is only used for sending control commands, like switching a light on or off because it is quite slow on the throughput, but it is a meshed network, and with a range that isn’t that great, you just need to add more zigbee devices, such as dimmers or switches, to extend the network further in the home. they relay signals off of each other, know how to figure out the quickest path, and will correct the path if a part of the home looses power.