Random Writings

So, after a year of faffing about and talking about it, I’m about to embark on the first leg of the Writing Up cruise, heading out from Cambridge to Waterbeach (Clayhithe) this afternoon. I’ve had a productive morning sorting out the outline of my thesis, reviewing some literature and dealing with emails.

Lots of people have expressed an interest in this cruise, either volunteering to help me crew the boat, or just generally. So, for all those who’d like to follow the cruise from their desks, I’ve fitted Innocenti with a webcam and GPS. If you click through to my Flickr map you should see spots on the map indicating the boat’s position. Each spot is a photo taken with the webcam every 3 minutes, so you can follow my progress and enjoy the scenery!

I am finally approaching the end of my PhD and thus have the delights of writing a thesis. Now, all available evidence suggests that this is a longwinded and possibly frustrating business and so I have hit upon an ingenious plan to keep myself on schedule and produce a report without going totally stir-crazy. I work better in the mornings, so my plan is to write in the morning (from about 8am until 1pm) and then move the boat down the river or canal for a few hours in the afternoon. My experience suggests that four hours is about as long as I’m prepared to drive the boat singlehanded, and this should give me some thinking time and relief from writing.

So, the plan is to leave Cambridge at the end of May and head off across the Fens to Peterborough. From there we go to Northampton and then down the Grand Union to London. In London we pass right through the city from west to east on the canals and join the Thames at Limehouse Dock before cruising upstream again. We carry on upstream as far as Oxford, where we join the Oxford Canal heading north to Banbury and then pick up the Grand Union again to head into central Birmingham. We carry on northward onto the Shropshire Union canal to Middlewich and then switch to the Trent & Mersey canal through the Cheshire salt fields. Now, assuming I can clear all the paperwork, I then hope to go down the Anderton Lift onto the River Weaver and then head on into the Manchester Ship Canal into central Manchester. From Manchester we then head east across the Pennines on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal and then turn north again to visit York. On leaving York we head south again onto the mighty River Trent, which will take us to Nottingham. We leave the Trent and go on into the Soar, taking us to Loughborough and eventually Leicester. Hopefully at this point I should have a finished thesis to hand in to my supervisor and can then cruise slowly back to Cambridge…

Anyway, a full cruise plan (which will be updated regularly) can be found here. If I’m passing through your neck of the woods, please come to a canalside pub and say hello! At weekends I’m planning not to work on the thesis, and I hope to schedule my trip so that the more heavily locked sections of canal occur at weekends so that friends and family can come and help me. If you’d like to come and help, suggest times that are good for you or sections of the trip you particularly fancy doing, and I’ll add you to the schedule. Oh, and inevitably there’s also a Facebook group.

Back in November I switched to Macintosh, after many years of PC-ownership, and even more years of being a die-hard Acorn Computers fan in my youth. Now, I am very fond of my uber-shiny Mac, but there has been one small gripe up until now. The Mac laptops all have this very nice MagSafe power adaptor which attaches magnetically – the idea being that if someone trips over your power cable, the adaptor just unplugs, rather than dragging the whole machine crashing to the floor.

Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have not marketed an in-car power adaptor to work with these laptops. Nor have they licenced anyone else to make one. There is an “airline” power adaptor, but it’s a) expensive and b) doesn’t actually charge the laptop’s battery – it just powers the machine when it’s running.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. This site explains how it’s a simple matter to cut the MagSafe power cable off an Apple mains adaptor and solder it to a normal DC power socket. It also explains that you can safely and easily power a Mac from any 16V DC supply. I already had a 12v adaptor for my old Windows laptop (bought from Maplin, cost £20, IIRC), so it seemed like an easy job. However, I was mildly reluctant to just cut the cable on my existing power supply – so I went to eBay. Fortunately, I found a firm – Relchron – who had a job lot of dead Magsafe power supplies. A quick phone call later and the guy there agreed to cut the magsafe connector and cable off a PSU and send it to me in the post for the princely sum of £2.50. This afternoon I’ve soldered it to a normal DC socket (again from Maplin) and hooked it up to the PSU. Hey presto, twelve volt Mac!

The upshot of all this is that I won’t need to run the inverter so often, and should reduce my power consumption quite considerably. Here’s hoping. And please, Apple, if you’re out there – sell this as an official product, rather than leaving it for us to hack up!

Today was Open Boat Day, a kind of vaguely annual event organised by the Camboaters’ Association. About a dozen boats moored up together at Jesus Green and opened our homes to the curious general public. Including mine. I reckon that over a hundred people tramped through Innocenti and asked questions… and now I’m surprisingly tired! Read the rest of this entry »

One of Innocenti’s drawbacks (which, to be fair, is part of the reason she was cheap for her size) is that her fit-out has been done by a succession of enthusiastic amateur owners, of which I am merely the third or fourth. As she was originally built in 1991 and fitted out fairly cheaply, her insulation leaves a lot to be desired – which results in being too hot in summer and too cold and damp in winter. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday morning, it was tipping it down with rain. I got back to the boat to find Emma from Kestrel next door waiting for me in her waterproofs – could she borrow my generator? Hers is onboard and cooled with river water, and the inlet pipe had become blocked with weed. Kestrel and Innocenti are now moored a bit further apart so that I get some sun on my new solar panel (of which more later) and so we ran a long cable to connect my genny to Kestrel’s inlet socket. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite reach. So I moved the generator away from Innocenti (it’s attached to my boat by a security cable, which is a condition of my insurance) to make it reach. Fifteen minutes later, a widebeam boat goes by and I hear an ominous splosh and no more generator noise…

Oh heck. The passing boat has pulled the cables tight and the genny is now on the river bed. I fish it out and pull it over gently. Water emerges from the exhaust pipe. I wring out the air filter, drain the carburettor (nope, no water in there) and squirt WD40 into the air intake. Still nothing. I remove the spark plug and find I’m getting no spark. Ah, an electrical problem. My favourite.

Fortunately, I’ve had experience of this before. All the high voltage electrics (both the mains outlet and the feed to thes park plug) on the EU10i are in sealed units and were unlikely to be affected by a quick dunking. But the low voltage electrics are not. I dismantled the genny and unplugged all the connectors. River water dribbled from them all.

I left it for several days on the bank under a box. This morning it has restarted, and I’ve reassembled it. I’ve been very lucky, and will be more careful next time. Isn’t Japanese engineering brilliant?

So, we went out on Friday night for our final attempt at the bumps – and once again we weren’t fast enough off the start. We got bumped about 300m into the race, and rowed home for a beer to celebrate our wooden spoons…

But it was all good fun, and with something of a scratch crew (the crew was different every night, and some of our substitutes hadn’t rowed for years) it was always unlikely that we’d be as together as some of the crews that had been training for months. I’ve enjoyed it, and will definitely be doing more rowing over the coming year.

Mobile broadband is great, and I bought one of the early Vodafone USB modems, a Huawei E270, when I first moved to Cambridge. My contract on this has now expired, and I’ve moved over to 3, who seem to have better coverage than Vodafone even if the network is more congested. Anyway, I thought I’d try and get the old Vodafone modem unlocked, because I can think of various circumstances in which it might be useful to have access to other networks. Read the rest of this entry »

A sofa has been on the to-do list since I first arrived in Cambridge. I’ve considered various options, but none of them were quite satisfactory. Most sofas are too big to get into a narrowboat, and those that come in sections were still sufficiently large that I was concerned that they would dominate the cabin. Also, I like to be able to clear the floor so that I can get six people round the dining table, or when I have a lot of people staying onboard and sleeping on the floor.

So, this weekend a plan finally came together involving a lot inexpert carpentry and an evolving design.
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When I was a little boy, my greenfingered Mum would drag me round the garden centre. I was always fascinated by the hoses, fittings, sprinklers and other such things – the plants were so boring! Anyway, I’ve constructed myself a rather Heath Robinson arrangement for watering the growbags on the boat’s roof with river water.
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