Sunday I passed my CYA Basic Cruising Skills paper test and the Pleasure Craft Operators Certificate (PCOC) test. Tuesday I passed my on-water test so I can now rent sailboats and join the yacht club! My instructor said that I have potential to be a good sailor given enough experience and she wanted to see me on the boat one more time this week. I went with her, her boyfriend, and a few of her friends the other night. We took the biggest boat at the club and went out past Toronto Island. We literally sailed off into the sunset (technically away from). Views of the city skyline from the water at night are absolutely breathtaking and I now know that sailing is something I will enjoy. The club I went to for my classes is just a 10 minute walk from my condo. It is primarily a training club, and nobody owns the boats there. You either rent the boats or get unlimited usage as a member. Membership for my level will cost around $1300 - $1500/year. I'll probably just rent the boat until the end of this season (one more month) then wait to buy the membership in May. Once a member I'll probably go sailing every Tuesday and Friday evenings.

This weekend was my first of two full weekends of sailing lessons. After the first day I realized it is nothing like I had expected. There are so many boat parts and terminology from hundreds of years ago that I have to memorize. Most of the words are really weird and they may as well be Latin since they don't have any meaning to me. I haven't had enough experience being in command of the boat yet to get to learn about wind direction and "sailing points". That's where I have the most difficulty. Luckily everyone else seems to be having as hard of a time as me. Next weekend we're going to have the test. I have to read two whole books before taking the tests, plus I barely have experience on the water (maybe an hour or two of me being in command). I'm not sure I'm going to pass this test on the first try or not. Even if I passed I would not be happy with myself if I didn't feel that I fully understand everything.

I was wondering whether or not I will like sailing. On the one hand there is soooo much to learn and master that it takes all of the fun out of it. On the other hand, it might become second nature to me and then I could enjoy it. I was thinking about how much easier motor boats are and wondered if I would enjoy that more. The others in my class said that driving a motor boat is like driving a car. It's not an experience, you don't go in the car to enjoy a drive. When you are sailing there is a lot to do, and that is part of the "fun". Hmmm :)

Back in January I purchased an expensive Cisco 871 router that keeps my home network attached to the office network over a VPN. I bought Cisco because I had some bad experiences with cheap networking hardware and knew that my job would soon rely on a VPN connection. I've been using it for a few months now and have had the strangest problems. When I access JIRA, Confluence and CollabNet's Scarab issue tracker over the VPN I am unable to click buttons that submit an HTML form. The browser spins forever and eventually times out. In Confluence I am unable to switch to wiki view or preview mode when editing a page. I had these problems using Firefox 2 and 3 on Linux, Solaris, and Windows XP. IE6 and IE7 didn't work either. Also, I was unable to do subversion commits. When I tried from my Windows Vista computer, *everything* worked perfectly.

Our network administrator was certain that there was nothing wrong with the Cisco router or configuration. A few weeks ago I brought all of my computers to the office and plugged them directly into the network. Everything worked great on all computers! Today I set up a new Linksys router with a built in VPN client feature. Now all of my problems are gone! Our network administrator is speechless.

Another problem I had with the Cisco is that I could not access my own website using the external web address. The server is hosted behind the firewall and accessed through a port forward. Our network admin set up the proper routes etc. to make it work, but those changes made the VPN not work. He thinks there is a bug in the firmware. The Linksys router doesn't have this problem and didn't need extra configuration to make it work. The Cisco router requires you pay something like $70/year to get access to firmware updates. Linksys firmware updates are free. The Cisco uses some weird command line interface to configure it and it looks like configuring iptables/ipchains in Linux. There is a graphical GUI on the router but it is basic and doesn't understand the changes we made by hand to enable the VPN!

I was very unimpressed with the expensive Cisco, and doubt I'll buy one again. I don't know what the reliability of Linksys is like compared to Cisco, but I know the Linksys user interface is much better and it just works.

Toronto has a real castle built in 1911 by Sir Henry Pellatt, a prominent Toronto financier, industrialist and military man. After 9 years he went bankrupt and liquidated everything inside the castle, then sold the castle. I think it was run as a hotel for a while before the city bought and renovated it as a historic site. This weekend I toured it with a couple of friends. My expectations were far exceeded. I've never seen such a big and luxurious place before, other than Buckingham Palace which didn't impress me as much. The tour lets you into almost every room from the basement to the roof. We climbed all the way into the attic! There's even a very long underground tunnel to the garage, potting room and horse barn. The castle is used in many movies such as X-Men, Skulls, Chicago, etc. If you haven't been to the castle yet, I highly recommend it. It's only $17.