Travels and Thoughts

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WEEK 9 2007

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Saturday 3 March 2007

Saturday - an engineer at work handed me a copy of "High Performance Composites" magazine, telling me to look at the back. There is an article there on a huge sailing mega-yacht, the Maltese Falcon, built with, go figure, high performance composite material. Pretty amazing stuff - 187 foot high unstayed masts. Oddly the masts were built in two halves and glued together, rather than being filament wound. There is internal structure - reinforcement and roller reefing square sails - so maybe it was easier to build that way.

Latitude 38 has had a number of articles on the Falcon, one of which discusses her competitor, EOS, a rival in claiming the "biggest sailing yacht" crown.

I was talking to my brother about digital cameras - he wants to upgrade from his older point-and-shoot. I mentioned that I generally like my Canon Xt, but that the 28-235 kit lens was terribly soft and that I was unhappy with it (but didn't want to spend the $$ to upgrade to an "L" lens)..

Here is a comparison of a 50mm fixed versus the kit zoom lens; and of a supposedly better zoom, the 28:105 zoom vs the 28_135 kit zoom lens. Fixed focal length wins, hands down. I think I'll get one of those some day, they aren't particularly expensive.

I think he's leaning towards the Nikon D40, which includes a (supposedly good) 3x zoom when you buy it.

Lilek's came up with a logo for his child's "Peace Assembly", but it was nixed by his "domestic associates". Too bad.

I've a country western station on, for the first time in a while. They've gone... risque. When did that happen? It's apparently a three person cast now, a woman and two guys, and rather racy. It's a Clear Channel station I think, so I suppose that's the network feed. I noticed it the other day, but put it down to a particular broadcast, but apparently it's the new standard format. Ugh. Time for a new station.

Friday 2 March 2007

Friday - while up at my father's last week we were playing with Google Earth. On of the places I looked at was Port Stanley, in the Falklands. One of the pictures associated with that location was of an old sailing ship:

There were a couple more shots of what was obviously the same ship, a steel hulled clipper of some sort. A bit of looking around with image searching at Yahoo! and Google identifies her as the Lady Elizabeth, wrecked 80 years ago. In California she'd long ago have been scrapped, or turned into a museum like the Balclutha in San Francisco.

In the Falkland Isles she just sits and rots; though, for a hulk pushing a century, the Lady E looks pretty good.

Perhaps it is something in the air - Isambard Brunel's SS Great Britain, built in 1846 was used as a coal hulk in the Falklands and eventually abandoned, but later taken back to England and restored in the 1970's. The English weather of the last 30 years seems to have been less kind.

Thursday 1 March 2007

Thursday - kept busy all day.

In the evening I fixed the garbage disposal, finally. It's been half done, the old unit out, the new unit not in, for a week now. Which means I couldn't use the kitchen sink. I just ran out of energy due to the cold/flu thing. But it's done. And there is a load of dishes in the machine now.

And I fixed the TV problem - by rebooting the TIVO. And the phone was messed up when I got home - a perpetual busy signal even on the landline phone - unplugging and replugging in the wireless base station fixed it.

As evenings go it was pretty productive.

I saw a snippet of news about Ghost Rider. Apparently a soldier in Iraq saw the trailer and sent an email to the producers, stating something to the effect that "we could sure use that guy over here." I had to laugh, even though it looks to be a really cheesy movie.

Wednesday 28 February 2007

Wednesday - went to work, worked. Eh.

Did you know that all TV dinners just require 5 minutes in the microwave? Ignore that stuff on the back, the time, the rotating, etc. It's all nonsense. Five minutes. And just poke holes in the film over the all little bins, with the fork you plan to eat with. No need to get a perfectly good knife dirty slicing or cutting the film.

A link:
I made you a mother’s day card at school...

Another link - James Lilek on the new religion of Global Warming. The man is on fire.

I wonder if there is some way to turn off the incessant demands of Adobe's Acrobat Reader to be updated? Every small patch demands to be installed, and usually it's tens of megabytes of unnecessary crap and a reboot. I just say "no" nowadays. They've taken a good product and ridden it into the ground.

Tuesday 27 February 2007

Tuesday - I was watching Special Unit 2 and thought someone looked familiar: the 'fixer', Alice. I was right, it turns out that the actress Pauley Parette currently plays Abby on NCIS. She has, in accordance with my theory of success in Hollywood, a distinctive voice.

My TV has no picture or sound tonight. I'm not sure if it's burned out, or the settings are messed up. The little portable works OK, so it's not the cable. The gods are taunting me - I just received an ad with the same plasma tv we bought for my Dad at Christmas, but for $700 less. I'd rather spend the money on my boat, though I admit that the 27" is getting hard to watch - I can't read the text on the screen from my usual seat across the room, perhaps 12 feet away. Annoying. So I'm missing NCIS right now.

Dad sent me a picture of his plasma TV setup, by the way, with the new stand. Compare it with the Christmas location on top of the old stereo cabinet (which is now in the guest room). The eagles are a recent gift from my sister V.

Monday 26 February 2007

Monday - the first book of this year was Island at the Center of the World, about Dutch Manhattan. It was basically a trading post for animal skins to start with. Two hundred three hundred many years later the beaver are returning to Manhattan. I blame Global Warming.

Book #12 was Wyrms, by Orson Scott Card. Eh. I didn't care for it much, but admit that my paperback copy was messed up, with entire chapters missing and out of order.

Book #13 was The Worthing Saga, again by OSC. It was a do-over of a early effort, Hot Sleep, that I only vaguely remembered. Again, ehhh.

Obviously I had a lot of time to read while home sick last week.

"It's always helpful to keep in mind, I think, that Satan was the first theologian." Heh. I'm not very religious, but I appreciate it in others. I'm forsaking food today, actually, but for more secular reasons: medical tests & such.

Sunday 25 February 2006

Sunday - scattered clouds, winds. Unsettled weather I suppose you could call it. There is snow, still, on the mountains to the north.

Heh. I'm building a system for someone, and when I put in the Nvidia graphics card there were some associated demos. One of which was the wood nymph "Dawn" which whose pointed ears made me mistake her for a Vulcan, about this time last year.

We went to the LPAC, to see The Watercoolers. It was sort of an extended musical skit, about life in the modern workplace. Not bad, I enjoyed it, and the people behind us really enjoyed it. (To an almost annoying extent.)

Book #11 was The Voyage of Kristina, by Wayne Carpenter. It's the story of a family of four (five, when the mother in law was along) cruising in a NorSea 27, the model of boat I have. A good read - not the same level of sailing effort as Slocums or Chichester, but fun to read about.

So far this year:

#1 The Island at the Center of the World ^* #2 Enders Game * #3 Constructional Steelwork Simply Explained #4 Riding the Bullet * #5 Sea Change *	#6 Dykstra's War #7 Six Frigates * #8 The Green and the Gray #9 The Hills is Lonely * #10 Hell's Gate
#11 The Voyage of Kristina #12 Wyrms #13 The Worthing Saga

* Audio. My friend Tim apparently felt deceived that some of last years books were audio tapes or CD's, so I'm marking them, just for him. Personally I feel bad about listing the abridged books - Six Frigates is the only one so far.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Will Work For Food.

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