Rants and Revelations

As predicted in Rants and Revelations » I have seen the future, and it sucks, they’ve hired a new Flash guy to write the new user interface. It really sucks to find out that your contributions are going to be even more marginalized just as you’re also finding out that they want you to become a full time employee at a significant pay cut.

I guess it’s time to stop antagonizing recruiters and start finding out seriously what’s out there. Either that or find out if the bank account would survive me taking off however long it would take me to get a masters in user inferace design.

Update: Oh, it gets better. New Guy has never even heard of source code control. In other words, he’s used to toy projects on toy operating systems.

…really, really suck.

Can you believe I got called by a recruiter who hadn’t even bothered to look at a map to figure out where Rochester is in relation to NYC? She seemed shocked when I said it would be a 6-8 hour drive for me to “commute”. She kept referring to NYC as “the city”, as if none of the other centers of population in New York (or indeed, probably the world) count as cities in her world view.

Feh.

Today’s mission: flip the boat over and glue the outside seams.
Continue reading ‘Kayak Construction: Gluing the seams’ »

BayCreek Paddle Center has an “every Wednesday night” race series, which started for the season tonight. The race course was out into Irondequoit Bay, turn at a buoy, and come back and paddle up the Irondequoit Creek to another buoy, and turn back and paddle downstream to the start location.

I took my GPS along, but since it was on my lap it lost signal each time I bent forward and so it wasn’t very reliable when it says I paddled 1.4 nautical miles in 27:11. Next time I’m going to put the GPS inside the cockpit, and run the external antenna wire up to the bow.

Just about everybody else milling around the start area had these tiny little carbon fibre and/or kevlar wisps of boats that were slightly wider than their incredibly skinny hips. Most of them were wearing t-shirts from other races, or fancy racing wet suits. I felt terribly outclassed before anybody had even started paddling.

I never paddle on the bay, and today I discovered why - there was a fairly strong breeze, and the bow of my boat was slicing through waves that were about a foot and a half or two feet high, washing off my racing numbers and soaking my t-shirt and shorts. It was pretty hard going, and by the time I reached the turn I was sure I’d used up all my energy. The turn was a bit hard, as I tried to avoid broaching in these waves. Then the downwind leg was my first attempt to surf waves, and it wasn’t entirely successful - my bow ended up totally submerged in the wave ahead of me for much of the time, and I paddled quite hard to try to stay there. I wasn’t sure if I should slack off a tiny bit and see if I could actually just stay on the wave without effort, but every now and then I’d start turning sideways. I would sweep repeatedly on one side to try to point myself back down wind, but it wasn’t working, so I’d have to stop paddling and rudder like hell. (After the race, I talked to one of the experienced looking guys and he said “too bad you don’t have a skeg”, and I admitted that I had one, but I didn’t know how to use it in that situation. Next time, guys.)

Once back in the creek, it was just tiring. My arms and shoulders were aching, and every time I stopped paddling to rest a bit or take a drink of water, one of the fast guys coming in the other direction would yell encouragement at me.

I finished in 27:11. Most of the other people seemed to be clustered in the 16:15 to 17:30 range. But I figure if you measured it by minutes divided by pounds (either boat weight or total weight of boat + paddler), I won by a long shot.

Today’s first task was to set up the kayak with the keel on a straight 2×4 to verify that the keel is straight where it’s supposed to be, and that it has rocker where it’s supposed to be. Turns out that it’s flatter than it should be, so I’ve tried to prop up the ends and pin down the middle.
Continue reading ‘Kayak Construction: Too Hot To Epoxy’ »

Today was a long and hot day. It’s a good thing I’m not counting the hours, because I’m sure I’m taking more hours than what they say it should take. Plus it was hot and humid as hell today, and for much of the work I couldn’t use my stool and had to stand. Looking at the Pygmy Boats site, I’m about done 15 of the theoretical 70 hours (not including some of the optional extras I’ve bought). Today I added the side panel (Panel #2) on each side, and it’s looking a lot more boat-like. Because this is a hard-chined boat, the joint between panel 1 and panel 2 is the chine.
Continue reading ‘Kayak Construction: Adding the side panels’ »

Today’s task was to wire the two keel panels (aka “Piece #1″) together.
Continue reading ‘Kayak Construction: Wiring the Keel’ »

On Monday night I finished beveling the shear line with the palm sander.
Continue reading ‘Kayak Construction, drilling the holes’ »

Vicki and I and my cow orker Rob and his wife Iris paddled tonight. We put in at the Genesee River Paddling Center, and paddled up the river, down the canal, and up Red Creek. Red Creek is a very narrow creek that goes through some people’s back yards, golf courses, and some surprisingly wild land. We saw a Great Blue Heron, some carp, and some beautiful wetlands flowers.

According to Google Maps Pedometer, we did 3.7 miles. It wasn’t fast, and it was kind of tiring to paddle so slowly, but it was good to paddle with Vicki.

I’ve ranted about the impromptu meetings that break out outside my cube in the past, right? Well, today it reached a new pinnacle of annoying: there were three separate groups talking, and because they were so noisy, each group was getting progressively louder and louder as they struggled to be heard over the other two groups.

After a minute or two of this, I went out and said very loudly “Excuse me, I’m not working too loud for you, am I?” One person laughed, but nobody stopped talking. About two minutes later, two of the groups went away but the one group stayed for another 5 minutes or so.

Next time I’m plugging my iPod into my speakers and blasting “Mao Tse Tung Said” at them.

This morning at work, I’m forcibly reminded of the other thing I like about Eclipse. Debugging. I had a guy come to me asking why this value wasn’t set at a certain part of the code, and so I put a breakpoint on it, attached to the running process with the Eclipse debugger, forced a schedule change, and when it hit the breakpoint, was able to single step through. I found the problem much quicker than if I’d had to keep adding “System.out.println” statements until I’d narrowed down the problem, like I would have in the past.

For 25+ years I’ve been debugging programs with print statements, core dumps (remember //SYSABEND SYSOUT=A?) and writing out the value of variables on a printout of the source code. Every now and then I’d step through something in dbx or gdb, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Now I can step through the code in the same editor I modify the source in, and actually fix it right then and there. I wonder why it’s taken me so long to discover this?

It’s now been 250 days since I started using Eclipse, first for a demo I was doing with GWT, and then for day to day programming. Yes, I’d used it a few times in the past, but I’d never stuck with it and gone back to vi/vim/gvim and ctags soon afterwards. I’ve got to say, I’m surprised. After 20 years of using vi, and having my fingers well trained for those particular commands, I can’t believe how much I’ve come to like and rely on Eclipse.
Continue reading ‘Eclipse’ »

This office has never been particularly well airconditioned. Mostly it’s too hot in both winter and summer, although a few years ago it was the opposite, so that I kept a sweater in my desk for the days when it was too over airconditioned in the summer. But in the last couple of years, we keep getting “emergency power reduction program in effect”, which means that they’ve turned off at least one of the building’s chillers, usually because one of the (formerly belonging to the company, now sold off to some other organization) power generators is off-line.

Today it’s bloody hot in the office, and of course this is a day when I chose to wear a long sleeve shirt.

I had to work this weekend, which means I didn’t get to spend much time working on my kit, nor did I manage to get out kayaking. Although the weather was mostly shit, so I probably wouldn’t have managed more than a quick dash if I could have gone. Worse, I missed an opportunity to meet up with a couple of people who’ve built a Pygmy Boats kit similar to mine.

The next tasks on my list were to bevel the cockpit reinforcements so that they won’t clash with each other when the pieces go together at an angle, and to bevel the shear line so that when the deck and the hull are put together, they join at the outer ply only. The instructions are a little vague but they suggest that you can do this using a wood rasp, sanding block or block plane. I happened to have a palm sander, and I like a bit of power when I’m going to be removing wood. By holding the sander at approximately a 45 degree angle, and sanding until I saw the glue line between the first and second ply move back to just the right amount behind the sheer line, then I knew I was just biting into the third ply.

I got half the sheer lines done (the side on panel 3) before my hands got so numb I couldn’t continue.