Rants and Revelations

My employer has recently gotten all into “employee health”, mostly in the form of nagging us about what we’re eating. Probably they’re hoping to save on health care costs, but they’re spinning it as “we’re concerned about those of you we haven’t laid off or outsourced yet”. One of the things they’ve done is put “Healthy Choice” stickers on the least objectionable things in the vending machine.

The other day, I noticed that beside the vending machine, they’d put these redemption coupons, where if you collect 3 “Healthy Choice” stickers and stuck them to the coupon, you could redeem it for a free Healthy Choice snack. Hey, I thought, one free snack every 4 days, that sounds like a good idea. Then I read the fine print: you can only redeem the coupons on the first thursday of the month, at the cafeteria, between 11:30 and 12:30. I’m surprised there wasn’t a “beware of the tiger” sign involved in the process somewhere. I’m sure the process was carefully designed to discourage people from redeeming them.

So rather than save up my coupons, and suddenly one day a month having a vast armload of free snacks, I started peeling my stickers off at the vending machines, sticking them to coupons, and leaving them there for others to take. My lead was soon followed, and now every day there are several of these coupons full of stickers, waiting for somebody with a different sense of time spent versus reward gained to try to redeem them. I hope that person walks in on that appointed day with hundreds of these things.

Today the glass tape under the deck was dry, so I took the deck off the hull again. I cut two 9×23 pieces of fibreglas cloth. (The instructions said to use scrap cloth, but since the previous time I was using cloth it didn’t mention keeping the scraps, so I had to use “good” cloth.) These were used to reinforce the deck recess area behind the cockpit.
Continue reading ‘Kayak Construction: Finishing the underside of the deck’ »

Last weekend I ran into trouble trying to epoxy when it was too hot. So on Tuesday night I went down to the local distributor for System 3 Epoxy and picked up some “slow” (aka “hot weather”) epoxy hardener. I also bought a box of Nitrile gloves, because the cheap-ass no-name rubber gloves let some epoxy through and leave my hands sticky afterwards.
Continue reading ‘Kayak Construction: All that work and it looks exactly the same’ »

The weather looked horrible as I got in the car to go to the race tonight, and as I got there a few random rain drops turned into a full fledged downpour. Ken had the radar picture up on his laptop and said it was a narrow band of rain and moving quickly, and so the meagre crowd hung out under the awning to wait it out. And sure enough, after it passed the horrible hot humid air was gone and replaced with cool dry air.
Continue reading ‘Fifth Race: 27.33. Equipment failure.’ »

Oshkosh is surprisingly close. And the guy who had the club’s Dakota booked cancelled so I switched to it instead of the Archer I had booked, giving me a bunch more load capacity. So I guess it’s time to start getting my shit together.

The extra load capacity means I could bring another person and still have 200 pounds or more for camping gear and luggage. I’ve put out a call on the club mailing list, but no takers so far. Anybody here wanting to experience the greatest aviation show on earth? I’m currently planning to fly up on Sunday and back on Thursday morning, but I’m flexible.

I got invited to train with the Baycreek team, but then was told that I needed to take some private lessons with their coach first. That was fine with me, because I really need to improve my stoke and hopefully stop hurting my elbows. So last night was the first session. Coach Dan and I worked on getting good torso rotation, keeping my upper hand up at eye level, and getting a good glide on each stroke. During the course of the lesson, we paddled 4 miles.

After the lesson, the team showed up and I paddled with them and Dan’s young son Tom for their warm-up. Of course they’re all in Epic V10 surf-skis, except Tom who was in a KayakPro Jet, another nice racing boat. And the warm up was to paddle up to the same bridge we’d made it to in the lesson. Then Tom and I paddled back together. Towards the end, Tom was getting solicitous - I’m not sure if he was worried that I wasn’t going to make it, but he offered to let me ride in his wake, and assured me that when we got back he’d help me put my boat on my rack.

That part of the canal has a boat-house for rowing shells and sculls. Evidently they’ve got a lot of money for their programs, because there were a lot of boats out, most with an accompanying motor boat with a coach on board. There were a lot of coxed eights, some obvious high school teams but some with a mix of adults obviously from some night class “learn to row” thing. My boss was on one of them, and he seemed very surprised when he waved to me. One thing I thought was interesting is that the coxes now have microphones and loud speakers instead of hand megaphones. One of the kayakers I was with joked that was so they could have longer boats.

After the paddle, Dan cooked up hotdogs and hamburgers and a couple of the team members brought out coolers full of beer. We chatted about lots of stuff, but mostly how the US doesn’t have a good paddling program like Canada does, and how there is obviously a lot of money going into rowing development here and too bad we don’t have that sort of money in paddling. I observed that rich people go to expensive prep schools that have rowing teams, so that’s what they’re likely to sponsor rather than paddling.

Anyway, it was hard work, interesting, and fun. I can’t wait to see if it helps my time at Wednesday’s time trial.

Since I “wasted” the first three days of the four day weekend doing stuff like resting up, kayaking with my dearest wife, and doing an ill-advised upgrade on my Linux box, I felt like I really needed to get at least something done today. And what I had next on the list was to take off more wires and fill more seams with epoxy. And more importantly, to see how I could fix up the horrible mess that is the stern. Unfortunately the first three days were also the days when the weather was perfect. Today it’s hot as hell, and getting humid - and it’s going to stay like that until Thursday.

First I sanded and scraped the bow half of the deck, upon which I’d already done this wire removal and fill job a few days ago. Next I tried to make tape “dams” on the stern area, so that I’d be able to hopefully fill the gaps in with epoxy. Because I was going to do this filling, I mixed up two ounces of epoxy. I was a little wary of mixing two ounces in this heat, and I should have listened to myself.

When you fill seams, you use a dental syringe with about a third to a half an ounce of epoxy in it. I was having a bit of problem with the syringe leaving a decent sized trail of epoxy, and then suddenly splooge-ing out a big wad all at once. (If you’ve read “The Meaning of Liff”, think of it as a “Toronto”.) But I was doing ok, squeegee-ing up the big splooges, on my second or third syringe when I realized it was getting uncomfortably hot. I dumped the remainder and went back to my cup with the remainder of the two ounces I had mixed up, only to discover that the epoxy in the cup had solidified, and was also hot as hell - so hot it was melting the plastic cup.

So I mixed up another ounce to finish, and used about half of it. I didn’t get all the bits filled that I’d hoped to, but maybe when the temperature comes down below 80 I can continue on.

Got an piece of beta software that I’ve been waiting for for a while, but it required that I upgrade my Linux box from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. The upgrade seemed to work fine, but the kernel paniced when I rebooted. It booted on “Linux.OLD”, an older kernel, but my USB keyboard didn’t work and several other things weren’t working right. I re-ran “lilo” thinking it might get the proper kernel booted, but instead it removed “Linux.OLD” from the boot menu, and now I have no way to boot it. Downloading a Live CD right now.

Went flying for the first time in a long time. The plane is badly out of rig and with full left rudder trim, still required more left rudder to center the ball. I didn’t have any destination in mind, just flew around a bit to a couple of airports I rarely visit. My third landing wasn’t too bad.

Went with Vicki to buy her a kayak. She bought a Swift Saranac 14, which is a pretty good boat, and very popular. I hope she gets lots of use out of it.

Although the menu and other buttons on the new camera don’t work, I can still take pictures with it (just can’t change the ISO, or switch to shooting in RAW, or any number of other adjustments). First picture is here.

My contract is up at the end of this month, and they’re not renewing it. They have an open position for a direct hire, but I applied for it and I haven’t heard anything back. So I thought for self-preservation purposes, I’d better start looking to see what else is out there.

First step is to see if my pimp has anything. Ok, enter http://www.[pimpname].com/ into a browser, and get “Safari can’t find the server”, but first there is a weird little flash as if it is getting redirected. So I try curl on that address, and get:

<head><title>Document Moved</title></head>
<body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This document may be found <a HREF="http://spusitinf0
02/Pages/index.aspx">here</a></body>

And I repeat the experiment with a telnet to port 80, and find they made the exact same damn stupid mistake in the Location: header in the 302 message.

Do I really want to entrust my career to people who make mistakes like this? I don’t think so.

I bought a Maxxum 7D as I mentioned I might earlier. I decided that while it’s not the latest thing, it’s half the price of a new camera, and I can use my existing lenses. It arrived today. Only one small minor inconsequential detail. None of the buttons beside the LCD screen work. So I have no way to change any settings, review pictures, look at histograms, or basically do anything other than take pictures at 800 ISO. I’m hoping against hope that there is a setting on one of the bazillion switches and dials on the camera that is locking out those buttons, because otherwise I’m going to have to hope like hell that the seller’s “we guarantee against mechanical defects” guarantee actually means something.

I think Monday’s coaching session helped a lot - I shaved some time off this week compared to last week (but still not as fast as the week before), after a couple of the good guys complained that it was actually a bit slower this week. I didn’t get a copy of the race results this week or last week, so I can’t really compare, but I think they’re right.

Once again, the wind was blowing from the south, which meant you started off with the wind behind you, but then had to face a headwind for the entire middle half of the race. When the wind comes from the north, it actually doesn’t seem to blow on the creek part of the course at all, but when it comes from the south it does.

I started at the end of a huge group of people, so I got to pass one person and watch the faster people pull slowly ahead of me in the bay. Two of the better open canoe racers caught me right at the buoy that marks the second turn - I was trying to swing wide to see if I could do it with all sweeps and not lose too much momentum when I discovered this one guy trying to go around outside me, so I ended up not swinging as wide as I liked, and having to rudder and back-sweep, meaning a total loss of momentum as usual.

I tried to remember the lessons I got from Coach Dan on Monday, and I think I did for most of the time. I’m not sure it made me any faster, but I think my elbows aren’t hurting as much as they did last week.

Yesterday I glued the seams on the deck of the kayak. Today I’m supposed to be taking off the wires and filling in any seams that didn’t get filled. I took a look at them, and there are some major problems and some minor ones.

Major problems:

• The tail section didn’t go together correctly. It was so bad that I’ve had to cut the glued seams with a carpet knife. I’ve tried to slide a bit a scrap wood under it and using a combination of nails, tape and clamps tried to get it to sit right and I’ll have to re-glue it later.
• Two places on the deck, around where the bow and stern temporary forms are, the deck has actually slumped down too low and is too wide for the hull. I’m hoping that after I glue the under side and put it back on to dry, I can somehow manipulate those sections to sit right, but I fear that I’m going to end up carving the wood along the shear line to make it fit.

Minor problems:

• lots of glue spills on the outside of the boat that need to be scraped and sanded off
• some HUGE glue spills on the inside of the boat, some that went down into the hull will require lots of work to get off
• Most of the epoxy has set up correctly, but some is still rubbery. Hopefully that’s just a matter of time, and not that I somehow didn’t mix the hardener in correctly.

It’s times like this that I have to keep reminding myself that nobody else will see all the flaws.