Month: July 2008

Oshkosh checklist

Only one week to Oshkosh, and I’ve barely started getting ready. I think I need to write what I need so I can strike them out as they’re done.

  • Airplane booked
  • Charts ordered and arrived
  • GPS loaded with route and car charts
  • Tent
  • Sleeping bag
  • Thermarest pad
  • Camera and batteries
  • Camp stove
  • Camp chair
  • Cooler
  • Breakfasts
  • water bottles
  • diet coke
  • beer
  • cooking and eating utensils
  • warm weather clothes
  • cold weather clothes

You’ll note that I only plan to prepare breakfasts. OshawaPilot will verify that after a day of walking around Oshkosh I’m so wiped out that I’m useless for doing just about anything around the camp, so I’m planning to eat brats on the show site.

I’m also still having camera trouble – I bought a Minolta Maxuum 7D DSLR on eBay, but it was broken so I had to send it back, and I haven’t heard anything from them since.

Upgraded to 2.6

I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.6. It was extremely painless – I didn’t even bother to deactivate my plugins. So far, it looks pretty much the same. I do like the new plugins page, though. One of these days I’d like to see if I can get the Gallery plugin working – I had it working for a while, but it broke after a couple of upgrades of both Gallery and WordPress.

Wednesday night race: not getting any better

My boat is still broken. The skeg came in, but it turns out that the wire in the boat is too big for the hole in the skeg – evidently Valley made the skegs narrower in recent years and used a smaller gauge wire to fit it. So I’m going to have to wait while Dave at Baycreek rewires my boat.

I tried a Cobra Eliminator, which is a pretty fast sit-atop kayak. It was a bit tippy, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Unfortunately it had a couple of problems:

  • It had a tendency to turn left unless I held a bit of right rudder
  • the venturi self-bailer only bailed when I was going full speed, and tended to fill the boat if I went even a little bit slower
  • Even with full rudder, it couldn’t do a u-turn in the width of the creek
  • Most importantly, when I went out into the bay the water started coming in faster than it was going out – I ended up trying to balance the boat with the entire cockpit full of water
  • The cockpit was a bit too short for me, so my inner thighs were burning after a few minutes, and when I got tired my paddle kept hitting my knees. We tried taking out the seat so I could sit back further, but then I started sliding from side to side, which was a real treat when the cockpit filled with water again

So I decided not to use the Eliminator. The closest equivalent to what I’m used to was a Valley Nordkapp. It’s a little narrower than the Skerry, but it has almost no rocker, so it was very difficult to turn. Going out on the bay, it wasn’t bad, but when it came time to make the turn I discovered that the combination of narrowness and my unfamiliarity with the boat, and a new set of rollers coming from 90 degrees to my course, I dissolved into a quivering lump of “oh god, please don’t let me tip out here”. Needless to say, that didn’t do much to help my time. And the paddling I did before, and the bad technique during the quivering lump part of the course, meant that my second half wasn’t very good either.

Soon after I finished, and while others were still on the course, we got a brief thunderstorm. Those of us not on the water waited it out under the tarp, but the wind was coming pretty hard so we got wet anyways.

I need to work on my technique, conditioning, weight, and get a better boat. But other than that, I’m perfect.

“How many other unknown bugs did you fix?”

My main task for this release has been to rewrite large swaths of the database code. Along the way, I had to rewrite a lot of code. Well, evidently in the course of rewriting the code, I fixed a couple of bugs that some people in QA don’t consider bugs. And now they’re hassling me because there weren’t bug reports (PCRs) for the things I changed, and want to know what else I’d changed. I told them that I didn’t stop to document every bug in the subsystems I rewrote, I just wrote the new code to work correctly. But that isn’t good enough for them – evidently I was supposed to spend years doing their job (documenting what was wrong with the sub-system) before I rewrote it so that the bugs they liked could have been reproduced exactly.

The worst thing about this is that yesterday we had a 1 hour meeting with managers, customer service people, installers, QA and developers because QA had freaked about another behaviour that I had never liked and I’d fixed it on purpose, at the end of which every person present except for a couple of the QA people had voted that they like it the way I made it now, instead of the way QA wanted me to put it back to. And this new discovery is in almost the exact same area.

Well, that kind of sucked

Today I was supposed to have another private lesson with Dan, and then attempt to keep up with the team while they trained. But Dan couldn’t get there until nearly the time the team was supposed to show up, so I went out and tried to practice a bit before he got there, and then paddle with the team. But without a skeg, my boat was damn near uncontrollable on the bay – there was a tiny bit of wind coming from the west, and my boat kept wanting to weather vane into the wind. And then a boat would come along, producing a wake coming from the east, and my boat would try to turn into the waves. I’d be trying to practice a good forward stroke, and end up turning in circles. Then I’d try to keep up with the team but in order to paddle in the same direction as them, I’d be doing sweeps on one side for 10 or 20 strokes before I dared make even one stroke on the other side. I can’t really practice my forward stroke when I’m only able to paddle on one side at a time, so I yelled to Dan that I was heading back as they disappeared in the distance.

As I turned back to the dock, I got a long series of wakes coming at me, and by sweeping on the upwind side I actually got a good surf going, and about a third of the way back was assisted very nicely by that. That was the only fun part of the whole evening.