Month: July 2008
First advanced lesson
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.
Kayak Construction: Ok, maybe it is too hot to epoxy
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.
What a day!
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.
How desperate am I?
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.