Author: Paul Tomblin

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.

Minolta Maxxum 7D, DOA

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.

Fourth Race: 25.40. Paul starts to see some improvement.

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.