Category: Revelation

Epic rant company is epic!

A little while ago, an epic rant from the co-founder of Liberty Bottle Works went viral. You can see stories about it here and here. Now, I like a company that puts their employees family time above the “Me Generation”‘s whiny entitlement, and I thought I could use a new water bottle, so I ordered one.

It arrived a few days ago, and it’s really nice bottle. But the valve that lets air into the bottle when you suck on it makes a funny little squeaking sound. So I wrote to the company, making it clear that I wasn’t complaining, just asking if they had any strategies to mitigate the noise. The response I got has a formatting change in the middle that makes me think this is a semi-canned response, but it’s still pretty awesome:

First off thank you for your support, it really means a lot to us.

I am sorry for the noise you are getting from the straw, here are a few tips to try and help that:
Regarding the cap. We have found that a few caps (when fresh off the line) may make a signature “Liberty” noise. There has been some debate as to which spirit animal this noise is indicative of. Some folks believe it to be the illusive “purr” of the Sasquatch, however for more practical reasons we believe it to be more closely related to the majestic dolphin (who knows what sound a Tuna makes). Albeit, as cute as it is, I agree that the call of the majestic dolphin should be reserved for the ocean as it can be a little disruptive in class, at the office, the gym, or during ones morning Yoga. FYI, Sasquatches are really into Yoga.

Although the most likely cause of this unique audible phenomenon is rare and unintended, it is however by design. The noise may be due to our precision molding along with the strategic placement of the umbrella “flutter” valve as well as the assembly process of our sport caps, each individually built by hand. On the underside of your cap, you’ll see a flat rubber upside down “umbrella” that is about 1cm wide. When using the bottle in “sippa” mode via the spout, air must go through the umbrella valve into the bottle to replace the volume of water leaving the otherwise sealed container. The passage of air through the umbrella valve in association with the inherent back pressure of fluid may cause the tightly placed (hand installed) umbrella valve to flutter and vibrate thus creating the majestic acoustic sounds of the dolphin.

> How can I make it stop?
So, what can be done? First I would try opening the cap and running warm water (please be careful) directly onto both sides of the umbrella valve. Then, while the rubber is softened, use your finger on the top of the opened cap to push the little rubber “bead” (that holds the umbrella valve in place) down through the cap. What we are trying to do is create just the slightest amount of space between the underside of the molded cap and the rubber umbrella valve. That should do the trick. Replace the cap and test to see if we’ve set the dolphin free.

In most of these cases the sound will also go away once the valve relaxes with normal use. However, if your dolphin is stubborn and refuses to swim off into the ocean blue, I’ll be happy to send you a replacement cap of your choice at no charge. After all, we stand behind or products 100%.

Thank you for your support and for the opportunity to provide you with a better product, made by friends right here in Washington State.

If there are any other questions I can answer please let me know!

Thanks,

Denise Fischer
Customer Service Manager

I must say, I love these guys. If you’re in the market for a metal water bottle, you could do a lot worse.

Technical obsolescence? Nah…

So a few years ago I was kind of despairing that all the new languages and frameworks came with utterly huge learning curves. It used to be easy to learn a new language – you’d sit down with the manual, read it over a weekend, and by Tuesday at the latest you’d be an expert. At least that’s how it was for me when a language manual was the size of K&R – 228 pages. These days a language manual is more like this one – 1632 pages, and that doesn’t even get into the web development frameworks, the IDEs, the debuggers, the various Object Relation Models, the continuous integration stuff, the virtual environments, etc etc etc. It’s very daunting. And because of that, I was beginning to think I was going to be stuck in a rut called “Java” until I retired. I believe I used the phrase “I’m too old for this shit” more than once.

But that’s changed now. In the last 3 or 4 years I’ve

  • Become moderately proficient at XSLT
  • Become really proficient at DOM manipulation and AJAX code using Javascript and jQuery (and lately with Coffeescript) – haven’t felt the need to learn much about object oriented prototype based stuff yet.
  • Learned Perl::Mason and made a website using it which makes extensive use of AJAX
  • Learned Python and Django and made a website using them which make extensive use of AJAX
  • Used the Bootstrap Framework to make the front end of the Django website.
  • This week I started a side project where I’m writing a plugin for WordPress using PHP, another language I’ve never used before.

The difference is that these days I don’t let the enormity of the task get me down. Instead of trying to absorb the whole thing in one weekend, I go incrementally. I cargo-cult some code, write some more, google up the pieces I’m missing, and keep writing code. I don’t have to learn new IDEs because gvim still rocks, and I know how to use print statements to debug the way I’ve been doing for 30 odd years, so why get bogged down learning a million new things? Learn a few as you need them, and worry about the other stuff when you have time. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how I became proficient at Unix, C, C++, Java, etc.

As an aside, I find it scary that StackOverflow’s SEO is so much better than everybody else’s so if you ask Google “set timezone in PHP” the first couple of results will be StackOverflow, and you have to look further down the page to find the official documentation. Especially since the StackOverflow hits will all have been closed as duplicates of each other. Much as I love StackOverflow as a resource, it’s usually better to find the official references if you can.

Tarifa: the summary

So I’ve written narrative summaries of each day at the Epic Surfski Center in Tarifa Spain, but what exactly did I learn?

The Forward Stroke

My forward stroke is pretty much based on a sprint paddler’s stroke, but with a few mistakes and imperfections thrown in. But at Tarifa, Boyan was teaching what I think of as the “Oscar technique” – lower hands, lower elbows, and most surprisingly, no torso twist – the hips, shoulders and paddle remain mostly parallel throughout the stroke and almost all your twist comes from leg drive rather than torso twist. I’ve been trying to keep my elbows lower this year as a defense against shoulder problems, so that’s not an adjustment. Lower hands make sense in the surf, but I feel they’re probably not optimal on the flat, so I should probably be flexible about that and use the lower hands when appropriate. And I’m not sure I want to eliminate the role of torso twisting entirely.

One thing that showed up in the video tapes, and I’m not sure why I’ve never noticed it before, is that I’m not really getting my catch in at the beginning, and I’m raising my hand over my head in order to get the angle right on the paddle. I’m probably not explaining that right because I’m not sure I understand what is supposed to happen. Boyan briefly mentioned the proper way to do the catch, but we never did any exercises or drills for the catch. I need to do some research, because I really think this is something I need to fix.

Waves

Waves are why I came to Tarifa. I had hopes of experiencing long downwind runs on very large waves on very long wave lengths, the sort of thing you see and drool over on the videos from ocean paddlers. Well, the conditions never quite reached that level – instead we got situations that I’ve seen on Lake Ontario, although possibly more consistent and definitely nicer weather. This year I’ve had a huge break through in confidence and skill and I’ve handled some big stuff with my Epic V10Sport. I’m not scared of falling out, and I don’t get all twitchy and panicky when sideways to the waves. But what I went to Tarifa to learn was how to get the best ride out of the waves, and especially to get some skill and experience when you’ve got multiple overlapping waves coming from multiple directions. And that’s what I got.

The basic change in tactics I learned is to not stop paddling when you find yourself stalled out on top of a wave with the water filling up the cockpit, and not waiting to start your sprint to catch the wave when you feel the stern start to lift. Instead you try to get to your “base speed” as soon as you can, including when you’re riding a wave and it’s starting to die. Then you start your sprint while you’re actually “hull up” pointing up the backside of the wave ahead of you. Once you get on the wave coming up behind you, you use the one just ahead of you to see both where the wave is going so you can turn with it, and also to judge when the one behind you is going to start to lose power. The other related tactic is how to find the next wave – you scan the area just ahead of the boat, watching the waves in an arc on either side if the nose of the boat. Several people refer to that arc as “a quadrant”, but my pedantic engineer nature doesn’t like that name because it’s rarely 90 degrees. Mostly it seemed we were looking about 30 degrees on each side, but you would adjust that to favor one side or the other if there was a predominant wave from one side or you were trying to get to a destination that isn’t quite in the direction of the prevailing waves.

I think I did pretty well with these skills. Sometimes I managed to link – I’d get on one wave, use that speed to catch the next one, and then use that speed to catch the next. And then on the third wave I’d end up stalled out on a wave with the cockpit filling up with water. But it’s a start. It felt especially good when the waves were going in different directions and you’d be basically doing s-turns down the waves. Now that I’ve got the feel, I feel like it’s only a matter of practice, practice, practice.

Falling behind

I didn’t get to blog about yesterday. In a way, it was just “more of the same”. We’d been joined by three German men who’d come with their non-paddling wives. They had been here before, and they were given the V10 Sports to paddle.

In the morning we went to the beach near town to practice going out and coming back through a mild non-dangerous surf. The Germans didn’t bother taking the van with us, they paddled down to the town to join us, and didn’t take any longer to get there than we did. It was Magnus’s turn to paddle today, and Frank was in a V8 as well.

I kept trying to catch a wave in order to practice handling the scenario that gave me trouble the other day, but instead every time I caught a wave it sped past me right at the beach leaving me coming in on the backside of the wave, which of course is the safest and easiest landing. So every landing looked like I knew what I was doing, even though I was doing the exact opposite of what I’d wanted to do.

After we finished, Magnus paddled back with the Germans. I guess we didn’t tire him out enough.

In the afternoon we went out to Punta Paloma for another downwind paddle. The conditions had looked relatively calm, but when we got out there it turned out to actually bigger and more confused that on previous days. I got some really good runs for a while, and then it started getting so confused I couldn’t find anything and over and over again found myself stalled on top of the wave I’d been trying to catch. I started telling myself out loud “catch the small ones, the bigger ones will come”, and that kind of worked. I started catching more waves, and having more fun. Frank appeared to be in some distress, and many times when I looked at him in the back of the Double he was leaning back in the cockpit to relieve his back. The Germans and Magnus were ranging far ahead, and Kassie and I were trading the Lanterne Rouge back and forth. I felt like I was getting better at my old nemesis – where you’ve got two sets of surf at about 90 degrees to each other, one longer and faster and the other shorter and steeper. Trying to pick out where the wave fronts are when there are interference patterns going on everywhere, and trying to stay on this wave when this other wave is attempting to crash over the side of your boat and fill it is a skill I’ve often felt a need for in Lake Ontario, and I think it’s coming along.

Afterwards, Frank said that his back was hurting and he wanted to spend tomorrow taking the ferry into Tangier. So we went into town quite early by Spanish standards, and he went to the port and booked a tour. Then we went to find the restaurant we’d been to on our first two nights was now closed, probably for the season, so we went down a nearby alley and found a really nice restaurant that was just opening up. The food was a bit pricy, on a par with the place we’d been the previous night, but unlike that place the portions were relatively big. And really delicious. And they gave us a free little appetizer – aubergine (zuchinni to Americans) and honey, and free glasses of Muskat wine afterwards. So I was completely impressed.

One last thought – I don’t really feel like I’m really on a wave until I hear the cheerful little burble that the drain makes when the cockpit is completely emptied. Is the empty cockpit the effect of the speed of being on the wave, or the cause of you being able to catch it in the first place? To me it seems like a bit of both.

Sometimes I just like to be reminded that Africa is right over there

This morning it was pretty calm and flat, and we headed off to the harbour in Tarifa to do some forward stroke drills. Magnus switched off with his wife, so now it was Karen’s turn to paddle with us this morning. We did the same drills we’d done on the first full day (God, what day is it today, Thursday? I don’t want to think about the rapidly approaching weekend and week end.), although hopefully we did them a little better. Then we went out of the harbour for a bit of a sightseeing trip along the outside of the harbour wall and a nice view of the city rising up the hill.

As has been the pattern for most of the week, the afternoon was breezier and we headed off to Punta Paloma. As has also been the pattern, Kassie joined us. However this time instead of going from the point directly to the hotel, this time we went a little further out to sea, and headed towards the football stadium on the edge of town, making the downwind section closer to 10km rather than the 6km or so the “direct to the hotel” trip was. Frank was in the V10 Double with Boyan, leaving three V8s, two red stripe and one black one. I was half expecting to be demoted to the black stripe one for my cock-up yesterday, but instead Boyan had us draw straws and I ended up in the black stripe one anyway. Hmmm.

On the paddle out the point, we again encountered Ben, the English paddler in the V10 Sport who we’d met yesterday (and again in the excellent “Eco Center” restaurant later). He said “There’s no surf, I just went around the point to look at the Roman village”, which kind of intrigued me. But Boyan knows the conditions like the back of his hand, and he told us to paddle “towards the tip of Africa over there for 5 minutes”. I know I see that it’s Africa I see across the Strait every day, I just get a little frisson hearing it in a context like that.

When we first turned downwind, the waves weren’t much, but they got slowly better and better. By the time of our third little “get together to make sure everybody is having fun and staying safe” on the water, they were getting amazingly good. Most of the time both Karen and Kassie were well ahead of me – I think I was wasting time and energy trying and failing to catch the biggest waves, and they were both doing a better job of seeing and catching the little ones. But on the other hand, when you catch a big one it’s a real thrill. So I’m not going to apologize for that, but I am going to try to get better at spotting the little ones that can give you a push in between hunting for the big ones. I did catch a couple of nice ones that linked to other nice ones where I went from a big one to a small one to another big one all without slowing down or even having to paddle hard. That felt good.

When we approached the shore, I told myself to not be an idiot this time, go last, and watch and learn. So Boyan and Frank went in on the double, and then Boyan stood and signalled where we were to go in. Kassie was in, and Karen was heading in, and I was paddling parallel to the shore to try to line up to go in at that same spot when a big wave broke over me and dumped me in the water. Fortunately it was shallow enough that I could stand up and grab the boat, so it looked almost like I planned it that way. I guess today’s lesson is “do your line up outside of the breaker line”.