Category: Revelation

Kayaking Red Creek

Vicki and I and my cow orker Rob and his wife Iris paddled tonight. We put in at the Genesee River Paddling Center, and paddled up the river, down the canal, and up Red Creek. Red Creek is a very narrow creek that goes through some people’s back yards, golf courses, and some surprisingly wild land. We saw a Great Blue Heron, some carp, and some beautiful wetlands flowers.

According to Google Maps Pedometer, we did 3.7 miles. It wasn’t fast, and it was kind of tiring to paddle so slowly, but it was good to paddle with Vicki.

Eclipse Part 2

This morning at work, I’m forcibly reminded of the other thing I like about Eclipse. Debugging. I had a guy come to me asking why this value wasn’t set at a certain part of the code, and so I put a breakpoint on it, attached to the running process with the Eclipse debugger, forced a schedule change, and when it hit the breakpoint, was able to single step through. I found the problem much quicker than if I’d had to keep adding “System.out.println” statements until I’d narrowed down the problem, like I would have in the past.

For 25+ years I’ve been debugging programs with print statements, core dumps (remember //SYSABEND SYSOUT=A?) and writing out the value of variables on a printout of the source code. Every now and then I’d step through something in dbx or gdb, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Now I can step through the code in the same editor I modify the source in, and actually fix it right then and there. I wonder why it’s taken me so long to discover this?

Eclipse

It’s now been 250 days since I started using Eclipse, first for a demo I was doing with GWT, and then for day to day programming. Yes, I’d used it a few times in the past, but I’d never stuck with it and gone back to vi/vim/gvim and ctags soon afterwards. I’ve got to say, I’m surprised. After 20 years of using vi, and having my fingers well trained for those particular commands, I can’t believe how much I’ve come to like and rely on Eclipse.
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Kayak Construction, beveling the shear line

I had to work this weekend, which means I didn’t get to spend much time working on my kit, nor did I manage to get out kayaking. Although the weather was mostly shit, so I probably wouldn’t have managed more than a quick dash if I could have gone. Worse, I missed an opportunity to meet up with a couple of people who’ve built a Pygmy Boats kit similar to mine.

The next tasks on my list were to bevel the cockpit reinforcements so that they won’t clash with each other when the pieces go together at an angle, and to bevel the shear line so that when the deck and the hull are put together, they join at the outer ply only. The instructions are a little vague but they suggest that you can do this using a wood rasp, sanding block or block plane. I happened to have a palm sander, and I like a bit of power when I’m going to be removing wood. By holding the sander at approximately a 45 degree angle, and sanding until I saw the glue line between the first and second ply move back to just the right amount behind the sheer line, then I knew I was just biting into the third ply.

I got half the sheer lines done (the side on panel 3) before my hands got so numb I couldn’t continue.

Kayak Construction, gluing the cockpit reinforcement

After a couple of days of it being too cold to glue, yesterday I glued the 4 pieces of cockpit reinforcement that I cut on Tuesday. The instructions said to mix in some wood flour into the epoxy to make it “the consistency of honey”, which is odd because I think of normal epoxy as being about that consistency normally. It also didn’t say how much to mix up, so I did one squirt of resin (1 ounce) and hardener (1/2 ounce).

Before I mixed in the flour, I used some of the epoxy to fix one of the joins where the cloth actually came up off the wood – I crammed in the epoxy with the stir stick and then put the mylar sheet on top and several brick on top. I wasn’t expecting perfection, but I’m hoping it will be less obvious that it was before.

The gluing went ok, but I nearly ran out of epoxy at the end. The first one had lots of epoxy running out the side when I put the bricks on, and the last had absolutely none.

This evening I checked on it and took off the bricks. The join fix came out about as well as I’d hoped – it sticks up a bit and it’s obvious if you look, but I think it won’t be horribly obvious to bystanders. I’m hoping it will be less obvious when it comes time to glass the whole thing. (But if you want to embarrass me, it should be on the left side of the deck very near the stern)

The reinforcement plates had the usual sorts of problems. One of them stuck to the table where the spillage missed the plastic I’d put under it, and I had to scrape off the stuck on table wood with the cabinet scraper. Another one had some scmutz from the brick stuck to the top, and I scraped that off as well. But the one where I’d used up the last of the epoxy seems to be stuck on good and tight, so no worries there.