Category: Revelation

Kayak Construction: Adding the side panels

Today was a long and hot day. It’s a good thing I’m not counting the hours, because I’m sure I’m taking more hours than what they say it should take. Plus it was hot and humid as hell today, and for much of the work I couldn’t use my stool and had to stand. Looking at the Pygmy Boats site, I’m about done 15 of the theoretical 70 hours (not including some of the optional extras I’ve bought). Today I added the side panel (Panel #2) on each side, and it’s looking a lot more boat-like. Because this is a hard-chined boat, the joint between panel 1 and panel 2 is the chine.
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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?