Archive for May, 2006
May 26th, 2006
What is it about bad driving and Florida? I drive 120 miles a day for the last 6 years and the driving get worse and worse on the roads everyday.
Just a few of the gripes I have:
- Cars pull out at the last minute and don’t accelerate quickly. Hey, if you are going to cut me off why don’t stop being a complete ass and speed up quickly.
- As you pass people, they speed up so you can’t get out of the fast lane and let other people go by.
- You try to change lanes and the idiot behind you gasses it so he can get over first causing you to slam on your brakes to avoid occupying the same space at the same time.
- Semi’s who travel in the left lane. On I-75 it’s illegal so get the hell outta my way and stay in the two right lanes.
- Assholes who get right on my ass in heavy traffic. Hey, I can’t go faster then the dude in front of me so back off.
All in the SAME day.
Ok, if you have any other issues, add your comments.
And I leave you with a prime example of fine Tampa driving. A chick® added a drive-thru window at The Rack where Chel works as a bartender.
May 23rd, 2006
I will have a nice explaination of my stay in Key West here in a few days. Come back soon.
May 23rd, 2006
Sorry I haven’t updated things in a while. I’ve been out to sea racing to Key West on that sailboat you see below. It was a liberating experience. It always seems like drama follows me to Key West and this year was completely different. More on that later.
I kissed my beautiful bride-to-be on a most excellent Wednesday (17th of May) morning and jump in the carpool to the Clearwater Yacht Club. It’s funny that I get up earlier to go racing a boat then I do to go to work. I get to the boat and what do I have before me but a brand new spinnaker that needs to be bagged. Leave it to Al (the owner) to buy a brand new sail that we are going to hoist right before the start line and carry (leave-up) for 217 miles. I love it. That takes faith, or balls, or both. That’s why I love racing with him.
The start is good and clean and then we are off. And once we have started I have nothing to do for the most part, except look cool on the rail with my $6 sunglasses. Al has me look at the radar/chart module to figure out target tracking and by the end of the race I was pretty good at it, regardless of what Coolie thinks. 
He was never happy with any location/distance numbers I gave him but most of the time I had no idea what he was asking for. I need to learn the Englisian (cross between English and Russian) he speaks. Read “Floss the Keel!” for more Coolie antics.
I do need to show people how that plotter works becuase I had the course all laid out and they were still using “distance and bearing to cursor.” They just had to switch screens to see how far off the layline we were and all position data instead of screwing with the plotter data. It kinda miffed me but what do I care. As long as they stay in the back of the boat when I am up on the foredeck Life Is Good(tm). You know you are a foredecker when you come on shift and see halyards moved and bags placed on sails not being used and you really start to worry until you have had a chance to check them out.
We did a bunch of jibs to get out to the better wind along the layline and Coolie showed us the master he is at the helm. I couldn’t have done better myself. Once we get going the wind picks up and we start to fly. We see speeds over 12 knots and everything has gone good. I thought we had picked the best course, we were eating good, and we had good, experienced crew on board. 27 hours later we are coming up to Key West #1 and all I hear is “Prepare to jib!” It didn’t stop for another hour. We got real good regardless of what the back of the boat thinks. Bill Tait was awesome help. It was good to sail with him.
We douse the chute right in front of the cruise ship in Key West as we round Tank Island and I was ready for the cameras. Gotta keep the tourists happy here in Florida. They pay my income tax. I was looking good for them It was a great windward strip but I really wanted to spike it. Someone (I think it was Coolie *grin*) was calling for me to grab the foot as it went into the water but I knew that already. Good douse and we tightenup to cross the finish line. First. I like that word. It just slithers off your tongue when you say it.
Of course, just because you finish first doesn’t mean you are first. After that it becomes a waiting game as you hope the slower rated boats finished farther out then they need too. Two boats didn’t. The J-105s kicked our butt. They finished 40 minutes better then us so we ended up with a third place plaque and the name of the boat engraved on the perpetual trophy for crossing the line first, at least that is what someone told me.
We had the boat all cleaned up, sails folded, and drinks in our hands by the time the next boat (Velox) finished. We had arrived in Key West some 28 hours and 15 minutes after we started and it was a great feeling. It felt like we had accomplished something. I don’t feel that enough.
May 23rd, 2006
I learned how to Floss The Keel.
Of course it happens at the complete wrong time. Let me back up. The boat is very flexible so when we go up a wave it flexes on one side and when we go down it flexes on the other. That can be good as that this boat is a lot lighter then the last one we sailed. It is faster with less weight. And it can be bad because now you can’t sleep because everything creaks.
So, everyone was retreating to my foredeck to sleep on a sail that was in a bag and it was actling like a big fluffy pillow. A great place to sleep. And everytime I wanted to get a few winks some butthead was sleeping there. On my foredeck! So, after being up all day and all night I was determined to get a few hours sleep before the sun came up. I go up there and someone is in that spot. “Screw this,” I thought and I was just about to kick them in the ass and wake them up when I realized that the foul weather gear the person was wearing looked like the skipper’s. The only rule more important then “Don’t Piss Off the Foredecker.” is “Don’t Piss Off the Owner.” So I sit there and wait a few more hours like a vulture until the skipper gets up. I then jump in and get my 2 hours of sleep that I have been longing.
Ok, that was long-winded but it shows how important 2 hours of sleep was to me. I wake up just as the sun comes up. What a beautiful morning. The water is a lovely shade of blue and the sky is all pink. My eyeballs had just come unglued from my eye-lids and I was thinking about taking a picture when I hear from the back of the boat, “Mark, floss the keel!.” My response, “WTF?” I asked Coolie what that meant and when he was finished I was none the wiser. It was something about rope, over the side, in knots. I had no idea. I really thought he was screwing with me. Trying to get me to do some odd task at my expense just to see if I really believed him. Like taking people snipe hunting, that’s what I thought I was being suckered into.
So, Coolie gets so frustrated with my mis-givings about this task that he gives the helm over and joins me down below where I can’t find a line suitable enough. Of course he takes 10 seconds to dig the one out from under the sails that I have no clue about. We go topside and he does that neat coil-twist-end-under-the-loop thing that gives you N number of overhand knots depending on N number of coils. Pretty neat and I needed to re-learn that anyway. He then explains what he meant and this time I completely understand him because he is only 2 feet away from my ears.
Flossing the Keel is basically taking a knotted line, throwing it to the leeward side, passing it under the pole, walking to the windward shrouds, and pulling. There it is, nice and simple. The line goes under and around the boat and when you pull it the knots dislodge seaweed, crab pots, and anything else trapped by the keel. Pretty neat. And if you are Coolie, you do this a lot on 30-day races. And apparently, “everyone knows how to do it.”
I took an informal poll while I was in Key West and no one had any idea what the hell I was talking about when I wasked them if they could “Floss the Keel.” But now I know something that I didn’t know before and for that I am all the wiser. Thank you Coolie. Next time, wait until I get breakfast.
May 16th, 2006
Sunday was my birthday.
It wasn’t one of the big ones. I am now 31. No big deal but now I am officially ‘not young’. *sigh* As I turn 31 I have realized several things:
- I accept that I am not going to get younger, but I also accept that perhaps, the best times of my life are still ahead.
- I feel empowered to make the choices that guide me through this life. I look forward to the uncertainy of it all. It makes the trip less boring.
- I shouldn’t put limits on myself or people around me. Sureprises can be good, unless she is pregnant.
- I am glad I don’t live in the Northeast.
It was a fun birthday. Chel went all out to make sure it was memorable. I really love this girl. It was a mini-pub crawl. And if you know anything about Tampa and my friends we really like pub crawls. It was based on the Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie. We had the Black Knight, search for shrubbary, Holy Grail trivia and other odd tasks for the birthday guy. All in all in was a good time and we ended up at Four Green Fields for the final stop. I have been going here since the day I moved to Tampa back in 1999. The bartenders know me and I know them. In a way they are like family. And I like to share in the good times.
May 15th, 2006
Saturday night was my first game refereeing the PDL league. This was the first time I refereed a ‘professional’ game. I had no idea what to expect which caused me to be so jittery. Sid (the other assistant referee) and I left Tampa around 3:30 so that we would have plenty of time to get to the game. The game was in Orlando, about two hours away. We were to meet up with the man in the middle ref (Rob Joyner) once we got there.
We pulled into the parking lot and cars filled the parking lot. 400+ people were along the sidelines. The park had a carnival atmosphere. Kids were everywhere and their parents eagerly awaiting the forthcoming matchup between the Carolina Dynamo and the Central Florida Kraze. We walk around and are introduced to both coaches and the referee representative. I’ve never had one of those before. It was wild to have so much attention directed towards us. Rob shows up and it is like old times. That’s good. Something familar to grasp onto in times of high anxiety seems to calm things down. We are joking back and forth and we slip into referee mode. You walk taller and speak with more conviction and purpose when that happens. It is a nice feeling. You can wrap yourself in it like a glove.
Now let me explain something about stress. Not only was this my first PDL match but we were also being assessed by a National Assessor as that Rob is trying to move up. In addition, we had a U.S. Fifa Referee on the sidelines watching us. Now I am Very Nervous. The cool thing is, I like stress. It makes me more aware of my environment. It gives me an extra boost to make the runs and perform at that high level. Once I feel like I am in the groove the stress flows away and I have a singular purpose at that time. Be The Best Referee I Can. I like having only one thing to concentrate on. It gives me joy.
Usually it is like this. Every so often things go a little wrong and the stress doesn’t drop away. I find it is a little thing during the game that I choose to ignore that comes back to cause major problems during the match. A push, a shove, a slight kick. And before you know it I have to do everything I know to pull the game back from castastrophe because I wasn’t paying attention.
Life is like that. I stop paying attention to things around me for the slightest minute and things can go bad while I am driving, saling, and in my relationships; my friends, my family, and my future wife. It was a hard lesson to learn. I hope I don’t fail at it.
May 12th, 2006
Last night was a decent race. I still don’t feel like I am in a groove with the people in the back yet. Made some good saves. The jib was labeled wrong in the bag and thankfully we noticed before we started hoisting. Some moron wrote ‘Tack’ on the Clew end of the sail. I noticed the problem when I ran the tape. I clipped the bag of the spinnekar backwards and noticed it right before the set. It only took about 10 seconds to reset.
I did a quick re-pack of the spinnekar and it came out twisted. It was just so damn hot down below that I wanted to get it done quickly. I need to stop and take the time and run two tapes instead of one. I got to spike the spinnekar for the final take down. It was what we were practicing last Sunday. I have to climb out to the end of the pole and stick a fid into the shackle and the spinnekar pops off. Everyone else gets the sail down and all I have to worry about is getting my butt back on the boat without falling off. It works out pretty well. We came in 4th. Overall it is a good showing this series for the new boat.
You can follow our progress by going here http://www.diyc.org/ and looking for the boat called ‘Wired.’ Until I get better pictures, here is the best I have.
Note: we need more rubber bands for spinnekar packing and we need a longer takedown line on the reaching chute.
May 10th, 2006
When I was growing up, the last thing I ever wanted to do was get married. As I went through life this was a constant theme in the back of my mind. I think it was even responsible for ending a pretty decent relationship. I never really understood why one would want to get married to someone. Until now.
Last year, after getting out of a pretty harsh long-term relationship and dabbling in the dating scene I made a promise with myself to just stop looking for Ms Right and just have fun. A week after I did that I met Chel. We both weren’t looking for anything serious and it was perfect. There were no expectations so I presented myself to her as raw as I ever was. I wasn’t going to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I didn’t hold back in my opinions or what I had to say. It clicked. A few weeks after that first run-in we headed to the Bahamas for a long weekend. I couldn’t find any cheap flights out of Tampa but I could out of Ft. Lauderdale, yet it was a 4 hr drive. Doing the drive was the best thing to happen to me. (Well, the second thing. The first thing was when the ex broke up with me.) We had four hours to talk and explore each other’s head. It was awesome and scary at the same time. Geeze, what if I started to fall in love with this chick?!? Well, that’s what happened and less then a year later I asked her to marry me. It has never felt so right.
May 6th, 2006
Yet another deadline looms for this software engineer. And therein lies the problem.
Every year on the weekend before Memorial Day, I race to [Key West->http://www.clwyc.org/KeyWest05/] on a sailboat. This year’s race falls right into the middle of a development cycle at work. My ship date for my product is June 9th. So my manager has declared that I must skip the race and concentrate on software. Well, I don’t want to let my shipmate’s down so I am working as much as possible on my stuff so that I can get ahead of the game. Hopefully, when it comes around, I will be getting a few days off to go racing.
So, I am at work. On a Saturday. Again. The good thing is starting this year I get paid overtime. Well, I get paid straight time for any hours I work over 46 to 66 hours. So, I can get an extra 20 hours a week in overtime if I need to.
And at 10 minutes to 4:00 on the 6th day of May, 2006, my software runs bug free. It’s a real-time, unencoded audio amp with 12 channels and 6 servers on it. I’ll save that for later.
May 5th, 2006
I guess this thing is on.
