Too Much Stuff

Excess Equipment For Sale

Marantz PMD 660 Professional digital stereo handheld solid state recorder with 32g compact flash memory, 5volt ac power converter and USB 6 to 4 output to connect with computers or audio studio mixers. Twin XLR microphone inputs with phantom power capability, 3.5mm line in and 3.5mm line out for headphones or speakers. 2 internal microphones and internal speakers.

User Manual, 32g compact flash card, 5v power pack included. Wiired remote available b ut n ot included.

There is a steep narrow and extremely poorly lit bridge between analog audio Island, a decrepit yet comfortable place I thought I would always inhabit and the digital mainland where audio road isn't anything I could recognize. Oh lord I hates to see me go.

Panasonic AVCCAM M70   condenser shotgun microphone with phantom power and XLR cable. High dynamic range, ultra directional. Wind screen foam blimp included.

I didn't know what a trail of tears the purchase of this thing would entail. But it is a helluva nice microphone and hope to be able to use it some day.

Panasonic AG-DV2000 digital video recorder and editing deck for digital videotape. Highly complex professional editing station with audio mixing capabilities. Outputs to Firewire, DVI mini tape or to VHS tape. Inputs from cameras or other VHS devices, microphones or from audio sources, digital or analog.

There is a wire connection not included that will turn the controller into a wired remote so you can concentrate on your monitors while you make editing decisions and give editing commands to the processors.

Before computer editing, this was the top of the line for editing videotape, working with a plethora of input modes and output formats, it will find and isolate and mark input clips, mark and output selected clips, mix and overdub audio tracks for all or part of the project

Manual, power cable, included.  Remote control extension cord available but not included. 

in the 3 am hour this seemed like a good idea to edit video without a computer, and this machine was the answer to my rebellious heart.

Paltex Abner switcher deck for videotape, allows simple A-or-B editing functions when hooked up to two cameras or recorders for input and a third for output. Mark in and mark out functions, pre-roll cushion functions to get the reels up to speed before the dub.

they called it the Abner because that is what it is, an A-or-B switcher to go from one video source or another source to edit into a single outputter I paid 18 bucks and shipping for it, still shrinkwrapped behind my bed under the window.

Lot of 2 Sony Trinitron PVM-8041Q color studio/field monitors. Full function monitors for full control of both chroma and luminence and white balance, blue-only  balance. 12 volt batteries are available but not included

Features include: 250 TV lines, beam current feedback circuit, comb filter for NTSC, component inputs (Y/R-Y/B-Y or RGB or Y/C), external sync or sync on green, underscan, pulse cross, blue only, tally, AC/DC operation, front panel gain and bias controls, rack mountable, speaker, metal cabinet, worldwide TV standard (NTSC, PAL, SECAM, and NTSC 4.43), carrying handle. 5 rack units high.

Nice goddamned machines, these are, and the reason I love Sony electronics. I watched Jane Pauley every morning for many years, and Vanna White every evening on a little trini with rabbit ears. It went in the boat all over the Gulf of Mexico. These studio version rack-mountable units are even nicer than my old Trini portable

MAKE ME AN OFFER

Dont Bogart That Joint, My Friend, Replace It!

I got a bad joint. Four years ago I had an attack of bursitis in my left hip that would not go away.
One afternoon Terry dropped me off down by Powell's and I almost didn't make it home, it seemed like my leg was going to fall off, like there was a 16d nail right in the very joint of it, and I went slower and slower and limping more and more to that side, and what the fuck I finally crawled in the door two hours later. Yikes.

Check out the BLUE arrow, the right hip joint the ball is nice and uniformly round like a nice joint should be. The WHITE arrow however points to a real mess all divots and dents and pretty much chewed up magillicuddy. Guess which one I'm keeping.

Doctor Thayer the next day but he didn't know, and fucked around and another Dr poor Jim Thayer's partner Smith or Jones or whatever the fuck missed the diagnosis completely." Presents as Bursitis, pain interior, nothing helps, everything makes it worse. Does not respond to steroid injection. Device helps take weight off. " That, my friends is the classic presentation of AVN, Avascular Necrosis. Cute little Meg De Voe, second coolest MD in the whole civilized world, got it right away first time, blam, that sounds like AVN and we did Xrays and lo and behold, the inherently poor circulation of the Trochantor, the ball of the hip, results in the bone losing density and collapsing under the cartilage.
However that was three and a half years later. I spent a year leaning heavily on a cane until it sort of got better but did never heal actually remaining fucked up and painful and subject to weird twisting breakdowns and a sense of fucked-upedness that never went away. Finally I went to Meg to see if she could figure it out who sent me over to see Faye at the Phys Rehab joint up in Good Sam, little dark haired intense little cutie, I instantly had about a half a mad crush on her, anyway she took one look at the Xray and said, "Honey there's not much I can do that joint will have to be replaced, they don't even fuck around with that shit any more just cut and paste and good to go." Words to that effect.
Enter Dr Ballard down at Meridian Park.
October 21 is the date he's going to cut it off and put in a new trailer hitch and ball.
Until then I'm on long-term pain management which right now means a fuckton of Vicodin at regular intervals, which I like, but there will be consequences later on down the road.
But not right now.

Voodoo Up In Here

Last spring Maggi and I had occasion to hang on the south coast for a few days. It was pretty nice down there, and among other activities, which I think I already told you about, I managed to get lost in the woods around the Bullards Beach campground. Not really really lost, but lost enough I was damn glad I had bars on my phone so the gps worked and showed me where I was in relation to where I was supposed to be.
It took some effort to admit I fucked up.
Then, on the way backtracking to the real trail turnoff, shedding the BS oh I'm OK this goes to the same place, well, n o it doesn't, and where you come out is a fuck of a long ways over there, way farther than you think it is, girlie, wake the fuck up it is getting dark, in the midst of all this inner turmoil there, laying on the trail I had just come down unbeknownst to me was a giant gob of "old man moss" or Spanish Moss as they call it down on the bayou.
Voodoo doll material.

The snap swivel allows you to form a connection without getting twisted up in the process. On the left side of the sash there is a narrow panel of blue and red beads to keep the place in memory of times when it was necessary for the Archangels such as Michael to carry a broadsword in the fight for truth and justice.
Those times are past, and now it is safe for the green heart of glass to be worn openly.

So last night I got busy like you know I like to do, and lovingly slightly cut upon an old blanket my kid had used when he was little, and I still sleep under every night and blessedly gladly to have it there in love for the guy, anyway I got out Moms Viking sewing machine, actually a Husqvarna, and sewing up a little inch or so next to the edge so as to seal off the stuffing, I gently scissored off that extra inch to make rather like a bandage of the civil war school, a couple feet long, of printed cotton blend, to wind the voodoo doll around the stuffing of Spanish Moss all the while working with love and warmest rich intentions for peace and love and understanding in colors of greens both light and lighter, and wear worn and faded into soul shadings and reds and burgundies patterned nicely in the colors of Anaisa Pie's best friend Belie Belcan, syncretized as Michael the Archangel, righter of wrongs, friend to the downpressed and all-around good guy.
I looked in my stash and there were two of the little gold chains left from Thailand transformation journey so I hung them around there for good fortune and prosperity for the young man who kept warm by this love and who kept me warm until so many years went by.
We'll see what happens now.

Surprise, Surprise

WARNING:WALL OF TEXT!!!

Starting a discussion with the words "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about" doesn't really leave much room for a real exchange of views.

Because I do know, at least I think I do know, my subject, and to deny that at the beginning leaves my entire process of reasoning dead on the floor, devoid of credit or substance.

Why, little Jimmy, of course there is no such thing!

uh, Mom, look at your foot.

EWW what is it?

It's a land crab, Mom, like I told you.

What?

A land crab. They don't have them in Coquille, but we're in Sumatra now, and they are all over the place.

(fainting noise offstage)

Enough nonsense.

The position as I understand it is

1 It's too dangerous

2 The pipeline is illegal

3 Fracking is immoral.

1. It's Too Dangerous
The discussion around point number one raises some very good objections. The opponents term the possible destructive failure of the physical plant a low-probability high impact event. True, the destructive event would be very very unacceptably destructive. Ugly. Dead people everywhere.

Too close to population centers. Less than 2 miles from the plant to Sunset middle school where my son the highly educated and sophisticated liberal progressive did his 6th and 7th grade. This is the best objection. But, if  you must insist, and they should insist, they could make the builders pay to move the schools and if the opponents would get with the program they could make that happen. There's that kind of money in the thing. And they will pay their 1% in lieu of taxes, because there is so much money involved that it will be a cheap way to reduce the Clauswitzian "friction" of haveing this facility in operation.

Here's where we differ, and where the true believers will stop reading.

That  the probability of a destructive event is very very low, nearly out of the realm of possibility. Of all the LNG facilities around the world there has never been an explosive event involving  a whole plant. And this one will be state-of-the-art brand new, with all the safety bells and whistles that extremely big money can buy. Not because the owners give much of a rat's ass about little kids, damn their capitalistic hearts, but they do care, deeply, about their 9 billion dollars in plant costs and their untold hundred billion dollars of profit they plan to realize over the plants useful life. These folks are serious about their money, and they aren't in the habit of investing it where there is the slightest chance of catastrophic failure. They don't whitewash this shit, or kid themselves in their greed. They are far too greedy for that. They are absolutely cold-blooded about risk assessment at this scale.

The energy industry has a bad reputation from the habit of BP and other -penny-pinching actors of fucking around with safety at their extraction facilities, but when they aggregate the product you get such a density of value that the gloves come off and the reading glasses go on and some careful thinking gets done. It becomes a different animal.

The thing the opponents don't grock, and I do, is the scale of this fucker. 6 to 9 billion dollars for the plant. The biggest industrial installation in the state's history. Bigger than the Intel plant in Hillsboro.

And that number is what I trust to be very well taken care of.

So even if that fact, and my extension of it into the above argument fails to convince you to support this project, let it be a cold comfort to  you after the thing is built. If there is one thing the big money boys are careful about protecting, it is their investment. Stash the baby with the gold and you will not be far wrong.

It was said that my position is nostalgia. "If North Bend could only be like it was." I say North Bend because I am a total chauvinist about the town. I don't give a shit about Coos Bay the town. I care about the bay, and my town North Bend, and only then about Coos Bay the town because you can't deal with North Bend without also dealing with Coos Bay. But if you think I want Coos Bay/North Bend to be like it was in the glory days you are much mistaken.  Let me disabuse you of that notion. Far from it. See for yourself.

Coos Bay/North Bend, back in the day when the timber industry was booming, was dirty, and noisy, and stinky, and crude, and destructive. Populated by people who were destructive and rude and ignorant to an astonishing degree, or culture-bound and straight-laced and as prejudiced about virtually everything as it is humanly possible to be. Provincial would be a compliment. Paleolithic is more like it. To think I would ever want those days back is an insult. I hated that the mountains were being raped and the carcass sold off and taken away and the gut piles stinking to heaven.
I want a new industrial style. One that is interconnected. I want an economy that is not based on kissing tourist ass. An economy that does not depend on perpetuating the myths of the white-haired generations. One that can hold its head up and who has to think through the working day and who says at the end of the day I do work that is a man's work, not a servant's. I want there to be people who can afford shit, who want to make their houses nice, and can pay the property taxes without pain, who will vote for a better library and for a new school. People who live in a town that will kick your ass, figuratively speaking, if you get out of line, not a town that will cower in fear that you might take your Winnebago someplace else, where something besides a gambling den is the big employer. A town that has  self respect.
Savvy?

The second safety topic is Fukishima and the subduction zone. Yes that would be bad. Very bad. Unacceptable. How do you calculate the probability? And how does that relate to the possibility?

I don't know.

I relate to it in a way that is open to criticism. I don't know, and I chose to ignore the chance of natural disaster since the danger cannot be calculated in a meaningful way. Climate science is one thing, but this geologic activity prediction is not climate science. Past occurrences are predictive in a general way, but the science is not as well understood, and there are many variables that are unknown. Why we haven't had a 9000 year quake in 13000 years is not fully understood, and the raw horse-race probability of the thing would lead  you to think the fucker was a bit overdue, but whatever it is that has held it off for 4000 years may just as easily hold it off for another 4000 or it might happen tomorrow.

But you cant stay in the house your whole life because it might rain or you might get hit by a bus. Not if you want a life. You have to accept some risk. If you cant tolerate that risk move to Kansas. Oh, right, tornados.

I say build the plant.

If you make your living off tourists then you won't like the next part of my position.

For the first 100 years of its existence, the Coos Bay area's economy was extractive. Selling mother earth and her products. Coal, then Timber, then Fish.

I hang out in a small boat on the bay and I do not object to the presence of commercial oyster patches because we have all got to get along and people who work hard make a modest living thereby.

I don't object to the fish plants cutting up the flowers of the ocean, the beautiful fishes, although I would like to see the process become more sustainable, and it is, too slowly in my view, but still, okay, go ahead and catch the fish and sell them, it is good to eat and it is good to work and it is good to live in an honest world of work.

I like going up the river into the mountains especially in the summer time to walk in the forest or along the streams and enjoy the shade and the greenery and swim in the clean cool water.

I even enjoy mushroom hunting in the Coos County Forest even though that forest is actively managed and my mushroom patches may be gone when I get there when that part of the trees get their turn at the saw. The place is beautifully and carefully managed like the entire Coast Range forest could and should be which would allow for a generous harvest that would feed a substantial sawmill industry with all the attendant sideshows of trains and ships and barges and saw shops and Emporiums to sell Hickory shirts and Roameos.

The key is balance. The thing  that was utterly lacking in the original race to rape the forest of its best and brightest giants and those are gone and the culture that took them is gone too and I say good fucking riddance.

I just read "Hard Times in Paradise" by a guy named Robbins about the end of the timber industry in Coos Bay and let me tell you that was some depressing shit right there. I lived through it, and got over it, taking my consolation from the way the town smelled better after, and the fucking clanking and roaring from the mills all night long was gone and the bigass log trucks with the smoke and roar are gone and good fucking riddance,

The extractive economy is dead, and I don't miss it and I don't want it back.

So in order to remain a town the people need a few jobs and the obvious choice is to  become a "transfer payments" economy bolstered by the tourists that come in the summer to enjoy the ocean and the forest now that the stupid ugly mean and destructive loggers are gone. Transfer payments is a way of saying retirees that get their money in the mailbox. Its a putdown.

Or find a new industry.

I feel strongly the spiritual difference between a town that has an industry and a town that lives off tourists and retirees. I prefer the industry even though it is less esthetically pleasing. There is a spiritual strength and an honesty in making something, or facilitating the making of something, however that falls out, a difference to the serving of people that pass through. It has to do with the primary process of creating the things of life. The farmer has a primary relationship with food, the carpenter with shelter. The banker has a very abstracted and many times removed relationship with the stuff of life. I was a banker once, and I felt like a ghost. A Marxist would say I was a parasite. Then I learned carpentry, and I felt good about living, and I respected myself, because I knew about the human need for shelter and was a part of that process at a primary level.

So when I say and industrial town feels different than a tourist town this is what I am talking about.

And I say the towns of the South Coast have a choice to make, to be extractive, or abstract servers, or industrial, I choose the latter, and I say the fact that this shit represents and investment of a shit ton of money and that these  bozos that put this together would take much better care of 9 billion dollars than they would of their own kids.

So it is not that I want the old days back, far from it. But the only thing about the old days that made it endurable was that we had a primary relationship with the elements of human life. My position is that the spiritual honesty of that primary relationship that results from an industrial economy is desirable to the degree that the risk of this plant is acceptable because it is lower than the opponents think it is

2.Eminent Domain.

The law has been used plenty of times for economic gain. Sure, they can't take your land for Joe blow to build  a tire store, but they can and do take land to build highways and airports. They even use it for real estate developments, though I think that's wrong but the point is the use of eminent domain to build industrial infrastructure is well established. Yes it is different than the import argument, public good, we all need this gas for energy,  but it is well within the established uses to build industrial capacity that provides jobs and tax benefits. SO that, even if I also think it is stretching things too far and I don't like it one bit and if it was my land I would fight it but it's not illegal. They do that shit all the time.

3. Fracking is Immoral.

You bet it is. You got my full agreement on that. If you argue that we shouldn't handle the fruits of the immoral tainted tree then you shouldn't have earned comfy livings exporting the logs of vast clearcuts. All you longshoremen shut the fuck up.

Fracking is on its way out. Not altogether, but there seems to be a growing pushback and a gathering storm about the practice and I predict a long and bitter and possibly bloody fight about it in the near future, Especially if we get a second straight 8 years of progressive or at least Democratic government.

I think there's a pushback about fracking that is just starting. I think it will get much bigger and stronger and bloodier. It adds to the following tendency a reluctance to export natural gas at all, in the backstage bullshit that surrounds this stuff, a strong motive of NOT exporting LNG because there are industrial uses for it as a raw material, not just the substantial need for it as a source of energy.

Our industry has been hamstrung forever by the cost of LNG both as an energy source and as a raw material for fabric and pharmaceuticals and plastics. So now that is no longer a scarce commodity the domestic industrial users are saying hey not so fast lets see how much of this stuff we need here domestically before we ship it offshore to our industrial competitors.

Which leads us to a fourth objection that the CAVE (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) people don't know about yet, because they think they know all the material while in reality they are chasing their own tails.

4. Export policy
This objection has a LOT of traction behind the scenes.

The position of LNG as a plentiful resource is new thinking. It hasn't yet been fully grokked by the leadership of industry and policymakers. The Obama administration has been extremely, remarkably slow to develop a policy toward export. They have issued 2 TWO Only permits for export plants, one in Texas and one in Louisiana. There are 15 or 16 applications in the hopper awaiting decision. It is not a done deal.

In fact, I expect that only 1 or 2 more will be issued in by the Obama administration. There is a lot of pressure to NOT export and to let the American industrial system see how much of the stuff it can absorb at these cheap rates, because we desperately need some kind of an industrial advantage in the competition for manufacturing contracts and this is a rare opportunity for American industry to  get a leg up.

3dWorldTour conclusion
So, surprise surprise, I will be very surprised if the Jordan Cove Project will ever get FERC approval, for the same reason that the import version got its approval so shockingly quickly. Industrial demand for cheaper LNG.

In Loving Memory

Mom passed away last Saturday afternoon of just plain old age and wore-outedness. She was comfy in her bed holding her eldest son Bob's  hand with her right, and her youngest daughter Marilyn's hand with her left. She just slowed down and then stopped. The room was clean and well-lighted filled with little objects of comfortable use or beloved decoration.

 We had her memorial service yesterday down in North Bend at the First Christian Church on upper Sherman Avenue, the church all us kids grew up loving and being desperately bored by, the church that represented so much in Mom's life, social and spiritual for more than 60 years. Many of her friends were there, many were awaiting her in that home in the sky, or not, as the case may actually be.
She had such a good long run I can hardly be sad. May we all lead such lives of discovery and refinement and forgiveness.
They buried her the day before, on a hill in the sunshine, next to our Dad, dear long-gone Bob, and very near her latest and second only loveing companion and husband Alan while we all stood around and watched as the serious and well-trained workmen with their precise equipments carted and levered and filled just so.
 I will miss her. I already do, but I have to say also, that I feel extraordinarily free as well, and we shall see whether or not this is a good thing to feel.

Mom

I'm on my way to Ashland tomorrow. Mom is on her way off this coil of sorrow, this vale of tears.

She's comfy. There's not really anything that hurts or that is bothering her, or that can be fixed. Really there isn't anything that even needs fixing. She has a very nice room, and people that love her to check in from time to time, and help her with a sip of this or that or a little spoonful of something yummy. She's just old, at the end of a very long and well played run.

New Process

Bin Laden's Last Facebook Post

Last week I took the boat up the Willamette towards town to see the fireworks. It was so noisy and loud and full of drunks and speedboat wake downtown that I turned right around and went back to Swan Island, the farthest south end on the beach to set up my camp. And I did see the fireworks, the very tops of the colorful highest rockets as they esploded way over the buildings downtown.

The second evening there was an enormous and quite oblivious or maybe extra-hungry beaver that swam up to my camp and proceeded to gather and consume cottonwood shoots for dinner. I will try to get the video to up load after I get home next week. It's a hoot.

Let us see if this new dropbox process will work with the massive panorama I took with my phone over the 4th of July camping trip down to Swan Island- not a spectacularly romantic spot for a vacation but in its own way a very nice place to camp. Especially considering it is well within the urban industrial area I love so much, and that the floating-homeless-camp boaters have so thoroughly fucked up Willamette cove.

I did not actually melt, unlike some.

Of course I celebrated the end of Oregon's rainy season with a 2-day camping trip to Hayden Island.
It rained all night both nights, but during the days there was enough time between showers to get things set up.
I had a lot of new gear this year, like a new tent, inexpensive but large for its price range and a real 3-season setup, speaking of setup, Of course I did not find the assembly instructions until it was up, which makes me ask how come they put the instructions in the bottom of the bag, why not put them in last so you find them before?. I just figured they must have been left in the box it came in and were still home on the floor with the box I haven't yet thrown away.
Once I figured out that you put the poles through the front short sleeve ,then through the back long center sleeve and then through the other short front sleeve, so the poles cross and recross like the arches on the Sauvie Island bridge would if you dropped acid and spent a long time looking at it, but the tent sprang up into shape and the full rain fly fitted just right and I didn't get so much as a drop of rain inside.

Sand, another story.
It being wet the sand clung to everything especially feet so every time I went in and out I brought a about a pound and a half of sand, so the little whisk broom I got out of the dumpster at the marina became my most cherished possession.
Self-inflating sleeping pads seem to take a bit of getting used to, adding or letting out tiny amounts of air makes a big difference, and I slept OK considering I was scared to take a sleeping pill the first night, then terrified even worse as herds of marauding deer crunched searching through my campsite for edibles all night long, I'm not kidding, in the morning the hoofprints were everywhere. I dont know why it gave me such a scare and re-scare all night, I know they are herbivores and won't really attack you but my feelings didn't get the memo and I laid there all night terrorized unmercifully. Until I did fall asleep gladly and slept until the sun was well up.
I say sun metaphorically, really the rain became visible was all, but eventually it did stop and I went for a long walk on the beach.

Where I found this guy.

This is the reason I did not go swimming at all. A hundred yards up the beach this seal lion has been dead so long that its skeleton has fallen out of the billowing shroud of skin and anchored the whole mess to the bottom.

I poked it with a stick, thinking maybe I could get the skull  and I could collect me some teeth but the bones aren't even in there any more. That part at the top of the photo that looks like the face is not the face. I don't know what it is. It is as if the whole thing has melted in some chemical vat or something. I had to wade out there to get within stick-poking distance, and my threshold for gore-suppression wasn't as elastic as I had hoped and I got grossed out sooner than science would have demanded. I am not a scientist, and I didn't get many answers but I did wonder what killed this thing.
Back in the 60s a dead sea lion washed up on Bastendorf Beach and laid there stinking all the summer of 64, so in the spring our surf club dug a big hole and buried it, but 2 weeks later a big storm rolled in and dug it up again, and it stank up the summer of 65 as well. It vanished that winter.
I will check it out later this summer and tell you if it is still there or not., but until then as far as I am concerned the beaches of Hayden Island are closed for swimming.

Bye Bye Sweet Charlotte

My pal Charlotte is moving back to Mill Valley, California this month. I will miss her.

When a sincere, lively, smart and sweet young person pays attention to me and listens to what I have to say it makes me want to be very careful to think before I speak, and that is a valuable and rare influence in my life.

Catching up Before it gets too hot to Post

I gotta catch this thing up so I'm throwing some unrelated events together with some photos. I fully expect to be very busy quite soon now that it is summer and time for actual boating.

Some people can only go to the plan. Some, like my pal, like to see where that little road goes.

When I took this picture from a little wide spot along the road that goes down to the harbor in Port Orford Oregon I did not know that there was a little house for sale right behind me. $79k. Makes me wish I wasn't quite so humble in my life-plan. I would like to see this out my front window every morning, even with a highway in between. I would not, however, like to freeze balls when the north wind blows 40 mph all blessed summer long.

Maggi and I took a trip down to the South Coast for a 12-step (anonymity) convention in Coos Bay, after which we went on down to Gold Beach, returning to Bullards beach where we spent a restful night in a cute and comfy little yurt with a skylight and bunkbeds and quiet mossy trees all around.

Very comfy and relatively cheap at $30 a night and you can cook on the campfire and sleep on a bed.

Back in Portland I spent the next two weeks painting and adzing and generally messing about in the boatyard getting ready for the new boating season.

Under a thin veneer of mud and rotten bark beat a heart of oak. Simple, stout, and free, rescued from a throwaway pile mouldering under the pines above the gully.

Made with my trusty sharp as the dickens shipwright's hand-axe a new crossing mast-partners out of a crooked piece of tree.

Look at the photos above and below and tell me if  you see what this rotten old log turned into. I love my little hand-axe and my little folding saw. I feel like I could recreate civilization by myself if I had these and a forest.

 Then I bolted that thing on there with a  half-dozen galvanized bolts and good to go. The other one I made, pretty as it was, simply lacked the bomb-proof brutal strength to abide in that role of getting beat to shit in any weather and be stumbled and fallen upon with out shift or complaint. This new chunk of oak does all that and laughs.

Upshot being that she was ready to go in the water this past week.

Sorry about the lack of pixels, a screen capture from a HD video is pretty much Low Def, still you get the, ahem, picture.

Nice.

Phone

This picture was taken with my cell phone. I think it might be the best photograph I have ever taken. I even edited it in the -phone before I sent it over here to 3d world headquarters to brag it up on. There was one, taken with a film camera,  back in the day of the shrimp boats coming into Rockport Harbor on the Texas Gulf Coast at sunset that was pretty good. But it is long lost so there's no way, really, of knowing.
This version, edited in the HTC MyTouch 4g Slide, lost 90% of it pixels in the one edit, going from 900k plus to just 91k in that one edit.

This second copy I sent to my computer in the first phone version and cropped it a little bit to center things up same as before and it is 851,000 pixels. Now, I dojn't know how you feel about such things, but I like me some pixel density. You can compare and see how you feel about it.

Then I really lost my shit and cropped it again. It only has 251k pixels left but I think it is the better for the reduction in excess verbiage.

Not bad for a cell phone photo

Bad RAM; (UPDATE)

UPDATE: There was a note in my mailbox Tuesday when I got home from my trip to the South Coast with Maggi over the weekend. We took an early holiday to go to an NA convention at the Red Lion in Coos Bay and fuck around camping and driving around farther south. We even took the two-rivers tour to Glide but that is another story. Anyway I finally figured out it must be my new RAM back from the mfg and sure enough it was.
It was easy enough to install once I got my nerves to calm down, and for good measure I put the CMOS jumper back where it is supposed to go, which was the hardest thing, I had to look it up slowly and carefully you do not want to put that little fucker on the wrong 2 of the 3 available pins.
It is weird, though, not having any blue-screen crashes at all. I got kind of used to it, I guess.



Eventually I got plenty tired of rebooting from the frequent and inevitably inconvenient blue screen crashes of my new computer. Pissed me off.
So I started trying to find out why the fuck this brand new $900 machine just would not stay lit.
I learned how to access the event viewer, and what the results mean, and I found a program called blue screen viewer which kind of analyzes the crash dump and summarizes the findings. Crash dump, when the machine crashes it remembers what it was doing at the time so folks who know more than me can go in there and find out why it had to shut itself down. Interestingly, crashing is what it does so it doesn't hurt itself by trying impossible things or doing two things at once or really breaking anything, so it stops working and reports what happened.
Result being that it said the problem wasn't something the user (me)  did, or what the software did, but something in the lizard-brain wasn't adding up. They call it the kernel. Fine.
Blue screen viewer said it probably was a matter of bad memory storage.

The red part of the screen is the record of bad sectors in the memory module. It can run into the thousands of bad ones. I had 42 bad in this pass, while that's not a lot it is far too many. Your rig won't run with any at all.

So I learned another diagnostic, Memtest86, which is a weird program you load onto a DVD and reboot, so the system loads a simple operating program which writes a string of coded numbers into your RAM and then goes  back and reads the numbers in comparison to what it wrote  so you can tell if the memory is storing the right shit and reading the same shit it wrote.
Turns out, yes and no. I have 8 g of RAM, two 4g sticks. I took one out and ran Memtest86 on the other one. Bad. I ran 3 passes, and they all said there were bad sectors the first had 42 bad, the second 65 bad and the third got to a hundred even.
The other stick, to my surprise,  was OK.
G Skill makes a lot of memory devices, including this RAM, and they have a bit of a reputation for spotty quality control. On the upside, they were perfectly fine issuing me a RMA number, so I sent on the bad one and hopeful soon I will have a replacement. This computer runs fine on 4g of RAM but it is kind of weird not ever crashing. I am eager to get the new module in there, though, editing HD video takes lots of RAM so my video projects are all on hold. Pity, because I just got some new software, Sony Vegas Pro, and I'd like to try it out.

Trending Now

Laying in bed trying to sleep because I had to get up at 4:30 to go to Salem I was wondering what the bitchen new video, HD by the way, would look like on here, the blogness of it all. So I got up at 310 or so, not to Yuma.
Turns out between the viciously unstable Graphics processor and the size of hd video files I'm pretty much out of luck and so are you.
But I assure y ou here at 3d world headquarters we take this shit seriously and are working night and day to fix this fucker.

Last year when I painted the bottom I didn't have the energy to fuck around getting the waterline. So I took the easy way out. Painted the bottom strake and called it good.

So here are a couple of stills to tide you over. They are twice as densely pixellated as the other photos from my phone camera, and more than twice the pixel density of my other Sony.
Alas, they are not 1080P HD video.
I know, thin gruel indeed.

SO I used my brother's Bushnell Laser level to strike the waterline. Hanging masking tape on a curve is a motherfucker. I have yet to decide if it was worth it. Popoular opinion seems to be trending yes.

My Obsessions Develop An Expensive New Twist

OK, so a year ago I got a new phone because it had a bitchin 8 MP camera. I paid way too much for the phone but I had to have such a high-end camera.
Then, because I am an ignorant slob, this bitchen high-end developed a quirk, the fucker wouldn't focus where I wanted it to. You are supposed to tap the touch-screen where you want it to focus and voila whirrr le focus. Not.

Without the butter, my phone takes gorgeous photographs does it not?

So I wanted a camera you could manual focus. Expensive. The guy downtown tat the camera store was all "Oh this Canon is only $300 dirt cheap but obviously you are too ignorant or too poor to see that get the fuck out of my store."
Ebay, DSLR Cameras, drool all over the keyboard. Older 10 MP DSLR Sony Alpha with 2 lenses around $200. There's a 14.2 MP alpha a hundred bucks more, nice stuff. I have a Sony cyber-shot 7 MP point-and-shoot, but you can't tap the screen and tell it where, and you can't manually focus. But I like Sony stuff it is cool and strong and well-thought-out. Old-fashioned brand loyalty. I have it.

When I saw the DSC-HX100V with  a 30x zoom and manual focus for 200 plus change I jumped on that shit mos' skosh' as David Haysbert used to say in the CBS drama "The Unit" which they dropped after 9/11 but to this day my favorite military drama ever. I digress. ( He's the Allstate guy with the comforting voice.
Let me say one more thing about this camera: 16.2 MP. And 1080p video at 30 fps. That's two things. So what? Because fuck you, that's what.

Today I got the tripod of all tripods off of Craigslist, Bausch and Lomb Masters, the big one, you can't even buy them any more and I stole it from a farmer in the throes of grief etc nice deal Oh pipe down!
 I like to take high-resolution photographs with my high-resolution camera and look at them on the high-resolution monitor of my brand new high-performance computer with the dedicated 2G  AMD 6670 graphics processor.

It is springtime here in Northwest Portland. All the ornamental fruit trees that line all the streets are in beautiful burgeoning full-throated bloom.

And now I can photograph the shit out of the best time of year. And then summer which is also the best time of year.

I still use the auto-focus. I have learned that much

And if you have an expensive high-end android phone with an expensive camera built-in, don't eat toast dripping with butter and then drip the melted butter on your tee-shirt, especially if you are going to try and clean the tiny little lens of your expensive high-resolution phone-camera with the part of your tee-shirt covered by a big blob of cold congealing butter. No camera in the world will focus through that shit, and you might spend hundreds of dollars on new camera gear before you figure it out.

All Winter Long

Boy do I feel weird right now. The sail is finished.

 All done. I still have shit to do to set up the sailing rig but the sail making is over, the canvas work is all done, the mast hoops are bent and seized with marline to seven of the fifty grommets, the reefing patches, cringles and crow's-foot points are all on there, and all the earrings are where and how they are supposed to be, with keckling all complete.

First I bent the shaved-down-flat cedar branch a little then I boiled it in a stew-pot on the stove and then put on my gloves and hot-bent it some more and then when it was like I wanted it I  seized the ends with fine copper picture wire. Out of the twelve I bent, only one broke.

There were 48 grommets when I started marling the mast hoops.  You would think they would be pretty much everywhere you could possibly need them. You would think. #s 49 and 50 hold the uppermost and lowest hoops. Oh well.

I fitted the mast to the sail, and it fits. I was worried last fall that the sail would be too big but it is not, every step it shrank, all the folding and seaming and hemming let alone three hot washes and two  boilings in the big galvanized tanning washtub.

To think I was worried the mast would prove too short. Hah.

The snotter I made last fall is way too short, but I have some 6 strand round sinnet that will do just fine once I seize an eye into one end. The halyard is the one I dipped in the pine-tar/linseed oil last fall. It smells really nice now and it happily is no longer sticky at all;. Nice stuff, and this summer I may treat more of the little ropes with that stuff.

I think I could have got away with the 10 footer for the sprit. However I really like how this one made from a 12 foot  #2 KD  Doug Fir 2x4 came out so fuck it. The sprit is the smaller pole angled off to the right to hold up the upper outer corner of the sail. The snotter is a little rope that holds the sprit and ties it loosely to the mast.

I marked out where the halyard cleat goes, as well as the down-haul thumb-cleat, and the two snotter thumb-cleats  one on the mast and one on the sprit.

Supposedly the pattern I painstakingly made out of cardboard will ensure that this thing snaps right into place so I can slide the mast into its receiver. We shall see.

I have still a couple of things to do like arranging for a steering oar, and possible some sort of a lee board, but that is another project altogether. I'm done with this one. Its a good thing, too. I'm bout half sick of sail making and all that type of nit-picky bullshit and especially:
 fuck grommets.
I'm very happy but like I said before, I do feel weird.

More Movie Please!

This took a while. Figuring out the movie maker in Windows 7 was annoying at best, but it works OK I guess. I don't like it though, there are things you can't do in this one that made the Vista movie maker more versatile. But I have VLC and maybe at some point I will get into it.

One thing, though, don't bother with the fullscreen option. There's not that many pixels and you really don't want to spread them out.

After All

Here's some raw video the day after I finally got my new computer working.

 Warning:Excessive Camera Movement!

Samson Post

The very first time I took Felicity Jane out of the marina I got bounced by the wake of  a great big catamaran motor yacht doing 25 in a no-wake zone. I was tied to the fuel dock and the bounce pulled the cleat right out of the foredeck like pulling a candle off a birthday cake. And that was where you were supposed to make fast the anchor rode. Not stout.

Why you would place a cheap plastic ventilator in the middle of the foredeck is beyond me. I broke it jumping off the housetop trying to corral a flying jib halyard. Luckily the hole was perfect for my plan.

That day I made up my mind to have a real Deep-Sea Mariner Samson Post. At first I was going to run it all the way down to the keel like the one on our old wooden cutter "First Light". Then I got the idea of making a giant shipwright's clamp, to sandwich a big chunk of foredeck between two slabs of ironbark bolted hella tight together and drilled out to receive the post.
Back in the day even small ships had a slab or panel of heavy plank arranged on the deck inboard of the hawse to land the anchor and wash her down before catting overside. Inevitably scuffed and splintered all to blazes, when it got too bad the carpenter would just tear it up, heave it over, and build a new one out of dunnage. Called it a billboard.

In the dark ages this stuff was thought to contain a mystical life-essence  because the sawdust turns green on exposure to the air. There's a fine-woodworking lumber store over by East Burnside. They wanted $30 for this 4x4  Lignum Vitae lathe turning blank.

Portland is not a bad place to find the right kind of gummy hardwood the stuff we used to call Ironbark back in the fishing fleet on the coast.
 God only knows what it really was, there are a hundred exotic tropical hardwoods that fit the requirement, hard as the dickens and impervious to fungus even when soaking wet all the whole year round, except for those 12  dry weeks in the Oregon Summer.

My 3/8 drive Ryobi could barely swing the 31/2 inch hole saw, but even this 8/4  Padouk, heavy and gummy as it is, eventually let me through. It took some doing but wasn't too crooked to finally use. I did remember to turn it halfway and come from the other side. That helped.

The day I put it together I nearly got in a fistfight over a chunk of Padouk that one of the locals took a shine to, under my very nose, like a bad-mannered hound will steal your sandwich if you set it down anywhere he can reach.

 The deck plank aka the billboard , I think it is Ipe, is only 3 quarters so it went easy here are all the wood parts nearing their final shape

 I came off the fore-deck with a carpenter's hatchet that wasn't as sharp as it is now but the fellow saw the light and gave up trying to take a chunk that he said was his and I knew was not. Some guys will not listen to a chick. It's like we're not even talking.

The bill-board fitted in place around all the stanchion brackets and the hawsepipe the cardboard template I made actually worked, which kind of surprised me. Sometimes they don't especially on boats  where nothing is level, plumb or square and bevels n two or three planes.

These beaver stick springers held the backing plate just fine while I drilled and pounded up on the foredeck.During the trial assembly I bored a  1/2 inch hole horizontally from the port side through the receiver block, the shaft of the post and out through the side of the block to starboard. Laying on my back with stinky sawdust raining down all over the place. But once I had everything bedded and assembled, a 10"x1/2 inch hex-head bolt cinched up tight really held everything solid as a bomb-proof rock.

I bored six half-inch holes in three pairs all down the length of the billboard. Four of them caged around the post, and one pair as far forward as the receiving block's forward end. Then half-inch stainless carriage bolts bedded in 4200 with washer stacks to spread the load a bit, and some sweaty gruntwork getting the nuts tight. I believe the six bolts grip the foredeck plenty tight.

Stainless carriage bolts and plenty of them clamped all the hardwood plenty tight. That's just plain brass rod for the ears.  Alaska Copper and Brass had some very expensive silicon bronze but they only sell 12 footers. I suppose I could have made all my bolts out of the stuff but I'm not much of a machinist. And I don't have any machines.

The actual fashioning of the parts didn't take very long, really, an afternoon or two down in the cabin in a spate of foul weather. I get a real kick out of this mariner stuff. It's a lot of fun, and I feel a lot safer swinging on the anchor when the tide shifts and really starts to run.
I hang a six inch snatch block from the bow pulpit for a fairlead to keep the chain and rode from chafing on the rail. Works pretty good.
And when I am tied up to the fuel dock I don't worry much when the power cruisers strut their stuff. This here setup is plenty stout.

I set a second little piece of light mahogany on the bow half  for a chafing board, under some Manila pudding. The post has an epoxy fillet all around where it sets through the deck and around the ears. I bedded the plank and the bolts in generous amounts of 4200. I only had to reset one of the bolts that leaked. After that nary a drop. And that post isn't going anyplace.

The installation took most of a Saturday.

Short And Sweet

Where the little tiny label says "CHA FAN" is where there's some power coming OUT of the board. This is not where you put some more power INTO the board. Who knew?

We got some LEDs and some fans running and the message on the screen says "Dude, where's my OS?"

I'm such a rebel.

Hubris UPDATED

Wrote this letter to the computer guy last night. I haven't sent it yet.

HI Geoff;
I got my wonderful beautiful new computer home OK the other night, and I opened it up to look at it and one thing led to another and now I am afraid I have made a series of extremely ill-advised and quite possibly destructive mistakes.
You see, Geoff, I'm a kind of an artist. I'm creative. I am busy all the time making stuff. I needed a sail for my traditional wooden boat, a Grand Banks Dory just like they used to use in the codfishing industry back east so ai got dsome books and I am making a traditional old-time canvas sail with all the lashings and reefing-lines and everything just like they were in the old days, and you know I make all my own ropes. A sail needs a mast, so I got a piece of salvaged 3x4 douglas fir 12 feet long and I made it into a mast using hand tools in the old-time sparmakers fashion and it, and the sail and the ropes are beautiful and highly functional. And I needed a new flannel nightie so I made a beautiful warm pink flannel nightie with lace and ribbon trim and it is a nice thing. I'm teaching myself how to make a really good county-fair-worthy apple pie. I needed a case for my netbook, so I took apart an old leather jacket and made a padded netbook sachet. A couple of years ago I made a Lynx-fur parka with walrus tooth toggle buttons, and I made a pair of matching pigskin gloves lined with Lynx fur.
My point is I make nice  stuff, complicated stuff, and I try to do it the right way.  I study up on how the big boys do it and I put in the time and the effort and learn technique. I do my homework.
Apparently not enough homework in this instance.
So there are some things I had been studying and thinking about to do with cabling and the arrangement of the drives and the harness and just the sheer hands-on. I wanted not only ownership, but authorship.
I  wanted more of a hand in the doing of it. As you may recall I said something about wanting to do the final assembly. I should have left well enough alone, but  I went too far. way too far.
I'm going to tell you exactly what I did even though I know now, and I sort of knew at the time, that I shouldn't. I feel terrible about how far in over my head I am.
I took the harness off the motherboard, and I took out the GPU. I wanted those red thumbscrews in there. I wanted to run the harness a different way. I am sorry but that is what I was thinking. I put the thumbscrews in,  and then I put the GPU back in and then I hooked up the cables, correctly, I thought, but routed the way I wanted them, and I rubber-wrapped the trunk of the harness and I made branch lines like they do and it looked beautiful. I found another black SATA cable so they are all the black ones now, 28 gauge for the SATA3 drives and 30 for the DVD.

If this were an actual rubber hose I would have black and blue marks all over my body.

I changed the run for the CPU fan and plugged it back into its proper header, as well as the case fan. I mounted another case fan in the top of the case. I had to mod it a bit to fit over the RAM but it clears them easily and I did not take the RAM out. I put that clip back on the back of the case over the expansion card slots that you said I didn't need, just because I, in my ignorance, thought it looked better that way.
And of course did something, or several somethings with predictable results.
Now I am back to no-power-up, no-POST.
I am so disappointed with myself but I cannot say I am surprised.
See, Geoff, when you plug in a wire, you know what it is and what exactly it is doing and why it is where it is and how it is. When I do it all I know is where I think it is supposed to go according to what looks like the picture on the diagram. I "know" what the drive is and does, but only by name and from what I have read. You know what it is and does by your life, education and systematic experience. And I don't mean to disrespect that, but I think I kind of did.
I have no idea where I went off the road here, and I am starting to think my worst enemy is my sense of adventure to do unknown things. I really really wanted to do this build and I did not know how little I knew about it. All these kids do this all the time and they make it look easy and fun. Well, it is fun, but not that easy, it is delicate and complicated and things have great meaning even if they look little and unimportant. There's more to this stuff than meets the eye, and I am sorry if it is insulting that somebody like me thinks they can do what you do,  without they have the education that you invested in and the hard-won experience that you have given your professional life to acquire.
Of course when it didn't even blink I took thos stupid thumbscrews out, and I took the rubber wrapping off of there.
And I would walk across hot nails and bring it and more money if you would try and fix this thing.

UPDATE: there's two little 4-pin headers way down at the bottom of the board that says CHA FAN2. There was a 4-pin mini-plug from the power supply that I thought routed the power through the board up to the actual chassis fan at the top. A separate fan circuit, or so I thought. NOT. Apparently you can plug in dozens of chassis fans to this board, which some guys do when they overclock and heat the system all to blazes. Not me. Luckily, if you make this mistake the board knows you fucked up and simply shuts down to give you an opportunity to reflect on your behavior and make deals with the gods concerning penalty and repentance.