Saturday 29 November 2008

3 Boats in 12 sqm.

We got 3 moths in the workshop today for some small repairs and modifications etc... It is a bit of a squeeze but it work out great.



The plan is to get all 3 in super working order so that next season we can concentrate on sailing and doing regattas. Not messing about with boats and rigging and trailers and covers and plodders and trolleys and wands and foils and ropes and....

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Blog worlds update on behalf of Andrew (No Blog) Brown

Well we have been asked to do an update on the blog worlds...



The new every exciting blog site on the IMCA page has made our lives
easier as judges and by this fact alone Doug is ranking high on the
list...

Luka is doing awesomely and we are just waiting for him to "rark" up
Bora about the AUS nationals then scores will go through the roof!!!
Pity about that music - starting a new job sitting near the IT
department with the music going full on still isn't a good thing - but
it is all in aid of research I suppose.

The recent spat about elitism within the Sydney sailors is a good story
and leading the charge as usual is Scott, Scott is a master of stirring
the pot just the right amount...

Bruce has been doing some amazing things and am loving all the ideas
that Phil has on his site.

Then we have the little man in England Simon, I have a little offended
of late with all the photos and renderings of his Penis and Nose
though....

Chris over there in Dubai is still ranting and raving - very
entertaining especially when he's forgotten to take his medication it
adds to the whole "madness"

The Moth Chronicles by Karl have gone a little quiet lately and only a
ting post of late so looking forward to more effort from this area.

This has left Joe and his History, Geography, political and life lessons
blog - very in depth and lots of it



The scoring right now is very close and in true Hollywood style no
scores will be let out until the final whistle the second to last day of
the Moth Sailing World Champs



Andrew Brown

Monday 17 November 2008

Shameless plug

I do not believe in shameless plugs but here is one that is worthy. A mate of mine has set up this site and frankly it is damn good. I gave him some advice which luckily he ignored and the result is impressive. It is a database of days out for animal lovers. So check it out:

http://www.animalvisit.com/

I especially love the map that you can zoom in on. I told him it would be too complicated but as I said luckily he ignored my advice.

Fat boy slim

Check out my girls:



They are both getting fixed up for next season. One however is a bit heaver than the other. After 15 years of development less is definitely more.

I am very happy that the Flashheart has gone down under and that Nick Flutter will hopefully do the next iteration of the design. This is why I wanted to do a GPL boat so that the design can evolve and bounce around. I hope to build the next iteration of Nicks design one day but for now I just want to get my girls in shape.

Friday 7 November 2008

Moth Training.

There was the idea to make a Moth training video DVD but it never happened. Rohan proposed that we should do a Training page on the IMCA site and embed YouTube videos. This I think is a great idea but unfortunately no one has got round to implementing it.

I will post up a Training page on the IMCA site but I need content. So if you have a video or some text that you wish to contribute please send me a mail. Training can be sailing techniques, rigging, launching, repairing, building your own CNC machine, how to down the tiller of doom, how to set up a blog... Content can be YouTube video, pictures and/or text, and without copy right complications.

You do not have to be an ex-world champion to contribute because the training should be for different levels from first low riding experience, to advanced racing and boat tuning. I am not going to set up a predefined table of contents because I will publish whatever I get (within reason), so please contribute what interests you, and I will try to pull it together in to a structure, so short videos on one point will be easier to structure and merge than a 10 min video trying to cover everything.

So lets see what evolves.

Tuesday 4 November 2008

Blogs, Press, Sewing machines and bits.

My people have been inundated with feedback about the new Blog Aggregator, which was 100% positive. I have fixed the network performance issues by making it update every hour so it should mostly be fast. Therefore my people have advised me to go live ASAP which I have done. Although it is hard for me to thank all the people personally for their feedback I will do it: Thanks Alan and Joe.

The Moth site did get 2700 unique users a day during the last worlds so there is a lot of users out there, however with all the rss feeds most of them are probably now computers. Unfortunately the log file is too large to download and analyse at 1.3 GB so I do not know.

I will not be writing about Austrian politics any more. There are well known Austrian comics making light of Haiders death and they have had to cancel their tour due to the threats made against them. As far as I am concerned Haider was a great man on the way home to his family after being in a cool night club when he tragically died in an accident as reported in the press here. He was certainly NOT pissed out his head driving at twice the speed limit when he overtook an car and smashed himself up in the tax payers car he was driving on the way home for a gay night club having been in a fight with his toy boy who happens to be the number too in his political party. This information as reported in the foreign press in incorrect.

I am really disappointed that some people "now" misunderstand that he was maybe gay friendly as he will me remembered as this and not for his responsible well thought through policies to the difficult issues of cultural integration.

One problem with my political misunderstandings is they have little to do with Moths. So for those Haider fans that are still reading I got very disappointed today because I visited a sewing machine shop and showed then bits of an old windsurfing sail and some sample sailmaker thread. The idea was their 600 EURO heavy duty domestic machine would handle this and so I could make covers tramps and foil bags for the 2 moths I own. However the guy there said no way and I am looking at 2000 EURO for a second hand machine if I am lucky. So my plan to kit out 2 boats, cut down an old Moth sail for a storm sail, and make the boom end loss stopper thing this winter are over.

I had a great sail on Saturday as Niki and I enjoyed a force 2 to 4 warm wind. It was beautiful flying around an empty flat lake. However I decided that was the was to end the season and packing up my boat I saw that the rudder, that was broken by the delivery monkeys, has cracked again. This is probably a result of the contact with the ground and the fact that it is had to get the core glued back together again once it is cracked. So I think I have a to stick a new horizontal on the rudder this winter.

Moving into winter mode I spent most of Sunday de rigging 2 boats and storing them in the workshop. I will spend the winter getting then in good working order for next season and then I hope to sell my old boat so we have another sailor here and I can get rid of some of the huge number of Moth bits I seam to have.

Monday 3 November 2008

Not sure if this is a good idea.

I have been playing and got a Blog Aggregator sort of working. Please go easy on this page and give me feedback. I am not sure if I will link this in as it is a bit network resource intensive.

Got google maps integrated into a very empty event page. Event detail pages should get more detailed later.

I am tired having spent 1 hour fixing a problem I created for myself.

Note to self: do NOT upgrade libs if you do not need to. Still it is better than the time I got pissed and deleted the whole database by mistake.... woops I was not supposed to tell anyone that.

exit