"Kayak Construction: Finishing the underside of the deck" by Paul Tomblin
Today the glass tape under the deck was dry, so I took the deck off the hull again. I cut two 9×23 pieces of fibreglas cloth. (The instructions said to use scrap cloth, but since the previous time I was using cloth it didn’t mention keeping the scraps, so I had to use “good” cloth.) These were used to reinforce the deck recess area behind the cockpit.
After that was done, I spread a saturation coat of epoxy over the entire deck. I love doing these, because the wood looks so beautiful once it’s soaked in epoxy. I use a roller to apply this epoxy, and that makes it go very fast, but it seems incredibly wasteful because almost the entire first 4 ounces of epoxy you mix up seems to go to saturating the roller, and you get a lot more coverage from the second 4 ounces. Plus there is no easy way to clean the rollers, so you throw it out after doing a single coat. After you roller it on, you go over the whole thing with a paint brush a couple of times to smooth it out and take out the bubbles that come up. You’ll also notice the deck has a bit of a twist to it - that should disappear when it’s glued to the hull.
After that coat had dried, I trimmed the fibreglas from the cockpit reinforcement, and rollered on a second coat. It looks pretty much the same as in this picture, so I didn’t take another. Once again, a couple of passes with the paint brush were necessary to smooth it and take out the bubbles.
I also took out the temporary forms from the hull in preparation for doing the inside of the hull. That’s going to take a lot of prep, and I’m still trying to figure out when to do the hatch kit.
"Kayak Construction: All that work and it looks exactly the same" by Paul Tomblin
Last weekend I ran into trouble trying to epoxy when it was too hot. So on Tuesday night I went down to the local distributor for System 3 Epoxy and picked up some “slow” (aka “hot weather”) epoxy hardener. I also bought a box of Nitrile gloves, because the cheap-ass no-name rubber gloves let some epoxy through and leave my hands sticky afterwards.
This week I finished up gluing the seams on the outside of the deck, and sanding and scraping it to smooth it out a bit.
Then I took the deck off (and parked the hull in the driveway) and worked on the inside of the deck.
First I glued the inside seams. I used a half-and-half mix of the regular hardener and the slow, and that helped a lot.
I then mixed some epoxy with a ton of wood flour to build up some fillets. The instructions said “mix … until it is the consistency drier than peanut butter”. Unfortunately I was thinking “natural foods peanut butter” rather than “Kraft Smoothy”, so I ended up with something that was almost impossible to work. The fillets ended up being uneven and horrible looking.
Today I applied fibreglass tape to the deck reinforcement blocks, and all the deck seams. I used the “slow” hardener only, which is great because it allowed me to mix up 6 ounces of epoxy at a time and have it still flowing well at the end of the pour, even though it’s nearly 90 degrees out. First I put two layers of tape on the seams in the deck reinforcement. Then I painted a stripe of epoxy along each full length seam, and then used that epoxy to hold down the tape while I wetted it out. On the first seam, I put down the whole tape then wetted it out, but on later seams I applied the tape and wetted it out in small sections at a time. I thought that would help with the problems with stretching and shifting problems I had with the first seam, and maybe it did. It wasn’t in the instructions, but I also put a layer of tape along the horrible messy fillets on the cockpit deck reinforcement in order to smooth in out a bit so I wouldn’t scratch myself on them every time I get in and out of the kayak.
Then I waited an hour and a half for the epoxy to get tacky, and put the deck back on the hull to dry. So now the deck is sitting on top of the hull again, just like it did at the beginning of the week.
"Fifth Race: 27.33. Equipment failure." by Paul Tomblin
The weather looked horrible as I got in the car to go to the race tonight, and as I got there a few random rain drops turned into a full fledged downpour. Ken had the radar picture up on his laptop and said it was a narrow band of rain and moving quickly, and so the meagre crowd hung out under the awning to wait it out. And sure enough, after it passed the horrible hot humid air was gone and replaced with cool dry air.
I was the second one off, and started behind a young woman whose times had been straddling 25 minutes for the last couple of weeks. I tried to paddle quickly but also using the new techniques Dan had taught me. I’m not sure I was doing a very good job of keeping good technique, and I think I started out too fast. There was very little in the way of waves on the bay, but enough to get a bit of a surf going on the way back in, which was good because I needed a rest by then. The young woman was pulling away a bit, but not too badly. I can through the split with a time of 12.05, which I think is about 0.50 minutes faster than last week.
I’d had my skeg about half way down while surfing the waves in, and decided I needed it most of the way up to negotiate the twisty bits of the creek. And that’s when I realized something was wrong - it wouldn’t come up at all. Thinking I’d scissored some weeds, I tried to put it all the way down and then put it up. But after putting it all the way down, it wouldn’t come up at all. And that’s when I noticed that a loud swishing noise from the stern, indicating that the skeg had picked up a load of weeds. I also noticed that I was paddling as hard as I could, and not producing much of a bow wave. It was like paddling a dock. At this point, I thought about turning around and DNF-ing (DNF == Did Not Finish). But I kept going. With the skeg down full, I had to sweep full on one side for 10 to 20 strokes to turn one corner, and then sweep full on the other side for the next bend. And the buoy turn needed back paddling and a complete loss of momentum. By the turn, any thoughts I had of trying to do a good technique were totally out the window, it was complete brute force and ignorance paddling. I just wanted to get home.
When I got in, I told Dan what had gone wrong, and we pulled the boat out of the water we could see that the skeg had broken completely off at the front pivot, and was handing down with a V forward instead of a more hydrodynamic V backward. And sure enough, there were a couple of pounds of weeds trapped in the V. Dan asked if I wanted to take a different boat and try the course again, but I had blown out my arms and shoulders on the long slog back.
Dave tells me that GRO should have replacement skegs in stock, so I should have it back by the weekend.
Oshkosh is surprisingly close. And the guy who had the club’s Dakota booked cancelled so I switched to it instead of the Archer I had booked, giving me a bunch more load capacity. So I guess it’s time to start getting my shit together.
The extra load capacity means I could bring another person and still have 200 pounds or more for camping gear and luggage. I’ve put out a call on the club mailing list, but no takers so far. Anybody here wanting to experience the greatest aviation show on earth? I’m currently planning to fly up on Sunday and back on Thursday morning, but I’m flexible.
I got invited to train with the Baycreek team, but then was told that I needed to take some private lessons with their coach first. That was fine with me, because I really need to improve my stoke and hopefully stop hurting my elbows. So last night was the first session. Coach Dan and I worked on getting good torso rotation, keeping my upper hand up at eye level, and getting a good glide on each stroke. During the course of the lesson, we paddled 4 miles.
After the lesson, the team showed up and I paddled with them and Dan’s young son Tom for their warm-up. Of course they’re all in Epic V10 surf-skis, except Tom who was in a KayakPro Jet, another nice racing boat. And the warm up was to paddle up to the same bridge we’d made it to in the lesson. Then Tom and I paddled back together. Towards the end, Tom was getting solicitous - I’m not sure if he was worried that I wasn’t going to make it, but he offered to let me ride in his wake, and assured me that when we got back he’d help me put my boat on my rack.
That part of the canal has a boat-house for rowing shells and sculls. Evidently they’ve got a lot of money for their programs, because there were a lot of boats out, most with an accompanying motor boat with a coach on board. There were a lot of coxed eights, some obvious high school teams but some with a mix of adults obviously from some night class “learn to row” thing. My boss was on one of them, and he seemed very surprised when he waved to me. One thing I thought was interesting is that the coxes now have microphones and loud speakers instead of hand megaphones. One of the kayakers I was with joked that was so they could have longer boats.
After the paddle, Dan cooked up hotdogs and hamburgers and a couple of the team members brought out coolers full of beer. We chatted about lots of stuff, but mostly how the US doesn’t have a good paddling program like Canada does, and how there is obviously a lot of money going into rowing development here and too bad we don’t have that sort of money in paddling. I observed that rich people go to expensive prep schools that have rowing teams, so that’s what they’re likely to sponsor rather than paddling.
Anyway, it was hard work, interesting, and fun. I can’t wait to see if it helps my time at Wednesday’s time trial.
"Kayak Construction: Ok, maybe it is too hot to epoxy" by Paul Tomblin
Since I “wasted” the first three days of the four day weekend doing stuff like resting up, kayaking with my dearest wife, and doing an ill-advised upgrade on my Linux box, I felt like I really needed to get at least something done today. And what I had next on the list was to take off more wires and fill more seams with epoxy. And more importantly, to see how I could fix up the horrible mess that is the stern. Unfortunately the first three days were also the days when the weather was perfect. Today it’s hot as hell, and getting humid - and it’s going to stay like that until Thursday.
First I sanded and scraped the bow half of the deck, upon which I’d already done this wire removal and fill job a few days ago. Next I tried to make tape “dams” on the stern area, so that I’d be able to hopefully fill the gaps in with epoxy. Because I was going to do this filling, I mixed up two ounces of epoxy. I was a little wary of mixing two ounces in this heat, and I should have listened to myself.
When you fill seams, you use a dental syringe with about a third to a half an ounce of epoxy in it. I was having a bit of problem with the syringe leaving a decent sized trail of epoxy, and then suddenly splooge-ing out a big wad all at once. (If you’ve read “The Meaning of Liff”, think of it as a “Toronto”.) But I was doing ok, squeegee-ing up the big splooges, on my second or third syringe when I realized it was getting uncomfortably hot. I dumped the remainder and went back to my cup with the remainder of the two ounces I had mixed up, only to discover that the epoxy in the cup had solidified, and was also hot as hell - so hot it was melting the plastic cup.
So I mixed up another ounce to finish, and used about half of it. I didn’t get all the bits filled that I’d hoped to, but maybe when the temperature comes down below 80 I can continue on.
Got an piece of beta software that I’ve been waiting for for a while, but it required that I upgrade my Linux box from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. The upgrade seemed to work fine, but the kernel paniced when I rebooted. It booted on “Linux.OLD”, an older kernel, but my USB keyboard didn’t work and several other things weren’t working right. I re-ran “lilo” thinking it might get the proper kernel booted, but instead it removed “Linux.OLD” from the boot menu, and now I have no way to boot it. Downloading a Live CD right now.
Went flying for the first time in a long time. The plane is badly out of rig and with full left rudder trim, still required more left rudder to center the ball. I didn’t have any destination in mind, just flew around a bit to a couple of airports I rarely visit. My third landing wasn’t too bad.
Went with Vicki to buy her a kayak. She bought a Swift Saranac 14, which is a pretty good boat, and very popular. I hope she gets lots of use out of it.
Although the menu and other buttons on the new camera don’t work, I can still take pictures with it (just can’t change the ISO, or switch to shooting in RAW, or any number of other adjustments). First picture is here.
My contract is up at the end of this month, and they’re not renewing it. They have an open position for a direct hire, but I applied for it and I haven’t heard anything back. So I thought for self-preservation purposes, I’d better start looking to see what else is out there.
First step is to see if my pimp has anything. Ok, enter http://www.[pimpname].com/ into a browser, and get “Safari can’t find the server”, but first there is a weird little flash as if it is getting redirected. So I try curl on that address, and get:
<head><title>Document Moved</title></head>
<body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This document may be found <a HREF="http://spusitinf0
02/Pages/index.aspx">here</a></body>
And I repeat the experiment with a telnet to port 80, and find they made the exact same damn stupid mistake in the Location: header in the 302 message.
Do I really want to entrust my career to people who make mistakes like this? I don’t think so.
I bought a Maxxum 7D as I mentioned I might earlier. I decided that while it’s not the latest thing, it’s half the price of a new camera, and I can use my existing lenses. It arrived today. Only one small minor inconsequential detail. None of the buttons beside the LCD screen work. So I have no way to change any settings, review pictures, look at histograms, or basically do anything other than take pictures at 800 ISO. I’m hoping against hope that there is a setting on one of the bazillion switches and dials on the camera that is locking out those buttons, because otherwise I’m going to have to hope like hell that the seller’s “we guarantee against mechanical defects” guarantee actually means something.
"The LUGOR Meeting for Thursday, May 15 from 7:00 - 9:00pm will be held at RIT in building 70 room 70-1400. The topic will be "FOSS and Patents" by guest speaker Barnaby Bienkowski." by Linux User Group of Rochester RSS News Feed
First, I would like to apologize to everyone who put so much effort into qunu.
Current Status:
The server has been taken offline. There are no backups which are current, the latest is one month old.
Why:
The server that was just taken offline was to be a temporary home lasting one, maybe two months. We were then going to find a more permanent setup. As with most things that have a deadline it received no attention until it was necessary.
Apparently there was some confusion as to the date which the account was to be canceled. It was scheduled to be taken offline on December 21, 2007. However, the server was taken offline nine days before the scheduled time (e.g. today)
A few weeks earlier, Mickaël at process-one had generously offered to take qunu off our hands. So we had finally found the home we had been looking for. I had even started the process of getting all the data off the server. Unfortunately, the transition is not going as smoothly as I had hoped.
Once again, qunu will suffer through a period of downtime before it is finally resurrected again. Maybe qunu should be renamed Phoenix or Lazarus
At some point when all the kinks are worked out, probably next month, qunu will be started at its new home. Don’t hold your breath, but don’t give up hope either.
Just ran into this emacs key binding. Someday I need to just read the manual and mark all the stuff I wish I knew already for later study. But since I will probably never do that here is yet another cool thing in emacs which I didn’t know about:
C-x h runs the command mark-whole-buffer
which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `simple.el’.
It is bound to C-x h,
Put point at beginning and mark at end of buffer.
You probably should not use this function in Lisp programs;
it is usually a mistake for a Lisp function to use any subroutine
that uses or sets the mark.
Not only can you edit videos in emacs now, but you can also create music. My initial response was WTF!? However, after watching the demo videos, I can see the practical uses.
I am going to be meeting with Mickaël Rémond at an adhoc ejabberd meeting. afaik, the location is undetermined, however, I am flying out in the morning and have decided that Gramstand is as good of a place as any for now. (primarily thanks to stumbling onto a coworking blog). Will probably move onto a more pub-like venue later on.
I am hoping to meet a few erlang/ejabberd devs on this trip. If not, the chance to chat with Mickaël f2f will definitely be worth the 1.2hr plane ride.
I am taking Jetblue flight1 from Buffalo to JFK and landing around 10:00am. Then finding my way from Queens to Manhattan via the subway. It looks like I will have about 8hrs to play with in nyc.
If you have the time or inclination give me a ring at 585-705-1877 I will be hanging out at gramstand writing erlang.
You should be congratulated. This is a level of incompetence of which I have not seen since ’90s.
My scathing insult aside, what is that? The world has moved on. There are ther platforms out there such as OS X and Linux which have fully capable web browsers. You really should look into hiring a new web team if thats the best they can do.
I have been avoiding these social hype sites for a while now. I have
simply failed to see the benefit. (besides sucking yet more of my time.)
Today, stpeterposted that jaiku had a jabber interface. Anything that
allows me to quickly utilize their service via emacs is very
enticing. Since I use emacs-jabber jaiku was
simple.
While I was able to setup a profile quickly and get it setup
in jabber via xmpp:jaiku@jaiku.com I
have yet to find anyone I know on there. I have 348 people in my roster
and not one of them is on jaiku. Oh well.
I suppose the price one pays when they ignore all the social crud
crusting up the edges of the web is that they don’t know anyone
there. (Also, not blogging for a while probably might have something to
do with it.)
I just had an interesting chat with hawke about presence and transports. It may seem pedantic, but I think it strikes at an important point. A lot of clients assume that a jid must have a node; miranda,iChat,gtalk come to mind. If that jid lacks a node then it must be a transport, e.g. behave fundamentally different than a typical IM client connection. In other words the jid is being used to determine the basic functionality of an entity on the xmpp network.
Below is the chatlog, but it can be summarized as:
hawke asserts that presence is a mutual agreement for communication
I assert that presence is a reflection of an entities availability
This post is a solicitation for opinions.
Below is the chat log
[12:11] hawke> since most clients will show the quser
service as a transport, instead of (or as well as) sending the
message, just send offline presence.
[12:11] hawke> then they can just log back in
[12:11] hawke> instead of the ’status on’ message
[12:12] zion> thats a bit client specific though
[12:12] hawke> How so?
[12:12] zion> quser is not intended to be a transport
[12:12] zion> just because it doesn’t have a node in the jid
[12:13] hawke> I’ve not seen a client that determines
transport vs. other contact any other way.
[12:14] zion> emacs-jabber ;)
[12:14] zion> yeah… that semantic is annoying
[12:14] zion> so I don’t want to encourage bad habits
[12:14] zion> the client should disco to find out what it is, not use
the jid to assume
[12:14] zion> to many clients to that, and it sucks
[12:15] hawke> True
[12:15] zion> the jid is an identifier, nothing more
[12:15] hawke> But even so, the same thing applies to
quser as actual transports
[12:15] hawke> you still log on and off by sending
presence
[12:15] zion> no… there is not log on/off
[12:15] zion> I added that ability because it was requested
[12:16] zion> its a presence aware node on the jabber network
[12:16] zion> it doesn’t proxy your messages to another network
[12:16] hawke> I think the distinction between
“list/delist” and “logon/logoff” is pretty unimportant for this
purpoose.
[12:16] hawke> too many “o”s.
[12:16] zion> it is important actually
[12:17] hawke> oh?
[12:17] zion> if you go ‘away’ on aim/msn/yahoo then you are still
reachable
[12:17] zion> you are still connected to that network
[12:17] hawke> How does that relate?
[12:17] zion> so there is a diff between list/delist and logon/logoff
[12:18] hawke> Going “away” is different from logging
off though
[12:18] zion> thats my point!
[12:18] hawke> If I send offline presence to a
transport, I am logged off not set away
[12:18] zion> exactly
[12:18] hawke> if I send offline presence to quser, I
am delisted/no longer reachable to the qunu web service
[12:19] zion> there is NO logoff from qunu
[12:19] zion> you will not be listed
[12:19] zion> but quser can still contact you
[12:19] zion> since you are still on the jabber network
[12:19] hawke> Obviously.
[12:19] zion> qunu is a jabber service, not a transport
[12:19] zion> there is a distinct difference and the semantics of a
transport do not apply
[12:20] hawke> I know that; the logic is the same
though — log off/on.
[12:20] zion> if you log off aim, can the aim network still contact
you?
[12:20] zion> no
[12:20] hawke> Only the terminology is different.
[12:20] zion> no its not
[12:20] hawke> but that’s “can’t” vs. “won’t” isn’t it?
[12:21] zion> presence is significantly different than network
connection
[12:21] hawke> if I log off of quser, it
won’t/shouldn’t be inviting me to rooms.
[12:21] zion> inviting is only one activity
[12:21] zion> and there is no ‘log off’ quser
[12:22] hawke> Sure there is
[12:22] zion> *sigh*
[12:22] hawke> if I send offline presence, I am logged
off
[12:22] hawke> am I not?
[12:22] zion> if you send me offline … does that mean I am a
transport?
[12:22] hawke> I am no longer listed in the web
service, and I won’t be invited to rooms any more.
[12:23] zion> just because your client forces those terms in the UI
does not define it
[12:23] hawke> No. I’m not saying it is a transport.
I am saying that the particular action of sending online/offline
presence that applies to transports also applies to quser
[12:24] zion> right. if you send directed offline pres to quser, then
it will think you are offline and treat you accordingly
[12:24] hawke> Yes.
[12:24] hawke> though it will still respond to
messages.
[12:25] zion> I lost track of where we are… we seem to be
disagreeing about something, but saying the same things
[12:26] zion> you want quser to behave like a transport by sending
presence offline instead of using status on/off
[12:26] hawke> Let me restate my suggestion: The status
of quser should reflect the user’s listed status on the quser web
service.
[12:26] hawke> yes
[12:26] zion> my argument is that is not appropriate, because quser is
not a transport
[12:26] hawke> quser is a presence proxy.
[12:27] hawke> (and metadata bot, but that’s not
relevant for this purpose)
[12:27] zion> so quser should send an offline presence to the user
[12:27] zion> which will hide it from the roster ui
[12:27] hawke> I think so, yes. Sending the message,
so that they notice is also valuable.
[12:28] zion> but quser is not offline
[12:28] zion> and the user is not offline
[12:28] hawke> True.
[12:29] hawke> Well
[12:29] zion> imo, pres should indicate the availability of an entity.
[12:29] hawke> the user is “offline” as far as the
website is concerned.
[12:29] zion> not exactly correct. the website is just a jabber
client.
[12:30] zion> so the user is delisted from results, but not offline
[12:30] hawke> and with transports, presence doesn’t
indicate whether the service is available either
[12:30] hawke> it indicates whether or not you’re
logged in to it.
[12:30] hawke> For the purposes of the website, what’s
the difference between being delisted and offline?
[12:30] zion> currently, nothing ;)
[12:31] hawke> QED.
[12:31] zion> qed?
[12:31] hawke> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.E.D.
[12:32] zion> ex: we are going to be incorporating pubsub into the
service
[12:32] hawke> OK..
[12:33] hawke> Does the users presence have any effect
on pubsub?
[12:33] zion> it should
[12:33] zion> e.g. if they are really ‘offlien’ vs ‘away’
[12:34] zion> if pres != chat || online then they are delisted
[12:34] hawke> OK..
[12:34] zion> if pres != chat || online || dnd || away || xa then send
them pubsub events
[12:35] hawke> So, only send them pubsub events when
they’re offline, or am I missing a status there?
[12:36] zion> only send them pubsub events when they are connected to
jabber, if they are offline don’t
[12:36] zion> there is a diff between ‘I am connected’ and ‘I am
online/away/xa/etc..’
[12:37] hawke> but surely you can send pubsub events
regardless of quser’s status?
[12:38] zion> of course… we could set it to offline and still send
stuff
[12:39] hawke> As I see it, the user sending directed
offline presence [to quser] means “I don’t want you to talk to me any
more”; quser then sends its own offline presence confirming that.
[12:40] hawke> So when quser decides “I’m not going to
talk to you any more” it should do the same thing.
[12:41] zion> you assertion is that presence is a mutual agreement of
communication
[12:41] zion> my assertion is that presence is a reflection of an
entities availability
[12:41] zion> regardless of its role
[12:42] hawke> OK, so amend that to add “…unless you
talk to me first.”
No plan survives contact with the enemy. This was made abundantly clear when Qunu was released as alpha for the public to abuse. As with any alpha there were countless problems that I dealt with on a daily basis. Clients insisting that a jid must have a node, xdata limitations in iq:register, double subscriptions, broken muc support, etc…
For some of these problems I was able to hack up a work around, such as quser@qunu.com as a subscription proxy for quser.alpha.qunu.com. A few of them had no decent solution and I had to suggest other clients. The wiki page, http://qunu.com/wiki/index.php/Documentation, has a list of clients which have the bare minimum feature set.
The default gtalk client does not support muc or groupchat. Since a lot of people had a gmail account they naturally tried to use their gtalk clients. Making the brash assumption that gtalk behaved like every other xmpp server I directed them to the above list of working clients to try. After several confusing chats and some poking of my own I quickly discovered that gtalk is not xmpp.
That may sound rather harsh so let me qualify that. While google’s xmpp-like servers may follow the letter of the xmpp RFC’s they most certainly do not follow the spirit. The reason I say this is that the gtalk servers will block any stanza which their default client will not understand regardless of which client you are actually using. This means that even if you wanted to get cool new features by using another jabber client, gtalk will block the stanzas before they get to your client. Not only do you have to get a different client, but you have to use a different server. *sigh*
The biggest issue, at least for qunu, is muc invites. GTalk silently drops them regardless of which client is on the other end. disco requests are reported assuming the default client. iq:version is always reported as not implemented, again ignoring the client.
Of course there is no bug/issue report system at google. Thus this blog post. Hopefully someone at gtalk will see this and file a bug. Of course, if you need further clarification, feel free test this yourself or ping me at zion@openaether.org
After many long nights and lots of bug squashing we are finally ready to open up Qunu for general abuse. This is an invitation for everyone in the jabber community to try it out. Let us know what you think and how Qunu can be made better.
So what is Qunu?
<marketing-speak>
In a nutshell, Qunu is a Jabber-based ‘ask-an-expert’-style service that you can ‘tag’ yourself with. Qunu allows you to use your existing jabber client instead of forcing you to lurk on a web forum, irc channel or muc room. In essence, people looking for help come straight to you, the expert.
</marketing-speak>
How it works
Someone on our site searches for help in an area in which you have tagged yourself. They can request an anonymous chat with you. We then send a MUC invite to your jabber client which you can accept or reject. We only send thru invitations when you’re online and available, and you can change your presence with us at any time. You have total control.
<marketing-speak>
It’s a great way to give your expertise back to the community in a non-annoying,
non-intrusive way. You can give help when it’s convenient for you, and best of all, you get to see the ‘thank you’.
</marketing-speak>
How to get in
In order to accommodate the various ‘quirks‘ of all the jabber capable clients out there we have setup lots of ways to get in.
Use the site at http://alpha.qunu.com. This is simply a custom jabber client via html and javascript.
Today the glass tape under the deck was dry, so I took the deck off the hull again. I cut two 9×23 pieces of fibreglas cloth. (The instructions said to use scrap cloth, but since the previous time I was using cloth it didn’t mention keeping the scraps, so I had to use “good” cloth.) These were used to reinforce the deck recess area behind the cockpit.
After that was done, I spread a saturation coat of epoxy over the entire deck. I love doing these, because the wood looks so beautiful once it’s soaked in epoxy. I use a roller to apply this epoxy, and that makes it go very fast, but it seems incredibly wasteful because almost the entire first 4 ounces of epoxy you mix up seems to go to saturating the roller, and you get a lot more coverage from the second 4 ounces. Plus there is no easy way to clean the rollers, so you throw it out after doing a single coat. After you roller it on, you go over the whole thing with a paint brush a couple of times to smooth it out and take out the bubbles that come up. You’ll also notice the deck has a bit of a twist to it - that should disappear when it’s glued to the hull.
![[RSS 1.0]](images/rss10.png)
![[RSS 2.0]](images/rss20.png)
![[FOAF]](images/foaf.png)
![[OPML]](images/opml.png)
