It’s 2019!
Well we are about 20 days out from heading to the coast for another month and a bit on the water. L has a conference in Vancouver starting June 1, so that pretty much gives us a finish date. There is a small chance I will drop her off in False Creek and solo back to Nanaimo for the 3rd or 4th but we will play that by ear.
So I guess it’s time to start making plans.
Flotilla
My brother belongs to the DSAA in Calgary and is an avid racer but he’d never sailed the coast in a keelboat (some excuse about a wheelchair or something). Last year he convinced some friends of his who own a Kelly Peterson 44 to join the Calgary Yacht Club’s annual flotilla and cruise Desolation. He had such a blast he is doing it again this year and invited us to tag along. Since the schedules worked we said we were in.
They are meeting up on May 16 in Comox to pick up a couple of charter boats from Desolation Sound Yacht Charters and then are heading off to Gorge Harbour to enjoy the Seafest festival for the weekend. After that it’s off for a nice jaunt up through the Discovery Islands. At this point the flotilla consist of Rainbows End (36 Dufour), Gloman Magic (Charter Boat—42 Jeanneau), Time Warp (Catalina 32), Sail Away (Charter Boat—45 Jeanneau), Teeka (Kelly Peterson 44) and us.
17-May—Comox
18-May—Gorge-Seafest
19-May—Gorge
20-May—Octopus Islands
21-May—Blind Channel
22-May—Big Bay
23-May—Toba Wilderness
24-May—Grace Harbour
25-May—Lund
26-May—Comox
It should be fun, and I am keen to see how they get my brother in and out of the cockpit…it sure wouldn’t be easy in our Hunter. The trip is a nice mix of marinas and anchorages so should be a good break for us since we intend to anchor out most of the time.
Before that
Which brings us to our plans. Right now we should be arriving in Nanaimo on April 25th. Given our usual slack-ass schedules, that should put us out and about by the 27th. Tentatively we are going to head north. We’d like to go back to Lasquetti and also to visit (revisit actually) Tribune Bay on Hornby. We’ve only been there once for a quick overnight stop and every other time we have been in the vicinity the winds have been blowing from the south which means it is completely exposed.
Other than that, this years tick list includes Tenedos Bay, Pendrell Sound and Homfray Lodge, and perhaps revisiting Roscoe Bay. I have been following Homfray Lodge on Instagram and it seems like such a cool place that I’d like to drop by and see it in person. So there should be plenty to keep us busy for a few weeks while we wait for the flotilla to gather. And of course, if all else fails, we can hole up in Van Donop because so far, it is our favourite place in Desolation
After that it’s back south we go. We will either hit Nanaimo and clear off the boat around May 31st before taking a seaplane to Vancouver and dropping L off. Or we’ll sail into Vancouver for June 1 and anchor out in False Creek. Then I will solo the boat back to Nanaimo and pack everything away on my own. Mostly I think it will depend on the weather—I’m not up for a solo crossing for the Strait in shitty weather.
Stuff
Last year the switch on my favourite 12v LED lamp died and despite my whizbang fixit skills I was unable to salvage anything but the lead weights in the stand. So I ordered a new one and will be bringing it out.
We also have to deal with our oar situation. I don’t know what NYCSS did last summer/fall. I suppose they dug up some replacements. But the last time we used some of their oars they were too long and impossible to row with. And since we often would rather row than motor, I might spend some time trying to get new oars.
I just heard that one of our forward Lewmar hatches has cracked and needs to be replaced. I know it was crazy crazed and I’ve contemplated fixing them before. Now I will have one good one and one crappy one and I know that will really tempt me to fix it as well. We will just have to wait and see. Other than that I don’t think there is much we need to do this season. Fingers crossed.
Other Plans?
We had almost the entire season booked but at the last minute there was a cancellation of a 4-week charter in August. The downside is it’s late to try and find anyone who might be interested…any takers out there? I will throw in a skipper for free 🙂
The upside is that it is now within the realm of possibility that we could get a few weeks in during the warm summer months which would be a new experience for us. For some reason we have never really sailed Never for Ever when it’s warm out—we have been cruising either off-season or up north where it’s much cooler. But that is a matter of money. Money we lose not chartering and money we spend flying back and forth again. Just another reason to buy a lottery ticket some day 🙂
The last time we cruised in really warm weather we were still chartering.
Patience is a virtue
I am psyched to get going. I have been reading blogs and watching youtube videos all winter and I really want to put some miles of my own on. And the carrot of 5 weeks on the water sure helps when its -30°C out. So it’s time to start digging out gear and making some lists.
Hopefully we will see some of you out there!
—Bruce #Cruising
Instagram This Week
It’s a matter of opinion
I haven’t done a Stupid Human Tricks post for a while, but this one really made me cringe. Context: it was a discussion about whether or not politics should be allowed/tolerated on a sailing forum (the rules say no). Discussion was moving along tolerably well until someone came up with this first bit of non-factual “facts.”
this is not about politics this is a FACT America is the ONLY free country in the world because Americans can buy guns. so if American freedom bothers you all I have to say is God bless you and Merry Christmas.
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f129/politics-or-not-please-216054-7.html
Clearly not part of the topic discussion. This then spawned the second comment which I am giving an A+ rating on the stupid scale. I mean, you don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to know this wasn’t going to take the conversation anywhere good. But then again, maybe my politics are showing. Still, less than a page later the thread was closed by Mods because it had gone off the rails.
I’m a recent British refugee, now American citizen ~15 yrs or so. I suspect much of the recent political furor may be due to us electing the most brilliant leader the world has ever seen. I sense that much of the rest of the world is very envious, or hopelessly mental.
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f129/politics-or-not-please-216054-8.html
Instagram This Week
Teh is The Answer
For some reason Chrome has never wanted to suggest any other possible spellings for the word “teh.” I almost always misspell it when I am typing fast and it is pretty damn annoying since Chrome completely ignores OS X’s language preferences—so I can’t turn on Substitutions—and screwing with the OS X dictionary was useless. So every time I go back through to proof a document (especially here in WordPress) and although Chrome will identify it as an error, I can’t just right-click and correct the offending teh like every other word I mistype:
I’ve spent hours trying to figure it out and I finally managed it today. It seems I didn’t have a dictionary enabled. I’ve got English, US and English, UK selected in Chrome’s preferences but that never did any good. You need to go to Edit: Spelling and Grammar: Show Spelling and Grammar: and instead of Automatic by Language, change it to something else.
Turns out if I change that to Canadian English:
Then voila! Right-clicking now yields the proper suggested spellings.
Mystery solved. After too many years.
Addendum
So here we are a week later and teh is no longer being suggested as a correction! WTF mate? So I went back and checked, and sure enough Chrome had moved the language back to Automatic by Language. A quick selection of Canadian English and we are back in business. But why? Was it an update somewhere along the way? I will have to keep an eye on it…
Addendum to teh Addendum
June 7th and the bloody thing has forgotten its dictionary again. Another quick reset back to Canadian English and we are good to go. I guess now I have another problem to investigate.
Instagram This Week
Instagram This Week
#cssishard #doingitthehardway
ebook creation
As a side project in late 2018 I started to produce ebooks for Standard Ebooks. I had been wanting to broaden my knowledge of epubs so I went casting about the internet for some good starting places. And I stumbled across this project:
Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
It sounded perfect. And the addition of current semantics and web standards in construction also allow them to be more accessible which was something I had also been looking into. Volunteers pick a book project and after the redesign of the base code, they are modernized, proofread again and issued on the Standard Ebook website in multiple formats. And the whole system is also setup to allow maintenance after publication with fixes and updates by both the original producer and readers at large using GitHub. I would absolutely recommend that if you are thinking of downloading an ebook from Gutenberg that you check with Standard ebooks first to see if it has been worked on. It’s a much better choice.
So what do you do?
Well first off you need to subscribe to their google groups mailing list. Then you pick a copyright free (U.S. copyright free) book and propose it to the group. They prefer that the first project be short (~40,000 words) to encourage you to finish it rather than getting bogged down and abandoning the book. I get the sense that this happens a lot. Once the proposed title is approved you head over to the their website and follow their handy step-by-step guide. Step one is downloading their tools. These are a set of Python-based command line tools that take care of a lot of the technical bits. If you’ve never used command line (Terminal on a Mac) it can be a bit intimidating but if you are interested you really shouldn’t let that stop you. Downloading the tools can take a lot of time so be patient.
The process
Essentially you follow these basic steps:
- Find the book on Gutenberg (or some other archive). Also locate online scans of the original text.
- Create a basic ebook template using the downloaded files (via the toolset).
- Clean up the files and make them conform to Standard Ebook standards.
- Fix the typography (via the toolset).
- Check the typography against their thorough typography manual.
- Add Semantics (again first via the toolset, then by using their semantic manual).
- Modernize spelling and punctuation.
- Find a cover (this is really rather a difficult and time-consuming step because they insist you find a CCO public domain image or something that was previously printed prior to 1922.)
- Complete the ToC and add links to various pages.
- Finish off the metadata (usually just a matter of writing a synopsis and filling in some blanks).
- Proofread, proofread, proofread.
- Submit for approval (and inevitably revise based on things you’ve missed).
Interestingly enough
This is a project started by and mostly inhabited by bibliophilic computer geeks. They use a programmer’s approach to both structure, methodology and problem solving and rely on all sots of computer tools like GitHub—and the things I have learned about regex’s (high-powered search and replace paradigms) makes me giggle in glee. I can’t say, as a book designer I always agree with them and some of their stricter choices but the results speak for themselves. The main the thing their approach brings is an easily updated and maintained ebook that suffers very little from the idiosyncratic problems I find in “professionally” designed ebooks. And their collaborative approach ensures that multiple contributions by multiple contributors can be managed swiftly and easily, something that almost never happens in the real publishing world.
My ebooks so far…
After the first couple of books I settled into doing mostly plays. It’s a form I have always enjoyed, a genre that I am really familiar with and the technical challenges make them much more interesting to work on. And they’re fairly short which works well with my short attention span.
If you’d like to see a current list of books I will try to keep the page over at astart.ca/coding/ebooks current.
In conclusion
I plan to continue doing this as long as I have time. I am learning an incredible amount about ebooks, ebook structure, programming tools, css and html, art, literature, and even a bit about copyright and the open source community. I am trying to talk L into collaborating on a project with me (we are thinking William Carlos Williams’ pre-1923 poetry) where I will focus on the tech end and she can do the “boring” proofing and editorial. There might be an opportunity to work straight from a scanned original—bypassing the Gutenberg process altogether. That will make it much more challenging. And I will probably start adding some notes about my various process and fixes to the site. After all I did originally start it as a way to save my bits and bobs of computer experimentation for posterity. So if you start seeing things like:
Find stage direction in brackets: [maid dusts the mantlepiece]\[(.*?)(.*)\]Replace with:<i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">\u\1\2\.</i>
…you will know what it’s all about.
A new look
I realize my poor site has been neglected as of late. I’m not sure if anyone ever comes here anymore. Most of my writing time has been over at neverforever.ca but even there it’s been pretty sparse. On this, my home site, it’s been a couple of years since I posted regularly, instead just letting my Twitter and Instagram aggregators fill the pages. And the look was pretty sad as well. I realize I was trying to keep it hand-coded, but really…there are limits.
I’ve been working on ebook production lately (more about that later) and it has necessitated me refamiliarizing myself with css. So it occurred to me I really ought to do something with the site.
underscores
I started with a a starter theme called underscores and started modifying. I wanted something clean and simple and found a few examples online to base it on. Then it was just a matter of digging in and starting to code. most of the work was done in the header.php file and the style.css. I’ve got a lot more I want to do but there’s the start.
I got rid of the sidebar and had to redo the menu as a result. I also wanted to add in some customization for the social-media icons. I based my code off of Patrick Garmen’s post on using Customizer with underscores. This meant I had to do some hit and miss php programming as well. Most of the code is available on the link but what Patrick failed to post was the code for inserting the links into the header. So here it is:
<?php
$test1 = get_theme_mod('youtube');
if ($test1<>'')
echo '<a href="'.$test1.'"><i class="fab fa-youtube-square fa-lg"></i></a>';
?>
You repeat this for each social media option you added in the Customizer.
Fonts & Icons
The icons come from Font Awesome and they have a great system for adding icons etc. to your page. I also grabbed two fonts from Google Fonts: Open Sans Condensed and Quicksand. I might go back and rethink that later, but for now they work pretty good.
To Do
- I want to revisit the code for posting the Instagram updates. It’s still pretty ugly and I think I can do better.
- I am not sure about the background colour yet. Too blue?
- I want to continue to work on the header to make it work better on smaller screens.
- Go through page by page and fix the tiny issues.
- And probably delete some of the pages that are out of date.
It also occurs to me I haven’t upgraded to WordPress 5 (Gutenberg) here on my main site. That might also throw some wrenches in the works…maybe even monkeys…
This is a screen shot for posterity. I am sure it will change pretty quickly.
The old look!
Instagram This Week
#oldfriends #toughplants #tropicals #indoorplants