YVR
Dave not buying a boat.
Leslie wanted to buy this boat, but I wouldn’t let her.
This is the crew cabin in the bow of a 55′ Beneteau that I couldn’t buy even if I wanted to.
Yesterday was an great day. We toured the Granville Island floating show and Dave introduced me around. Nice to talk to brokers with a bit more of a personal connection. Sales people are still sales people though and I’m pretty sure Len was working hard to put the bug in my ear. But he was good at it so none of that slimy feeling was left behind.
Yesterday we talked quite a lot to all three Hunter brokers. The first was a good salesman and while we felt the pitch, we also felt he was on our side. The second guy was even better or actually just genuinely interested in talking boats. I really left believing him. The third (a woman, which may or may not be significant) was pure old school used car salesman. She left us believing Hunters could sail around the world without even getting the hull wet. She was good. Real good. And I would never buy anything from her. I am way to paranoid to ever trust someone that can steer me around like that.
Anyway we toured some boats and chatted in the rain. I like the Catalina 445 as a I’m-so-rich dream boat. But the Jeanneau 37 wasn’t bad as a realistic dream…
We drive back to BC Place and wandered. L and I bought some Gill 3-season gloves so our fingers will be warmer this year. We took in a couple of seminars. One on couples cruising which had a lively speaker and some common sense knowledge and one in canal cruising. This guy, an author of a couple books, needs to take classes in public speaking.
He read from his notes and the only time he had any colour in his voice were the 2 asides when he looked up from his screen. Couple that with a very linear story of his boat buying experience and picture slides with 0 explanations and he had a few people leaving mid-presentation.
Which was too bad because the presentation had good bones and based in his Q&A after he had good knowledge and a charming personality. Margaret liked it though so I guess I was just looking for more. Makes me want to go back though.
The we headed out to the Boathouse overlooking English Bay for an awesome dinner and terrific company. Them’s good peoples.
I really enjoy the boats how. D & M say we really ought to check out Seattle’s show (which just started) so maybe we try that one year. It’s nice to spend a couple of days dreaming and not worrying about reality. Leslie always enjoys Vancouver, and I do too, even if I did get wet.
And now we wait for spring and sailing season 🙂
More Day One Images
My cellphone sees…
Boats I didn't buy!
Boaty-Boat-Boat
So off to Vancouver. Our first flight since the no bag/carry on rule change and wow, what a difference. For one thing they have zone boarding now which is good. For another they are actually checking bag sizes. And for yet another thing it now takes flipping forever to board the plane.
Tanstafl as Mr Heinlein used to say. (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch for you uninitiated.)
Off to #YVR and the boat show. Hopefully, after all that sailing in 2014, this year we will have a better idea of what we we are looking at/for.
Day one. Note to self. It rains in Vancouver. Jean jackets are not waterproof.
So I got a bit wet.
My cellphone sees…
Mighty empty trains here in #yvr
How’d he do that?
Well the second issue of the magazine is off to the printers and should be on shelves next week. I did a lot of “fancy” photoshop work this issue—nothing too complex but more than I normally do. One of the articles is on the history of the Bruin Inn in St Albert and the Big Kahuna wanted to try a fancy archival/modern blend. We tried in vain to photograph it, but couldn’t get the framing right and the depth of field was screwing us. That and the photographer was constantly in danger of getting run over.
So we decided to blend three separate images in photoshop to get the desire effect. One was the original archival photo, one was a shot of the restaurant that was built to mimic the Bruin Inn’s architecture and one was of a hand holding a picture. With a lot of careful masking the picture below was slowly built. The big issue I had right up until the last minute was I couldn’t get the thumb to look like it wasn’t “photoshopped” in, which I didn’t want, even though it was. I fought with it several times in vain, but it wasn’t until Zak said the thumb needed a big, soft shadow that I realized what the problem was. It still looks a little fake, but it is miles above what I had. I guess my kid’s pretty smart after all.
Archival Photo Credit: Provincial Archives of Alberta, A11605
My cellphone sees…
Proofs!
Bad Poetry
Limer-Licks
There once was a magazine crew,
With a professional communicator or two,
One always mumbled,
The other’s lines crumbled,
And left the point all up to you.
What issued was often confused
As dirty minds too much were used,
Oh it wasn’t his fault,
Her mind just wouldn’t halt,
Till one and all’s ears were abused.
So heed this cautionary tale,
As we track down this pair in jail,
She went for offensive,
And found it expensive,
Cause he always mumbled the details.
—On occasion of sending away the magazine
Pedro Porn Star
Volume 2, Issue 1 of T8N magazine is all but done. And Pedro Migennes the Lion once again bulled her way into the photoshoots. The shotlist called for an image of the clothes first, the girl second and the bed third. There was no cat. So she changed it. It turned out though didn’t it?
Charge It!
So the other day I went to Staples to print out some cover proofs in colour. The cover measures 9.5 x 10.75 so it won’t fit full size on 8.5 x 11 sheet. So I picked tabloid on the colour printer and choked the machine. Stupid colour copiers. The machine of course, charged me almost $4 for the 4 copies I didn’t get. But the nice lady at the counter happily took my USB stick and set up the job to send to her behind-the-counter printer and all seemed well.
Just as she sent it, she mentioned there would be white space at the top and bottom and was that ok. I said sure, the cover was only 9 x 10 and there would be whitespace all around. At this, she screwed up her face and cancelled the print job. While she reset the print parameters, she told me that the reason the other copier had choked was because I was trying to print a file that was the wrong size. The next time I had an odd size I should just come to the counter and for a $3 service fee she would “fix” my file. Because the  software they used automatically expanded the image to fit the paper size. And they had to tell it not to do that.
So to summarize, she (Staples) would charge me $3 ($2 if it was not a rush job) to print out my file at the size my file was. It was ‘free’ to blow it up to a bigger size, but would cost me almost double if I wanted it just the way I supplied it.
Kill me now…
A rejected version of the cover