Hey there fabulous people,

As regular readers know, I will be helping out and possibly sailing in the North American International 14 championships, which will be held at Shilshole Bay on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The race committee is looking for one to three volunteers on Friday who can hang out on the committee boat and assist with scoring, timekeeping, etc. No experience is required -- I certainly do not have any.  I am planning on taking Friday off work and helping out. If you're free and care to join me, I'd love the company. Let me know.  (The event starts at about eleven, so I'm planning on being there from about ten onwards.)

Well that was quite the day.

Got up early. Went to Ballard. Tore up rotten boards off of the 14 fleet dock, sawed them into small pieces, filled four or five dumpsters, cut and screwed down about 50 new boards. Fortunately the rest of the fleet showed up to help so it went fast. But still, many hours of labour.

Then we had a fleet meeting, which went like this:

Brian: I've been captain of this fleet for three years, and we have a new baby, I don't have time to do this any more.  I nominate Ken to be the new captain.

Chris: Seconded.

Ken: Brian, I don't have time to be captain either.

Brian: All in favour?

Everyone but Ken: Aye.

Brian:: All opposed?

[nothing]

Brian: OK, congratulations Ken, this is how I got the job three years ago, you get used to it.  Any other business?  No?  Meeting adjourned!

Then I helped John Hyde run new halyards on his boat.

After that, I asked John if he was interested in taking his boat out for a spin to see if we got all the rigging right. Since I may be sailing in the North American Championships next week in his boat, I figured that a quick shakedown sail was probably a good idea. 

(If I sail in the championships I will crew for a guy from New Jersey who is borrowing John's boat. I in turn am lending my boat to some Calgarians.)

On the other hand, it was blowing 18-21 knots this afternoon, raining, with a front moving in and a strong tendancy towards an easterly. So maybe not such a good idea.

Oh, and did I mention, John is SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD and has been sailing i-14s for 40+ years. A little deaf and not as spry as he once was, but still a fine sailor. Then again, this was his first time sailing in over a year and he was a bit rusty.

So, again, maybe not such a good idea. But, hey, it's an adventure.

And it certainly was an adventure. We capsized once, which was pretty scary. I mean, it was a completely run-of-the-mill ordinary leeward capsize, except that it was with a 75 year old guy in the frigid Puget Sound. It took us two tries to get her righted, but at least we didn't do any up-and-overs, so that worked out pretty well.  I vaulted back into the boat over the side, John swam around to the stern and came in at the transom, it all worked out just fine. But after hauling thousands of ponds of boards around all morning and then getting dunked in the sound, we were both pretty tired and didn't have any more capsizes in us, so we took it easy going back in.

He also "teabagged" me, which was again a bit scary. ("Teabagging" is when the crew's weight brings the boat back towards him and he gets dunked into the water while hanging from the trapeze wire -- like dunking a teabag in water.)  Again, not scary in of itself, but scary in that here I am, falling off the boat, possibly going to bring it over on myself and with a cold, wet senior citizen in the boat.  Fortunately we recovered and did not capsize to windward.

Then dinner with Leah and a classic episode of Dr. Who, and now I'm going to bed.  I ache everywhere...

After watching Superbad the other day I was thinking about Seth's obsession with Evan's mother's breasts when it struck me like a baseball bat from behind how it was that the writers structured the interactions of the three heroes. They used Freud's structural theory of psychodynamics.

Seth represents the id. He is immature, childish, short-sighted, foul-mouthed, only barely concerned with societal norms, and constantly worrying about fulfilling his appetites. He avoids his unpleasant reality by retreating into a juvenile fantasy world full of rude body parts, essentially returning to his childhood.

Evan represents the superego. He is overly mature, parental in attitude towards everyone, obsessed with doing the "right" thing at all times. ("Is this what a smart person would do?" he asks himself when crashing the party.) He continues to be obsessed about doing the right thing even when he gets his chance with his crush. He avoids his unpleasant reality by retreating into high-minded intellectualism and thinking about his future at college.

Fogel/McLovin represents the ego. He is the most adult of the three, suppressing the id's excesses while mediating between the id and the superego in order to keep them both relatively happy. He even has a super-adult extra-mature alter ego to help cope with all of this. McLovin is the only one consistently grounded in reality, living in the present and dealing with situations as they come at him.

How Seth wearing Evan's father's pants fits into this theory, I'm not sure, but I'm working on it.

A reminder for west coast readers: there's a total eclipse of the moon, Tuesday 2 AM PDT until 5 AM.  Should be spectacular if it is not cloudy. If you miss this one, the next one visible in the Americas will be in February.

Woo hoo! I just got my third patent!

I can now add "Type Inference for Object-Oriented Languages" to "Schema-Based Machine Generated Programming Models" and "Document Customization For Transparent Execution On A Client And A  Server", my patents from 2004.

So that means that if you want to infer types, translate XML into classes, or run the same code on the server as you run on the client, you'll have to talk to me about it first, buddy.

I can't help but think that software patents are a bit silly.  But still, the Patent Cube is a nice tangible reminder that we do actually invent stuff around here.

Even a day of modern air travel -- delayed flights, oversold flights, and the luggage guy not being able to tell us whether our luggage was in Toronto or Chicago -- could not completely undo the relaxation of two weeks at the beach.

Highlights: other people's delightful children, kite flying, my cute little Spiers 11 (aka "Gayest Boat On The Beach" for its lovely mauve colouring), old friends, wind, waves, storms, calms, kayaks, long walks in the woods and two uninterrupted weeks with my wife.

It's good to be home, which is not to say that I couldn't use another week.  Or two.

(Photo courtesy Chris.)