Catching up

I realized that a week has gone by without me blogging. I guess I feel like I don't have much to report. The last week hasn't been that busy - I have quite a bit of personal business that I've been attending to and I've spend some time on the boat - just piddling.

Today, as I was doing one of my favorite things - walking around in marinas - I decided to take some photos to post to the blog.

Walking around and looking at boats is among my favorite things to do. It's a weird cross between going shopping (when you know you're not going to buy anything) and going to an art gallery. There's a certain beauty to boats. Not ALL boats have this beauty, but I find that there's 2 distinct types of boat that have this 'artistic' beauty to them.

This boat isn't 'ugly' by any means - but it hasn't gotten any love for a few years.

The first type is a beautiful classic - but sometimes even modern - design that just sits in the water reflecting beauty. The lines of the boat are a work of art and the way even the ports accentuate the design and the slant of the deck as it changes heights can bring a sense of beauty to the onlooker (at least me). I don't see this in all boats. There are plenty that I think are visually offensive. Some of this is due to the designers decision to value function over form. I understand that in many cases this is necessary - but - it doesn't mean that I have to like it. I find many racing sailboats fit into this category with me. Not all - but many. Again - this is not unlike art. There's many types of art - and many types of art that I don't care for.

This boat was obviously damaged in an 'event'. Whether it was just a blow or a real storm - the owner has some work to do if they want to use her again.

The 2nd type of boat that I really enjoy looking at is old derelict boats that have seen their better days and are kinda just hanging around in the 'old folks home' of the nautical world - simply because someone still loves them enough that they just can't part with them. They have backgrounds that would be really cool to see in fast forward with the ability to 'pause' when you see something interesting. All boats were new at some point and someone was very proud when they cast off the lines on the first trip out. Someone likely toasted with a loved one in the cockpit and dreamt of what they would do on the boat. Millions of dreams originate in the presence of a vessel - some fulfilled - some not.

Anyway, I took these photos at the Seven Seas Marina in Daytona Beach Shores this afternoon. It's not a fancy marina, but some of the boats here are real characters.

I leave on wednesday to go to California for some training for the new football system that we'll be using this year. I'll be back on saturday.

Here's a photo of one of the boats that was up on stands. These are barnacles that are attached to the rail of the boat. The only way that these can get here is for the boat to be submerged or laying over on it's side in shallow water for an extended period of time. Looking closer at this boat, I could see it was the latter. Someone has a big job in front of them.

This is the backwall of the 'grunt' side of the marina - where all the work is done on boats. I just found it to be kinda artistic.

Frustration, hope, frustration, frustration, hope, success...

My new board
The title of this blog pretty much sums up my morning surfing. I haven't gotten much surfing time in since last fall. My buddy Steve at the Pit Surf Shop had ordered me up a new higher performing epoxy long board with a 2-1 fin set-up. The new board is designed to turn more traditionally like a skateboard, like a carve board, like a lot of boards. My other longboard is a 'noserider' with a single fin set up. It takes a different turning style. I was wanting to carve, so Steve and I (along with some advice of friend Todd Hammond) decided on a new McTavish 'Original' board. Steve ordered me up a 9'1" model. I picked it up in late May, then went promptly to work for almost a solid month. Then the surf was flat. Then we took another trip to the OBX and the surf was flat except on one day - when I tried out the board. I liked it - but didn't have any long rides.

About 2 weeks ago, I went out for a 'dawn patrol' session here at the inlet and the waves were only so-so.

This morning, Jan went to work at her new job and so I checked the surf report and it sounded decent. I let a few things slow me down getting out to the inlet and when I arrived around 9:15am, the place was packed. (I found out later while talking to another surfer that it was packed from 6am.)

The best surfing is within 100 yards of the inlet and then the surfing gets less desireable the further you go north from that. Since it was so crowded, I surfed pretty far to the north - because when it's really crowded, it's easy to get run over by another surfer or to get in someone's way. I don't mind 'mixing it up' with a few in the line-up, but I'm talkin' crowded here.

The waves were pretty good even that far north, and even though I didn't get consistently good rides - I got one of the best rides I've ever had - where I'm carving back up the face of a 'still building' (not yet crested) wave. A ride like that really sets the 'stoke' and has you paddling back out looking for more.

I've never participated in anything that I wanted to achieve at with more frustration than surfing. It's a physical sport - which puts me down the totem pole a bit - plus it takes a lot of practice and that's where I need to step up to the plate more. I'll head back out on a more regular basis here in the near future.

Thanks to Steve for hooking me up with my new board. I'm really liking it.

Savannah for the weekend

Jan and I were going to take the boat up to St. Augustine for Fri - Monday, but the engine oil leak that a mechanic has spent a LONG TIME working on - at 2 different times - still was not fixed and I didn't want to get oil all in the bilge. We were going to go up and stay at a marina for a couple of nights - so we could enjoy the boat's air conditioning at night. It's hot down here in Fl during the summer and I wasn't too excited about sleeping in the boat while at anchor in July. The air conditioning on the boat is dependent upon A/C electricity and we don't have a generator on the boat. The answer was simple and that's to pull into a marina for the night.

It didn't matter with the oil leak anyway. I'm supposed to be meeting with the mechanic again in the next day or so.

So, on thursday, we just decided to go to Savannah for the weekend. I've been through Savannah twice, but never stopped - so it would be a good trip for us to see the city for the first time. I booked a room at the Mulberry Inn for Fri and Sat nights. My 'priority club' membership (as well as Jan's suggesting it to the clerk) got us upgraded to a King Suite.


We had a nice time touring the town. We took a trolley tour (which I had always thought was kinda cheesy until we went on one in Key West and really enjoyed it) and learned a lot about the town. It was a good time.


On Saturday afternoon, we drove out to Tybee Island for a while. The photo below is of the Tybee Island Light House

iPhone after 1 day

I've had a few people email me to find out what I think about the iPhone after seeing that I purchased one on tuesday. Overall, I really like it a lot. You have to keep in mind that I'm usually very picky about my phones and buy only the phones that I think are the best for what I want/need in a phone. My last 3 phones have been Sony Ericsson's and I'm pretty convinced that they make the best phones outside of the 'smartphone' world.

So, when I go comparing the iPhone to 'phones I know' - it's a tough sell.

My most recent phone was a Sony Ericsson K790A. I bought it for multiple reasons, but one of the main reasons was it's 3.2 megapixel camera that was integrated into it. That phone has an incredible battery life. I could go for days without a charge AND when it came time to charge it - it would go from dead to totally charged in less than an hour. It has a screen that people would comment about. Overall - a great phone AND Sony Ericsson has good customer service.

So, now to the iPhone. I'll give you the negatives first.
1. No MMS.. (Multimedia Message Service). What this means is that I can't "text message" a photo. I can send text messages - but not a photo. (I can email a photo). This only matters when it comes to my blog. This is the way that you send photos to a blog from a phone. Rumors is that this will be updated.

2. No user accessible sim card. The sim card in the iPhone is sealed into the unit - just like the battery. In the past, I've moved my sim card from phone-to-phone as needed. When I was in California City, I used to put my sim card into a 'less valuable' phone when I was building - so I'd stand less chance of damage. I think I see the reason for this with the iPhone. There's a lot of information on the iPhone that doesn't apply to a regular 'sim card' phone. It could create data problems if you changed out sim cards. Still, I'd like to be able to move my card to another phone if I wanted to.

3.Camera. As I'd pointed out - it's a tough comparison to compare ANY phones camera to my Sony E. This one does just fine at 2.0 megapixels, but I don't feel I have quite the exposure control that I had with the Sony E. Also, the location of the shutter trigger on the iPhone is a little funky with it being a 'soft' key on the screen. It'll just take a little getting used to. The photo at the top of this post is from the iPhone..

What I DO like
1. Very easy to use interface. Things work as you'd expect and there's no big surprises in the flow of the work. Easy to learn and get used to.

2. The keyboards. Apple made variable keyboard for whichever screen you are in. They are all still QWERTY layout, but some of them have other options that make sense for the application. For example, if you're in the web browser, there's a ".com" button so that you don't have to make 3 extra keystrokes - because they know you likely want to put .com on the end of the web address you're typing in. It's a well thought out software for the layout of keyboard.
If you've been paying attention with the 'hype' about the iPhone, you may have heard that the keyboard's "soft" keys are very small and easy to make a mistake. I think this is true HOWEVER; Apple has created some amazing software that 'fixes' your spelling mistakes and even corrects major misstrokes. It's amazing how much it's 'on the money' with what I MEANT to type as opposed to what I DID type. It nearly magic.

3. Full fledged email. There's nothing short on features here and any email I've done on a phone was with a regular numeric keyboard so it was a pain in the butt. Anyone coming from another 'smart' phone won't see this as a big leap, but I certainly do. I am aware however; that having email with you at all times can be detrimental. I have friends with other 'smart' phones who have their email setting on "push". That's where the email is sent to you phone at the moment it's sent to you. I've seen how this affects their life (I don't even think THEY see how it affects their life) and I want to make sure it doesn't happen to me. I won't set mine on 'push' - this way, I'll have to take an action to get my email. Hopefully I'll use the tool and not let the tool use me.

4. Full browser. Just like the ads for the iPhone say - it has a full browser that's very easy to use. I even did some banking from it. It's the whole internet on your phone. THAT is a big deal to me. I use the internet for a lot of things. I really like looking up facts and just finding out the answer to general questions as they come to me and having the whole whole world on my belt is extremely appealing and probably the number one reason that I was drawn to the iPhone (other than it's just plain COOL

5. Maps. I didn't really think much about this feature until I started playing with it. It's really just cool. Google maps has written a special application for the iPhone. I can put in any town and it'll show me a scaleable map of that town - down to street level. I can also see satellite photos of the same areas. I can find directions between 2 places as well. Now, all of that isn't super special - since you can do it on the internet the same way. The difference is that this app is really fast AND while in a certain map area, I can put in a topic - like PIZZA - and it'll show me all the pizza places on the map using little 'push pin' type graphics. Then, I can touch that 'pin' and all the info about that pizza restaurant will pop up and all I have to do is touch the phone number and it will dial it. That's an example that uses pizza, but you can do the same with any subject: taxi, restaraunt, hotel, car repair - anything. Now that's a handy deal.

I have only used the iPhone for a little over a day and so far I like it alot other than the items mentioned. It's not the perfect device, but if we waited on the perfect device to come out - we'd be waiting forever.

One really cool thing about the iPhone is that Apple released it's programming information to developers about a month ago and so I sure that hundreds of other uses for the iPhone are just around the corner.

Yeah, I'm a gadget person. This gadget is not needed by everyone, but it sure is cool.

Resistance is Futile

As Jan said: "You're going to get one anyway - you might as well go ahead and get it now".

So I did. It activated in about 2 minutes. I didn't have the problems that some had reported. Syncing everything else up (photos, songs, emails, bookmarks etc) is taking a while. The first upload of all my media seems like about an hour long project - BUT deciding which photos and songs to upload may be what's taking the longest.

The Daytona "Pepsi 400" Race

Sunrise on Saturday morning. This photo was taken from the camera 3 location (which is the one they always use to show the cars leaving the pits.

After a couple of weeks off, I was scheduled to work the Pepsi 400 which is held here in Daytona Beach. With the sad news of Jerry's death on Monday night, when I showed up at work on tuesday morning, I alerted the crew that I'd need to be leaving for 2 days during the work week. We had a long discussion about it and decided that if the days I needed to be gone would turn out to be thursday and friday, then I'd probably not need to bring in a replacement. During the day on tuesday, my brother Buddy called me to tell me the schedule for the services and it turned out to be thursday and friday - the best possible days for my work week.

To explain this further: The first 2 days we are on site (this week was tueday and wednesday) are extremely busy days where we haul tons of equipment out into the field and place it in strategic positions based on the individual track. After setting up all of this equipment which gathers data constantly, we have to work on the method of getting this data back to the our production truck. The paths of this data can take many forms including fiber optics, phone cable (RJ-11), ethernet cable (RJ-45) and combinations of those. We have to bring back the data from our special sensors we have on each of the cameras that we have our sensors on as well as from our telemetry recievers that we have placed all around the track - which are used to receive the info from the cars and send it to us.

Where possible, we try to use fiber because it's very reliable and has almost no limit to how much data we can send on it. Very often, we have to use a combination of RJ11 - which carries information in an analog form and then convert this analog signal to a digital signal and pass it back to the truck via fiber. Anyway, the point of all of this info was to say that we try to get all of this done in the first 2 days and then the remainder of the time before the races is spent trouble shooting the data flow and this part of the job can be done by less people if necessary.

Also, taking all the equipment apart and getting it back into the truck after the main race is another time that we need to have as many 'hands on deck' as possible. So, the days I needed to be gone worked out best for all of the crew and we didn't need to call in a replacement for my position. The guys said they'd cover me and were very helpful and I greatly appreciate it.

Well, Friday night's Busch race was rained out and for some reason, Nascar decided to run it on Saturday morning at 9am - with the scheduled Cup race for 8 pm on Saturday night. What this meant was we would have a 22 hour PLUS workday. It was very exhausting and I spent all day Sunday doing nothing but recovering. I'm glad I didn't have to travel this week.

This is a photo of our control room where we make the "TV Magic". During races where I don't operate the 3D cam, I sit at one of the 2 computer monitors in the far left.


These 2 photos above are from the camera position inside turn 2. On race day, we had to be in at 5 am, so I was out in the field as the sun was coming up.

There were thousands of fireworks mortars set up for the fireworks display after the race. It was funny in a way because a normal TV camera costs about $200,000 including the lense and all of these fireworks were set up around 5 of DirecTV's cameras. Not ideal.


The raceways use trucks with jet engines mounted sideways on the back to dry the track. Here's 4 of them turning around to go back for another pass. When these truck dry by you (at about 3 mph) it's so loud you have to hold your ears - but they do dry the track very efficently.

A Sad Turn of Events

The last few days have been especially difficult. My sister Libby, who lives in Columbia, SC has been married to her husband Jerry Teal since Valentines Day of 2000. From the moment I met Jerry, I realized what a great person he was. He's one of those people that seem genuinely interested in almost anything you have to say. I have lots of life experiences that are fairly unique and he's always have plenty of questions about them and wanted to know more. It's not unusual for people to ask me what I've been doing and then kinda 'fade away' from my answer and lose interest quickly - because I might not be the easiest person to relate to. I've gotten used to that, but it wasn't that way with Jerry. He really was interested enough to ask questions. He really was the kinda person who liked learning new things.

Jerry was also quite the historian and was extremely interesting to listen to when he'd start telling you about the history of areas that we'd meet up in. The fact that Jerry treated my sister like a princess was just icing on the cake.

About a month ago, Jerry and Libby found out that Jerry had a tumor in his brain. It was quite advanced and inoperable. Jan and I went by about 2 weeks ago to visit with Libby and Jerry and to just let him know we were thinking about him. He was scheduled to begin chemotherapy for his tumor on this past monday.

During his treatment, Jerry's body decided to react adversely and he left this earth after midnight with Libby by his side. This is one of those things that you just can't figure out why it happens.

We drove up to Columbia on Thursday morning and stayed at their house. We attended the Funeral Home on Thursday night and the funeral on Friday. It was a very sad occasion, but there was no doubt that Jerry was loved and appreciated in the community. Hundreds of people were on hand to say goodbye to Jerry and express their support for Libby as well as Jerry's mother, brother and kids. There was an endless supply of people with stories to tell of how Jerry had helped them out very selflessly over the years. It was obvious that he was one of those special people who does a lot for the community, but never speaks about it or expects anything in return.

My sister Libby is going to have a tough road ahead of her in regards to her emotions and dealing with the large void in her life. It's a sad, sad thing to think about. You're here and your life is going just fine at any given moment and then it's turned upside down in the blink of an eye.

I could never have personally picked a better person for my sister. I just hope I had let him know this to some degree.

Don't forget to appreciate your loved ones. Also, don't forget to forgive them for not being perfect - or worse. Life's really short.