A while back, someone showed me Hacker Typer, which I thought was
pretty neat. In a fit of Christmas-day-madness, I’ve written a libfake437-powered library
to create a similar effect, with the bonus that it looks like my old DOS
machine.
The library is called textstream, for those
brave souls who might want to play with it.
At the end of the day, we put a lot of effort into mooring the ship
properly. After the four lines that bring the ship alongside, we run out
two thick hawsers on the starboard side. The combined effect is that the
ship can’t drift into or away from the wharf. After that, we double up
the port lines for extra security. Here’s an anti-example:
Hint: The bowline isn’t meant to run under the bow. She’s just in
front of our berth and can cause us a lot of trouble when we try to get
alongside. The other day we tried to come in and the wind kept blowing
her right out each time we tried to get past. Eventually we gave up,
moored in front of her, let our passengers off, tightened up her lines
and then got in.
Another short one. This time, it’s H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. It’s an
interesting read because it doesn’t deal with paradox at all. The
opening makes time travel sound plausible as a concept, after which the
main narrative begins. Wells uses the time machine to conjecture the
ultimate destiny of a capitalist world: humanity splits into two classes
(the worker and the capitalist who profits from them) and then into two
distinct races (the workers are forced underground, while the
capitalists lead idle lives).
Wells advances some other interesting ideas. The time traveller notes
that although the future humans appear to have conquered nature,
resilience and other good qualities of ‘modern’ man come from struggling
against hardship. Without anything to struggle against, humanity
degenerates. In my experience, I have noticed that I cannot be idle for
any significant length of time. There comes a point after which I resort
to distractions such as games and the internet.
These books are another connection to my childhood. I didn’t read
them growing up, but the Mowgli stories of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book
form the foundational mythos of Cub Scouts. In fact, Baden-Powell asked
Kipling for permission to base the Cub Scouts upon his work.
My interest was primarily in the Mowgli stories. The idea of the
“noble savage” runs strong through the text, with Mowgli becoming
stronger and tougher than any regular man thanks to his unique
upbringing. His nobility and moral superiority come from an upbringing
under The Law of the Jungle which is called “by far the oldest law in
the world” and “as perfect as time and custom can make it”.
As he becomes an adult, Mowgli eventually outgrows the jungle and
must leave to find his way in human society. That fits the
age-bracketing on a Cub Scout Pack rather well - eventually things have
to be let go to grow beyond them.
I’ve been keeping up with my reading, but I’ve been slack in writing
about it. Most recently, I have read 1606: An
Epic Adventure. I don’t care for the overuse of
epic but crossing an ocean qualifies, even by Maddox’s
standards.
From the title, I expected the book to detail the Duyfken’s voyage to
Australia, relying on ship’s logs and journals. In actual fact, it’s a
history of the charting of Australia, starting from Duyfken’s voyage and
finishing with Flinders’ circumnavigation.
The book’s fairly well-written and has quite a few amusing moments.
One captain covers up his mistake by shifting Australia 1000 nautical
miles west on the charts. He got away with this because while measuring
latitude was fairly accurate, measuring longitude required accurate
timekeeping.
I’m no student of maritime history, but I still enjoyed the read.
It’s accessible, relevant and entertaining. There’s a section that talks
about the French exploration in Tasmania, and it was especially
enjoyable to read about Recherche Bay, Storm Bay, Adventure Bay and so
on having sailed across Storm Bay and anchored in Adventure Bay and
Recherche Bay.
We’ve finished the last of our voyages for a while. The 8-day
training voyage was probably the best voyage I’ve been on so far. We
were aiming for Preservation Island again, but the weather thwarted us
at every turn. The sea and wind built up on the first night and we were
forced to hide in Port Arthur for a few days, doing what training we
could.
After the weather improved, we started sailing north, but the
northerly change appeared much sooner than expected. Had we pressed on,
we would’ve turned around just in time to catch a big southerly in the
face.
As a result, we anchored in Bicheno and repaired the upper tops’l
overnight. The trainees were a little slow striking it and it tore
itself flogging. The upper was brought down, patched…
