After some discussion on the catsailor forum about how people started sailing, I went and found these historic images of my early sailing experience, taken at Baddeley’s Beach, circa 1974.
I passed my Club Race Officer certification test yesterday at the Milwaukee Yacht Club, scoring 22/25 in a multi-choice test. The pass mark was 20. A llittle disappointed about the three questions I got wrong. I certainly feel like I know a lot more about racing than I did before.
I stayed up late Friday to study for the course and then couldn’t sleep. Ended up sleeping from 4-6am and then drove to Milwaukee and did the whole class on only two hours sleep!
Yeah, it’s been a bit quiet here lately. Sometimes it’s difficult finding the motivation to navigate the mambo back-end to the website. They could really do with a simpler admin UI, maybe a separate client application.
Anyhow, life is busy. Tomorrow I head to the Milwaukee Yacht Club for a one day course in sailing race management.
A couple of weeks ago I had a trip to Singapore for work and got to sail in the National Catamaran Champs.. Photos from the regatta are here, and some photos from my hotel (actually two hotels) are below -
Currently -2F with windchill of -35F in Lake Zurich according to AccuWeather. That’s a windchill of -37C!
Interesting quote from Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg in an interesting article in the NY Times -
“When you look at private-sector debt that was over and above what can be explained by G.D.P., you are talking about $6.5 trillion beyond the economy’s capacity to handle that debt.” That debt will have to be either written off or paid back. People will have to stop spending, he said; they’ll have no other choice. “The problems are deep, widespread and intense.”
If that’s true in the US it’s at least as true in NZ.
Interesting speech by Newt Gingrich on terrorism. Sharp thinker.
Here’s a nice tribute video from CNN on the death of Sir Edmund Hillary. A sad loss.
Here’s something kind of cool – a company called Vectrix is selling plug-inelectric scooters for just US$11k. They’re being trialled by the NY Police Department, run for 35-55 miles on a charge and recharge in 2 hours. Just the thing for short range commuting. I think they could be a winner. Main disadvantage I think is the lack of storage space.
Just back from Barnes and Noble, where I wandered between the shelves for a while contemplating the books I was thinking of buying. I could not help thinking as I reflected on the mass of volumes surrounding me – does humanity really need all of these books?
I love knowledge and so I’m naturally attracted to books, but when I see so many of them and consider how little time I have for actually reading, I wonder whether the information needs of humanity are so diverse or the ability of people to consume information so vast that there is actually a good reason for all of these books to be written.
Ok, again just making a note to myself… sorry, nothing too interesting here for normal people…
Problem #1
There is a bug in Internet Explorer that means that if you float a div left with a left margin and there are no preceding float lefts in the containing box, the margin will be doubled! Great! 
. Same thing happens with right divs.
Two fixes are known. One is to add a “display: inline” to the div style. This apparently works because of another bug in IE. Therefore I’m reluctant to use it. An alternative is to put the floated div inside another div and float that one left with a padding. That way you don’t have to put the margin in the inner div and it doesn’t get doubled.
Problem #2
In the process of making the above fix I discovered another problem, which is possibly a bug in Firefox. It looks like you can’t do a float left and a float right on the same line. Firefox puts the second one on a new line. This is at least true if the width of the divs is not explicitly specified (actually now I think about it, don’t floated divs have to have an explicit width? – must check that).
The solution I used for this was to just float left both divs. They end up next to each other and I used padding to ensure that they had the right separation between them.
All nasty stuff. So that’s how I spent most of my Saturday, apart from figuring out how to move a template I had created on my laptop to my server.
Also bought a half a terabyte of external disk storage for 150 bucks. I think my internal drive may be close to failure, so time to back-up.
