After work on Mondays, there is the Monday night slalom. It's a special treat when I get to bring Emmett as the other sailors enjoy seeing him too. Yesterday Emmett was riding a Techno 293 for the first time in a while (he usually rides Formula). Bryanna was with us so he was a little distracted. Bryanna was flying her kite and Emmett loved playing with her kite too. As Bryanna was screaming loudly, Bruce and I glared at Emmett and he said those three words that are virtually impossible for an older brother to get out of their mouths "I'm helping her". Bruce and I smiled at each other and said "Ya right". I told Emmett to stop helping Bryanna and get in the water. He ignored me and they had a great time playing with Bryanna's kite.
Last Monday, Bruce beat me in the first race. I've been training for the national championship and one of the hardest things to do in a slalom race is pass people. Most races I lead from start to finish and found myself never having to sail in bad air, bad wake or trying to pass people. So I've been giving the fleet a head start so I get better practice for Nationals. Last week I guess I gave a bit too much of a head start as I finished second twice. Now I don't want to take away anything from Bruce as it was a solid 5 buoy race (longer than our normal 3) and I was giving it everything I got and he beat me fair and square. This monday was payback time. It was lighter and I had my 12.5. I started with the fleet for a three buoy race. I still had good practice in bad air and bad wakes as I was lapping people. In the same time Bruce did three buoys, I did 12. So I lapped him three times. In the second race, I even lapped Kevin (who is a light wind master). I told him I should get points for first and second as technically I placed in both of those positions by lapping him :-)
Kev broke out his guitar and sang a special song about windsurfing on San Francisco Bay. The kids loved listening to it and I recorded it on my iPhone.
Bryanna lost a tooth earlier in the day so we went out to dinner and had ice cream for desert. Yum!
At home Emmett and I did some object oriented programming for the first time. Em totally got it. I was amazed. We were simply making a ball go from the left of the screen to the right and off to oblivian. Very simple program but you have to start somewhere. Emmett wanted to make the ball go faster and I asked him how to do that. He said "easy, just make dx bigger". Ok, I was very impressed that he knew that already. Em was very happy and proud of his first program. Me too.
Then I showed Emmett some 2D physics and Bryanna made a movie of. He said "That person sounds a lot like Bryanna". I giggled and said that the reason that sounds like Bryanna is that it IS Bryanna. It's very hard at this age for a sibling to complement another sibling but that's what he did.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
the classic
the san francisco bay classic, according to st. francis yacht club director, jim kiriakis, is the longest running distance distance race in the sport of windsurfing. yesterday the race was run off the st. fyc with a healthy turnout of windsurfers and kiters.
the history of this event is legend. the best of the best have raced this event (and many of them have gotten lost (which is really easy to do)). as the course is so hard to remember, i created a song to help remember the course.
yesterday was an interesting day. on the drive to the club from silicon valley (where I live), it was close to 100 degrees near woodside (and over 100 in los gatos). There was a distinct absence of fog in the valley leading towards SFO. I saw more trees in the sun than i can ever recall as they are normally covered by fog. forecasts said the bay might not blow. As I passed the memorial flag pole along 280, a flag that is normally plastered in a horizontal state due to the wind, it drooped towards the ground in an almost total doldrum. If any wind was breathing on the flag, it was pushing it offshore, the wrong way, the kiss of death for a sailor wanting wind. Maybe the forecast was true?
One of my favorite books on the San Francisco Bay is written by Kimball Livingston (Sailing the Bay (available on amazon for cheap)). In his book he says:
"...San Francisco Bay ... well ... what you get here is a seabreeze of heroic proportions."
In a section called BOOMTOWN Kimball continues:
"Imagine a still summer morning...there is scarcely a breeze to stir...A rowing shell passes beyond the harbor entrance, and it might was well be crossing a pond. The surface of bay beneath it is mirror smooth, blinding in the eastern light...
In Golden Gate Park, the first roller skaters are strapping on their wheels and trying on their moves, but significant events are under way far to the east, where the early rays of the sun are beating down on the roof of Lucky's in Lodi, on the parking lot of the Dairy Queen in Stockton, on the lined-up metal rooftops around the Ford dealership in Tracy, and every bean field up river to Sacramento and beyond.
The valley is heating up.
to be continued...
the history of this event is legend. the best of the best have raced this event (and many of them have gotten lost (which is really easy to do)). as the course is so hard to remember, i created a song to help remember the course.
yesterday was an interesting day. on the drive to the club from silicon valley (where I live), it was close to 100 degrees near woodside (and over 100 in los gatos). There was a distinct absence of fog in the valley leading towards SFO. I saw more trees in the sun than i can ever recall as they are normally covered by fog. forecasts said the bay might not blow. As I passed the memorial flag pole along 280, a flag that is normally plastered in a horizontal state due to the wind, it drooped towards the ground in an almost total doldrum. If any wind was breathing on the flag, it was pushing it offshore, the wrong way, the kiss of death for a sailor wanting wind. Maybe the forecast was true?
One of my favorite books on the San Francisco Bay is written by Kimball Livingston (Sailing the Bay (available on amazon for cheap)). In his book he says:
"...San Francisco Bay ... well ... what you get here is a seabreeze of heroic proportions."
In a section called BOOMTOWN Kimball continues:
"Imagine a still summer morning...there is scarcely a breeze to stir...A rowing shell passes beyond the harbor entrance, and it might was well be crossing a pond. The surface of bay beneath it is mirror smooth, blinding in the eastern light...
In Golden Gate Park, the first roller skaters are strapping on their wheels and trying on their moves, but significant events are under way far to the east, where the early rays of the sun are beating down on the roof of Lucky's in Lodi, on the parking lot of the Dairy Queen in Stockton, on the lined-up metal rooftops around the Ford dealership in Tracy, and every bean field up river to Sacramento and beyond.
The valley is heating up.
to be continued...
hall of fame
I'm thrilled to have been inducted into the collegiate sailing hall of fame by the ICSA. Standing next to me in the formal dining room at the St. Francis Yacht Club is Mitch Brindley, president of the ICSA, who presented me with my hall of fame plaque. Upper right is a picture from 1988 during a trip to the Boston Dinghy Cup. Lower left is Jill Ginsberg and I sailing in college (circa 1988). Upper left is a race during the May Cal Cup windsurfing race in Berkeley 2009.
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Sunday, May 3, 2009
Spreading the good word of Windsurfing
Members of the St. Francis Yacht Club as well as the Windsurfing Task Force were spreading the good word of Windsurfing at the Strictly Sail Boat Show in historic Jack London Square in Oakland.
click here for more info...
Sunday, February 1, 2009
fun with kids
So much fun to be had.
I'm a big fan of parenting and having fun with your kids. I saw a bumper sticker that said "Focus on your home" and I think there is a lot of good that can come to that. A friend of mine, whom I have very high respect, Charles Ivey, said "Be sure to not forget to focus on your own back yard". Charles did great things for our nation and it was nice to hear that someone like him had a local emphasis too.
Ok, enough philisophy...what are fun things to do with your kids?
I love to play the recorder with my daughter Bryanna. Recorders are super cheap on ebay or amazon and there are tons of songs to be gotten from the internet. The songs we've been focusing on lately are hot cross buns, Ode to Joy (Beethoven (interesting use of this song in Get Smart (it was used to trigger a nuclear bomb by Kaos (the bad guys)), twinkle twinkle, amazing grace, silent night (some fun high notes to learn on a recorder), scarborough fair (one of my favorite simon and garfunkel songs), brahms lulluby (some tricky low note combinations for me), yankee doodle, jingle bells, when the saints go marching in. Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring is my nemesis...high notes, low notes, timing: all this makes for a challenging song (and practicing this song makes all the others seem easy). We play just a few minutes a day max. For hard sequences, we play slow and break them down to smaller sequences to learn the pattern.
I love to read with my 2 year old Tallula. We also play some fun interactive games together (Arthur, Sesame Street, Dr. Sues, Blues Clues...a lot of these games are old and can be bought used for really cheap on amazon or ebay). This morning we had fun watching a few episodes of Pingu. If you have never heard of Pingu, you are in for a real treat...tons of episodes available on YouTube. My brother swears they don't speak a real language but I notice that there are dutch subtitles on some of the episodes...do you know if they are actually speaking a language?
My father sang to me when I was a child. I loved this. I try to sing with my kids too. There is a wonderful book full of children's songs that I love to sing to Tallula: A Treasury of Children's Songs: Forty Favorites to Sing and Play by Fox, Dan (can get used for cheap from Amazon).
A friend of mine showed me a sterling engine...wow, those are cool! Bryanna and I built a thermoacoustic stirling engine (from a kit). If you have an easy explanation of how these works, I'd love to hear from you. I believe Los Alamos have spent millions (maybe billions) studying these things. Our engine is totally awesome and was used as part of a fun skit Emmett and I performed at the St. Francis on Christmas Eve lunch called Juggling Physics (which included 'interpretive juggling' of the four states of matter (electrons were simulated with rings and they were flying fast by the time we got to the 4th state of matter, plasma).
Yesterday Emmett and I were learning about simple projectile motion in flash. There are so many cool resources to learn how to program flash on the internet. With the internet being able to fly across international borders with ease, it's delightful to learn wonderful things from all the creative minds in other countries. For the simple projectile motion, Emmett and I empirically derived that around 45 degrees is the optimal angle for a given speed to make a projectile fly the farthest (and this was translated to baseball where if you want to throw the ball as far as you can, aiming for a 45 degree launch angle would get the ball the furthest).
Here are some cool physics tutorials in flash:
http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/840/1/Simple-Projectile-Motion/Page1.html
http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/742/1/Physics-in-ActionScript-30/Page1.html
Now here is a super cool program to learn more about physics:
http://www.crayonphysics.com/ (and with cross over, it works on a Mac)
I'm a big fan of parenting and having fun with your kids. I saw a bumper sticker that said "Focus on your home" and I think there is a lot of good that can come to that. A friend of mine, whom I have very high respect, Charles Ivey, said "Be sure to not forget to focus on your own back yard". Charles did great things for our nation and it was nice to hear that someone like him had a local emphasis too.
Ok, enough philisophy...what are fun things to do with your kids?
I love to play the recorder with my daughter Bryanna. Recorders are super cheap on ebay or amazon and there are tons of songs to be gotten from the internet. The songs we've been focusing on lately are hot cross buns, Ode to Joy (Beethoven (interesting use of this song in Get Smart (it was used to trigger a nuclear bomb by Kaos (the bad guys)), twinkle twinkle, amazing grace, silent night (some fun high notes to learn on a recorder), scarborough fair (one of my favorite simon and garfunkel songs), brahms lulluby (some tricky low note combinations for me), yankee doodle, jingle bells, when the saints go marching in. Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring is my nemesis...high notes, low notes, timing: all this makes for a challenging song (and practicing this song makes all the others seem easy). We play just a few minutes a day max. For hard sequences, we play slow and break them down to smaller sequences to learn the pattern.
I love to read with my 2 year old Tallula. We also play some fun interactive games together (Arthur, Sesame Street, Dr. Sues, Blues Clues...a lot of these games are old and can be bought used for really cheap on amazon or ebay). This morning we had fun watching a few episodes of Pingu. If you have never heard of Pingu, you are in for a real treat...tons of episodes available on YouTube. My brother swears they don't speak a real language but I notice that there are dutch subtitles on some of the episodes...do you know if they are actually speaking a language?
My father sang to me when I was a child. I loved this. I try to sing with my kids too. There is a wonderful book full of children's songs that I love to sing to Tallula: A Treasury of Children's Songs: Forty Favorites to Sing and Play by Fox, Dan (can get used for cheap from Amazon).
A friend of mine showed me a sterling engine...wow, those are cool! Bryanna and I built a thermoacoustic stirling engine (from a kit). If you have an easy explanation of how these works, I'd love to hear from you. I believe Los Alamos have spent millions (maybe billions) studying these things. Our engine is totally awesome and was used as part of a fun skit Emmett and I performed at the St. Francis on Christmas Eve lunch called Juggling Physics (which included 'interpretive juggling' of the four states of matter (electrons were simulated with rings and they were flying fast by the time we got to the 4th state of matter, plasma).
Yesterday Emmett and I were learning about simple projectile motion in flash. There are so many cool resources to learn how to program flash on the internet. With the internet being able to fly across international borders with ease, it's delightful to learn wonderful things from all the creative minds in other countries. For the simple projectile motion, Emmett and I empirically derived that around 45 degrees is the optimal angle for a given speed to make a projectile fly the farthest (and this was translated to baseball where if you want to throw the ball as far as you can, aiming for a 45 degree launch angle would get the ball the furthest).
Here are some cool physics tutorials in flash:
http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/840/1/Simple-Projectile-Motion/Page1.html
http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/742/1/Physics-in-ActionScript-30/Page1.html
Now here is a super cool program to learn more about physics:
http://www.crayonphysics.com/ (and with cross over, it works on a Mac)
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