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Showing posts from March 15, 2009

LavaCon 2026 and the future.

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LavaCon is a conference now going on 25 years. Its always fun at conferences where folks collaborate on what the future holds. This year I drove to Charlotte NC from Duluth GA to attend. I used the Tesla in Full Self Drive. I went park-to-park without touching the wheel for over 200 miles. It's crazy. I don't think most people understand how well it works. Lots of nay-sayers still, but it really does work. Be on guard, but enjoy. I spent some of my time "driving" while conversing with Grok as part of my daydreaming. I was discussing with Grok an idea I have of building a West system (cold molded) old style barrel-back runabout maybe 20 feet long- all varnished Mahogony. Of course this boat would have an exotic 12-cylinder engine under a transparent engine hatch between the twin cockpits. We discussed the designs, available actual study plans and pre-lofted design documents for the hull. We also discussed the best engine (perhaps a BMW N73) coupled with a Velvet Dri...
Here are a couple of videos from Playa Zancudo Costa Rica.
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Spring officially starts in about an hour and a half. It was a long winter. There wasn't that much snow nor did we get record low temps, but it was hovering around zero or below zero degrees for weeks and weeks and weeks. Good ridance. It was good to take vacation that first week in March as I did last year. The benefits are a combination of daylight's savings time changing, weather breaking up North and the respite of the Winter fatigue. It worked well this year. It is the way to enter spring. My hard drive is causing me trouble. My computer has been open on the desk for a few days with the hard drive kinda hanging out. CHKDSK won't run. It runs to 74 percent and hangs. It is a weird one. I bought a new hard drive. I will reformat everything and it will be good for another year. The computer needed to be cleaned out anyway.At least I don't loose a lot of data like I used to in he old days. I am headed to the scrap yard tommorow. I have pretty much picked clean the...
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Yeah we are back. Sorry for the delay. What a great trip. I have lots of more pics to post. Luckily we had left before the big earthquake. Interestingly. the epicenter was right where we went fishing. Here are a couple for starters. I had a pretty good seat on the plane ride huh? It was a great ride in a Cessna 208. It was very interesting for me and time flew watching the pilots. I learned a lot about turbine power plants. We caught 14 sailfish in one day. Fishing was excellent! The smallest one was about 80 pounds. The largest was over 15 feet long! In thinking about the fishing trip I realized the expereince cost more than my first boat. Then I thought then that the fish were bigger than my first boat. We caught well over a thousand pounds of fish. I didn't get a pic of a fish jumping, but I am still having the vision pop into my head. There is nothing like seeing a 15 foot fish jump 20 feet in the air about a 1/4 mile away from the boat and realizing that the only thing betwe...