Category Archives: Sailing

Poetry, Sailing, Security

Into the Ocean

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by Blue October

I’m just a normal boy
That sank when I fell overboard
My ship would leave the country
But I’d rather swim ashore

Without a life vest I’d be stuck again
Wish I was much more masculine
Maybe then I could learn to swim
Like, ‘fourteen miles away’

Now floating up and down
I spin, colliding into sound
Like whales beneath me diving down
I’m sinking to the bottom of my
Everything that freaks me out
The lighthouse beam has just run out
I’m cold as cold as cold can be, be

I want to swim away but don’t know how
Sometimes it feels just like I’m falling in the ocean
Let the waves up take me down
Let the hurricane set in motion, yeah
Let the rain of what I feel right now, come down
Let the rain come down

Where is the coastguard
I keep looking each direction
For a spotlight, give me something
I need something for protection
Maybe flotsam junk will do just fine
The jetsam sunk, I’m left behind
I’m treading for my life believe me
How can I keep up this breathing

Not knowing how to think
I scream aloud, begin to sink
My legs and arms are broken down
With envy for the solid ground
I’m reaching for the life within me
How can one man stop his ending
I thought of just your face
Relaxed, and floated into space

I want to swim away but don’t know how
Sometimes it feels just like I’m falling in the ocean
Let the waves up take me down
Let the hurricane set in motion, yeah
Let the rain of what I feel right now, come down
Let the rain come down

Now waking to the sun
I calculate what I had done
Like jumping from the bow, yeah
Just to prove that I knew how, yeah
It’s midnight’s late reminder of
The loss of her, the one I love
My will to quickly end it all
Set front row in my need to fall

Into the ocean, end it all
Into the ocean, end it all
Into the ocean, end it all
Into the ocean, end it all…

I want to swim away but don’t know how
Sometimes it feels just like I’m falling in the ocean
Let the waves up take me down
Let the hurricane set in motion, yeah
Let the rain of what I feel right now, come down
Let the rain come down

Into the ocean end it all
Into space
I thought of just your face

Can’t get these words out my head…

Sailing, Security

Dolphin Skin

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Pete Melvin sails his latest International A-Class Catamaran (the A3) at the USA Mid-Winters in Islamorada, Florida. The bottoms are black from nanoparticle “dolphin skin” paint.

pete_dolphin-skin

Not totally sure if it is the same stuff, but the information about dolphin skin is interesting:

Karen L. Wooley, Ph.D., professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, has noted the shape and texture of dolphin skin and how it naturally prevents marine creatures from clinging to dolphin skin. The observation fits into her study of finding ways to mediate interactions between biological systems and synthetic materials, designing chemical “functionalities,” or groups of atoms, that either promote or discourage binding between them.

A-Cats provide industry-leading innovation without breaking the bank…no super-yacht or super-tanker required.

And I just had to make this a security post since Bruce recently wrote about giant squid that attached itself to a sailboat. Plus, I guess you could call it an access control, although Pete’s using it for speed.

Sailing, Security

Single Points of Failure

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Single points of failure pop up in the strangest of places. I’ll never forget the day when a colleague noticed a lonely single orange (fiber) cable coming out of a giant disk array. We were working in a data processing facility where the world’s largest computer manufacturers dropped off their latest-greatest technology for us to evaluate and bang on. The manufacturer was so impressed that he noticed an oversight on their part that they flew him out several times to meet with their engineers and review their designs in person. Sometimes seeing the obvious stuff makes you the expert.

In a similar vein, I was just reading a post in alt.folklore.urban that claims a US Navy Vessel was almost completely disabled when Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) went offline:

For close to a week and a half an Aegis class destroyer ended up piloted through shallow extreme-Northern Arabian Gulf waters by a combination of extremely cautious steering, celestial navigation, dead reckoning, and the occasional check by landmarks if we got too close to an oil platform.

[…]

More nerve-wracking for the rest of us was the fact that all our weapons systems with the exception of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System are dependent on the INS for levelling information, the failure of which turned them into so much useless scrap. Those of us dealing with our one offensive weapons system, Tomahawk, regarded it as a grand vacation during which we didn’t have to notify the entire chain of command up to CentCom that we would be down for routine maintenance.

I’d be surprised if they don’t regularly practice running the ships on reduced navigability or impaired systems, but with today’s rapid-development and release industries it seems more prudent then ever to double-check for redundancy, in case of failure.

Poetry, Sailing, Security

Game Poet Society

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Maybe it is just because I do not have time to play video games any more, but so far the poems on the Game Poet Society site seem, well, how shall I put it…lame?

Take for example:

71r3d w17h 4ll 7h3s3, f0r r3s7full d347h I cry

Not sure what is worse about this poem. The fake-L337 speak or the attempt to show real feeling for a virtual fire-fight in a fantasy first-person shooter world. Then again, many poems are based on imagination induced by drugs, alcohol, endorphins, etc. so why not video games?

Each shot fired sang its own noise;
A forced cacophony of mottled sound.
Cracking the wood of his crate,
Squishing as they entered flesh,
Pinging high and low off concrete,
Echoes of gunfire pierced his skull,
And dulled the noise of men cursing their God in vain.

Dulled noise, mottled sound? The real meaning of this poem is that it is time for a sound-card upgrade. A little more power in the sound department could change this poet’s lament from “forced cacophony of mottled sound” to “full cacophony of crystal-clear sound”.

In fact, a true game-poet would upgrade this poem to “109dB SNR audio quality 64MB X-Fi Fatal1ty cacophany of CMSS 3D sound”. Yeah, that’s more like it. Now we’re talking game poetry!

And that’s just one line.

Oh, and I’d change the last line to “Game over” if not “Upgrade time”. I swear that the phrase “terrorists win” is becoming so sadly common-place that I am no longer surprised to hear it around American children who are playing. One day while I was launching my boat off the beach I was near a few kids kicking around sticks and stones in the water who said “Oh, no, the terrorists have blown up the tunnel, killing all the civilians. Terrorists win.”