South Florida - part one - South Beach

In our great tradition of flying the budget airways, neither one of us could remember when we last flew American, and we hope we never will again. Though strategically located at the front of Atlanta's airport, the years of not competing effectively against other carriers such as Airtran and Delta have taken their toll. Squeezed into a dirty little corner, three little lines led passengers in no particular order to agents while at the same time blocking the self check-in terminals from those next in line. Waiting behind some living reincarnation of Casey and the Sunshine band didn't offer any further comfort. By the time Homeland tagged our baggage I knew an adventure lay ahead for us, as the airport code for Miami International Airport [MIA - missing in action] gave me no futher encouragement towards American's competence or us completing a successful vacation.

After what I believed to be a shaky take-off and landing intermixed with assurances that the flight attendants new, still uncomfortable and impractical looking uniforms would somehow aid me in the future, Jeanne became one of the few lucky individuals with luggage to claim. We all stood by after removing the dozen or so bags that came out of the carousel while an unclaimed purple suitcase passed by all of us for the third time. A matter of factly agent told us to go to carousel 25 where we all lined up in the lost luggage line and discussed which of us was the most fucked. Comically, Jeanne packed all of our clothes in her bag, which we claimed, but the tent and our shelter for the next week rested in my bag, somewhere in the continental US. Most of the other passengers claimed none of their luggage and needed to meet shuttles to cruiselines within the hour. Therefore, we had clothes but no shelter, while they had shelter and no clothes. I suggested they wear towels to the captain's dinner. MIA - missing in action.

After about an hour of this, the American agents, who cared so little as to almost mock us, finally revealed that we could just call an 800 number on a brochure and not wait in line for the rest of our lives. Apparently, the ground grew didn't load our plane correctly, so they removed most of our luggage and threw it onto the next flight, scheduled to land after cruiseships left dock. Luckily the first leg of our journey contained a hotel stay in South Beach, so we could wait for our camping gear for a few days and just told them to deliver it to the hotel. The bag did come, at 3:15 the next morning, when our confused bartender kept calling us to come and retrieve it from the lobby. Jeanne and I argued whether he meant right away or later that morning, but a second phone call prompted a downstairs march to the lobby by two half asleep, soon to be campers.


Former Miami residents told Jeanne that we'd never find accommodations in South Beach for less than $100 a night, but she actually secured $60 a night with a continental breakfast and an open bar happy hour. To save additional money she also decided not to rent the car we'd use to drive across the rest of south Florida until after we left South Beach. This turned out to be a wise decision since parking prices seemed to keep everyone driving in circles all day long despite the area being very walkable. We stayed at the Hotel Shelley on Collins St, part of a chain of accommodations that all shared the same airport shuttle service and even continental breakfast venue. A modest location next door to a Barney's and sharing the same block with countless other highend retail fashion outlets, Jeanne met her simpler needs with the plethora of alley cats living large beneath our window. We always try to avoid tourist traps, and I came up with the formula to avoid restaurants on the beach or anywhere where the majority of the clientele wore nothing more than bikini tops. Our bartender recommended an out of the way Cuban place that sounded much more reliable than the "go to Gloria Estefan's restaurant" suggestion Jeanne received from a co-worker, who by the way, only really wrote a list of bars and what drinks to order at each. The food was tasty and cheap and gave us the energy to wander the pedestrian mall on Lincoln St. where each dessert selection tempted Jeanne more and more. We hadn't seen that much gelato since Roma!


So, South Beach basically consisted of shopping for fashion (even the local cable offered FTV - Fashion Television - interviews with models before, during, and after photo shoots), restaurants with overpriced food and extreme portions (to promote the need for the South Beach Diet regime), and maybe we swam at a beach, too. Not our cup of tea and we probably stayed a day too long, but now the wilderness of state parks called.

Xbox7800

Over the last holiday season I found myself torn between the prospects of either upgrading my PC or buying an Xbox360. From college and the budget arena of "retro" gaming to my short-lived career as a mechanical engineer with its disposable income factor, I've been a multi-system gamer and knew that the purchase of a single next generation solution during that timeframe would not be my sole entry into the future territory of gaming. Thanks to the limited availability of the Xbox360 combined with the fact that most of its major titles in which I could fathom any interest would soon be released on the PC, I chose the slightly more expensive PC upgrade route. Going from an AthlonXP to an Athlon64 processor while at the same time changing from an ATI9800pro to an Nvidia7800GT produced a quantum leap in gaming power that tripled some benchmark scores while actually making some of the newest batch of games playable (the title F.E.A.R. really didn't do much on my old computer).

Having set up my previous secondary computer (a 500MHz Intel) to be a children's machine for a neighbor, downgrading my primary computer and reselling its now unnecessary parts for additional "rebates" toward the purchase of the new machine lessened the blow to my bank account. Frightened of being forced into the next generation graphics card community with its $300 entrance fee, though completely justified by the performace increase, the end result stayed very near my initial GPU budget of $200 thanks to the $30 rebate from the manufacturer, reselling the complementary Quake 4 that came with the card (another $30), and selling my ATI9800pro (essentially a third rebate for $100).

For the CPU on the other hand, I went the budget route with the Athlon64 3200. The supposed overclocking moster, the Athlon64 3000, disappeared from the market during my purchase, and I couldn't scrap enough from my old machine to justify an Athlon64 X2 3800 or the acclaimed Opteron 165 and enter the world of multiple processors. In the end, since my secondary computer grew to be what was left of my primary computer from the previous few years, I do have a budget multiprocessing setup. While one machine completes a CPU intensive task, I switch to the other one for more casual tasks that would have interupted or slowed down a single processor computer had both tasks been attempted on one (like encoding video while surfing or watching TV). Keeping my old primary machine intact also allowed me to leave the programs installed on it intact as long has they didn't require any graphics power beyond the onboard directx7 video solution offered by the motherboard.

So E3 started today with its hype intended to get me to purchase an additional gaming system since all three of the main players should debut and promote their new hardware and games. The question left to me isn't when will I become a multisystem gamer, purchasing more next generation consoles beyond my primary gaming device, my PC, but when I will I become a multiprocessor gamer? With all of the Xbox360 games showing up as ports on the PC and vice-versa, how underutilized is its powerful array of three 3.2GHz hyperthreaded powerPC processors (six logical cores) when my machine runs the same games using a single 2.0GHz CPU? How many of the Playstation3's (seven?) physical cores within its cell processor will do more than decode a dozen HD streams of pre-rendered videogame footage simultaneously? Give me an alternative and not another competitor for the bloodbath of FPS for my PC!

Until there's a killer app, new systems and hardware just serve as expensive coffee table pieces. I'll stick with the original games spilling onto my NDS, emulators on my PSP, and next generation games on my PC. Maybe hope rests with Nintendo's Wii (nee: Revolution), as it promises to bring the next generation of games from Nintendo through an original interaction device (motion sensitive controller) while still offering emulation for their last few decades of gaming history. Plus, they might have the price right: less than the $600 PS3, less than the $400 Xbox360. 2005 broke me with its $150 NDS and $250 PSP. Who had enough left over for even the dumbed down $300 Xbox360 core? By the year's end, I predict that Nintendo takes my next generation budget money. Someday, multiprocessor gaming will be ready for primetime. I still doubt that 2006 will be that year.

Galleon from Scrap

Before even completing Artesania Latina's re-release Baltimore Clipper Harvey (AL22416), I knew I would have no choice but to directly continue to another wooden ship model. Unfortunately, during the eight months I spent assembling her, the market for such kits seemed to dry up completely. The website from which I purchased her no longer seemed to carry any wooden ship kits, and the offerings from other sites are beyond my budget and size restrictions.

My goal of advancing in difficulty and consequently, price, through each additional model came to a halt during my search for the next project. Harvey marked my second attempt at wooden ship building. Prior to her, Swift 1805 (AL22110) gave me an introduction to plank on plank* construction methods, but I much preferred the plank on bulkhead* method of hull construction taught to me by my experience with the Harvey. Swift cost me about $75, and the $150 Harvey I got for a steal at $100 shipped. The next step should have brought me to the $300 level whose price perhaps could have been justified by the second quality that subsequently disqualified it: size. Both the Swift and the Harvey measure around two feet in both length and height, leaving mantle mounting an option, but the more expensive kits double in both price and size quite easily. A three to four foot long ship requires its own display table and quickly reduces the usable size of my 3'x6' hobby table during assembly.

Swift (left) and Harvey (right)

As an individual whose 1995-1999 college tuition money would have served better me had it instead been invested in Amazon, Yahoo, or Google, as I would never have lifted another finger in my life for the purpose of earning money, I of course turned to the internet for answers. Model plans existed here and there for purchase, but reluctance to purchase them came quickly without example pages or images of completed models. Further searches revealed links to military sites for actual plans of actual ships, but I felt that translating these into modeling terms might be beyond my capability. Also, I didn't feel ready to advance into the navies of the 20th century. Finally, after dismissing plans for small ships intended for full scale building (I'm not that near to water), I happed upon a personal webpage offering encyclopedic type drawings for free. Quickly I realized that if I could adjust the scale properly, the scrap wood left over from my previous two ships along with the wood I'd saved from my high school days of balsa airplane construction might just be enough to build a third ship for almost no cost!

Galleon plan detail

My main obsticle to just creating something from scratch has always been hull design. During college I made a few ships using only cardboard, again keeping with that no budget mentality. I really needed some concrete plans from somewhere with wood construction being much less forgiving than cardboard. The selection of ship plans I'd found varied from whalers to strange Dutch vessels, but I chose what I felt to be the simplest in terms of geometry to create from a few pictures downloaded off the internet: an early 17th century English galleon. Only the ornamenture and level of rigging I decided to pursure could slow my progress. Though the intent of the images was clearly to print them map sized, I felt the level of detail produced from my 8.5"x11" inkjet should be a sufficient start. After studying the seven images associated with the Galleon and determined to take over my life for the next year possibly, I came to the conclusion that I would have just enough wood to produce the ship at a 1:100 scale. Good news: the completed galleon's size should be similar to that of my other two ships. Bad news: the other two ships are scaled to around 1:50, so I needed to split the majority of this thin, remaining planking in half somehow.

Galleon model detail

Well, from the title picture I've come a long way but still have much to do. This blog will be updated with future advances as I feel necessary. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

*Basically, plank on plank resembles paper mache since it consists of applying multiple layers of extremely thin plies of wood to the bulkheads. This gives you two chances to cover the hull completely and properly: one to define the shape and another to lay down a better quality but equally thin layer of wood which should cover all surfaces perfectly and without gaps. Plank on bulkhead differs by using single, thicker strips of wood to cover the bulkheads. This method offers three dimensional shapes to cover a three dimensional surface and leaves the majority of errors to be eliminated via sanding. The thin layers of plank on plank really only serve as two dimensional shapes and can really have problems bending in too many directions. Plus, forget about sanding due to the shear thickness (or lack of) of these plank on plank members. Any material removal beyond exposing a virgin layer for varnishing cuts right through the layer and exposes the lower levels assuming any exist and leaves gaps if no lower revealed.