Blog
Dec 16, 2005 - Shop and Boat Ramps
Putting up a picture of the outside of the shop building here. The shop is your basic tin shed. Used to be the paint shop of the Alameda Naval Air station. Now it houses myself and a number of artists, artisans and other such folk. Eventually, we will have to move, the building will be torn down and high priced residential complexes will be erected here to take advantage of the lovely view of the bay and the SF skyline. Our ace in the hole is that any development is preceded by lots of planning and requires the Navy to pull all the stuff out of the ground that they dumped into it, something that always takes longer than expected.
Encinal Boat Ramp
Alameda has two boat ramps, the Grand Avenue boat ramp and the Encinal boat ramp. Today, we are featuring the Encinal boat ramp. The Encinal boat ramp sits right on the edge of the former Alameda Naval Air station. It faces south into San Francisco bay. It also abuts a breakwater that is popular with fishermen. So when we launch our kayaks here, we also get to see what the fishermen are catching. Bass, leopard sharks, rays. The ramp has regulars, people whom you see here repeatedly, guys who have claimed this as their turf and hang out here and will talk to anyone who will listen to them.
Encinal boat ramp facing south into SF bay toward the San Mateo bridge. During extreme low tides, the ramp opens onto about a foot of water, not suitable for launching anything but a kayak. Extreme low tides are also followed by extreme high tides, a phenomenon which floats all the driftwood stranded on the riprap that surrounds the bay. With the right kind of wind, the boatramp then becomes choked with fragments of rotted piers and two by fours. The opportunistic scrounger can find plenty of wood on these occasions.
The approach to Encinal boat ramp. Half a mile of blacktop with a speed bump a quarter of the way in. To either side, cyclone fence. I imagine the approach to heaven or hell to be something like this. The Tibeteans don't picture heaven or hell at the end of life but another birth. The space between one life and the next they call the bardo. The bardo might also look like this.
Dec 14, 2005 - Coast Guard, Cormorants and the Homeland Boondoggle Boat
Another slow day in the boat shop. But I did walk the half mile down to the estuary, to the Grand Avenue boat ramp which is just across the way from Coast Guard Island, the CG's Pacific home and took some pics which I would like to share with you.Coastguard
The Coast Guard has gotten some new gear in the past few years. Yesterday they were playing with some kind of new floating barrier. This is the first time I've seen it. It's red and white and two of their small boats were hauling it around. It looked like they were folding it up to get it out of the way so one of their big boats could get in or out.
They've also retrofitted their small boats with machine guns. I guess they can now shoot it out with the bad guys, though most of the work around the harbor has to be about dealing with drunks in party boats. Still, with that machine gun mounted in the bow, the drunks are less likely to talk back.
Coastguard boat now outfitted with machine guns. They also have a stealth model of roughly the same size painted all in gray.
Cormorants
There must be some fish migrating into the estuary. For the past week or so, the cormorants have been cruising up and down the estuary in great rafts, diving and popping up, diving and popping up in great numbers. Very noisy. Usually when you see cormorants, one of them dives and then you wait a while and then it pops up again elsewhere. With these rafts, about two thirds of them must be under water and the popping and diving happens on a rate of several per second. The water almost seems to boil. Old B-movie piranha attacks on pig carcasses come to mind.
The Sheriff's New Homeland Security Boondoggle Boat
Check this thing out. It's the biggest boat I've ever seen in the hands of a local police agency. Usually the sheriff and police have a Boston Whaler apiece to keep an eye on drunk boaters or other on the water miscreants. I don't know what the Alameda County Sheriff needs this big a boat for, but I suspect that some homeland money might have paid for it. And now that it's winter, the boat just sits there, mothballed til party weather comes back and the Sheriff's nephew or whoever runs this thing feels like going back out on the water again.
Dec 13, 2005 - Stats, Shipwrecks and Video clips
Not much happened yesterday in the boat world. I spent half a day messing around with video formats and getting browsers to display them. Also spent some time ruminating about whether the blog is worth my time. Anyway, details follow.Stats and Shipwrecks
The stats that my web host provides have been improving. Before, all I got was number of hits and kbytes downloaded. Of late, they have also started listing most popular downloads and most popular entry pages and exit pages and all sorts of other stuff like pie charts and country of origin of visitors and search strings. Wow. I was amazed and delighted. One thing I found out is that a few people have actually visited the blog. That's good. I'll keep it going for a while longer.
Anyway, a topic not at all related to boatbuilding, but I have my website split into two parts, a boat part and a painting and photo part. While most of the hits right now are on the boat side, a few people also seem to go and visit the other side. Graffiti and Barbie both seem to be popular and get hits. It's got me thinking that I want to refresh the graffiti pages. And yes, the fat buddha is also getting some hits.
A tugboat abandoned in the Oakland estuary.
The other thing I've been meaning to throw out there with the graffiti and Oakland trash and lite industrial landscapes is a page on shipwrecks. Well maybe shipwrecks is a little overly dramatic. What happens is that on a body of water of any size where a lot of boats are moored, some will be abandoned or run aground or simply rot in place so that there they are, not quite out of the water in many cases, with holes in them, slowly falling apart. Anyway, there's lots of these sort of boats laying around the shores of SF bay and Oakland harbor and I have been starting to get some pictures of them. Posting soon for you decay aficionados out there.
Video formats and browsers
This is boring stuff for anyone not into messing with html, but not having posted any video on my site before, I got out the O'Reilly book on web design and looked up how to get a web page to display a video. Not difficult really. You just stick an embed tag and the name of the video file into your html and the thing plays. Well, as you know if you read yesterday's blog, Glen Howard made a whole bunch of rolling clips in different video format for me. Most of the files were too big to be practical for downloading. The only candidates were wmv which is Microsoft's formata and mpeg which is an independent standard. Both offer reasonable file size. Everything was cool except that the Firefox browser wouldn't play wmv. It brought up the little player screen, but nothing played. So I switched to Internet explorer and not surprisingly, it played wmv format. Firefox did play the mov format files but they were 10 times as big as the wmv formats.Reluctantly, I posted both wmv and mov formats to my website. But in uploading I realized that the time it takes to download, several minutes would dissuade anyone from actually downloading. So I figured that for all practical intents, people were stuck watching the clips in IE.
But then I remembered that you could also get your browser to download the video clip and launch an appropriate viewer for it. Voila! The clip doesn't play right in the web page, but who cares. Sure enough, this worked. So now both Firefox and IE will play the rolling clips.
Dec 12, 2005 - Blog Archive and Rolling Videos
Blog Archive
The blog accretes text and images at a rate that makes the page unwieldly after a week. So each week I will start a new blog page and archive the old one. See the column on the left for links to the archived weeks.The blog is an ongoing experiment to see if anyone will actually read it. Site statistics from my web host are improving daily. I can now find out top 20 query strings that people used to find a page on my site. I can also find a ranking of top 20 pages visited. So far, the blog hasn't turned up in the top 20 but we'll see. Not having anyone read it is sort of liberating because I can write anything I want. On the other hand, if no one reads it, then there isn't much motivation to keep on writing. Well, not actually, the writing of it has some entertainment value, but the effort of doing it in html might be more than it's worth. I could sit in a cafe and write in one of those fancy journals while sipping coffee.
Rolling Videos
Glen Howard, producer, director, cinematographer and editor of the rolling videos.
I got together with Glen yesterday and he handed off a disk to me with short video clips of me rolling. The clips are in various formats, everything from mpeg to mov to wmv. The point was to see what the best format was for putting them on the website. So far, I like some of the wmv formats best, mostly because of best quality with smallest size. Firefox has a problem playing them embedded in an html file, so I'm launching them in their own media player or whatever will play them. So here we go, rolling clips.