Swiftsure 2006, Victoria, BC: The Agent Survives

I'm back, and still trying to wrangle my thoughts on this year's Swiftsure yacht race in Victoria.

"Why write about it if you can't organize your thoughts about it?" the heckler in the audience is asking.

Well, shaddup: I raced, you didn't, and I'll give you my three rules for Swiftsure, so that when you do go, you don't get stuck with your balls hanging out. You can thank me later.

1. Use The Winch For Everything

I don't care if we're talking about winching in lines, using the radio, tying your shoelaces, cooking dinner, divorcing your wife, or filling out your next job application - if it bends, twists, or looks squiggly, you put that sonofabitch around the winch and crank until metal shavings come out. If you need to eat, well, that enchilada goes around the winch first. If you need to phone home, take the radio and wrap the wires around the winch and crank, and it'll broadcast all the way to the moon. This is because winches are made of magic.

We're sailing upwind, beating hard, twenty-five degrees heeled over. We scoot inland for a second to take off the current, and it's when we decide to tack back that it happens.

Marc's got the handle in the winch and is turning for everything he's got to sheet in the jib; the strain of the line is audible. The winch is dinging hard like a dinner bell. He's almost got it in but the breeze is huge. I turn around for a sec to get my camera when I hear a cry, and a final winch ding. I look back, and he's splattered with black specks. The deck is splattered. The lines are splattered. The gear is splattered. Everything is dotted like God had the shakes with his quill pen.

"Wh- what happened?" Marc asks. Nobody knows, until Mike shows up and laughs. Winch grease, he says. Marc sheeted that line in so hard he squirted the grease right out of the winches. 10 Points, Popeye.

2. Don't Take a Flyer

This means you do what the rest of the boats do. Don't get slick, don't get smart, just use your winches (see Rule 1) and shut up. Got a bright idea about how to get around the mark faster? Figure you can shave five hours off a crossing with some hare-brained plan? Well, forget it, we don't care. If we don't see another boat doing it, it ain't gettin' done. A flyer is a bright idea that separates you from the pack, and in racing, it's certain death (or at least certain not-really-finishing-all-that-well).

Let me explain. Swiftsure is, even for the big boys, at least a twenty-hour race. We raced for twenty-five hours(placing 5th out of 8 in division). We race anywhere from two nautical miles an hour (yawn) to nine nautical miles an hour (the nautical equivalent of the Batman ride at Universal Studios). At those speeds, with that much time, you make up your distance and set yourself apart gradually. The course is fixed, the weather is the same for everyone, and it's likely that if there were an obvious advantage to whatever you're thinking that'd really get you that much time off your finish, someone would already have done it.

We're in a toilet. A toilet called Race Rocks. It's noon, near the shore - the rocks are being pounded by waves nearby crashing from all directions. Our sails are full, we're heeled over, beating hard into wind, but there's no motion. Five knots forward motion plus five knots of current pushing us backward equals zero knots. We're running to stand still, and it's the weirdest feeling I've had since I had that lower GI done.

To make it worse, there are forty other boats around us. Nobody's going anywhere. And then, slowly, we realize a horrifying development: we're going backwards. Still full on breeze, still drafty sails, still heeled, but the land is slipping away. Watching each other, forty boats go backward in the current.

Someone decides to take a flyer, right then. He's a Beneteau, like ours. But the skipper's thinking about doing something slick. He turns hard to starboard, heading right for the rocks. See, sometimes the current turns around and goes the good way near the shore - you can actually go with the current like sailing down a river.

And it would have worked, if he hadn't hit that rock.

Nobody saw it, hidden under the water.
But we all heard it. It's the sound of $30,000 of keel repair, right there with a big fiberglass BANG. He stops dead. And slowly, almost pathetically, he limps back, and proceeds to take his place, leaky keel and all, in the same toilet with the rest of us. Sorry about that, chief. See Rule 2.

3. Spinnakers Are Evil, But Evil Wins Races

We've all heard how much I like spinnakers. These big chutes are my sworn enemy, requiring more maintenance and Prozac than a Beverly Hills wife, and I have my suspicions, on good evidence, that they are secretly plotting against me.

But let's be realistic. The only time we made 9.2 knots over the water was with the chute up ('chute' is another name for spinnaker, if you say 'chute' around me instead of 'spinnaker' you get brownie points). You just don't get that kind of nut-punching speed without a spinnaker, and that's why everybody and their mother uses them. UNITY!

So use a spinnaker. Get it ready early, get it rolling as soon as you touch off the windward mark, and fly it all the way home. And give generously to the United Way.

The GPS is squawking - thirty minutes to the finish line. We can't see it for beans; we know there's a finish line out there somewhere, but in the squall that's hitting us, all we can focus on is oh god don't let this boat tip over. And it's all the spinnaker's fault. Bastard.

The spinnaker and I are on speaking terms, after staring at each other for hours, starting at 0030, half past midnight, when it went up after rounding the windward mark, when it looked like a jumbotron-sized Pac-Man ghost flapping in the chalky glare of the steaming light. There, with the spin sheet in my hand, leaning on my elbows, getting some Z's, I decided the spinnaker wasn't so bad after all.

But all that changes in the squall. Rain comes, a gust knocks us down. There's thirty minutes to go, and we're making 9.2 knots. Can we survive? Everyone around us hasn't hit the squall yet. We've got the lead. We decide to dump the spinnaker and go with a heavy-air genoa.

We're safe. The finish line is in sight. My self-satisfied smile, knowing that we don't have to use the hellbeast chute to place well, fades as I look back. Everyone else's chutes are still up. They survived the squall, unhindered, and hauling ass. Unable to do anything about it, and unwilling to slap up the chute again, we watch as Artemis squeezes in past us, toerail dipped in the water, riding their spinnaker all the way to the finish.

I guess evil really does triumph.

Related Tags: sailing, regatta, swiftsure, yacht racing, sailboat, spinnaker

Consumer Hell: A Case of Mistaken Identity

A week is about as long as I'd like to go without doing a blog post; school has taken most of the writing bug out of my system, but it's the middle of a "week off", so I get to come back to the stage for a second.

And while I'm here, I'll tell you a story.

The Wind-Up
I like to grill in the summer. And I shop for grill accessories at a spa shop. It's weird, but it's one of the mash-ups of business that seems to have worked out just due to proximity. People that grill think about having a pool or spa - people that have a pool think about grilling. Put the two together, and you get barbecue-flavored chlorine tablets, or something.

This place is one of the places that has the business practice of collecting customer data. If you want to buy, you give them your name. And your phone number. And your address. And what they do, see, is they compile your purchases, they track what you buy, then they use that to "target" you for products that they think you might like. They upsell you on your purchase history. Simple enough.

The Pitch
I'm checking out with my purchase, and give him my name. As he's scanning my items, he looks at his terminal and goes:

"How'd that solar heater work out for you?"

He looks at me, expectantly. I look at him. I don't say anything. I can't. Because I don't know what to say.

I never bought a solar heater. I don't even know what a solar heater is.

There's an awkward moment. I realize he's committed a modern error only possible in this incredible age of digital technology.

He's picked the wrong Charles Cox.

The Strike-Out
I never bought a solar heater. He's confused me with another Charles Cox somewhere in the gigantic database of customers that his 1989 two-color terminal calls into at 56k. His purchase data is for someone else.

And as we calmly sweep the issue under the rug, I realize another horror unfolding as I watch his keystrokes.

He's letting the purchase go through. On The Other Charles Cox's account. When The Other Charles Cox walks in, the rep is going to ask him "how those grill pellets worked out."

The awkwardness will continue. Slowly, inexorably, we'll be drawn into the same circle of customer serivce hell, unable to communicate to each other, unable to know anything about each other except what our last purchase was.

"How was that barbecue sauce?"
"Filter unit workin' good?"
"Getting use out of those grill tongs?"
"Did that pH tester help out?"

Cue Edvard Munch's The Scream, and put a chef's hat and swim goggles on him.

The Angry Coach
We'll never escape, we'll never really quite get the point across that there's been a very deep, very crucial, very un-exorcise-able case of mistaken identity somewhere in the system, and nobody will go to the trouble of figuring it out. And they can't. They don't understand their computer system. And even if they did, the system is flawed.

Because we are both Charles Cox. We are keyed into the system based on our name. Either one of us could come up. In a human sense, we are non-deterministic.

Purchase history isn't easily served by cards either, though, so maybe it's more deep than just fixing the primary key. Just look at supermarket "club cards". People I know use my club card number. As a result, tabulated purchase history isn't even accurate. I get special offers for tampons, for God's sake. I didn't buy those. I don't want those. But because of hangers-on on my "purchasing" identity, the supermarket thinks I do.

My take on the future? The purchase history of any individual is IP - marketing data currently owned the company that collected it. Should they? Expect a case of mistaken identity gone Pete Tong (that is to say, gone all wrong) to trigger a move in the direction of hidden purchase history and/or universal "foolproof" consumer identification.

And it's gonna happen when some angry PTA mom gets a special offer in the supermarket for Trojan Make-Her-Scream electro-shock condoms, the fraternity model with twice the herpes-killing virucide. And she's gonna get it right in line, the checker's going to ask her in front of everyone because his boss told him he had to.

Embarassment will force her to picket the White House lawn, and suddenly the issue's going to matter. Until then, I guess I'll just dream of having my own spa; living vicariously through Charles Cox #2's purchases at the spa store. Hope you're enjoying that pool, Charles.

Related Tags: marketing, identity, advertising, identification, club cards, purchasing history

Look Who's Come Crawling Back...

I'm not sure why I'm subscribed to CreativeHeads.net, but I suppose it was a fallout of the early days of game industry employment, when I felt it necessary to be pretending I was "in touch" with my right-brain side (the type of individuals CreativeHeads is so elegantly seeking to strike recruitment gold on), as a general process of exposing myself (alright, exposing my talents, that's less offensive-sounding) to as many potential employers as possible, even those in California.

Looking at it now, I honestly shudder to think. But I hear Napa isn't bad.

Today, though, I can hardly blame it for bringing me maybe the most interesting news I've seen out of the recruitment sector for a while. Now, funny jobs have come and gone. Designers are an odd lot, with cryptic and misleading job descriptions, as are the bevy of "tools programmers" every house seems to need one of without actually calling him "The Build Guy" and paying him that extra $20k he deserves for keeping the entire studio alive with the Post-It notes he carries around in his head about how the entire content pipeline of the most recent game works.

But this one got me right in my irony bone. Vivendi Universal, the much-battered legal opponent of Valve in my favorite landmark case of Digital Distribution rights, is looking for a Digital Distribution Producer.

I won't linger on it for long - there's some evidence to support that Vivendi Universal has long understood the value of Digital Distribution, so it might not even be ironic in that classic oppressor/oppressed sense - but rather I take it as a sign of the times, a shining - if somewhat self-satisfying - symbol of the coming of digital perestroika for games.

And before you ask, I'm not applying for the job. They're saying it's a job in California. That means it's in Southern California; if it was in Northern California, they would have said so. Northern California is where people drink wine. Southern California is where bank heists and contract killings happen.

...wow. Maybe I've got this backwards. I need to take another trip to L.A.

Related Tags: digital distribution, video games, vivendi universal, valve, steam

How You Know You've Made It Big

According to my access logs, someone got to my blog by googling "rotate 90 degrees nutsack".

I don't know how you feel about it, but I've finally made the big time. So suck on that, Daily Kos. Bet you aren't Twisted Nutsack Headquarters. Not to everyone, anyway.

Apparently, though, I'm the most google-famous for this blog post.

Something else comes to mind, though. Who was searching for "rotate 90 degrees nutsack"? And why? BMEZINE fan, I guess? Great.

Quartermaster Harbor By Cruiser

The sailing season is upon us. And while that's appropriate to say, technically, it's also the cruising season. It's the year of the Big Boat.

And I got my first crack at that Big Boat, my new sweetheart thirty-eight footer on Saturday.

Making Quartermaster Harbor from Commencement Bay was just a dream in 2005; and not for lack of gear, and maybe not even wherewithal. I just didn't really think of going anywhere last year: sailing was enough in itself - it was tacking and jibing for the sheer sake of the art, being embedded in a new extension of my limbs and lungs and mind.

But as any good drug goes, you have to switch it up from time to time to keep the buzz fresh. With the new Ericson, there comes the live-aboard-ability and long-range spirit, and that lends itself to the new gestalt of cruising, and that involves making the shift from going nowhere, to going somewhere.

Maybe if the shift from twenty-two feet to thirty-eight feet had happened more gradually, I'd think nothing of it. But yesterday's first sail in the Ericson made things come alive in a new way.

It makes a huge difference to have a destination in mind. Even the concept of speed takes on a different meaning: it never seemed to anyone else, and not even to me at certain points in the daysailer circuit, to be an achievement to make six knots with any means, sail or motor; but in cruising, you quickly realize that parking-lot speeds mean plenty, when the water is the shortest way across the islands of the Puget Sound.

And the weight of the boat, the sheer unimpeded and undeniable mass of the boat brings along a new feeling of immediacy and reality, there's the feeling for me of finally being Captain Of Something, and the colors around become vivid, the adventure starts to take hold in a new, more immediate way.

I've heard from others who've been around enough to know, that the Puget Sound is crap for crusing, and titles like "Gunkholing In The Sound" aren't incredibly reassuring, but from what I saw on Saturday, I'm convinced cruising is good for my soul. I'm going to like it out here.

And so, naturally, I tackle racing next. Coming up Memorial Day Weekend, Swiftsure 2006. Will I make it back alive? It'll be great, don't miss it.

Related Tags: sailing, cruising, puget sound, sailboat

Creating Talent

Dubner and Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, one of my favorite books, have penned an article in the NYT about a recent discovery by Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, which attempts to answer, "what is the cause of incredible talent?"

According to Ericsson, talent is made, not born. And practice really does make perfect, even if you have very little skill starting out. It also means you had ought to do what you love, regardless of talent level going in, because it's the interest you have in a subject that leads to the deliberate efforts to try to get better, not some genetic predisposition to being "good" at a particular thing.

In short - if you love it, you'll get good at it.

This is huge to me, even though will likely be a million qualifications to the statements made by the research. Check it out.

Article: A Star Is Made

Related Tags: talent, psychology, freakonomics, education

Knock The Boat Over

I spent yesterday afternoon in 25-knot winds, holding the 38-foot Ericson abeam of four-foot waves in Commencement Bay.

Sometimes the weather just works out; today was a day to test survivability and safety - we gave the reefing system a workout and she held. We had no more than a handful of sail up the stick, but it still felt like the Volvo Ocean Race out there to me.

Add in tugboat wake, and we're in the wet as well as the wind. There's something discreetly pleasurable, almost smug, about being back in harbor at sunset, leisurely washing the salt off the boat, salt that you worked your ass off to spray back as far as you could. I even got some on me. It ain't genteel, but that's not one of the boxes you can check when God cranks up the fan and decides to blow your boat over.

But it held. And sailed with all of the grace I'd want out of my lady, and when the day was over, her three trips back in and out of the slip to test docking maneuverability were completed with not a stitch of complaint. Tough, smart, sexy; this boat is ready for anything.

Screw the forecasters; my summer starts now.

Related Tags: sailing

May Day and Self-Interest

When we say "never forget" today, it's for once not about 9/11. Catallarchy, via EconLog, has the round-up of blog posts on the dark history of Communism.

Bryan Caplan's post in Catallarchy sums it up for me:

In short, both ideologies [Nazism and Communism] began with the creepy demand that human beings stop being the diverse, self-interested animals that we are, and eagerly jumped to the conclusion that a bloodbath was in order.

Why it is that some societies find it necessary to kill the self-interested spirit with a pickaxe is beyond me; I can see no more in that way of thinking than I can in religious arguments - both speak to hidden truths known only to the highest tier of leadership, unnatural states of being with little or no empirical evidence to support their existence, and shunning of natural competition in worldly pursuits.

Somehow, we gravitate toward these whirling centers of ideological mass, and whole civilizations are sucked up in them and turned out to unified purpose, to live and die under the unilateral self-interest of a central leadership, instead of working toward their own internal goals and desires. Even science can be twisted, as Stalinist Russia saw with Trofim Lysenko's mad race for power declaring the natural competitive state of genetics to be a "bourgeois construct", and insisting that plants don't actually compete for resources, they help each other, as if nature herself had just joined the Communist party.

Count me out. Socialists be damned, the market survives as the world survives, on self-interest, and it will continue. I'm proud to make my selfish contribution, guilt-free, and this May Day, I say to the million splinter causes all around the world that demand the world's pleasures be placed aside to make room for the angry torch of "collaborate-or-die" ideology, that individuality be supplanted by sefless sacrifice to some vague notion of a "greater ideal": suck on my stock options.

Long Live The Market.

Related Tags: communism, capitalism, may day, politics, self-interest, competition, socialism