Stormy Weather
Commodore B. J. Turk, 13 July 2004

It's the time of year here where I live when summer storms bring high winds, which are not at all bad for sailors, and lightning. Don't get me wrong. I don't worry about lightning too much, but it's hard to ignore such a dangerous threat. Lightning does actually kill people with a degree of frequency that makes me more than a little skittish.

Most of us don't sail boats with masts made of carbon fiber or some other non-conductive material. We normally have masts of some metal, and that draws lightning. Given that everything is wet, especially the way we sail, the masts of our boats make very good lightning rods. There are more dangerous things to do than to sail a sailboat in a lightning storm, but I wouldn't want to try them either. I mentioned once before that our most valuable members are the living ones. Please try to remain one by not sailing if there's lightning about.



My failures in the construction of the member module have not yet appraoched spectacular magnitude, but there are certainly plenty of failures occurring. In fact, I managed to unearth a few significant ones in the stores module, and even one in the commodore's log module. I think that I may have fixed the latter (famous last words), and am attacking the one in the former because the stores module must work perfectly before the member module can work at all.

Of course, the down-side of all this is that the stores module must work perfectly. How likely is that? After all, we are sailors of misfortune here, and by definition, I must be a programmer of misfortune myself. All the evidence points to that by now. That means that getting the stores to work perfectly will be a monumental achievement. My only hope is that some hotshot programmer type won't take a look at my code and tell me that he could have done it in less than half as many lines of code. Then I would have to kill him, or at least give him a good flogging.



Stay safe, sail safe, and see you next month! Maybe I'll have something positive to report! Even if you don't believe it, it's pretty important that I do, or it won't happen at all.



Other Commodore's Log entries:

      Thankful (13 November 2005)
      Shorter Days, Longer Nights (13 October 2005)
      Summer's End (13 August 2005)
      Summer Sailing (13 July 2005)
      3rd Friday the 13th Status Report (13 May 2005)
      Ode to Spring (13 April 2005)
      The Misfortune Continues... (13 March 2005)

      Commodore's Log Archive (old stuff)


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