We went to Tony’s place tonight. The episode was fantastic, and it is getting into the really nice stuff. The Hound fought for his life, John Snow got it on. I really liked the episode. Tony and Elizabeth made some really amazing homemade pizza.
This was a nice little restaurant, and much better place to get lunch than the minimart across the street from it. I got a really tasty breakfast bagel. The bagel was a sun-dried tomato based bagel and soooo tasty. Steph and I shared an iced coffee to keep us going.
We were on a really nice ship today. It was the first time it had been taken out for a class. The ship was really nice to handle and had roller furling in the main sail in addition to the jib. the name of the boat was Cat’ 350 because it was a Catalina 350. Not very creative, but certainly clear. This is one of the ships that I’d like to take out cruising. We did some parking drills today, and Steph is certainly the best at it. I’m getting pretty good at points of sail, taking, and jibing. I really enjoy learning from Steve, but it is sad he won’t be able to teach us the last class and give us the test. Steph and I are going to try sailing around Shoreline Lake next weekend to practice the points of sail and parking. I wonder if the dock hands will be annoyed by us trying to practice parking. We did lots of man overboard drills. Steph lost her hat and we were able to do a man overboard drill to go pick it up, which was pretty impressive.
Also, we saw a baby sea otter!!!! it was sooooo cute!!!!
The boat is not yet on the site.
After taking a nap from a tiring day of sailing, Steph and I went back to Beachhead to join in for Tina’s Relaxed Party. It lived up to its name and a good number of people showed up.
After sailing we decided to go ahead and get an early dinner in Santa Cruz. Steph looked on Yelp to find Lillian’s and it was fantastic. They had a wine special for a gewurztraminer that was crisp, but not sweet. They also had some stuffed pesto gnocchi, which was really good. I’d still say that Cafe Moulin is better, but not by that much.
We got up at 8am to head over to Santa Cruz for the first half of a class on Intermediate Coastal Cruising from Pacific Yachting and Sailing aboard the Pacific Spirit. Our instructor was an old salty guy named Steve, and I really liked him. The instruction was very precise, he made sure everyone did every part of what was needed. He also gave us some really great pointers for a weekend trip from Santa Cruz to Monterey. He said that it is good to Monterey around 11, and that calling a week or so in advance to get a slip is a good plan. If you call in advance you can see where you are going to need to go in the harbor and not have to randomly sail around looking for the slip number. He had us plot a course for Monterey on one of the nautical charts they have as part of the class, which was rather nice. For coming back from Monterey it is good to get going by 10, and motor for the first hour out to where you can pick up the winds that are coming around the point. The winds there start picking up around 10:30 and it is good to have the whole morning to head back to Santa Cruz.
During the first half of the day we just talked about navigation and did some quick chart exercises. Afterwards we got lunch at the local minimart. After lunch we did one parking exercise each, and took the ship out onto the bay. Once we got underway it was a little much, and we did some heaving to exercises, during which we took in a reef of the main. We then did some precision sailing in figure 8’s around two ships at anchorage near the Santa Cruz Pier. We went out by the 1-mile buoy, did a “tactical jibe,” which is also known as the “chicken jibe.” This is a maneuver where you do a 270 degree tak, instead of trying a jibe in heavy winds. There was a ship that passed us near the 1-mile buoy that had a really pretty spinnaker out, as well as a kevlar main sail. I really enjoyed Steve as an instructor. We were joined by a woman named Ashley.
I had a good time at the party. Jullian invited us over, along with Nick, Brian, and Candice. We got in the hot tub there and had around 12 people in one of the smallest hot tubs i’ve seen. It was still fun. Nick got in with us, but not Candice or Brian.
We played a game called Contact where someone things of a word. Other people then try to guess the word. The thinker then gives the first letter of the word to the group. People as pointed questions so that others in the group besides the thinker will know of something that fits the letter that the thinker won’t get. The thinker just has to know an answer to the question, even if it isn’t the one that the other person is thinking of. a good example of this is if the letters are CA and someone asks, “Is it in bananas” the thinker can respond “It is not carbon” even if the other person was thinking of calcium. When the thinker can’t think of an answer he says “challenge” and the person must answer what the word he was thinking of was along with at least one other person in the group, who had previously said “contact” to indicate that they knew what the question poser was talking about.
I played two games at Beachhead last night. The games were Blood Bowl, where I got destroyed by going against the people on the games that they decided to push harder than their other matches. I also played gauntlet of fools where I won one of three games. The game I did win it was very close, and I got all the gold quickly, and died first.
I love this book. It is a book that I would gladly listen to several more times, even though I understood mostly everything it was talking about. This is using applied game theory to talk about inequalities and market forces. It shows how many things that don’t make sense on a macro scale can make sense on a aggregated micro scale. It talks about how special interest groups can get really far ahead without anyone caring that they are being abused by them. It also supports the manufacturing of incentive programs in specific ways to drive the results you are looking for. I will recommend this book to many people as a way to understand game theory in practice.
It's an Exciting World 