Day:-6 Lat:40.78 Lon:-73.92

When I'm in NY I go running in a park by Hell's Gate. Hell's Gate is so named because the tides run very fast through this area and there are a lot of old shipwrecks. If you're in an underpowered boat going against the tide, you aren't going anywhere but backwards. If you're running with a fast tide, you risk getting slammed into the rocks. I went through Hell's Gate several years ago when I helped a friend move his boat from Baltimore to Connecticut. We left Manhattan early in the morning to hit the gate at the time known as slack tide. It's the time when the tide is at it's lowest or highest point and the water is running neither in nor out.

I bought a microcontroller this morning. I'm creating a Rube Goldberg fix for my autopilot. I was going to buy a new autopilot, but they are very expensive. Anyone who knows me, knows that I am going to make every effort to get the old autopilot working before I drop a grand on a new one. I'm having fun getting the microcontroller and circuits working. I haven't done anything like this since I was a kid and I got a heathkit electronics kit for christmas. I built all kinds of neat things with it, like a radio and microphone, siren and other crap. But there was no cpu included in the kit. It was back in the days when hobbyists were just starting to build crude pcs.

I guess the tinkering is in my genes. The only tv in our house until I was 10 or so, was a heathkit tv assembled by my dad. It sat in a plywood box enclosure and you could see all the circuits and the cathode ray tube sticking out the back.