Thursday, April 5, 2007

I went to the Adventurer's Club tonight at Outrigger Canoe Club and it was about "How to Dock A Cruise Ship" something very different from the usual program. The speaker, George Losey, retired marine biologist and currently a cruise ship lecturer, has created a computer simulation program that includes classic ship design with rudders, thrusters and shaft-mounted propellers, and ships with propellers on rotating pods and no rudders. Three of us volunteered to "dock" a big cruise ship on the simulation. Two chose to dock their ship in Honolulu and I chose the dock at Long Beach. I was last and learned from the others. My score was the best and everyone thought I was a harbor pilot in another life! The lecturer proclaimed my excellence, and all the people congratulated me on my quick time and I didn't run into anything. ha ha. I didn't know what I was doing, it was pure luck, so I guess I put something over on all of them. They all thought I must be doing video games all day.

WorldVitalRecords.com, that I mentioned before, has a subscription option, right now there is so much to discover for free that I won't worry about a subscription - I'll have to see what they have - they have records on the US and 11 countries. Just as I was looking up the subscription cost I found a book "The History of Rehoboth, Massachusetts 1643 - 1918" popped up for free for the next few days. I've spent many days in Rehoboth researching at the Blanding Library. The book has about 10 hits for William Blanding. Guess I'll have to check out all the other surnames from that early colony founded by several of my direct ancestors in the 1600's, such as Bliss, Carpenter, Bowen, Perry, Chaffee, and Read. I think this website may have lots of stuff you can't get elsewhere, like the small town newspapers.

I tried today to start editing my Mongolia trip video, but my new software "Roxio Easy Media Creator 9"- that I just installed, keeps crashing the computer when I try to edit video. Sooooo - another hurdle. I think that I need to update my video/graphics card by downloading the driver from the manufacturer's website. This IS almost too much for my brain. Very scary to fool with that stuff. I may go back to re-installing version 7.