Ten Year Plan Number Plate

William Estep
Ten year plan
October 10, 2018

Table of Contents

s/v Ten Year Plan received it’s official number plate today. U.S. Coast Guard documented boats are assigned a lifetime documentation number. The requirements are the number be affixed to the interior of the boat in such a way as altering them would damage the numbers or the hull. Folks solve this problem in a varieties of ways, including wooden plaques, plastic or metal carved plates.

A friend of mine, Al, owns the AutoMetalSkin company, and offered to make a number plate for me. Using a jewelers saw, he cut out the numbers from a sheet of metal, then using his unique finishing process, coated the number plate with brass. He left it exposed, without a clear coat, so we can watch the metal patina over time. See the video below to see more of the reveal process.

I’m really happy with how the plate turned out. It’s now mounted at the nav station, in an honored position just down the companionway ladder. I found some stainless screws to mount it, but hope to find some nice brass screws soon. Love how it looks. Thanks for the hard work!

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Sublime Text 2

I wanted to see what all the buzz is about, so I downloaded the evaluation of Sublime Text 2, and bought a copy a few minutes later. What a terrific editor. It’s clean, easy to work with large projects, intuitive, and powerful.

My favorite part so far, and keep in mind I’ve only been using it for a few hours, is the Find and Replace with regular expressions. Many editors will do this, but this is the first editor where I’ve very easily been able to find a pattern, select all the locations at once, and make a chance in all the locations with ease.

Words Don’t Cook Rice.

Looking At a Python Pelican

I really like the static version of the site. It’s so much easier to support and configure. I can tweak to my hearts content. Jekyll is a wonderful platform, and Octopress is a great framework on Jekyll. However, ruby isn’t my strength. I’ve fiddled with ruby in the past, but I don’t love it. It is a great language, just not for me.

If I’m perfectly honest, I love perl. Perl was an early first love, and is still a terrific language, but the static site generators in perl are limited. I did take a look at Blosxom, but there isn’t a large number of active users. I did find one site with current posts built using Blosxom, so it’s still out there.