Wade Tarzia
- Date Joined:Jul 19, 2006
- Instructables:13
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- Answers:1
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» Thanks. Sure thing, a box for Martha Stewart's more rugged twin sister :-) What is not…
» My friend bought those. That is her classroom. They are plastic. She shops a lot at Off…
» Yes, good idea! I'm not that smart. I never think of these things! No, really :-)
» Thanks. The Cure is continually operational!
» Nice technical writing, especially using sound as a cue, ie., "most hollow sounding not…
» I once went to a museum with the Roycrofter's stuff feaured. Nice stuff!
» Mine used to wake me up to NPR, but that function did fail. Only the alarm stills works…
» Have not logged in in a long time. Thanks for the kind words. I will continue to be ve…
» Ha! It keeps on going, too! Haven't the heart to get a new one while this still works.
» Nice! Keep at that mechanical connection to the Victorian! The Victorian Age was confro…
» My friend bought those. That is her classroom. They are plastic. She shops a lot at Off…
» Yes, good idea! I'm not that smart. I never think of these things! No, really :-)
» Thanks. The Cure is continually operational!
» Nice technical writing, especially using sound as a cue, ie., "most hollow sounding not…
» I once went to a museum with the Roycrofter's stuff feaured. Nice stuff!
» Mine used to wake me up to NPR, but that function did fail. Only the alarm stills works…
» Have not logged in in a long time. Thanks for the kind words. I will continue to be ve…
» Ha! It keeps on going, too! Haven't the heart to get a new one while this still works.
» Nice! Keep at that mechanical connection to the Victorian! The Victorian Age was confro…
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Aug 1, 2010. 2:46 PMzigzagchris
says:
first id like to say ur instructables are very inspiring. I was just wondering how you learned to sail?
Hi -- I am sorry to be almost a year late answering this. I have had Instructables writer's block, have not been on the site in a long time, amd I did not see it until now.
I learned to sail by getting in a boat and sailing it. I read some manuals, one of my father's ancient bgooks he had given me when I was a kid, and other stuff since then. In 1984 I could finally afford to have a dory-skiff built for me by Lowells Boat Shop. So I floundered around on the local lake for years, sailing, and making many basic mistakes. Oh, I could sail the boat around and return under sail, but I now shudder to think about the classic mistakes I made (over-sheeting), bad sail tuning, lack of knowledge about sheeting angles, sail twist, etc. If you go my way, buy a modern sailing manual and really study it. Dry-sail (on your lawn on a windy day) your boat to get a sense of how the sails look at different angles (they ideally sould look like sheets of steel, taut and perfect, not fluttering, as a basic guideline, but they will not look like that really until you can buy $10,000 hi tech sails :-). Better still, get some sailing lessons if you can -- they will REALLY pay off. Or, learn your self to have the satisfaction for a year or two, then take the lessons to correct your errors, the best of both worlds. Have fun! -- Wade
I learned to sail by getting in a boat and sailing it. I read some manuals, one of my father's ancient bgooks he had given me when I was a kid, and other stuff since then. In 1984 I could finally afford to have a dory-skiff built for me by Lowells Boat Shop. So I floundered around on the local lake for years, sailing, and making many basic mistakes. Oh, I could sail the boat around and return under sail, but I now shudder to think about the classic mistakes I made (over-sheeting), bad sail tuning, lack of knowledge about sheeting angles, sail twist, etc. If you go my way, buy a modern sailing manual and really study it. Dry-sail (on your lawn on a windy day) your boat to get a sense of how the sails look at different angles (they ideally sould look like sheets of steel, taut and perfect, not fluttering, as a basic guideline, but they will not look like that really until you can buy $10,000 hi tech sails :-). Better still, get some sailing lessons if you can -- they will REALLY pay off. Or, learn your self to have the satisfaction for a year or two, then take the lessons to correct your errors, the best of both worlds. Have fun! -- Wade
Oct 18, 2007. 3:13 PMJohnsons on fire
says:
Like your stuff. You like wood. I wish i had time to do this stuff..... : ( Oh well!
Dec 17, 2007. 7:09 PMJohnsons on fire
says:
thats kind of harsh to say "ruthless" but pretty much true... i cant see how ruthless and creative go together. thats just me.
Well, not to ignore the sudden insights, the serendipity, the rush of creativity after the morning coffee....but a lot of creativity is actually habit, and a powerful determination to be creative. That might boil down to being ruthless with time, tossing things from the "lifeboat" to leave the essential stuff, etc. The only time I advance on a project such as a novel is when I say, "I will write a page per day no matter what, even if some days that means garbage." It tends to work!
Dec 19, 2007. 11:17 AMJohnsons on fire
says:
From what i got from u're big words i don't completely agree. Because i don't really think you can force creativity i think that it should come naturally to a person. We probably have different views because creativity is you're job while for me it is a pastime or hobby. (hmmm???)
Big words??? But anyway, no, my job is not any more creative than any other job requiring similar education; most jobs devolve to un-creativity or have that cursed 'factory' aspect because creativity does require energy (and to break tradition and change the world around you requires even more energy), and efficiency must come into things too. But we can lose creativity when we need it: creativity is all of our job, but habit and sometimes lack of encouragement from peers and bosses can grind us down to sameness, in my view and experience with, at least, office-type jobs and middle-class life in general.
Jan 11, 2008. 1:45 AMrasputinsauntie
says:
I recently graduated with my bachelors and now I'm finding myself horrified by the new reality of being introduced as a co-worker. Thanks for giving me inspiration to continue to keep all of it fresh!
You have my best wishes. Soon I found my old office job (technical writer at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft) to be a desert. Bosses and co-workers had a very different definition of "creativity" than I did (my background was anthropology and English lit). I was frequently clashing with them: the office environment (any, not just at Pratt) enouraged the use of "approved" ideas and even words and phrases: that is convention, not creativity. Corporate propaganda kept saying "take risks!" but it often seemed to mean "don't take risks, we were just saying that." I came up with a radical idea to ask our customers if they could understand our manuals. No, that would be too hard, thank you! One day I learned that a foreign airline was misassembling our JT8D engine and it was vibrating too much. Turned out, they could not understand the turbine disk balancing procedure because the manual was vague (for a native English speaker it was also vague!). So, breaking conventional thinking in the American workplace may be hard but vital. I met only one manager with the foresight to say, "Send the tech writer to the field with the engineer to check out communications issues," and I was sent out once -- worked great -- but thereafter the manager was told no, costs too much (the $3,000 in 1988 dollars it took to send me might provide insight into a bad manual section costing millions to the airline customer and perhaps to company legal fees if an airline accident ever happened?!#*?). I was vocal about such foolish thinking, and not well liked. If I had not creative outlet in the form of scholarship and creative writing on the side, I would have gone bonkers.
Feb 22, 2008. 10:02 PMmsbarrk1
says:
So, are you a teacher now, or was the fold-down desk in a teacher friend's room? Good for you for speaking out about the engine instructions. Did anything come of it, or did the plane crashes happen? Tangent 3, so have you read Piers Anthony? And finally, your 50 cent words...delectable!
I replied to this a few days ago and now the reply is missing -- how odd! It was a long and intricate reply, full of airline folklore, and I even spoke about the infamous 'bird cannon' legend; now all evaporated into cyberspace! So, a short reply: I am a college teacher and the desk was built for a friend who teaches at a small but crowded charter high school. No, the planes did not crash because the engines should have have passed the tests in the concrete test cells. No, have not read Piers Anthony, and I really have no reason why (perhaps he wrote so many books I feared he was a little hack-ish). I just read Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition, and I recommend it. Generally though I like the New Wave SF writers (now a rather Old Wave, of course) as well as the late 50s and 60s classic SF. An editor to whom I just sold an SF story remarked that I sounded very New (Old) Wave, so I guess my reading interests were passed on to my writing!
It gets stranger and stranger! Now I see that the reply that was missing two minutes ago is suddenly there just as I posted this. I love Instructables, but its software and my computer often have these dysfunctional relationships. Sorry about that! At least the airline folklore is not gone ;-)
Feb 25, 2008. 10:24 PMmsbarrk1
says:
The medium sized reply is here, but I don't see any airline folklore. Now I'm curious, and it's still missing somewhere in cyberspace. Other than 4th-8th grade level SF/Fantasy that I'll read along with some of my higher readers (just so we can get into the books together), it's been awhile since I've enjoyed an adult book I actually chose. Drop some names of those considered New (Old) Wave writers. I'd like to see if my thinking is close. Dune is an all-time favorite. I'm pretty sure (kind of foggy on that) I read all of them, but then when I look at the book covers and flip a few pages, the images from the stories permeate my being. This is part of why I struggle to find new books...not because they aren't out there, but because I am responsible for the care of my 5 year old, and when I sit down with a good book, I don't eat or sleep much until I finish the book. I only read when I visit my family in NY, then I know my child eats ;-). I suppose Piers Anthony is a little hack-ish. When I started reading through the Xanth series, it wasn't complete yet. I had to know what came next, and it was comical, therefore, I kept reading. It was definitely more fantasy than SF. I'll have to see if the library has Pattern Recognition, but only because I'm going home for Spring Break. Oh, glad to hear those planes weren't the ones on the news a couple of years ago with engine issues. And finally, yup, college professor would've been my guess after the blurbs that mention your dissertation. I'm "hittin' the hay." If you come across the other reply, send it my way. Like I said, I get a kick out of the way you write, you stimulate my intellect. After years of "dumming myself down" to please exes, I'm finally in a time and place where I don't have to anymore. HAHA, they didn't win!
Hi -- The New Wave writers had precursors in Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Theodore Sturgeon. The actual New Wave itself had strong editorial encouragement from Michael Moorcock. Writers include (as well as Moorcock), Ursula LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, JG Ballard, Al Bester, Phil Dick, Sam Delany, Roger Zelazny. There are others. These 1960s writers brought SF to new levels, and have the standard for contemporary work (which suffered some artistic declines from the wave of techno/military SF that became popular later.
Dec 21, 2007. 8:18 AMJohnsons on fire
says:
I'll just stick with "big words." You are way up on another level of intelegence for me. I am just barely following what you are saying, and Wow. You are definetly a philosopher... person... thing..?
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