What to look for when buying a used Vanguard 15

Most of my posts are related to the business of software, the web, and IT in general. However, I came across some useful information related to one of my main pastimes, competitive sailing, and thought I’d post it so others can benefit.

I’m in the market to buy a used Vanguard 15, a popular 15 foot sailboat raced here in San Francisco. Here’s the list of some of the less-obvious things to look for when buying a used V15. Some of these come from Nick Adamson, a past V15 national champ who was instrumental in getting the local fleet going here a decade ago, and Morgan Larson, a 505 world champ who’s done a bit of sailing in the Vanguards.

This isn’t a complete list of things to look for — that would be a long, boring post. Rather, these are some of the really big items to look for to quickly size up a boat.

1. Mainsheet block attachment becket – they eventually get loose and have to be reinforced (repairable but you should negotiate on the price).
2. Spider cracking in on hull – usually means the hull has a weak spot in the spider cracked area (stay away if you see this).
3. Excessive wear in the centerboard trunk – primary source of leaks (repairable but you should negotiate on the price).
4. Make sure mast is straight – they sometimes get bent when inexperienced folks stick the mast in mud. (Means the mast needs to be replaced.)
5. Bow dings. These are often repairable, but indicate the boat’s probably had a hard life.
6. Delaminated rails. These are usually repairable if they are caught early. But make sure the rail hasn’t turned mushy.
7. Misaligned/misshaped centerboard trunk. This is not repairable. If you want to be competitive, this could be a show stopper.
8. Corrosion in the rigging. Not a showstopper, but means that you should consider replacing the shrouds, else your mast could come down.

On the other hand, Nick said it wasn’t necessary to weigh a V15 hull, since he’s never her of major weight differences. This is in contrast to Laser hulls 20 years ago — yes, I’m dating myself — which could range in weight from 130 to 145 pounds.

Aside from these visual checks, it’s important to test sail a boat on a windy day and see how it holds up, and check out whether it leaks.

There are some things that are fairly easily addressed, and should not be major sticking points when looking to buy a used boat:

1. Minor rail dings.
2. Mast step depressions. Seems like V15′s get these after just a bit of sailing.
3. Wear on the boom, where it meets the shrouds.
4. Cracked plastic handrails. A number of sailors are simply taking the plastic handrails off.
5. Worn out shock cord and lines.

What do you think? What other kinds of things should one look at when buying a Vanguard 15?

How to create your own neighborhood newspaper

I’ve always wanted a neighborhood newspaper — something that covers what’s going on in my local neighborhood, and filters out what’s going on in San Francisco at large.

Our neighborhood does have a local paper — the Richmond Review — but it comes out only once a month and is pretty sparse in content. There are local news sites like Everyblock, and Outside.in, but these seem to miss a lot of local stories as well.

So, I used Yahoo Pipes to aggregate RSS from a number of sites — Everyblock, Outside.in, Google News and Blogsearch, WordPress, Flickr (for local photos), Craigslist (for events), and Yahoo Groups. (Unfortunately YouTube doesn’t have a way to display search results in RSS, and Upcoming searches can’t be fixed on a particular neighborhood. When these change, I’ll add them.)

Pipes is smart enough to let me filter out news from Richmond, VA, as well as the town of Richmond in the East Bay, as well as to filter out duplicates.

The result is here. While it’s not perfect, it’s more complete than anything offered by Everblock, Outside.in, or even the San Francisco Chronicle.

Which makes me wonder: what if someone did this for every neighborhood and town in the US, or even the world. You could use Craigslist as a starting point for your taxonomy of communities. Doing this manually would be painstaking, but it seems like it would not be rocket science to automate this.

This concept could by refined by grouping entries by date, so that you have a "daily edition" for your neighborhood rag. Then add a Digg-like way for people to promote/demote certain entries so they appear higher/lower, and to flag entries as inappropriate — wrong location, NSFW, etc.

Hyper-local news should be achievable given the information we have available today. Food for thought…

What early adopters really do at their computers

TechCrunch has a great post on how early adopters spend their time on their computers. What’s fascinating about this is the time usage stats are based on actual behavioral data, so it’s very accurate, relatively speaking.

No doubt people are drawing all kinds of conclusions from this. I thought I’d share mine, which revolve around how this data affects market share, revenue, and valuations:

• Gmail is used 3x more than Google.com. Not surprising when one considers their own workday activities. But, assuming clickthroughs are more or less equal for both (valid assumption?) — that means Gmail generates the bulk of Google’s Adwords revenue. Pretty amazing considering that Gmail originally came out of a developers "20% time" project. This supports the notion that sometimes the best projects come out of skunkworks.
• Facebook is accessed 50% more than Google.com. Maybe that $15 Bn valuation is justified after all!
• Outlook is, unsurprisingly, the most used app. Now, think about Xobni. If you got it installed, whenever you use Outlook, you’re using Xobni. That means Xobni could soon become one of the most widely used apps around. That presents some interesting monetization opportunities when you have that many user attention minutes. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for those guys.
• It’s surprising that Yahoo Messenger has such low usage. Last time I’d looked, a few years ago, Yahoo had many instant messenging users. One more thing for Jerry Yang to worry about. I’m also surprised that Meebo is at the bottom of the list.
• OpenOffice and Google Apps have very low usage. For instance, Google Docs has 3% the usage of Word. If even the early adopters aren’t using them, I guess it will be some time before they start to challenge Microsoft in terms of market share. And it will be some time before Microsoft profitability, largely driven by the Office suite, starts to suffer and drag down Microsoft’s valuation.

A note on accuracy: I’m sure some will quibble about the accuracy of the numbers given that
the sample was self-selected, But market research is an inexact science.
Not to go all Rumsfeld, but you need to use the data you have, not the
data you wish you had. This, as far as I know, is the best data we have on what people actually do on their computers. (If you know of a better data source, please let me know.)

Review of Evernote for Mac

I recently learned about Evernote for the Mac on the Lifehacker blog, and that I’d give it a try. Here’s my review of what I learned.

First, here’s why I thought of Evernote in the first place.

My main reason for trying Evernote is to archive meeting notes that I’ve written by hand onto a notepad. While I prefer to take notes directly into my laptop, this isn’t always possible — sometimes I don’t have my laptop, sometimes my laptop is tied up displaying a PowerPoint presentation, sometimes I can’t type in my laptop without the keyobard clicks annoying others on the conference call.

I’ve tried special pens that have a camera built in and require special paper. The problem is that this pens ar huge and basically make you look like a dork. Not the best thing when you’re trying to establish credibility during a customer presentation.

Given the challenges above, I’ve stuck with good old pen and paper. The problem is that retrieving information in notes from more than a couple of days in the past is a time-consuming, page turning exercise.

Evernote is a nice complement to pen and paper, handwritten notes. It archives them on both my laptop and the web, and most impressively, makes most of the actual handwritten text searchable. This is really amazing. My handwriting is not that great, yet Evernote indexes it, and makes it instantly searchable, a la Spotlight or Gmail.

So, Evernote is off to a good start, especially considering that they’re only on version one of their Mac client.

Here are some additional things I’d love to see in the product in future versions:

1. For the web version, support Firefox keyword searching. This way, I could type in the following into my FF address bar: "evernote <text to find>", and the Evernote Web site would return search results.

2. Better integration with HP scanners. (Mine is an OfficeJet 5780.) I’d love to be able to scan directly from the scanner to the Evernote OS X client. Should be technically feasible, since the HP scanner can today scan to Preview, iPhoto, Finder, etc.

3. Reduce the size of JPEGs of notebook pages that I’ve scanned in. The HP scanner by default makes them around 2.5 MB for an 8.5 x 11 page. This is overkill. Would be ideal if Evernote automatically crunched these down to a JPEG that’s around 300 MB. That provides enough information to be readable on a screen.

4. Let me use Evernote to quickly concatenate multiple scanned in images into a single image. This way I don’t need to have a bunch of separate JPEG files in Evernote, as in "Acme Corp meeting notes 1", "Acme Corp meeting notes 2", etc.

5. It would ideal if Evernote let me take pictures from the iSight camera built into the monitor. This means I would not have to open up Photo Booth, and would be a time saver.

6. Better still if Evernote provided a hook into QuickSilver, which let me take pictures from the iSight camera just using a keyboard command. Perhaps this could be implemented via a special utility app (or droplet) that Evernote provided, sort of a "gui-less" app that quickly starts up, takes a picture, and puts it into the Evernote database.

7. Spotlight integration. Right now, items in Evernote don’t seem to appear in Spotlight.

So, if you can live with the above shortcomings, Evernote is definitely worth a look.