Flying Car Engineer Nanodegree - Udacity

I really want to say this course was easy.  I want to tell you how much confidence I have now after a successful completion of the course and required projects.  Have you heard of the imposter syndrome?

At what level does one begin to apply one's skills meaningfully in gainful employment?  When is one ready to give back to the world?

Right now, feeling the surface of my mind, I don't feel like I have a working knowledge of anything that I completed over the past fifteen weeks.  Python, C++, rotor physics, PID controllers, probability, path planning, Gaussians, Kalman filters, Jacobians, Quaternions, what is this stuff?  I get it, all of the details of the more advanced math and physics are fresh and new to me.  Struggling is a part of learning.  One must learn to crawl before learning to walk.  Einstein also needed to learn to crawl. Etcetera, etcetera.. insert your favourite inspirational quote here.

I guess what I am searching for is that feeling I once had standing on the quarterdeck of a well tuned full rigger in a fresh breeze and knowing deep in my existence exactly where the wind is, when to toss off her tacks, brace about, and be gracefully on her way.  

For now, I must quite simply, push on.

Don't believe me?  Check it out for yourself.

FCND - The Flying Car Engineer Nanodegree at Udacity

What well-tuned full-rigger do you speak of?

SOIC - Ostindiefararen Götheborg

Invaluable heroic resource for learning math and clarity of physics concepts without the putdowns one might acquire querying stackexchange.

Khan Academy

"You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I Just kept pushing"

- Rene Descartes

Furu

Happy from the day, I smile and swing open the tarry door of the workshop.  My lungs fill with the sweet scent of a winter pine that gracefully lies end to end across the long hall.  Volunteers of the best sorts happily chip, chop, split away, the unwanted extra wood to form the scarf.  It is a sight not only seen, but felt.  I have been there before.  The one who happily, lovingly, labors, day by day, week by week, month by month, without, no, free, from monetary gain.  It is a beautiful life to live, and I see it here in this place, in these people.

SpoolMasterTM

Years ago I was working for Kalmar Nyckel during a winter maintenance period where we were scheduled to make a pile of new stays and shrouds.  We had a few huge spools of white polyester cable and hawsers that eventually needed to be turned black for good looks and extra ultra violet light protection.  "We could paint them by hand." was one suggestion.

Eventually we decided on running the cables through a half latex paint, half water solution, which works very well absorbing into the cable giving a nice coating.  There was one problem.  How do we effectively dry such an amount of cable without taking up too much space, getting paint everywhere, or dirt on the new cable?

And thus the SpoolMaster5000TM was born.

*images, drwing, of the painting process coming soon

Today I work with the Swedish East India Trading Company ship replica Götheborg.  Here we also have our own unique problems.  We make all of our own rope for rigging the ship.  The material we use to make the rope is hemp, and the material we use to preserve it is pine tar.  One thing is the same, the rope must be coiled.

Please welcome SpoolMaster5000TM-OldschoolEdition to the club.

No glue was harmed during the creation of this SpoolMasterTM.

I promise you, all of the joints didn't fit this neatly.

Slingerbardun

Chafe - Skav

On the old strop - På den gammal stroppen

So I shall splice up a new one - Så jag ska splitsa upp en ny

Worm, parcel, and serve - Tira, smärta, och kläda