The Marine Installer's Rant, what's your favorite?
... written for Panbo by Ben Ellison and posted on Apr 7, 2011
Admittedly, that vessel immediately makes me think of Reese Witherspoon's moderately immortal line in the moderately famous 1996 black comedy Freeway
While I've got MIR in Panbo's blogroll and have used comments to encourage readers to go there several times, I'm convinced that Bill isn't getting the attention he deserves. The guy really knows electronics and is not afraid to speak his mind; he can write and take pictures well; and I think he's wicked funny to boot (even to guy enduring lost days of PC malfunction). Consider the nuggets of installer wisdom in entries like "That boat ain't right, a primer" or "Big trouble in transducer town" or "What a dumb idea, stupid..." (photo below). Or enjoy some of the wackier general marine entries like "BOAT TRAVELS AT 65MPH WHILE BEING RUN BY AUTOPILOT! CITIZENS ARE OUTRAGED..." or "An Everglades 35 with some very clever dockside bondage work."
There are so many gems at MIR, but there's also a problem. Bill hasn't broken up his entries with "continue reading" breaks so you can't scan the topics easily, and MIR also lacks categories, a search engine, or an archive page like Panbo's (a recent and valuable addition, I think). Then again, I don't know where Bill finds time to create all those entries, and you can use his RSS feed and a good reader (like Google's) to get a linked table of contents. But if you do read Marine Installer's Rant regularly or do some serious poking around today, maybe you can come back here and give us a link or two to entries that really teach you something, or render you FDROTFL.
There are so many gems at MIR, but there's also a problem. Bill hasn't broken up his entries with "continue reading" breaks so you can't scan the topics easily, and MIR also lacks categories, a search engine, or an archive page like Panbo's (a recent and valuable addition, I think). Then again, I don't know where Bill finds time to create all those entries, and you can use his RSS feed and a good reader (like Google's) to get a linked table of contents. But if you do read Marine Installer's Rant regularly or do some serious poking around today, maybe you can come back here and give us a link or two to entries that really teach you something, or render you FDROTFL.
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Rereading the entry, I realize that I may have been mean to the yacht Seafair. A very late spring and a broken main computer will make a guy cranky. And further in my own defense, let me add that I have partially created and owned a, um, "distinctive" vessel myself: http://goo.gl/qCKNc
My line then was that function is more important than form, and I used to paraphrase the late, great George Putz ( http://goo.gl/RBq2v ) who used to say something like, "Who cares what you're driving? It's other boats you're looking at!"