Do you remember sun-drenched Wotje, with the little girl who presses a pretty shell into your hand and laughs? Do you remember Typhoon Kyle, and furling sails in 50 knots of wind and 40 foot waves? Do you remember a week out of Honolulu, already part of the family, when friendly Roger sailes out from Palmyra, sharing his island paradise? Do you remember sailing under the Golden Gate bridge, seeing parents waiting, and having the family scatter across the country, around the world?

Turn these pages, and remember the ports. Remember also the people. Your roommates, your watchmates, your teachers, the crew, your friends. Remember the ship, her tall masts towering above you. The sails filling with a snap and proud maple leaves billowing out as she leaps forward, dolphins and blue, blue waves her only companions.

You scurry about on deck, acid-washing your fingers to the bone. Scuppers, deck scrubbing, rust-picking, priming, painting. Scrubbing pots and flipping stir-fry, serving tables and being the juice-person.

Remember those endless nights on watch? Struggling to keep awake, keeping your eyes glued to the red glowing compass. Staring off at the horizon, watching the first faint rays of the sun creep up.

It's all in here, so you'll never forget. The voyages of the S/V Concordia, 1993 - 1994.

I'm revamping bmannconsulting.com. Right now I'm experimenting with putting flat files up on Github pages.

This is an example of me putting up my Class Afloat Yearbook, which I scanned in many years ago.

This is a transcription from the scanned image of the first page. I was the yearbook editor, but through a series of mishaps, never ended up with my own copy of the yearbook, so I only have these scans.

I obviously didn't have much room, so there are no line breaks. I've put some in for readability. And I'm pretty sure "rustpicking" isn't one word, so I added a hyphen.

Casting a critical eye on this writing, which is now 17 years old, written by my 19 year old self, it's…OK. I'm not emotionally removed enough (still!) from the memory strings it's tugging. As with most of my writing, it's very conversational; and by that I mean, I use the same cadence when writing as when I'm speaking.

I still haven't applied to speak at Raincity Chronicles, but if I do, it will be about some part of this Class Afloat voyage.

Cue the switch to tech talk…

Github pages? Well, it's a funny throw-back to be writing HTML directly in a lot of little index.html pages (never mind having a bunch of files all called the same thing open in your text editor). I need to learn Jekyll to actually build a site.

It DOES feel great to be "crafting" a site, with the links and organization of naming, file structure, and links all selected, rather than auto-generated. And it feels like work, in a good way.

The only peace of mind that exists in our current food system seems a kind of Orwellian trick- it is weird to know where your food comes from. By making it normal to not know, you don’t have to worry about it too much. We are beginning to see cracks in the sarcophagus with the occasional beef or peanut butter recall, the fear of food from China and the rise of local food on the fringes. But it is still mainly out of sight out of mind. Foodtree envisions a solution to the ills of our runaway food system by eliminating information asymmetry. It only takes a couple of times for you to be able to choose something you know the provenance of to remind you that it is actually bizarre to NOT know the source of your food.

It's great to be working with Tony and the rest of the Foodtree team on this mission.

While we joke about meeting the chicken that we're going to eat or joke about being "those people" that ask where stuff is from - it's important.

If you want to hear more from Tony, he's going to be speaking at the Raincity Chronicles this Wednesday - tickets at Firehall Arts Centre.