[PSUBS-MAILIST] Psubs conference report....

[Ian Roxborough <irox@ix.netcom.com>]

[Bewarned, very little technical content, just
 about how much fun it was.]


Wow, that was fun.  As far as information per dollar,
going to the psubs conference was a real bargin.

It was great putting faces to email addresses.

The talks were really professionally presented and
came loaded with really important advise.  Plus the
'freak of the week' shows where great, even if the
presenters where trying to paint personal sub owners
in freakish light. ;-)

After giving up my attempt to walk to Hagg Lake
from Forest Grove, I tried hitch-hiking for the first
time in my life, the first person to give me ride turned
out to be an been an ex-submariner on a nuclear submarine,
he got me within about 6 miles, although he was more into
talking about his hot rodded Ranchero than AIP, the next 
person who pulled over for my thumb was Alec Smyth (thanks
again, and my feet thank you too).  So there was definately
a submarine theme to the journey.

The picnic was a great setting to meet other list members
in a relaxed and social atmosphere, thats when I started
to realise that no matter how much any body talked about
submarines, where won't be any bored people looking at the
ground this weekend.

The external speakers where great.  Brian Healy gave some
excellent advise and buying used equipment.  Basically
buying large industral machine shop equipment can work
out way cheaper than buying smaller laiths and milling
machines.  Why? nobody wants to deal with the bulk,
but you can with a rented forklift.

Who would have imagined that getting a bigger work space
and buying large equipment was the cheaper way to go.
(Hmmmm, a forklift could be really useful during the
construction phase too.) 

The ASME welding standards talk by Anthony Ciapanno
was very enlightening.  I won't even try to write
a summary of his presentation, because I won't do
it justic.

There where a few people video taping the talks, so
may be there will be footage available to those who
couldn't make it.  I'd a imagine they would be too
large for the web (or in lower quality in the size
is shrunk), so may be we could look into burning
them onto CD, in a slight compressed format I'd guess
it would be easy to get 1 hour per CD.  If we got
the CDs duplicated (100?) then they could be sold
on the psubs web site store.  Comments?

(If anybody has really read this far...)

My only regret is that I had to leave in a hurry
on saturday evening, without getting a chance to
say 'good bye' to every body properly, sorry about
that.

Anyway, I had a fantastic time and learned a lot.
I will do everything in my power to show up next
year.

Thanks to all who attended, presented and organized
the event.  (and now I will sleep...)

  Ian.

-- 
The moon ate the sun on Monday and it was an awsome sight to see.