On avoiding the Frankensharpie...

On screwing up and its resulting payday, all in a day's work, and on the subject of biblical cherry picking...

I'm currently having a conversation with a friend about sharpie design and various schools of thought about the idea of a cruising sharpie. You might say it's a problematic conversation...

The thing is that my friend is suffering from information overload and it's making him crazy and driving me nuts as a result.

There are days when I really, really hate the guy who invented the internet!

The fact is, there are any number of ways to make a sharpie work... Phil Bolger's sharpies work but, then again, so do Reuel Parker's, Chris Morejohn's, Rodger Martin's, and any number of other designers. The problem is they all tend to disagree on some major issues...

Worse, the internet is a source of a great amount of information, much of it not very accurate at best and dangerous at worst. Trust me, there are any number of experts on the net who will wax eloquent on the design and building of sharpies who have never even been on a sharpie much less sailed one.

With so much information (both good and bad) floating around a lot of folks tend to want to cherry pick bits of various designs resulting in some serious Franksharpie mayhem... What works and works well on a Bolger design may not work at all grafted into a Rodger Martin design. What rocks on one of Rodger's designs may, when combined with something clever on a Parker design, be a whole lot less than the sum of its parts...

It's complicated and why designers actually earn their keep.

Listening to Bob Seger

So it goes...