Strother Scott
Layout Drawings

 

Layout 2004 Optimist Dinghy Association Atlantic Coast Championships

In 2004, after we bought the new land, but before we made any plans for it, we hosted the U. S. Optimist Dinghy Association Atlantic Coast Championships. We anticipated a huge traffic jam with up to 150-200 little 8' long sailboats, just as many Surburbans and parents.  This drawing was made to put on the event website and to hand out at event registration to try to keep some order out of the chaos of our hundreds of visitors, many boat trailers, and about 50 event volunteers and to provide guidance on how and where to get all the boats into the water on three different launching ramps

  

 

In 2007, our development of our new land is complete, and we are hosting about 100 20' long boats — all of which must be carried on long trailers.  I reworked the 2004 Opti Accs plan to show where everybody needs to park everything — and other specific event functions.  The drawings are simple, just beziers with arrows, rectangles duplicated as parking places — and all placed on a layer so they can just disappear with one click as we move to our next event.

  

 

For the Flying Scot event we have three seated dinner events in a 20 mile radius.  One member created a custom Google Map with our event hotels and restaurants.  Snapz Pro made a screen shot of the Google map — shown at http://www.fbyc.net/Events/2007/06.24.onedesign/layout.  I placed a screen shot of the Google map onto a PowerCADD layer and a government topo map on another layer — to which I added text and arrows, and colored lines.  We have all this on the website, and it will be available to all participants at registration.

  

 

All in the Family

In the dark days of 1995 or so, at a time when everyone in the world was saying that Apple was going out of business — and I was working on WildTools 3D — I was at a party that Strother and Evie gave for their sailing friends when they sold their racing sailboat. Strother had been urging Evie to use CAD but it never took. He had a Windows machine there with DataCAD on it. DataCAD had been developed in Charlottesville, VA and our older brother had been involved with the company.

At this point I had come to some conclusions on what I thought of various CAD and drawing programs, so I settled myself down in the office with the Windows machine on and with a copy of the DataCAD manual in my lap. After spending a half-hour with the program, I emerged to say "Evie, if you ever learn to draw with that program, I will kiss your a__ in public."

Some time later, Evie spent an hour or so watching Bobby Payne draw with PowerCADD and WildTools, and she said "I can do that." Strother, in great reluctance because of the onslaught of dismal news in the business press, finally broke down and bought a PowerMac 7100, one of the earliest PPC machines. When they got the machine home, a problem cropped up because the twins starting fighting over the mouse, and they had to pry their son's fingers off the mouse. This was when they began to realize maybe there really is something about a Mac.

Understand that Evie does not particularly like computers. She's a bright and very talented architect, but every time she wanted to cut, copy and paste in WordPerfect on the PC, she would call Strother at the office to ask him again how to do it.

Evie started a project on PowerCADD and WildTools. She wanted to be working on the project right away and didn't have time to read a manual or learn the program. The first month was a little rough, but after a month she was drawing about as fast as she had manually, and she could see that there was a lot of things in WildTools that she liked and that it was going to be fun.

Strother soon bought iMacs for the twins, and at last count I think they are on their 12th Macintosh. Evie doesn't much think about what she is doing on the computer any more and has become very much at home with doing her drawings that way. And now we welcome Strother to the Drawing Room. If you can't blackmail your own brother, then who can you blackmail?

Alfred Scott