I'm a bit amazed by the recent hype over cloud computing. Google Docs, Salesforce, Amazon EC3, the list goes on: the tech blogs are falling over themselves to keep up with the latest software-as-a-service and cloud offerings. Listening to Google's PR team, one might think that we're about to give up on stand-alone computers altogether.

EDIT 6-Aug-2010: These designs are now available!

A couple of new designs are almost ready to leave my drawing board. The Almaguin 400 and 500 are versatile 4- and 5-metre utility runabouts, designed with cottagers, anglers and day trippers in mind.

It's hard not to be impressed by the latest round of navigation electronics. This is 2010, after all, an era in which the average desktop computer has the computing power to calculate the airflow around a Space Shuttle during re-entry, and we can't tell the difference between live and CGI actors on the cinema screen. I'm not convinced, though, that all this computing power is a good thing to be throwing at navigation systems- at least, not in the ways we see in some of the current crop of nav systems.