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I’m now 25 jumps into my skydiving career and my next jump will be my “checkdive”, and if I pass that I’ll get my A-license. That means it will be the first New Year’s Resolution that I’ll have ever actually achieved.

I went skydiving on Sunday and wanted to do some coach jumps to practice how to “swoop and dock” since I’m pretty bad at it and I’ll need to know those things. For reference, a swoop and dock is when you arch your back hard, point your legs straight out and bring your arms in to fly toward another skydiver. When you get close, you slow down and eventually lock your hands around their wrists so that you’re face to face and holding the “dock”.

I did my first one, and could never make the dock – pretty frustrating. I also didn’t check my altitude once the entire time, which is terrifying – good thing the coach I jumped with was paying attention. We watched the video, talked about legs out and keeping a strong arch. I’ve had problems with keeping my legs out since day one, which is common but I was starting to think that it was a bad habit I had settled in to. Even in the tunnel I consistently get the “legs out” hand signal. We went up again to give it another shot – slightly better, but he still had to come to me to actually make the dock. I had a great landing, which helped make the jump not so bad, but after watching the video again it was clear that my legs just weren’t out. I started to think “maybe it’s not just legs out since they feel out, but instead legs out and down so that I’m really pushing them against the wind.” But, at the end of each jump, we turn 180 degrees and track away from each other so that we’re clear before we open. When I look at that on video, it’s clear that my legs are straight out. And I realized then the difference is my toes – they’re pointed when I track but now when I’m trying to swoop. He gave me a hard time, which I actually respond well to. It makes me want to get up there and fix it.

So, I found one of my instructors to do a coach jump with me for my last jump for the day. She was exhausted but still agreed, and for that I’m incredibly thankful – it’s good to do things as quickly as you can so that you don’t forget the sensations and you can really build on each jump. I specifically told her to not come to so that I was forced to try like hell to get that dock. We got out of the plane, I saw her in the distance, and I pointed my toes and push my legs out so damn hard – I started pushing them down too to get more power from them. What a difference that made. I got close to her pretty quickly. I slowed down of course, but it was a marked difference from my previous two jumps. Two successful docks and on our way to a third before we broke off and tracked away.

I got those elements of my proficiency card signed off (you need everything on the card signed off to get the A-license, which is why it’s typical to go past the 25 requisite jumps before getting the license). I just wanted to write this up in case anyone is having problems with getting their legs out, completing their swoop and docks and might find that my struggles were solved so simply by point my toes and pushing my legs down, not just out.

Okay, I just need to say this because everyone is freaking out about HTML5 after the whole Apple vs. Adobe thing. Apple is pushing for HTML5 to be the platform of choice for delivering video content over internet connected devices, even computers. But I want to say this – it’s not ready for primetime. HTML5 has many, many flaws that will prevent it from being the go-to choice. That said, Apple has done a good job (yet again) of making people follow it’s lead by only allowing HTML5 video on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. But it becomes pretty tricky when you have to consider all of the things that Macromedia/Adobe has done with Flash over the years to make it the leader in online video. Secure streaming (don’t expect to see full episodes of any of your favorite TV shows in an HTML5 player any time soon), rendition switching, thorough analytics (I say thorough because it’s still possible, just not nearly as robust with HTML5). Hell, you can’t even go fullscreen with HTML5 – only full window.

All of that said, I think it is good that it’s pushing developers to get the most out of an HTML5 experience and to become aware of all of its pitfalls. It’s easy to write a spec for something when you have no idea how it’s going to be used in the real world. I’m hoping (praying) that over the next year or so we’ll the HTML5 spec for video ramp up to be what we need it to be, at which point we can start building JavaScript libraries on top of it that will help your average developer who wants to delve into it all.

Also, goddamn you Apple. The iPad is stupid anyway.

First, let me explain what AFF is. It stands for Accelerated Freefall, and it’s the program most people go through on the path to getting their A-license for skydiving. It consists of 8 different jumps, and a ground school. The jumps include two instructors to begin with, and then eventually just one instructor, and you have certain tasks to complete each time. When you come in for landing, you have someone guiding you on the radio, though their guidance becomes less and less as you progress through the levels. These tasks range from things as simple as “stay stable” to “do a backflip and some 360s.” The most frustrating part about being a student, is that you have to wait for wind. If it gusts above 14mph, you wait. Otherwise you run the risk of being blown into the trees, and as frustrating as waiting can be, I think falling through a tree would be worse. In any case, last Friday was a perfect day and I was able to knock out my last three jumps for the AFF program, and do my first solo jump – that means I jumped out of the plane by myself, had no one beside me the entire time, and I landed unassisted.

The first solo jump was great. Thanks to some friendly advice from a recent graduate (who has since gotten his A-license, so congratulations to Dan Congdon), I had planned some things for myself to do during the jump. Otherwise you sit there and watch your altimeter tick away while you get closer to pull altitude, and it can be quite boring (yes, even though you’re plummeting through the sky, it can be boring). So, I practiced some backflips, some tracking, and doing fast spins (360s and 720s). I practiced some flares with the canopy after I opened, burned some altitude by doing some diving turns, watched some of the instructors swoop around me and scare me a bit. I had previously been coming in too low on my downwind leg, so I started a little higher this time. Came in, went a bit further before doing my crosswind leg, and came in for final – what’s that? The winds changed?! Yep. I was about 300 feet high passing over where I wanted to land and ended up at the very end of the runway (pretty damn far from where I wanted to be) and almost in the woods – close one. I landed standing up at least, which is my only saving grace, really. I guess I’ll have to work on a) judging which way the winds are blowing before heading to my holding area and b) getting that downwind leg locked down. Either way, it was a successful day of jumping. I’ll go into more detail soon about the specific levels for any other students out there doing AFF and are curious about the challenges and want to know what to expect.

My AFF Graduation Gift to Myself

Saw this Clinton vs. Obama demographic visualizer on Signal vs. Noise – pretty cool. I’ll keep my own opinions to myself, but definitely check it out.

Spotted this on uncrate. Hey – call me feminine but I like candles just as much as the next person. Otherwise my room just smells like dirty laundry.

http://www.hotwicks.com/ 

After you order, you can use their Pizza tracker online. It’s not perfect, but it’s still pretty cool. The best part is the fine print. First, I’ll premise it with their slogan “You Got 30 Minutes” meaning in 30 minutes you’ll have your pizza. Since that’s never going to be true in all cases (as it was for me tonight), they put in this bit of legal copy.

‘Because safety is a priority “You Got 30 Minutes™” is not a guarantee but an estimate. You may get more.’

Nice.

With Macworld coming up, I cooked up a theory. I’ll lay it out right now. Apple’s going to update the Apple TV with Blu-ray playback and HD content in the iTunes store including movie rentals.

The last two mentions (HD content) are kind of part of the package, but I’ll explain my Blu-ray theory.

Three major studios jumped to Blu-ray in the past week (Warner, New Line and Paramount with Warner and Paramount leaving HD-DVD. Sony and Apple have always had a close relationship. Apple’s said they would support Blu-ray if they got into the HD game.

With such sudden and active response in the HD market (which, granted, could be due to holiday sales), it seems too clear that there’s some insider info we don’t know about. If I’m right, you can expect Apple to increase its customer support (1-on-1s) to handle educating customers on how to create HD menus for Blu-ray, which (again, if I’m right) was probably a contractual agreement with Sony.

If this is all true, and let’s be serious – it’s probably not, then let’s hope the price of the Apple TV drops a bit too. $200 would be a great price point if it included a Blu-ray player.

And by that I don’t mean increase your site’s page rank, I mean increase your page rank. Have you ever Googled your name? Probably. You know who else does? Potential employers and stalkers. You probably don’t want the former finding pictures of your with dicks drawn on your face, passed out in a pool of your own vomit. So what’s an average guy/girl to do? Step 1: find some blogs that you like and post a comment leaving your name the same way it would be searched in Google. Leave a good comment too. Step 2: create some profiles for social networking sites and other popular sites that will show up when Googled (Amazon, Virb, etc).

Don’t fake it though. Post on stuff you care about. If you’re into cooking, post comments on recipes or post some of your own. If you’re into deep sea fishing, post some reviews about some equipment you’ve used. But definitely use your full name the same way some potential Googler would search for it. You don’t want people judging you incorrectly before they meet you, right?

So, I had my first run in with using PHP and JSON together. In PHP 5.2 and greater, there is native JSON support, so I started there first. It seemed to work just fine when the JSON objects were simple, but when they got complex and very nested, it failed every time.

After much hair pulling, a friend helped me out. The JSON I was getting back from the web service I was querying (Brightcove in this case) was not utf-8 encoded. Once I manually encoded it to utf-8, it worked.

But, it wasn’t over yet. I then ran into the issue that I couldn’t get any information out of the damn decoded response. However, once I passed a second optional argument to json_decode() (I passed in true), I was able to get my response as an associative array, and all was right with the world.

Since JSON itself is a relatively hot topic in web technologies, I wanted to throw this post out there to help people in case they run into the same issue I had.