{ }

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.

Well, you were, until I searched the intertubes and found a solution. If you’re saving anything for the web and you’ve upgraded from CS2 to CS3, you might notice that when you “Save For Web & Devices” that the images are all washed out. Now, usually this is due to the Color Profile not being correct (should be sRGB), but when I realized that I was working in sRGB, I started going crazy. It seemed like nothing I did was working correctly.

But, alas, tonight I found the answer. There are two new “defaults” Adobe threw at us web developers/designers without really telling us where they were. There are two articles that finally got me to stop banging my head against the wall, so thank you Tancredi and Adobe (make sure to check out the image attachment for the Adobe link).

So, if you’ve found yourself in the same place, hopefully this takes care of it for you.

Continuing with my “I’m dumb about some stuff, so others might be too”, I decided to finally look up what “et al” meant. I see it all the time but can’t figure out what it means in context. I looked it up today, and it simply means “and others”. That’s all. You can read a further definition at Answers.com.