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Showing posts from August 16, 2009

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Today I made good on my 40th birthday present from Paula - a session of indoor skydiving at iFly Utah. It started out with a 15 minute classroom session followed by suiting-up in jump suits, earplugs, goggles and helmets, and then we were in to the tube. If you've never seen one before, it's giant, vertical wind tunnel that simulates freefall. However good, bad or goofy I look in this video, it was a hell of a lot more difficult than I thought it would be, and it blow-dries your brain like you wouldn't believe. Your mouth goes completely dry, as does your nose, and once you finally come out, you spend 30 minutes blowing your nose as your body attempts to compensate for the sudden and extreme dryness. That aside, it was amazing. I've always said I'd never skydive for real but this has piqued my interest now..... Excuse the music - it's what they put on the DVD automatically.

This is, basically, my friend Bill and how he shoots.

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Heathrow rolls out soon-to-be-broken driverless taxis.

Oh dear. The BAA - that English organisation who took away all the UK airports and replaced them with badly-functioning shopping malls, has put the finishing touches on it's driverless taxi system at Heathrow Terminal 5 today. The initial rollout sees the system whisking people from the Terminal 5 shopping mall to one of the mind-numbingly-expensive parking lots. I predict that system will have failed and fallen into disrepair by the end of the year and here's why. 1. It's the BAA and they can't even keep the bloody moving walkways working which is 1970s technology 2. Without supervision, trust me - vandalism will be rife in these new little pods. Four lads, beered-up on their way to Ibiza, unsupervised, in a driverless taxi pod? It will be pushed off the track or be filled with piss and vomit. 3. The public are, for the most part, stupid - to expect a population of people who still have VHS recorders blinking "12:00" under their TVs to be able to use a touch

Pimp my helmet.

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I picked up my new Shoei helmet on saturday and took it out for a test ride on sunday. A short little 170 mile loop around the Oquirrh mountains to Tooele and back. It's a lot quieter than my old lid - well - it is once I don't have my ears trapped in the lining. For the first part of the ride it was noisy as hell and I couldn't understand why. Plus both my ears ached which is unusual - with a new helmet, I'm used to pressure on the ridge of my forehead, but aching ears? WTF? At my lunch stop I figured out why - I had both my ears pinned back in the lining which was causing a lot of wind noise where the lining was compressed, and was causing the pain where my ears were all screwed up. The lining and ear cutouts in the new helmet are slightly different to the old one. For the last part of the ride, I adjusted everything properly and the pain and noise went away. Much better.