If you want to follow my writings go to http://diffract.me
Aug
07
Check it out at diffract.me
Aug
04
Check out the entry at diffract.me
Aug
01
Just came back from my dropzone in Portugal (Evora) with a mixed feeling of happiness and frustration. First things first: My best friend and jumps partner had his first cutaway today. On his first jump of the day! Talk about crazy luck. One of the cells on his canopy did not fully inflate, even after he pulled some 360s and full break-release maneuvers. The solution: The old saying “In skydiving, in case of doubt, there are no doubts”; cutaway and deploy the reserve. Turns out there were some holes in that specific cell that did not allow it to inflate. All went well, thankfully and he carried on jumping with a different canopy. One important thing in sports, and anything you learn for that matter, is that you should always end the day (training) with a positive experience. And the rest of his day went fine 
As for me, did I mention the sky was almost 100% cloud coverage? Well, turns out that being the first to jump from the plane – on a clouded sky – vastly increases you chances of not being that close to the landing zone when you deploy your main. That, along with the fact that I pushed myself to only deploy after clearing the clouds (around 3500 feet), made me open right above a nice forest of pine trees. As a side-note, 2 weeks ago I did the same with an open sky and ended up landing outside the airfield. We are supposed to learn from these experiences, but apparently I’m a slow learner in this respect. Anyways, I used the trick of pulling the rear cables of the chute (and keep pulling them) to gain some more horizontal ground and it worked; managed to land inside the airfield, though far far from the hangar. Wasn’t a bad landing, but a sudden rush of side wind brought me to the ground with my hands. Thank goodness for the gloves I *always* wear 
The second jump was perfect. Second to leave the aircraft, so much closer to the airfield, deployed around 3500 feet again – after training some transitions of belly-to-earth to back-to-earth and the other way around. The landing was just purely perfect. Tip of my feet 
Now, by the third jump of the day, the wind started picking up speed. My canopy would not move forward (at all) when facing it. I had, however, the intention of landing past the runway so I calculated the point where I should be for a proper landing but almost barely missed it (only made it because of pulling the rear cables again). So, above the landing spot I defined, I start descending (but not moving forward – remember, strong wind). When I finally reach feet-on-the-ground altitude, another rush of wind pulls my chute back and before I managed to pull one of the controller cables I was already being dragged in the direction of the runway!! Did I mention the airplane was landing in that exact same moment? It must have missed me by 3 meters and it actually aborted it’s landing, not even touching down. Damn, that was freaking scary. But that’s how we learn.
Conclusions and mental notes:
- With strong winds, always be directly above the landing spot around 500 feet. It’s better to go sideways until needed, if needed;
- If in doubt about making it to a landing spot, abort and land in the safest area that is close by;
- Again, if being the first out of the plane (since the plane generally drops us up wind) open earlier that normal (4000 feet min).
Jul
27
Jul
21
I killed an ant. It was dwelling around in my living room while I was watching TV. I had noticed it before, as it was considerably larger than your typical ant. Tried several times, with no success, to get it to move up to something I would use to take it outside, where its world was. All the attempts failed, like it didn’t want to go anywhere except my living room. Half an hour later, after losing track of it, I move my foot and hear a gentle crack sound. I look down, and there it was. Struggling, with half of its body dead already, I see the ant I tried to rescue. I spent the next 2 minutes fighting in my mind the fight between life and death, morality and immorality, good and evil, fate. I ended its suffering, as I felt it was the right thing to do. Isn’t it funny how sometimes it seems that everything happens because it was supposed to happen that way, at that time, and in that place? I killed an ant today.
Jul
12
That’s right, episode 75 is now online. Featuring a Portuguese friend and colleague developer, this is probably the worst episode ever. By the way, those two pieces of information are unrelated, no disrespect Daniel 
This week we feature: – A lot of porn; – Echolocation; – Pirate bay; – Collecta; – Swedish girls allowed to topless in public swimming pools; – More porn; – Dolphins; – Grolsch beer; – A tale of two programmers; – HIV cure found, not advertised a lot though; – A lot of offenses to a lot of countries. Watch it: Video here: http://bit.ly/k6Pqu Audio here: http://bit.ly/oBVra Peace
Jul
10
As you might know, a while back, I started a video podcast on life, technology, and everything, with my dear friend Luis Soares (http://twitter.com/luizsoarez). You can watch the episodes here: http://vimeo.com/channels/tgab. Recently it came to our attention that we do not have a graphical identify yet (like we didn’t notice 
) so work has began in that area. In the meantime, we also thought of something cool to make the show more interactive and are working furiously to make it happen during this month and launch in August. Stay tuned, and watch the show Peace
Jun
30
While skimming through a blog entry by Nicolas Patten (http://twitter.com/nicholaspatten), I noticed the small twitter follower counter he has on his Posterous account. When I clicked to check it out, I eventually tried to see what the stats were about my own twitter account. As you may or may not know, some 3 months ago I decided to unfollow all the people that I previously followed out of courtesy for following me. I noticed a sudden drop in followers at the time, but now I can see that it is actually steadily going up again. It’s good to see that some of the crap that I say seems to be interesting enough for some people to follow. Thanks for that. The whole 215 of you! 
If you are curious about the stats of your own twitter account over time, I recommend this awesome site. That’s how I saw mine: http://twittercounter.com/nocivus/month/all Replace “nocivus” with your own account in the URL and you’re done.
