Had my second paragliding lesson with Rob today, which was just as exciting as the first, if not more so. Started with more just basic kite work, then started doing flights off the small bunny hill. I’m bad at guaging heights, but I think the small hill s about 50′ high. Got a total of 12 flights in on that hill, which were awesome. I’m really starting to get a hang of kiting/takeoff/wing control, which makes me really pumped.
I have to do a minimum of 15 flights on that hill before I can do my first radio assisted solo flight, so the current thinking is next lesson we’ll do another tandem flight, then finish with more small hill flights to finish that, then the next lesson, if I’m comfortable, the conditions are good, etc. I’d start doing solo flights.
Yes, you heard it right, in 2 weekends I might have my first real solo flight!!! I’m so psyched about how things are going. After each lesson, I’ve just spent the drive home thinking through all the details of things I’ve learned and trying to process as much as possible. I also managed to forget my camera today, so sadly no photos yet of things.
After the lesson, I joined a bunch of the folks for dinner at one of the local hangout/pizza joints. Met a lot of great folks, many of whom’s names I’ve innevitably mixed up or forgotten, but still seems like an awesome, very close group of people. Looking forward to getting to know more of them, etc. Rob and Dianne in particular seem like amazing people, having been doing this for years and years, and clearly playing an important role in the paragliding/hanggliding community here. If anyone is in SoCal and looking to learn either sport, I would highly recommend you contact Rob. </shameless plug>
On the tech side of things, I released a 0.8.5pre1 pre-release of muine last night, the major updating being support for Gstreamer 0.10. I’m going to do a final 0.8.5 release sometime next week hopefully. Sorry the geeky side of things here is so brief, been a bit pre-occupied with other things recently… can you blame me?
