DAY EIGHTY EIGHT

those of you who are loyal readers - and i know there's a ton, word up to the odd latvian follower! - will realize that i messed up the numbering of my days. whoops. SO CLOSE TO NINETY!!!!!!

a vacuum sealed pack of love!

let's just pretend that i blogged about aeronautics engineers. i read about them so you don't have to. if you've got questions, i'll field them, but otherwise, way too boring to write about.

Using sorta-slave/severely underpaid labor to digitalize documents.

i never use reader any more after they stopped the sharing option. do others agree?

people say life's a journey, but i'm tired of wasting mine in transit.

hey! wait! there's actually one of the people i'm interested in in the news! back to aeronautics engineers:

the boards of canada video dayvan cowboy features three very cool videos: a free fall from 19 miles up, a big wave surfer, and a clip from the film Chrystal Voyager. Each thing is as cool as the last - very, very cool. Joseph Kittinger's the dude who got me interested in all these back in the day scientists. He rode up 20 miles into the atmosphere and, wearing a specially designed suit and parachute and made to be in a sitting position, jumped out. As Wiki so helpfully summarizes:

He set historical numbers for highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest drogue-fall (four minutes), and fastest speed by a human being through the atmosphere.

How cool is that?! He fell over four minutes straight and if you watch the video you'll see how incredibly far up he is - over four times higher than planes go. He reached speeds of over 600 mph!! Something malfunctioned in his suit and he passed out and his hand swelled to twice the normal size! Crazy!
And, he's training Felix Baumgartner, who's also done some REALLY cool stuff and - like in Human Target - is a specialist in small space targetted landings. Unlike the show, though, he's a real person, and also holds a bunch of records for BASE jumping and parachuting and all sorts of cool things. Felix is going to break the sound barrier without being encased by any sort of vehicle! the last and only thing to say is that the article doesn't mention that the reason for the delay is not for the years of preparation but instead because of some Red Bull lawsuit.