In terms of crazy things I’ve done in my life, jumping out of an airplane is probably right up there with that time I took 5 hits of acid and went skeet shooting off the roof of a moving golf cart. (In other words, it’s definitely the craziest thing I’ve ever done.) I’m not one for taking risks, unless they are carefully calculated ones, and I’m still not sure how this happened so quickly. A few weeks ago it wasn’t even something I had even considered doing, but when it was proposed as a team-building exercise at Alicia’s work, she invited me along… and I couldn’t let her do it without me, now could I?

We chose Niagara Skydive in Dunnville, mainly because they offered the option of going solo even on your very first jump. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why this was deemed to be the preferable method, and as we sat through the 5 hour training session I began to question it even more. Most places will only allow you to do a tandem jump for your first time (that is, with an experienced sky diver strapped to your back doing all the work). While the system we used didn’t require you to pull the chute yourself (it gets automatically activated by a smaller chute that is released by the instructor as you jump), there’s still an unnerving level of responsibility involved in a solo jump. If, for instance, you somehow happened to pass out due to the stress of the free fall… the parachute would deploy, but you certainly wouldn’t have a very soft or predictable landing.

The first thing we did upon arrival was sign waiver forms saying that we understood that skydiving was dangerous and that it could result in death. If it hadn’t yet sunk in that this was more than just some silly amusement park ride, I was now beginning to understand the true gravity of the situation (no pun intended). We all heard a lot of things that morning that we probably didn’t want to hear. We learned how to properly climb out of the plane and hang from the wing before letting go. We learned how to adjust our direction while descending and how to read the ground signals to avoid potential obstacles such as rivers, trees and hydro wires (not to mention the high speed car test track that was right beside the airport’s runway). We were informed of the many things that could go wrong with our main chutes and how to identify when it might be necessary to release the original chute and deploy our reserve instead. We learned that skydiving was better than cocaine (well, okay, that tip was from some random passerby, not our instructor). After all this preparation, my stomach was in knots and I was wondering why we didn’t just do the tandem thing in the first place. At least it would have been over by now.

Once we got suited up and found ourselves kneeling on the metal floor of a noisy, cramped little plane, ascending toward the clouds, I wasn’t really that nervous anymore. There was no turning back. Alicia wanted to go first (I think because she wanted to get it overwith as well), and I was okay with that. Then the door opened and the deafening roar nearly knocked me on my ass. Okay, I was nervous again. Alicia got the go-ahead and stepped out onto the wheel of the plane, fighting against the wind and shimmying out to the strut where she hung there, looking back up at the instructor. I saw this brief look of terror in her eyes, and then he yelled “Go!” and in a split second her body was whipped backwards and out of sight. That’s when I thought to myself, “Oh shit. I should have gone first.”

The plane circled and we spotted Alicia off in the distance, floating down with no apparent problems. I breathed a sigh of relief. Okay, I can do this.

As cliched as it sounds, the best thing about the solo jump is having to conquer your own fear of climbing outside the plane. The rest is easy, because all you have to do is let go. All I really remember is that as I climbed out, my body was half numb and my feet were all prickly because I had just been kneeling on them for the past few minutes. Once I got myself out there, received the green light, and took the plunge, my 5 hours of training remained up there in the plane without me. We had been taught to arch our backs and look up as we fell, but which way was up? It was all happening so fast and I couldn’t tell where to look. Then I remembered we were supposed to count down out loud as we fell, before checking that our chute had deployed properly. I had just started to count down when I heard someone from ground control come over the radio and say, “Congratulations jumper! Turn right… right… right”. I stopped counting and immediately grabbed the steering toggles. The rest of the fall was peaceful and serene (and a little bit cold) but I wasn’t completely enjoying the view because I was worried about where I was going to touchdown. I felt like I was right over that race track for most of my fall. In the end, they brought me down right in the middle of the open field and the landing was so soft I barely felt it (possibly because my legs were still numb). At any rate, I just wanted to lie there and kiss the ground but I had to gather up my gigantic parachute and carry it inside.

There’s a lot less free-fall when you jump solo as you only have a couple of seconds before the parachute gets pulled, but I’m still glad we did it the way we did. I would do it again too — although it certainly hasn’t turned me into some kind of adrenaline junkie. Regardless of exactly how crazy skydiving is on your own personal insanity meter, I think it’s definitely an experience you carry with you afterwards. The next time I get worried or anxious about something, I will just look back and think, “Fuck it, I jumped out of a plane. This is nothing!”

I finally got around to finishing an article I had been working on a while back about the advent of “advergames” (video games created to help promote a particular product or brand). Jim Munroe was kind enough to publish it over at The Cultural Gutter, so head over there and give it a read if you’re interested.

For anyone out there who happens to produce a podcast, if you haven’t yet discovered The Levelator, you’re totally missing out on an amazing piece of free software. This program will automatically clean up and normalize the levels for your audio recording after the fact — simply drag and drop a WAV or AIFF file and let it go to town. I used to use the Normalization and Hard Limiting options in Adobe Audition, but this is a lot simpler, and I think it sounds better too.

I am always fascinated to hear what kinds of weird new gadgets are in the works over in Japan, and once again they appear to have outdone themselves with another masterwork of unnecessary over-engineering. Researchers at Osaka University have created a new iPod remote control that is worn as headgear and manipulated by clenching your teeth. I suppose any sort of hands-free interface has some value to it, and they’re talking about using it to move wheelchairs next. The question is, will it still work if you’ve been cursed with an overbite?

In yet another case of things that would happen only in Japan, there is a news story this week about an arm wrestling arcade game called Arm Spirit that had to be pulled out of arcades after actually breaking some people’s arms! It would seem that they built this thing with Sylvester Stallone in mind, but according to a spokesperson for the game’s distributor, “The machine isn’t that strong, much less so than a muscular man… Even women should be able to beat it.” Obviously they didn’t count on the severe lack of fortitude that most video game nerds tend to suffer from. Now if it had been a thumb-wrestling game on the other hand… maybe the geeks would stand a chance.

Zak sent me this story about a guy who came up with WikiScanner, a program to cross-reference the IP addresses of people who edit Wikipedia entries and match them to the IP blocks belonging to major organizations. In other words, it exposes instances where various companies and organizations were manipulating Wikipedia entries for their own benefit. This changes everything. Not only does it reveal how unreliable Wikipedia is, it also puts the power back in the hands of the average user instead of the big corporations. I’m surprised no one thought of this sooner.