Popping my cement cherry

Longboarding has its inherent dangers. These are pretty evident when you put it into the prospective of going downhill on a plank of wood at 30 mph. (sure some people can go faster but i'm not that good)

I have had my share of spills and bails but this is the first one that put a hurting on me.  This was a relatively tame fall but it did scab up my left hip and grind my headphone cable right in two.

Luckily I'm only half stupid and I do wear full protective gear. I have on a triple 8  helmet, bell knee pads, bell elbow pads, and homemade slide gloves.  Thanks to all this the only thing hurt other than my hip was the tip of my left ankle bone.

In the video when you see me fall I'm not even going that fast but when I transition from the dark concrete to the light concrete it become insanely slick.  The board slides out and I make about 2 steps before I dive for home plate (into a curb.)

Enjoy!

Oh honey honey

As it normally happens with me time slipped through my fingers and before I knew it July was gone.  I was suppose to pull the honey supers from the bee hives and collect that sweet delicious nectar of the (tiny) Gods. Now that it's August I finally got around to pulling the honey extractor out of the shed, cleaning all the equipment and suiting up on a cool evening to nab those bulging frames.

This time Austin helped me and could just barely fit in Amber's bee suit. Armed with the GoPro we set off to claim our prize.

Unfortunately for us the bees were lazy bastards this year and out of all the honey frames (the frames in the box at the very top of the hive that the queen can't get to) only 2 of them actually had honey. This is primarily do to the fact that we fed the bees very minimally through the winter. I think only twice did I fill their jars with simple syrup.  I knew they had stores of honey so I wasn't really worried about them.  My thinking, being the inexperienced bee keeper that I am, is if I kept their feeder full through the winter they would eat the simple syrup and save their honey stores. That way when spring comes there is less honey they need to produce to fill the lower boxes and they will start filling the top box.  We will try that this winter and see what happens.

As for this year I once again cleaned all the honey extracting equipment for nothing.  We used two colanders to strain the honey from the two frames into a bowl and then poured the honey into 4.5 mason jars.  

I really can't be mad about honey production. I almost literally do nothing with the bees all year. I don't use and chemicals or pesticides or any techniques to coax them into higher honey yields.  I like them to "bee" as natural as possible and so I am grateful for whatever they give me.  

Just the tip

So here's my random tip of the day.

I use a GoPro hero3 plus Silver Edition for all my video making. I had an issue where the Wi-Fi connection to my app on the cell phone wouldn't stay stable. it would stay connected for maybe 10 seconds and then disconnect. it was very frustrating to me. I have a  Samsung galaxy s3. Amber's Samsung note 3 would stay connected no problem.

If I were to turn my phone on airplane mode then the connection would remain more stable. this was ok but I didn't want to go and whole day doing a skate session or whatever without my cell phone on.

I finally fixed the problem and the problem was the phone's connection settings.

What I did is went under settings, connections, more networks, mobile networks, connections optimizer, and  unmanaged Wi-Fi networks.

The unmanaged Wi-Fi networks was the key to getting the GoPro to work correctly. this allows you to connect things like toys or airplane Wi-Fi that do not actually provide an active internet connection. 

Once I added the GoPros Wi-Fi to that list the GoPro now works flawlessly with my galaxy s3.

I hope this helps someone else who just thought their phone was crappy.