Remote Control Airplane with Goggle and Viewing Control

This is super cool.  As I was catching up on my blog reading, I picked this tidbit off of Marc Andreessen’s blog, that he titled “Where can I buy one of THESE?“.  Well, that got my attention as I love remote control toys, especially of an aerial nature.  You have to check out the video below.  Imagine being in control of a plane and flying without having to risk death :)

Cluster Ballooning, Pretty Wild Stuff

Just when I thought I had heard it all, here comes a new sport (if you can call it that given that you’re just “hanging around”, pardon the pun), and it’s called Cluster Ballooning.

The history behind this sport is actually pretty interesting as there’s been some urban myths about this sport, though the reality is far more interesting. A great summary of this can be found on Snopes. The Cluster Ballooning site shows step by step pictures of how it all gets set-up. Definitely worth checking out.

If the links above don’t work for whatever reason, you can get to the Cluster Ballooning site at this URL: http://www.clusterballoon.org/intro/intro.html.  There’s also a QuickTime slide show here.

Kiting The Lobby with Bill & Saar

I recently attended The Lobby Conference on the Big Island of Hawaii from October 24th through the 26th.  It was put together by David Hornick, a venture capitalist with August Capital.  The event brought together a really bright group of entrepreneurs along with top folks from several media and tech companies, to mingle and share their thoughts on where things are heading in this fast pace interactive online world.  But for three of us, it was also about kitesurfing a new island :)  Bill Tai, Saar Gur and I were on e-mail for the two days leading to the event deciding on times and locations for our kitesurfing rendez-vous (plural, if there is such a thing in this French term).  We were as maniacal as being in the Bay Area deciding which spot we are going to kite on any windy day.  The kitesurfing addiction is not to be taken lightly.

Rather than to recount this, let me point to Bill’s blog post on our adventure here.   Suffice to say, we pretty much got skunked for the first two days that we could go, Wednesday and Friday, but managed to get a good 30-45 minutes of riding on Saturday before the winds died and left several kiters stranded off-shore.  Fortunately, Bill, Saar & I had just come in as the winds dropped so we came away without incident and happy to have gotten some nice warm water riding in a truly inspiring location.