One of the useful but slightly odd things that stuck with me from school came from one of the teachers I really didn't like.  I never thought that particular class would have any relevance to the Rest Of My Life but here I am thinking about it.

That one thing was a phrase that the teacher kept repeating, week after week.  Anyone from my school will know exactly who I'm talking about.

"Make a statement, back it up with a quotation, then explain fully."  

Ok, so the 'explain fully' part wasn't entirely explained (the irony), but I've found the general principle to be helpful when I'm trying to get my thoughts on paper.  

Make your point. Provide some evidence. Explain it clearly.

BCPA Monthly Draw – June

I’m the guy in the white helmet.

The above was my first attempt at a proper 3-way skydive. If you look closely it becomes obvious that I’m being dragged around. I’ve clearly got some work to do before I can keep up with these guys by myself. We did get 7 or 8 points though!

About the video

The BCPA is the national student body that promotes skydiving. Every month there’s a draw of three formations. The idea is to complete the sequence of formations (and repeat) as many times as possible within the time allowed (35sec).

June was the last draw of this academic year and the formations in the video are Sputnik, Opal and Cluster. The divepool these formations came from can be found here.

My first attempt at markdown

Having come across markdown some time ago, I’ve decided to give it a try. This post is basically my attempt at using as many of the tags as possible. At least those I’m likely to need.

Reasons

• More control over how how posts look
• To be able to emphasise things in plain text
• Because I prefer using plain text email

As Gruber says:

Markdown’s syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web

I’m hoping I can get used to it. The last thing I need is to give myself another roadblock to writing.

edit: I didn’t get the list stuff correct the first time around