Flyboarding
Probably the most memorable event of July was me trying flyboarding. It’s a type of water sports where you put your legs into a board with two pipes that blast water. This water is pumped through the pipe connected to a water jet, and as a result you can hover over the water.
Before the event I was somewhat nervous: who wants to spend 20-25 minutes constantly falling into the water? Not me, that’s for sure. Turned out though that either it is fairly easy, or I am just good at holding the balance. After few minutes I managed to stand straight. The next 5 minutes I was going circles and getting used to the 5-10 meter height I was above the water. Finally, the remaining 15 or so minutes I was attempting to do some tricks: “making jumps” by first going down and then using the momentum going high up, diving like a dolphin, and doing spins.
Smashing yourself against the water even from a relatively low height like 1-3 meters is painful. And I managed to do just that on multiple occasions. I think helmet somewhat helped, but in the end my head still hurt a lot.
The verdict: it’s fun to do it once, but then it either gets boring really quick, or you end up hurting yourself doing tricks.
Fermentation experiments
While reading baking blogs I have learned about the liquid yeast. This is wild yeast that lives on fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and that you can transfer into water. The recipe is simple: grab some apples, berries, mint, or some other fruits, cut them into large pieces, add water and sugar, and leave in a dark place for a few days. Yeast will start eating sugars and multiply in numbers. Later on that water can be used for baking. And that’s what I did.
Turned out that liquid yeast is much easier to manage that the regular starter made of flour. I didn’t get the perfect loaf, but it was still orders of magnitude better than I used to have with all my previous starters.
Throughout the whole of July I was also learning to make kombucha. I got hold of the scoby and did 3 batches of kombucha with every next batch being an improvement over the previous one.
RC Car progress
Little by little I’m making progress, and this month I have finally managed to print a proper motor mount which nicely holds two motors. I then started experimenting with the couplings that connect the motor and the wheel. These do work, but turns out that there is so little space that in the end nothing fits. So I’m looking for new motors which are smaller.
Talking about my fuckups
Few months ago I wrote an article about some funny and silly fuckups which resulted in an invitation to do a video interview for a product management YouTube channel and talk about the same topic in a bit more details. Before the interview I hoped this would be more like a conversation, but in the end it was more like a monologue. Nevertheless the result turned out to be much better than I anticipated and landed me an invitation to do a webinar on product planning.
Video diary
I decided to continue and film monthly reports: