Blogged Et Animam Levavi

It would be pretty cool if you could use the trackpad on your laptop as a mini graphics tablet. Perhaps, with a special pen that enables this mode. It probably wouldn’t meet the needs of professional graphics designers, but would be pretty useful for quick sketches, diagrams and whatnot. A pen is still the most natural tool for free-form input, so I am fairly positive that this feature will be appreciated.

SEAL Pup Elite has a very cool-looking 4.85″-long full tang blade with a spine rasp and an injection-molded glass handle with deep comfortable finger grooves that make the handle sit very comfortably in your hand. This knife is available with both partially serrated and straight blades – I personally prefer the straight edge. Its weight and blade thickness feel just right and overall the knife feels very solid.

Initially I bought the knife with the Kydex sheath because it is quite compact, lightweight and has a neat little feature – a grove that reveals a section of the blade which allows you to cut rope without taking the knife out of its sheath. But after trying different ways to carry the knife (including designing and sewing my own custom thigh attachment system) I realized that the nylon sheath was just better suited for my situation. First of all, it has an additional compartment which I ended up using to store my Leatherman Charge multitool. But more importantly, it has a MOLLE attachment on the back, which opens up carrying possibilities galore. Also, I was able to attach a small loop of webbing to the side of the sheath for the firesteel.

I used the knife quite extensively at a week-long survival camp and I must say I am very happy with its performance. The blade is equally good for chopping down small trees, making a throwing stick, carving a pair of chopsticks or a replica of the knife itself. About the only issue that I had with this knife was the spine rasp – I would prefer if the knife did not have it as it hurts a little when I press against it with my thumbs while carving. But it’s a personal preference and I wouldn’t hold it against this knife.

All in all, I am very happy with my SOG and would highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a dependable fixed-blade knife. Would I recommend it as a survival knife? Well, it’s a highly debated question. Some say the blade should be around 4 inches long. Others rightfully note that there’s nothing a small blade can do that a big blade cannot. Yet others seek knives with hollow handles to put a small stash of goodies inside (my opinion of those knives is not very favorable). But in the end, it all comes down to personal preference – choose the blade you’ll be comfortable carrying with you at all times. For me, this is SOG SEAL Pup Elite!

That’s the 5.10b I’ve been working on for a few days. What’s next? Well, I’ve been eyeing the adjacent black 5.11c, but it’s clearly out of my league at the moment, so maybe I’ll work on power endurance for a while and climb some longer 5.9’s.

I went climbing today for the fourth time in my life – good stuff! I was working on my technique, so I was mostly climbing easy 5.7’s. However, when I say “technique”, I mean whatever I think is the right way of doing it. My hands still hurt after each climb and that is a sure sign that my “technique” is nowhere near where it should be.

I also tried climbing a very short 5.10c a couple of times and that is where I got some very interesting results. What’s interesting is that the difficulty of this route meant that I couldn’t just muscle through it. There were no good handholds, and I had to use my legs for climbing. And then the tiny crimps were so far apart that I often had to bend my body in very odd ways and cautiously move from one position to another while keeping balance – thanks to my yoga classes I was able to handle it pretty well. In the end I failed to reach the top, but my hands were actually very well rested after the fifteen minutes of trying painstakingly and failing to attack the crux. I think it was a great technique exercise and I’ll do it again next time.

Anybody in Bay Area interested to take on an indoor rock climbing with me?

I just came back from a week-long Extreme Survival camp based on the hit survival series “Man vs. Wild”. A thorough report with pictures will follow later.

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Bad Grouping, originally uploaded by sudarkoff.

This is a good example of the bad grouping of page elements. Neither of the text blocks clearly “claims” the illustration. Vertical whitespace below the upper text block suggest that the illustration belongs to the block below it. But the header of the second text block separates it from the picture. It would have been much better to place the header above the image and the rest of the text below it.