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[Tad Eareckson]

A bit over two years ago I switched Kite Strings' default time stamp format (what one sees when not registered or logged in) from:

Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:35 am
All times are UTC - 6 hours [ DST ]
D M d, Y g:i a

to:

2013/08/05 15:35:47 UTC
All times are UTC
Y/m/d H:i:s e

At the time I made the catastrophic mistake of assuming that "UTC" meant "UTC". Saturday I found - as a consequence of some discrepancies Steve was noticing and reporting - that this is not necessarily the case if one has an:

Enable Summer Time/DST

switch that isn't switched to "No". I happened to have my personal preferences so set and I'm virtually never not logged in so I never noticed that the default time stamps were running an hour high for the warmer part of the year.

Similar deal on The Bob Show. Back in 2011 I was noticing things weren't lining with my preferences in which I hadn't messed with the switch 'cause I thought it was irrelevant if one was set to UTC. Figured it was an intermittent bug and just copied and pasted what I was seeing.

So I have thousands, maybe tens of thousands of references which are hurting a bit in the integrity department. Fuckin' nightmare.

I've started editing posts with Bob Show quotes - everything I've seen so far has been an hour fast - and I'm trying to prioritize with respect to importance but with 8114 posts in General at the moment no one should start holding his breath for at least a few months down the road. Until further notice make sure to verify with the original source for any important application. (Minutes and seconds should, of course, all be good.)

P.S. I fuckin' despise local times and Daylight Saving switches for anything that goes out beyond a twenty mile radius. Give us the goddam UTC and let us add or subtract a few hours as necessary. Bob's default is:

All times are UTC - 8 hours [ DST ]

which is his way of saying that California is the center of the hang gliding universe and flatlanders/towers can go fuck themselves.

Also note that:

All times are UTC - 8 hours [ DST ]

doesn't make any sense. Pacific Daylight is a SEVEN hour offset and you can verify that it is Pacific by comparing at the sane:
2015/08/10 17:23:32 UTC
and lunatic default:
Mon Aug 10, 2015 10:23 am
time stamp formats on the current most recent post ("What is a "hang gliding" site?" - Post 1).
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P.P.S. - 2015/08/10 21:43:00 UTC

Also, if you've posted anything from Kite Strings (on a site that allows such references (if you can find one)) you might wanna check and do some editing.

[Tad Eareckson]

On the morning of 2015/08/16 I sat down on some steps in bright sunlight and plopped my trusty ol' MacBook Pro down on my lap to try to get something useful accomplished while waiting for the building to get opened. Looking at its top side prior to opening it I became suddenly aware of a vast and dense constellation of tiny floaters that hadn't been there before. Shifting my gaze skyward I saw a big flock of blackbirds that wasn't there.

On 2015/09/02 I got checked out by the ophthalmologist and learned the term "Posterior Vitreous Detachment".

And with respect to the RIGHT eye... In January of 1978 I was about to catch my boomerang while stupidly assuming the idiot standing five yards to my right was also in position to catch his. As it turned out I was in position to catch both of them and caught his in my right eye. It was banked hard and coming down steeply and I got nailed by the spinning tip without even getting a blink in. Damaged iris, permanently dilated pupil. (And if I'd been wearing sunglasses - as I made a point of doing ever afterwards...)

And that eye, I would guess as a consequence of getting the extra exposure, has a cataract developing and the iris issue makes surgery problematic.

Meanwhile, back on the left... I've now got a few huge mothership floaters drifting around. If I'm lucky (fat chance) things will settle out and I'll have some improvement in a few months. If not there's stuff (lasers, surgery) that can or might be done.

So anyway... I'm not seeing my typos very well and the spellcheck doesn't know I meant "far" when I wrote "for". So sorry 'bout all the errors lately and eternal gratitude to Steve and Brian for catching hopefully 99 percent of them.

[Steve Davy]

I am at a loss for words right now. I feel totally sick from reading this news.

[NMERider]

PVDs heal on their own. I've had them twice. The first time I was soaring at Sylmar and suddenly there was an explosion of lightning bolts arcing across my left eye. It was so bad that it gave me vertigo. My initial thought was, "Oh shit! I have a detached retina.". My next thought was, "Oh fuck! I can't land the glider". So I hung around in the sky and realized that lightning bolts are not indicative and detached retina. I don't see a black curtain. I landed safely and immediately called my wife and asked her to research the symptoms. While I was driving home she told me she'd found a hospital website in the UK that described my symptoms to a 'T'. It was called PVD and I'd better get my ass into an ophthalmologist to look inside and determine whether there were any pinholes that could allow aqueous to leak in back and cause the retina to detach. I bee-lined my car for urgent care in order a get a fast referral to an ophthalmologist. I saw her the next morning. She was very thorough and could not detect any pinholes. By this time a huge glob of vitreous had detached and I was now looking through a blob of Jello. At night, any time I moved my head I'd see an arc of lightning in that eye. The Jello lasted about 3 months before it finally all dissolved. The lightning slowly dissipated after a few more months. After a year my eye was back to normal. A few years later I had another Jello blob slough off and again I had it checked. It was not nearly as bad as the first episode. A year after that I had an ocular migraine which freaked me out but was harmless. I am extremely nearsighted and susceptible to retinal detachments.

So hopefully your PVD dissolves after a few months and leaves no trace. I wish your remaining good eye my best.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Tad Eareckson]

Thanks, Steve, but give yourself a break. I'm a little bummed out by this but it's not anything that's keeping me awake with worry. Global warming owns the field in that department.

Jonathan...

Wow. Had never heard of this stuff before.

Didn't get any lightning. Was on Day Two of a four day ukulele workshop program (started playing about half past the previous August (right before I got really hammered by that probable pneumonia thing that took me forever to recover from)) at the Strathmore northwest of DC just outside the beltway. Navigated in via commuter rail and subway (Metro) and logistics forced me in way early. If the building had been open I don't know when I'd have noticed that something was wrong. Needed the bright light and clear field (light gray laptop top in direct sun or sky) to see the problem. Knew a bit about the symptoms of retinal detachment and none of that was happening and the situation wasn't getting worse so I just went on with my schedule.

Didn't know about the ocular migraine thing either before I got hit - in the early Eighties I think. Was throwing boomerangs (was a boomerang freak for many years before and after I started flying myself) one evening. At first I thought I was just having a problem with an afterimage from the sun but it was doing the opposite of fading out and then I realized that it couldn't have been the sun 'cause it was already below the trees.

That scared the crap outta me. Thought I was going blind. Well, I was - but after what I subsequently found would be a twenty to thirty minute cycle...

I had to land at least once with one of those peaking and unable to see virtually nothing of anything I was looking at but it wasn't any real problem. Glad I wasn't in an F-18 at night low on fuel and trying to snag a wire on a pitching carrier deck though.

I think for a while I was scoring them about once a week or so but I think I've only had one or two in years recently.

Thanks for the info, reason for optimism, and well wishes. Doing one of my atheist prayers for your health and flying future. (Never dreamed you'd have one after that 2014/01/29 crash.)

[Steve Davy]

Half a sigh. I'm feeling a little bit less depressed now than I was yesterday.

[NMERider]

Here's the info source my wife had found for me back when:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/eye-health/eye-conditions/posterior-vitreous-detachment-PVD
The RNIB seems like a great information source. Gotta love the UK!

[<BS>]

I didn't recognize the activity in this thread, sorry to hear this.

[Tad Eareckson]

Steve and Brian... I'm a bit depressed about all this but my normal state is megadepression anyway so it's not making much difference.

Brian... Yeah, it's pretty easy to miss new posts in this thread. Nothing shifts, posts are infrequent, and it's not something one tends to keep an eye on.

Jonathan... Just worked up the guts to check out your link.* Mostly pretty encouraging. I don't understand how this PVD issue could be so common and I could've never heard about it until I was diagnosed on 2015/02/02. Nice to have some more encouragement about the prospect for improvement with these damned floaters. They're significantly cramping my style in the reading/writing department (like right now, fer instance).

UK... Yeah lotsa good stuff comes outta there but they're even more massive dickheads about the Infallible Weak Link issue than the US is.

* A while back heard on the radio about a study that found that when someone gets diagnosed with breast cancer the rate at which her coworkers get themselves screened drops like a brick. I can totally understand and relate to that.

[Tad Eareckson]

Happy fifth birthday, Kite Strings.

Original mission was to get people who wanted to understand the aeronautics of hang gliding up to speed and then, hopefully, united to get the sport on track. The first part was a smashing success 'cause there's not all that much to it for thems with the requisite interest, intelligence, and ten year old kid common sense. Part B has been more problematic 'cause the pool of Part A quality individuals can be counted on one person's fingers.

The good news is that the tens of thousands of dickheads WITHOUT the requisite interest, intelligence, and/or ten year old kid common sense and sleazebags with vested interests in keeping the sport off track are, inevitably, predictably, flying the sport into the ground. And the faster it goes down the faster it goes down.

So the revised mission is to keep accelerating that trajectory as efficiently as possible. We're not always students, we've known for decades what puts gliders out of control and crashes them, and in this age of people blurting out facts within hours of their friends slamming in doing what they loved and GoPros rapidly becoming standard equipment on all gliders, we can blow and are blowing the party line into thousands of pieces and the party operatives to hell where they belong.

Jack advertises his dump as the "Worlds largest Hang Gliding community" and currently lists a membership of 11962. I'll happily advertise Kite Strings as the WORLD'S (with an apostrophe) smallest - 43 individuals on the role, two of which are banned. 0.34 percent of his can of worms - quality, not quantity.

(T** at K*** S******'s Post 6666.)
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Edit - 2015/11/23 05:23:34 UTC

Crap. Meant to post this five years to the second (which this Edit time stamp is) from Zack's opening post but clicked "Submit" instead of "Preview".