lurch

Both the 555 timer chip and the 4017 decade counter/divider chip are readily available common CMOS chips off the shelf at any radio shack or electronics outlet. I've built a buttload of gizmos around those two particular chips, mostly LED sequencers. And actually you use a 555 to generate clock pulses for the 4017 and you can cascade em (4017s) not just in pairs but as many as you like. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

How bout "wasabi"? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Lurch checking in... Got PADI certified in 2001 at Matabuncay Beach, Philippines, but failed to send in for the C-card figuring I'd never use the cert again anyway... Wrong... March of this year wound up back in the P.I. getting ANDI safeair certified with a relative who is big into technical diving, rebreathers, has his own homebuilt gas blending station which I first mistook for a small oil refinery.... Next thing I know I'm sucking down 32% Nitrox at 130 feet and doing drift dives off Sepok Wall, Anilao area. Night dives, saw a cuttlefish in 70 feet of water had to be twice the size of my head...ever look one of those things in the eye? One big enough to take you on? Makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. The most alien thing I ever saw, totally creeped me out in the most wondrous way. Even scoped out what turned out to be the wreck of the Dari-laut, a sunken hotel/barge down there...I found out later the reefs I was diving are some of the most abundant marine ecosystems on the planet, anywhere. It was the most blurringly fast two weeks of my life to date and WOW just doesn't cut it. Giant clams, groupers, sea snakes, ten billion colors of fish, more coral than I could identify.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

...The early worm has a death wish. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Update: WOOHOO!!!!!!!!!! New personal best today in my GTI. 14.5 exit. (Thanks Dave!) 2.6 deploy. 2:58.52 flight time 46 mph average for most of it. One step closer to that zen state of perfect flight.... 1.5 seconds shy of the 3 minute mark... ...And I got an insane glorious visual by getting Waaaaay the hell above the plane when the pilot dived off to the left after I got clear. (lurch bounces off walls ecstatically, shoving fist in the air) YEAH!!!!!! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

2:41, 13.5-3.0 grand 46 mph average, 135 lb male in a GTI. If I could get 15 grand and dump at 2 grand I think 3 minutes is doable.... Might want to post your weights along with wings and flight times and defining altitudes....would help others get an idea of what is possible for their weight and suit type... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hey specfish...coolest sig line EVER! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

" If you DO have a nasty crash, there is a tremendous likelihood that your seatbelt, only if worn, will save you from serious injury or death. I'd like to know if Lurch disputes that fact. " I do not dispute that fact. I dispute your expressed opinion that it is fucking stupid of me to use my own judgement and decide if and when I wish to wear one. I occasionally do, in dense, fast twitchy traffic on the interstate, when I judge the real risk of undodgeable wreck and ejection to be particularly high. I'm not arguing against wearing a seat belt....I'm arguing against being required to wear one for reasons you seem to endorse, viciously. Your post is somewhat confusing for that reason. You say one thing but express opinions and data that seem to argue another. I'm disputing your expressed opinion that " That kind of death is indicative that he was a stupid person with shitty judgment, and I think the world needs a decrease in the number of such people using up air, water and space. I don't sympathize with a schmuck who takes himself away from his wife and kids because he's too fuckin' dumb to know that seatbelts save lives. " You say you don't favor mandating things but it is exactly this sort of thinking that results in mandating things. You mention these things "One of the arguments I have heard used in favor of seat belt / helmet laws is the cost of medical care for accident victims. Costly injuries can be reduced through safety device usage and therefore a person who gets injured by the choice of not using a seat belt or helmet imposes his choice on others through the cost of accident insurance, or if he is unable to pay his medical bills he imposes the cost through the government, which may pay his bills. I think someone told me that some health insurance (hospitalization insurance) will be void if the injuries are the result of a motorcycle accident involving a helmetless rider. So think of what a $235,000 hospital stay including brain surgery to relieve swelling might do to a family! That's a mite selfish of the rider, yes? Same deal for the woman who "just isn't comfortable" with the seatbelt on, or who is worried it'll wrinkle her outfit, or whose cousin's friend's aunt's brother-in-law was (allegedly) decapitated by his seatbelt in an accident. (There are always people who think it's smart to treat the anomalous .0002% chance occurrence as the most likely thing, and base decisions of that coming to pass. Shit, if even 49 out of 100 uses of a seatbelt resulted in a fatality, the 51% save rate of seatbelts would make them the better bet. And we can be thankful that the margin is not even nearly that close!)" As if you approve highly of them. You state you don't approve of mandating things but quote arguments in favor of seat belt laws and heavier consequences for failure to wear a helmet to back up your earlier assertion that its good when someone dies due to lack of seat belt and the world needs a reduction in the number of such people who don't wear seat belts using air water and space. Its your "they got what they deserved" attitude I take issue with. I've read a lot here and usually I DO agree with PJ on most issues but that particular post just pissed me off. Would you feel the same gloat the same and chuckle the same if someone you know went in without a Cypres that could have saved them? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

You got my point but theres no stopping it you know. Somewhere out there is some asshole thinks he'll save lives by making it mandatory to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle for the exact same reason. And you'll lose another freedom. Someday it will be illegal to drive a car without airbags, for the same reason. Somebody decided that wasn't an acceptable risk anymore due to the possible financial cost and got it turned into law. This is why you can't ride in the bed of a pickup truck anymore. This is why you can't have a bonfire without a permit anymore. Or ride without a helmet in most states. At some point you just have to leave it up to the individual to decide what is an acceptable risk and what is not. At some point no matter how uptight about it you may be you just have to accept that somebody is taking a risk that could cost YOU or themselves and their families and there is nothing you can do about it. Who decides who is stupid and selfish for taking what risks? I wonder when the insurance companies will realize how much profit there is in assigning arbitrary risk values to the obese and their behavior? I wonder how long until insurance companies realize the savings to be made by imposing controls on peoples behavior to mitigate the risks associated with obesity? Look at the lawsuits against fast food recently. It has already begun. It is the lawsuits that usually trigger such behavior on the part of insurance companies and governments. PJ's post and underlying logic highlighted the mentality that results in more and more laws either mandating behavior, such as helmet laws and seat belt laws or forbidding it, such as riding in the backs of trucks. Someone thinks it is unreasonable to allow something anymore. What about cigarettes? And the costs and losses associated with them? Shouldn't they be outlawed or consumption tightly monitored controlled and regulated to control those risks? It is coming. Will insurance companies refuse to cover lung cancer costs soon if you smoke? Someday soon it will be considered unreasonable to allow unregulated unsupervised uncontrolled purchase of fast food. Someday somebody is going to argue like PJ that its unreasonable and selfish to expect to be allowed unregulated access to fast food because its stupid and selfish to decide to take that risk....you could get fat and cost your family/society/yourself major money in medical expenses. The real question is what do you do about it? Somebody better figure out where to draw the line soon before you need a permit and insurance and I.D. to go to the grocery store. When will someone "establish accountability for poor nutritional choices"? Where do you draw the line between personal freedom and financial responsibility? And how do you do it? Any ideas? Anybody? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I love it when people use that argument. Seems to be a symptom of incipient police state or something. Ever consider the non-pc unmentionable category of people who know how to fucking drive, have confidence in their ability to evade being t-boned,refuse to wear seat belts, and make it through their entire lives without being ejected from the fucking vehicle? You know which group, its that group that, even before seat belts were mandatory, comprised 99.99999% of the population? Are they still stupid, Jeff? How bout all those "stupid person with shitty judgment" who think they can chuck themselves out of an aircraft thousands of times and think they'll get away with it without getting killed? No seatbelts in freefall, man. And reserve or no reserve the risk of becoming a crater due to skydiving is much, much higher than that of being killed in a car wreck. There are (rough estimate) what, about 30,000 active jumpers? 3 of us die due to cratering, or some impact-oriented variation thereof, per month, on average. I always feel better when I read the mag and see this month we got lucky and only had two or one or none fatalities. Means we're losing roughly one out of a thousand of our number, per month, on average. If we lost one out of a thousand citizens every month due to driving fatalities it would be regarded as absolute intolerable highway carnage. Your own words, here.... (There are always people who think it's smart to treat the anomalous .0002% chance occurrence as the most likely thing, and base decisions of that coming to pass.) Um, given the fact that I've been driving for over a decade without ever once even coming close to being ejected from the vehicle, I'd say being killed due to being thrown out of the car IS the .0002% chance occurrence you think would be stupid to base decisions on the possibility of! If I wore a seat belt for fear of that event I'd be doing exactly what you claim is stupid. You also claim failing to plan for that event and wear a seat belt to counter it is stupid. So which is it, man? You're so busy being venomous you failed to notice you contradicted yourself. I guess I can expect the usual statistical nitpicking, people arguing that my 1/1000 is wrong, or coming up with some way to prove me wrong about the 3 fatalities a month on average statement but attacking my possibly inaccurate statistics doesn't undo the validity of my point. I do not wear a seat belt because I see the risk of being ejected due to its lack as almost astronomically small...I hear about people dying for that reason a -LOT- less often than I hear about people cratering, or dying of freak cases of rare cancers, for that matter. Does that make me stupid because I don't get cat scanned MRI'ed and full bio-checked every week to avoid THAT possibility? I can't tell you how many times I read of someone who died for that reason. On a long enough time frame the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Life is fatal. Deal with it. One more thing....what about obesity? Society has been focusing on this one a lot lately since due to excessive prosperity and too much free time and not enough activity we're up to, what, something like 1/3 of all americans are now disgustingly, waddlingly grotesquely obese? Go to the nearest mall, man it gives me the creeps, looks like a sci-fi conspiracy theory plot to turn the population into a herd of semi-immobile lipid refineries. And about 60% of americans are at least overweight? Its a huge, rising risk of early death, man. Isn't it about time insurance companies started refusing to pay for any injuries or health issues possibly caused by the individual's failure to control their caloric intake? Isn't it about time we started making laws mandating certain maximum food intakes and mandating fat-testing before employment? How about having the police do roadblock obesity checks? You get bagged, you are required to go to defensive-eating school, your eating habits subjected to state-operated supervision and control and you get checked weekly to ensure compliance? Isn't it about time somebody started chuckling and gloating every time someone dies due to obesity? Oh, wait..... -exit rant mode, resume lurk mode....next post in 6 months..... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Thrown cds also have the unique property of occasionally becoming explosive when struck with heavy force at one point perfectly in line with the edge so all the force goes into the cd. I've thrown many that hit something at an angle and just bounced off. I've thrown a few which sailed nicely across the room, struck something squarely edge-on and detonated violently and loudly on impact scattering jagged chunks of polycarbonate everywhere. CD roulette! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

...YOU RANG? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

You want to know how? Money. First you have to have a guy good enough you can actually see being able to do the job responsibly. I'd suggest someone who does not want the job. If you want the job badly enough to try for it and engage in the campaign process and all the corruption and mudslinging and vote buying and flat lying and special interesting that it takes to get elected you're probably not fit for the job. Figure out how to gain access to the, what, 50 or 60 million $$ it will take to get your candidate's name splattered on every billboard, stuck on everyone's front lawn, in everyone's face. Hire an army of bullshit artists and PR guys to craft and present the image best calculated to get as many people to vote for the guy as possible. Got to appeal to the little old ladies, the southern white set, the blacks, the growing hispanic vote, (candidate speaks spanish a plus!) the west coast, the midwest, etc...difficult trick to do, appeal to so many diverse types with often conflicting values. You have to sell your guy as being everything to everyone. Then just hammer away bombarding the public with the guy and his praises till people do what they're told and vote for the guy. We got the best democracy money can buy...unfortunately its now so expensive if you don't have a Bill Gates budget, you ain't getting elected. Anybody know where to score a billion dollar advertising budget? The election goes to the guy with the most powerful friends the least skeletons in the closet the best spinmasters the most expensive public relations guys and the biggest advertising budget. It isn't about the will of the people anymore. Its about who is best at manipulating the will of the people through media saturation. So much for democracy. Give me a good old fashioned tyrant dictator. At least it'd be a welcome change from the overevolved scripted Jerry Springer show we call a political system. Maybe something would actually get done right by a leader not focused on pleasing the largest numbers of the stupid to ensure reelection. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Pete....A few days ago I too bagged myself a huge one, thing stood miles high, higher than max altitude. I flew up to it, turned around at about 9 grand and surfed down that cosmic slope till I came off the bottom of it at around 5 grand feeling like my mind exploded...watching that vapor mountain fall away behind me was simply stunning....here's the punchline: after flying home opening and landing I was standing around shooting the shit with people as sunset finished and watching my skymountain and its accompanying retinue of lesser puffies head off across the river when the damn thing started throwing lightning around. "!!!" Thought I, watching it go... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

If the time lag is in fact zero then this is not just a trifle this is seriously big honkin news, this is faster than light communications. What they have invented is the Ansible, an FTL radio, pure fantasy sci-fi since the idea was thought up. Do any of you have any idea how much cool shit you can make/build/develop with this? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Interesting thread, I'd wondered about it myself...out at skydive Pepperell there is a variant on that sung to the tune of that camptown ladies tune I can't identify precisely, something like "(insert name here) takes it up the butt, doo dah, doo dah, xxxx takes it up the butt all the doo dah day! All the doo dah day! all the doo dah day! xxxx takes it up the butt, all the doo dah day. HEY! Him! Him! Fuck him! (or her) Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I owe beer. Got 2 flights last night and a new #1 top of my list of coolest things I ever got to do. Hauling ass through the sky with the Nashua area light grid spread out below as far as the eye can see is simply mindblowing. Who else out there has flown at night? I know its been done before but I'm wondering how rare is it? Anyone out there who hasn't yet, DO IT! All I gotta say is make sure you have your navigation down SOLID and have a spare pair of shorts handy cause you're gonna need em. Wow. They just don't make reality like they used to.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I just bought this neptune like a week or so ago. Its a fresh one, software 2.1.3. I consulted with the alti-2 people and they told me the weird result was likely due to kicking ass with the suit and setting such a low fallrate the thing can't even tell I exited, but there will be another new release any day now which might eliminate that. I'm hoping they edited the trigger threshold a bit. In any case I think its a fluke anomaly kind of thing, Hasn't been repeated since that flight. So far my impression of the neptune is a damn near perfect universal altimeter, a piece of gear I didn't really need, impulse buy I'm glad I bought anyway. About the only thing I could ask for out of it would be a display with a backlit mode bright enough to be seen even when eclipsed by sun glare. A lot of my flights tend to be sunset loads and I wind up with the sun off my left wing neatly eclipsing the neptune and making it impossible to read in the last couple grand. This is easily solved by hanging a right turn and getting it out of the sunglare though. Besides my altitude awareness ought to be good enough to deal with or without being able to read the alti for the entire flight anyway. How picky can I be? I'm amazed anyone took the trouble to build a tiny bit of tech gear this advanced for such a small market and I'm really amazed they managed to make it cheaper than a Protrack and so much better. Props to the Neptune people, you've made a whole buncha birdmen quite happy. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hey, thanks...Its difficult to tell how good is good since I have almost nobody to fly with, to me the bar was set at 2 minutes until that became an every-time deal. Then the bar was 2.5, I'm settling in at a repeatable 2:20-2:30+ but it seems the BIG bar is set at 3:00 and I'm running out of things to improve. I highly recommend a Neptune and protrack combo, the exact outputs tend to vary somewhat but having both instruments to compare against each other means when I suddenly evolve a bit more and start getting another 10 seconds it shows up glaringly on all 3 sets of numbers, watch, Neptune and PT. And of course I'm having more fun doing all this than anyone else in my time zone. People just ain't supposed to be able to fly like this, I'm developing an insatiable appetite for vast spaces and distances. I'm already lusting for 28,000 feet and a bailout bottle, I'll be up there for a week.....woohoo! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Gripping the wingtips definitely seems to help. I can do just fine without it, but the logic to me was that the tips and edges where the wing angles out aren't very rigid and tend to flap a little, wasted wing surface. I grip right about where the "point" of the wing angle is, holding the last wing cell out tight. The difference in feel is like hanging from the wing (no grip) as opposed to hanging on to and flying the wing. This also gives much more control over the arm wings themselves, I can use em like ailerons/flaps on a plane's wing. Twist the wrist downward to direct more air downward and, hopefully, get a tiny bit more lift out of it. I suppose you could use em for air brakes that way too, but the legwing seems far more efficient for brakes/thrust anyway. If you wanna try gripping your wingtips though I suggest setting your grip before exit. I don't know about SF3's but with a GTI the wingshape is such that once you lose your grip and drop a wingtip you'll waste the rest of your flight trying to grab it back and it stays teasingly just out of reach... So far every time I've lost my grip on a wingtip my only option was drop em both and fly the rest of the way in the empty hands default config. And I don't think its your spindly arms creeping your speed back up after you hit your best slowfly. I'm no Mr. Universe but my 135 lbs is all 100% ripped up muscle, can hang by one hand in a half-pullup all day if I had to and I get the same exact results on protrack graphs. I think when you get down to the high 30's you're slowly and steadily bleeding off forward speed to sustain it just like a gradual canopy flare till you run out of speed and lift and return to a fallrate that gets you a balanced lift return. I can get to the 30's, I just can't hold it either, not long enough for it to be my overall average. I got a momentary down to 35 mph but the inevitable end of THAT is a bounce back to a higher fallrate than average, then I can slowly work it down to the high 40's again. The rules on this stuff seem to be quite reliable and concrete, TANSTAAFL. (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lift.) So I'm on the quest for ever tinier bits of improved efficiency and control. This is why I started this thread...a few birds seem to be able to keep a steady-state speed-lift return down to the high 30's continuous average and I want to know how, where the hell they're getting the lift from. I even tried wearing my heavy construction boots under the suit a few times. The result was self-negating. At about 2 lbs per boot It changed my weight and balance trim very noticeably and the added bulk at the toes let me get that much more tension and length out of the legwing. The weight and trim change also allowed me to bite in and dearch much deeper before the bobble kicked in, but it seems the added weight cost me everything I gained in efficiency. My times didn't change at all although I felt more stable at the edge, the edge itself didn't move. Dead end. Good luck, lemme know how much you get out of the wingtips huh? -Have a nice sky! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I figured somebody was going to say that.... Nuts. I had noticed that point of diminishing returns...a few flights I got decent times but didn't cover as much ground as expected. I found I could keep the times AND the distance by balancing the variables just right...I'm getting good distance now, the glide slope looks and feels like the worlds biggest invisible ski slope, I had hoped that since I was keeping the forward-thrust component as high as I could I was avoiding canopy-style stalling. I got what I think was a full-blown zero forward speed stall once, riding the speed off an exit till I ran out of speed completely, and suddenly dropped like a rock. Felt weird, like a dead air exit off a helicopter. Suddenly felt like I had no air holding me up. If my arms hadn't been tied I would have flailed...instead I went into a prolonged nose-down till I got my airspeed back. That move also took long enough to recover from I barely broke 2 minutes on that flight. I know if I could stop this side to side wobble I could keep my distance and airtime but aside from trying to counter the bobbling by shifting my weight back and forth to match it (not a very promising approach...I can't shift my weight that fast, within a couple cycles I wind up out of sync and make it worse instead) I can't see any other variables to tweak anymore. I've tried not-maxing, holding just shy of the bobbling threshold and going for distance but it didn't seem to make any difference to my times...just went further. Overdo it in THAT direction and I start sacrificing time for more distance. I'm sure if I can counter the fall-off-the-side-of-the-beachball effect I can have more of both time and distance but don't see how. A couple people in the 3-minute men/women thread stated averages down into the low 40's/high 30's and I figured they'd been through all this already and had the bobbling under control in some way that allowed them to bite in deeper than the bobble will let me. Gimme a few hundred more flights, maybe I'll get the hang of it....I'm still trying to improve my timing and balance on that edge, the sense of wasted/lost air during the bobbling is annoying. I want to keep that air. -Have a nice sky. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Been flying a GTI for most of my jumps lately. Largely solos, a handful of 2-ways with the one other occasional bird around here. Did the usual 1-flight FFC demo last season, other than that, no coaching available. So I'm pretty much self taught for the last 48 wingsuit flights aside from what I read here. Navigation I seem to have down nicely, at first I was asking for 2, 2.5 and then 3-mile spots from the pilots by the cockpit GPS till they got sick of the extra fuel and prop time I was using. Now I just wait half that long, then fly myself to the spot I want, do a wide shallow flat turn in a huge loop and fly home. Been working by use of pro-track till I broke 2 minutes, then by stopwatch started the instant I exit and stopped the instant my canopy hits full open, (I figure crude but accurate enough to give the general idea if you allow for say a 3-5 second buffer zone for variable length deployments and the time it takes to reach for my watch) then by neptune, then by all 3, compared against each other for performance evaluation. I find the pro-track is still useful in that its recorded deployment altitude just reflects where you were when it hit 119 seconds and stopped...took me a bit to figure out why it suddenly started recording ever-increasing deployment altitudes....If I come down and my stopwatch read 2:05 when I stopped it the PT usually recorded a deployment at 1:19, 3500-3800 feet even if I didn't pitch till 3300. If I come down and the watch was at 2:31 when I stopped it I check the PT and it says I deployed at 4900 feet, thus indirectly backing up my self-timing. The neptune is useful as tertiary timing measurement but I have found it gives irregular results...on a flight over 2:20 it failed to detect that I had exited at all till 8300, stopped when I flared the suit particularly hard around 4500 and claimed a 32 second freefall. I seem to have hit a limit. I can break 2 minutes easy every time by now from 13-13.5 to 3500. 2:15 isn't much tougher. I keep a grip on my wingtips, have experimented with a wide variety of tensions and wrist angles and degrees of shoulder-cuppage, arm cuppage and variable degrees and combos of the two. Too much downward-bowing on the arms eventually becomes counterproductive anyway by sacrificing usable wing area for arm-arch. Legwing I keep fairly tight, and either flat or somewhat de-arched at the hips. The harder I cup shoulders, bow arms and de-arch the slower I fall. Which brings me to the question. When I try to get much more than 2:25-2:30 the degree of de-arch at the hips required introduces a new kind of instability, horizontal potato-chipping. Rocking from side to side, spilling air like the simplest possible canopy with no vents. As I get more willing to deal with the rocking sway my freefall times go up...I got 2:35 once. I got 2:25 and 2:26 today and 2:31 yesterday running average 48-49 mph but the price is a really bumpy ride. Its easy to control....by backing off on the suit and sacrificing altitude by doing so, or even bending at the knees a bit and backing off on the throttle if it gets really wild. I get the highest times by spending as much of the dive as possible bobbling back and forth on the very edge of control. If I overdo it and sway too far, the downward sideslippage also costs me time. So the question for all you 3-minute birds is, how do you beat that? Is there some trick I'm failing to figure out here? I figure its either a balance thing, a technique thing, or else all the high-timers out there just weigh a buttload less than me and jump highly loaded small lightweight gear. I'm 135 lbs unloaded, maybe 155-160 lbs with gear...(sabre2 170, vector V5). (never weighed self with full kit on a scale of known accuracy.) All jumps deployed at 3500-3300 feet. I'm not willing to take it any lower for more time at this point and 15,000 feet would get me within shooting distance of the big 3:00 time but 15 grand is hard to come by these days. Can anyone answer this or is this the limit everyone runs into when maxed out, set by weight and wing size? How do you control side to side potato chipping? Or is the only answer "SF3"? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I wonder how many people have the sack to wear THIS on their bumper... .....EAT A QUEER FETUS FOR JESUS..... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Goddammit, those socks could have gone to a good home! Socks rule! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ender's game: that book was the bible for my brother and I, growing up. That book taught us everything we needed to know at the time about how to truly Defeat an opponent. Also try: the Radix tetrad, (series) or The Last Legends of Earth by A.A. Attanasio. Basically the story of an entire solar system created from scratch as a weapon/trap for another species which is eating/torturing the species doing the creating. How do humans figure into the story? Well, we are a long extinct species resurrected from fossil DNA, as bait.... Anything I've ever found by Attanasio was absolutely awesome. I read the first two Alvin books. I've kind of lost some respect for Card as a writer last few years....he has become rather heavy on the religion-pushing and I'm allergic to his God. I don't intend to finish the Alvin books. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.