Buildering.com has some fun stuff. I couldn’t get most of the videos to work, but this photo shows one of the great uses of a building. I like the beautiful feature of the building, although I wished the photo was a bit bigger: look.
I noticed a couple of ice climbers at the ski resort this weekend. They had their skis on with big backpacks and a couple of ice axes each. So it’s timely when my scanners hit a couple of winter climbing references. Unfortunately, only one was about ice climbing, but both were fun reads.
Ice climbing fills void for winter adventurers is a great article about ice climbing from the Poughkeepsie Journal. It explains why climbers do or don’t ice.
I really wished Climbing and skiing in Colorado’s backcountry wrote about rock/ice climbing and skiing in Colorado. That probably would make me fly out there right away. Instead, it’s still a great article about a 100-mile ski trek in Colorado, where you climb up over a thousand feet. You stay in huts, which might sounds a little misleading, because they’re really nice cabins.
You may have heard about death of Daniel Scott of San Francisco this January, he died due to a climbing accident in Joshua Tree. It’s quite a loss. He was a newlywed and paramedic. This Hi-Desert Star article puts it best: “Even in death, rock climber still saving lives.”
Climbers in India fault the government for failing to promote rock climbing in Jharkhand. See : State fails to tap ‘scaling’ potentials - Five enthusiasts form club to cash in on rock climbing opportunities in jharkhand for the full story. I’m sure the government’s dealing with a lot of issues besides rock climbing, but it would be nice to know what they are.
This 2004 video shows the outdoor climbing competition where ten of the world’s best climbers try to climb a newly bolted route in Millau, France. The video’s pacing is slow and times and sgements in black and white that make you think your computer’s acting funny. But there are some fun moments, including seeing people talk about climbing in different languages. If you’re in rush, skip to the following:
I’m not sure why another Jim Collins article came my way, but I’m not complaining.
Picking the Right People covers a bit about rock climbing, “Good to Great”, and business school. It’s not too different from some of other pieces linked in the previous post, but it help me think more about the subject.
I wasn’t sure that I agreed his “first who” principle applied to life and the social sector. His research on businesses showed pretty clearly that deep management teams are very important for transforming a good business into a great one. But his climbing example is too obvious. I care more about climbing with people I trust than which routes I climb. I don’t mind if people don’t want to climb with me because they think I’m fruit loops.
I wondered about how we reach a great society. To find the “what” we’re missing in a great society, do we focus on first who or first what?
It could be a people problem — we don’t have enough people who spend time actively building a great society — so we do need to focus on who first. It could be a what problem — we could solve the problems in society with the people we have, we just need to approach them in better ways.
I’ll need to read Collins’ monograph to see how he arrived at his thoughts and how he describes what a great society is.
I wanted to start this blog because of interesting climbers like Jim Collins.
I’d seen him on Charlie Rose talk about how good companies become great ones and he threw in a couple topics that were even more exciting for me. He talked about his love for climbing and the importance of climbing to “fallure”. Also, he heard many responses to his book “From Good to Great Book” from the social sector (non-profits and government organizations) and thought: “If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society - not a great one.”
Read his answer to: “What longtime belief have you changed your mind about” and decide for yourself whether it’s more important to first determine what to do in life than who you spend your time with.
For more info about Jim Collins, check out
After seeing a few things online that I knew I had to show other people (or things people told me to look at), it’s time to start up a new category.
“Look” highlights pictures or videos you have to see. To start, SuperTopo’s forum had a thread called
Whipper of the Year. Look and you’ll see quite a sequence.
Those cardio machines sure are popular in the gym. So popular, that in one gym, they decided to add 10 more treadmills instead of a climbing wall. To rub it in, Treadmills’ popularity seen in purchase says the treadmills are going to be placed right where the climbing wall would have been. Apparently climbers won’t have to look too far for a wall though, because they said there are two other climbing walls in the area. The gym’s in Peterborough (Ontario, Canada), so I found one: Rock and Rope. The other must be around.
I also stumbled upon this gym in Canada with glow in the dark rock climbing. I like the crack climb that looks like lava flow.
From germany, gekkomat enables you to climb like a gecko. They created powerful vacuums that enable you to climb up the side of a wall.
