Tag Archives: climbing

Climbing grades: a Kirigami example app

Software

In the ever expanding catalog of applications based upon the Kirigami framework and design language, I’ve just published a small one, tough quite useful if you like me have the weird hobby of rock climbing 🙂

It’s called Klimbgrades and it’s not much more than a conversion table between different grading systems for rock climbs (separed by lead and bouldering) used around the world.

At the moment the supported grade scales for lead are French, YDS, UIAA, British Tech and British Adjectival

the grades for Bouldering are Fontainebleu, Hueco and B Grade

You can grab it on Android from the Play Store, or build it from source for yourself either for your desktop or cross-compile it over Android.

From the screenshots you can see there is some amount of automatic adjustment between the mobile and desktop versions, both in terms of style and layout/functionality.

On Android:

On a Plasma Desktop:

First long lead

BlaBla

img-20160917-wa030Yesterday I did lead my first 30 meters pitch (Girotondo, 5c in Finale Ligure) that’s quite another level of scary compared with the ~15 meters stuff I was used to, and quite literally “pushing your comfort zone”.
When you see the last quickdraw you placed 3 meters below you (and the ground 20-something) and the next bolt just a couple of moves away.. just a couple too much, all fibers in your body tell you “give up”, fingers are starting to slip, they want to slip.
But you really rather not want to give up, because again, the last quickdraw you placed is 3 meters below you, so the fall will be very long (and scary, and potentially painful), and because what the hell, you came all the way up there, just to give up?
You just say fuck pain, fuck the fear, and just keep moving forward, one slow move at a time, just try to clip a quickdraw to one last bolt, and then I’ll maybe give up there, after all even if I fail, yes the fall will be long and scary and potentially painful, but at least I know I failed trying. All the safety precautions were taken (is a surprisingly safe thing to do, once you go manically through the checklist, it’s a *very* security conscious community) so while accidents do happen, usually the “worst thing that can happen” is “not very much”. In that controlled environment you learn to replace pretty quickly the “should do this”, “should have done that when I could” with the “just go for it”.