klafollette

if there's 90 kt winds aloft, I'll watch you guys from the ground while enjoying a beer, and will let you know what the separation looks like. This aught to be entertaining.

Ask me in a few months. Had surgery late October for rotator cuff, labrum, glenoid. Not skydiving related injury, did it many years ago first time waterskiing (and last), but was making skydiving painful and had to get it fixed. It's been a long road back. 3-1/2 months later and I still only have limited use of the arm. Seems to be taking forever. Hopefully will be back in-shape by May, so will be pretty much like a typical winter jumping down-time. I stay current by drinking heavily on Saturday nights, building a bonfire in the back yard, and running around naked. Then I go upstairs, rip a big fart and yell "Eat, Fuck Skydive!!!"

Had a decent experience recently Sold a junk car for $250. Posted the add and had a dozen replies in 1/2 hour. Cash only, come and tow it away. It was gone the next day and I had my $250, which sadly is also gone.

3br 2ba, $80 every other week.

Don't stick with a Freefly handle just because it's cool or supposedly safer. It has to work for you. I had one put on when I got my new vector, but I found it much more difficult for me to get hold of and pull. For me it was a combo of length of rig, length of arm or some range of motion issues I have in my shoulder, but I found several occasions where I struggled to get a good grip on the handle and pull. Scared me enough that I switched to a hackey handle. I have no problems now, though it is probably a tad less secure, I'll take that risk over a scary no pull.

What's this SSB crap, you should do it CW!! I've got my Bencher paddles somewhere in the basement. Just strap them to your leg. Grab both toggles and fly with your left hand and key with your right. Blue Skies & 73s KD9DB

Component video is an analog signal, no audio. HDMI is Digital video and audio. Most receivers will not do an analog/digital conversion, so that you can feed component video into the receiver, along with analog or digital (toslink optical or SPDIF Coax) audio, and have the receiver combine them into a HDMI signal going to your TV. hell, my old surround receiver doesn't have component or HDMI, so I run all my video signals direct to my TV; HDMI, Component HD and composite NTSC. The receiver only handles the audio from each source. Then I use a Logitech Harmony programmable macro remote to switch both the receiver audio and TV Video at the same time, as I switch sources.

Here's some front shots. While the outside bottom cells look orange, they're really just lime, but with the watermelon top skin, the light shining through makes it look orange. On the shot from the top, you can just barely see the red airlocks extending back into the nose. Pictures are taken from the ground, long zoom, so a little fuzzy.

In PD ZP fabric colors; Lemon and Watermelon are blindingly bright. Cool bit on my Samurai is that I had it done with different color top/bottom skins on different cells, so I have variations of color using only Lemon and Watermelon. The watermelon air-valves in a lemon body, give a gradient shading from front/back and a screaming red leading edge that is hard to miss if you're heading at me.

On my one skyhook cutaway, the freebag stayed with the main for most of the descent, but separated on the way down. Still, the freebag landed only 100 ft away from the main, so it definitely helped.

In Carbondale?? That's where your profile says you are, we just got cold and snow in Chicago. Well, guess you might as well call it a day and skitch down to Pinch Penny's or PKs or my fav was Hanger 9.

Bungee's are bad in my opinion. Could keep you from being able to cut away if needed. Some use a rubber band instead of bungee, thinking that the rubber band will break if cutaway is done. I too prefer the "Slocks". Had my rigger sew them on the risers, and they work great.

Next time insist you want a prescription for the cleansing pills, not the drink. Believe they're called "Visicol". You take like 25 of these pills over a few hours with something like a 1/2 gallon of water. Then belt yourself onto the can. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

I've had one cutaway with my Skyhook Vector. I had a hand on each handle. Pulled the cutaway. Soon as I felt the risers release, I was pulling the reserve handle. I barely had the handle out of the pocket as I felt the reserve open. I still pulled it all the way, and I threw all my handles away. Hell, it was my first cutaway with a wild spinner. Last thing on my mind was keeping handles. I wouldn't change my procedure with the skyhook, especially considering my backup rig is a Mirage without a skyhook. During an emergency last thing I want to be trying to remember is which rig I'm wearing and what procedure to use. Keep it the same always.

I currently just use an old Windows 2000 PC with two 400GB drives, mirrored in a RAID 1 array, then I share out folders for my various media storage needs, and nightly backup of PCs and laptops in the house (Using Acronis True Image). If you're looking for a inexpensive 2 drive NAS, I've heard good things about the DLink one, but no direct experience with it. Here's link http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509 and review http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2091788,00.asp

Find someone else (that you don't like much) that has one, and switch them when they're not looking. Let the helpdesk support fun ensue.

Here's some stuff that will keep you busy learning your canopy, practice 500 times, then consider swooping. Open high, (5-7K) and play around. http://bigairsportz.com/art-skilldrills.php http://bigairsportz.com/art-stall.php http://bigairsportz.com/pdf/bas-sizingchart.pdf

Get Brian's book "Transcending Fear". It speaks to the psychology of fear, the physical reactions, and how to deal with it. It is not skydiving focused, though it has a few plainly spoken skydiving anecdotes. My wuffo wifey even enjoyed it as she was starting a new highly stressful job that had her scared. I got it after taking Brian's canopy course. It helped me with some of the anxiety I still get every once and a while, climbing to altitude, or trying a new challenging jump.

Took the Skyhook ride, wrote the story, got the t-shirt. At no time during my spinning, line-twisted, ball of shit moment, did I think "Cool, if I let my Skyhook pull my reserve, I'll get a free t-shirt!!" I did things just as if I didn't have a Skyhook, and had a perfect reserve over my head, before I had the silver handle out of its pocket. I still pulled it, and in the correct order. So what's my prize???

Early reports were a flight altitude of 13K ASL, and terrain in that area looks to be in the 7-9K range. One news report had the radar tracked descent at 7000ft/min. That's 80 mph straight down. That would give you something like 30 seconds to wake up, figure out there's a problem, decide to bail-out, get your rig on, while everything is vertical and spinning, climb over seats, get a standard door open (if even possible), and get out before 1000ft. That would be very difficult in the best of circumstances. I've been in the back of a caravan by the door chunking a base with big guys, when it stalled. That slammed me against wall, ceiling, floor to the point where I couldn't get out if I wanted to, and that was with the door open 3 feet away from me. Other than the occasional time wearing my rig in the copilot's seat, I never traveled x-country in a jump-plane with seats installed. But I would imagine it wouldn't be very comfortable, and on a 2 hour trip, probably wouldn't have been wearing my rig. I'm wondering what are the O2 requirements on a flight like this? Thought O2 was required for the pilot over 10K for 30min, something like that? What effect would 2 hours at 13K have on passengers not on O2? Would they be a little hypoxic or groggy, with reduced facilties to make critical decisions.

Seriously??? Do you not have any Freeflyers or CReW Dogs at your DZ? They're the crazy ones. Most of us old fart RW folks are in bed by 10pm taking our Geritol and using the ice from the beer trough to sooth our aching joints.

We have 2 Portuguese Water Dogs, and we've had their teeth cleaned every 2 years. We know we should brush their teeth regularly but give up since it is a real challenge. Reading this post makes me want to give it another try. We give them nylabones to chew on which seem to help keep the plaque down. They've had no major problems with the cleaning procedure. Some vets will give you some options like giving IV fluids afterwards. We get that. They're a little lethargic for a day, and one had a bit of a cough for a few days from the intubation tube, but that's about it. Any good vet will tell you to have a blood test done before the procedure to make sure they don't have anything going on that would put them at risk from the anesthesia. We usually schedule their cleaning shortly after their shots and physical, so we can just get the blood drawn once and have all the tests done for their physical and cleaning procedure.

I don't know if performance wise pushing rears to the side makes much difference. It might make a tiny difference since it increases the spread, making canopy flatter, along with pulling the back half down, flattening the angle of incidence. Primarily pushing to the side is easier to do for a longer period of time than pulling down on the risers.

Ahh yes, it's the malfunctions that you can't see that come up and bite you. Under a "perfectly inflated canopy", aggressive toggle turns can result in the canopy spinning up into line twists (and now the low toggle is locked into the twists making it spin faster). You could have a line/toggle/riser/connector link fail under a hard turn. The obvious canopy collision, You could have blown a top seam/panel on opening and not realize it until you make a hard turn and it collapses. There's a million things that could go wrong. Right, maybe you don't need to tighten the chest strap on a cutaway, but if I had the time, I might try. Handles aren't where you expect them if its let out, and if you haven't had a cutaway before, that wouldn't be the time I'd want to be worrying about where they are. But, it could be just as bad waisting time trying to tighten it. It's always made me a "little" nervous loosening the chest strap. When the shoulder straps are completely to the outside of my shoulders, I have to imagine there is some spinning/twisting mal that could provide a way for me to come out of the harness, or to be in a funky enough geometry to not be able to reach a handle or cause reserve opening problems. Anyway, drifting off topic. If Brian says to open up the chest strap for big canopies on low timers, then give it a try up high, and see how differently it flies. That also makes it easier to do harness turns, which are more efficient than toggle turns when trying to get every ounce of drive out of the canopy.

Good points with using accuracy trick. Also look straight down to gauge your ground speed and track, and don't assume what you're doing at 3000ft will work all the way to the LZ. You need to constantly evaluate how winds aloft are changing. I had one a few weeks ago where the winds were shifting 90 degrees every 1500 feet. After opening high to play around 6000, I had a tailwind, then a cross wind, then a head wind all around 15-25mph. That is a mental and physical workout. Other things to eek out the most from your canopy is to get the slider down as far as possible. If you have type 17 risers, pull it down past the toggles. If your comfortable trying this, loosen your chest strap so that the lines can spread out and flatten the canopy. This will give it more lift and better glide ratio. Risk is that if you have a malfunction high enough to consider a cut-away, you might need to tighten your chest strap before cutting away. At 80 jumps with a larger canopy, I probably wouldn't try this, talk to your local instructors/riggers about how to safely deal with your slider and chest strap.