Joellercoaster

Don't forget people using "action" as anything other than the noun it is.

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Word to the wise: "action" isn't a transitive verb.

It's not even a verb, period. While using it as one may act as a signal between members of the middle-managerial classes, it annoys the technical people to whom such communication is often also addressed. As people who make a living paying attention to detail and knowing what rules are, it just rubs them the wrong way.

And annoyed technical people don't "action" anything.

Twice in about ten jumps.

First one was my fault, just misjudged the winds and landed next to the DZ.

Second one was pretty funny. Winds at ground level were within Student tolerance but the uppers were, uhh... a little stronger. Since I opened high and was very lightly loaded, I had no hope.

After realising I was going to be out, I looked down and realised not only was I over a lake, I was flying backwards and getting further away from the shore. Hightailed it downwind and was over the lake in no time, and the ground-level winds were still low so as soon as I arrived over land all was calm and nice for a stand-up landing.

The sheep were very impressed.

Got back and discovered that my GF had been watching the whole thing and laughing at "whoever that last guy was - he was doomed!"

Hmm. Reading this thread, some of y'all have had some way more terrifying experiences than this, but:

I was about twelve, and ran through one of those old-skool plate glass windows. I ended up dangling suspended over a triangle of glass stuck in the frame, with another one of similar size wavering back and forth, point down over the back of my neck.

Instead of being disembowelled or beheaded, I came out with a cut on my knee and a thin laceration on my abdomen through my sweater where I'd been hanging over the spike. Almost no blood at all.

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but th e 30 day current A jump rule doesnt ! I live in the north UK, where its nearly always cloudy or raining !

Which is why you might want to do your A somewhere else.

I'm going abroad next month for mine, and I'm confident it will still work out cheaper, but more importantly I won't have to worry about the weather so much.

(Famous last words, I know - this will turn out to be the only time in history Lillo has cyclones, or something.)

Doing my entire license in the UK, on weekends (and public transport!), sounded like a very furstrating process indeed.

Back on-topic for just a second, I first did AFF in Australia, and they charged us $12 or something for a packing class, taken whenever we felt like it and as many times as we needed. There were people in the class with no jumps yet, and a guy with about 30, and the rest seemed to be in between.

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The way its going to practically happen/be regulated is going to make us the laughing stock of the world

This is true of almost all British regulation nowadays. It's not just skydiving, don't worry.

I haven't been living here terribly long, but good grief - the rules! Those on their own can be pretty funny, but the real gold is in the way those rules get expressed (as with the original post... awesome!).

What scares me is that the British are genuinely scared that Europe is going to impose needless regulation on their lives. I dunno, going on their own performance, I would've thought they'd be pleased...

[edit: does this mean I'm not *allowed* to fly anything smaller than a 250 until I get CH1 checked off? I reckon my exit weight would be around 210...]

Toshiba laptop, you say?
Putting up with Windows, you say?

Get your friendly neighbourhood Linux nerd to hook you up, I say!

(It's really not that hard to deal with, no matter what Dvorak says. Hasn't been for years.)

I had the opposite problem.

I brought the Mac home, popped open a (transparent, yay OpenGL yay) terminal window and sterted playing with Python (yes, in vi - hadn't downloaded Emacs yet ).

I had a bit of fast talking to do to explain that this didn't mean it was going to be the Linux experience all over again, and this really was going to be nice to use for someone who had only ever used Windows.

An hour later, she turned to me and said, "You're right. Let's never go back."

This is true about the evolution from NeXT, but not about being a distant cousin to Unix.

The current MacOS is wrapped around a Mach kernel, which makes it a fully-fledged form of BSD. Pretty much anything you can get to run on a BSD will compile for MacOS X, as well (obviously) as a lot else.

It's definitely a Unix.

(For what it's worth, POSIX or no, it's closer to being an official Unix than Linux is )

Peej... dunno about Merkin methods of implant (there are a few out there), but the most popular one where I come from is Implanon.

It's a (plastic?) rod maybe a couple of inches long that goes under the skin - generally, the ones I've seen have been along the inner biceps. Sustained-release hormone for something like three years...

Anyway, in the last couple of years a whole bunch of my female friends, including my SO, got them put in. They spent many a happy minute in bars prodding one end of their implants and making the other end poke up under the skin. It looks pretty weird the first time you see it.

Watching two of them at it is like that scene in The Simpsons where Homer goes rushing out into the street with his new hair, and runs into another guy also with new hair, and they get that look of recognition.

Yarr! Hijacked ye be!

Debian is still the one for me after all these years, though I'm recommending Ubuntu to other people lately.

Given the choice between Mac and Windows, I'd buy a Mac right now. Actually, I did the other day

I've been a Linux user for over a decade, and since OSX, MacOS is the commercial (consumer) operating system that comes closest to letting me do what I want, and just getting out of my way, in the way that Linux does. I guess that's something to do with MacOS actually being a form of Unix nowadays... talk about interesting times.

It's also incredibly pretty, if that matters to you.

But:

To the people who are saying the lack of spyware/trojans etc is a reason to buy a Mac, I'd say that's not actually much to do with the OS's security - it's more that not much malware gets written for it yet, because the audience is so small. Why attack a few dozen Macs when you can infuriate tens of thousands of Windows users?

Also, modern versions of Windows aren't terribly insecure if you use them properly. Most attacks rely on user trust or carelessness nowadays. I've been using Windows at work for about five years now and haven't had a single successful attack.

Still. Get a Macintosh just 'cause they're sleeker. And they come with, what, 5 programming languages out of the box? Can't argue with that.

You're forgetting "implant". Unless that counts as being on the pill?

Works for us, and now my baby is a cyborg. Sorta... and it freaks people out when she finds it in her arm and makes it stick out

Depending on your Russian, this can all be a massive pain in the arse to do for yourself.

They really do (apparently) check with the cops to make sure you're staying in the hotel you said you were staying at, and the hotel will take your passport for the duration of your stay to make sure.

In the end, we threw up our hands and dropped some money on a tour company nominally based in Russia but actually run by (in partnership with?) Australians. They sorted all our accommodation for us, and were handily able to provide the invitation/cover letter too.

Depending on what you want to do, of course. We were just rubbernecking across from Mongolia to Moscow on the train, paying for their standard services along the way - they might not be so keen to organise someone's skydiving holiday.

[edit: This was a Tourist-class visa, if that changes anything.]

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800x600 is not enough. A computer that cannot go higher than that may also not be able to run the java virtual machie, so that is not much of an issue i think.

Not so. There are plenty of JVMs running on machines that are using old video cards, or in some cases don't even have video cards.

It's fair enough to say your software needs a resolution of more than 800x600 (I haven't taken it home to look at it but I will, it sounds like a neat thing and I'm all in favour of your open source idea), but don't go blaming Java for your UI design

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2. You're too drunk to remember, because if you don't remember it, then it never really happened

Unless your boyfriend walks in and isn't so drunk he doesn't remember. Then it probably happened, and you are probably dumped.

Happened to a girl friend of mine not long ago... she still doesn't remember :(

Oh, the poll? Nah. Carmen Electra is kinda skanky.

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Wonder what it is about some males (I won't call them men) that makes them run from a breakup straight into another relationship without any time in between to learn from the last one?

What, you prefer those of us who spend at least one day for every day the relationship lasted sitting in our rooms, getting drunk and moaning to our friends about how we'll never date again because she LEFT ME OH GOD I CAN'T FACE IT....

Then every time some unsuspecting female approaches us with a knowing glint in their eye, we chat amiably for a few minutes until the beer kicks in and we start regaling them with stories of our ex and how much we miss her but it's good that she's gone because she's obviously an evil bitch and... anyway, guaranteeing no action for a couple of years.

*ahem*

Sorry. I'm over it now, I really am. Just ask my girlfriend.

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My goal for the summer - plan less and be more impulsive.

"I plan to do less planning."

"It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

I know people with the opposite problem are often unwelcome in weight loss circles, but is there room on the list for someone trying to gain weight?

I want to do it fairly quickly before I buy gear, otherwise I'll have to worry about wing loading

Joellercoaster
Current: 185lbs
Target: 200lbs

I'm pretty sure someone on dz.com already has part of the whale soliloquy from HHGTTG as their signature. Absolutely no idea who it was though. Of course, now that it's cool again, they'll probably change it

In the opinion of some reasearchers, it should be illegal to drive while talking on the phone, period.

There are (apparently) numbers suggesting that even talking to your passenger can be a fairly risky thing to do, and that hands-free or otherwise isn't the problem with cell phone use while driving - it's the headspace you enter while talking to someone, particularly someone remote from you, that causes the accident increase.

For what it's worth, although I haven't booked yet:

I've decided to go to FFU at Lillo, and jump at Empuria afterwards if I'm still in Spain (which is likely, or I'll be back shortly afterwards). A bit more research has really impressed me with their pro-student approach.

I'd like to get my whole license done at Lillo, but if I can't, I can't. Consols at Empuria or back in the UK or something.

This puts a bit of a kink in the original plan to hang out with my GF and friend on the beach while I was jumping, but the idea was to learn to skydive. That's the most important bit to me, and dammit, it was my holiday first

Hey, better do these while we still can - there may not be anything to jump on in a while... not without floaties anyway.

Wingsuits. Ooooh.

I'm still a student, but I'm 6'5" and maybe 180lbs if I get real wet and hold some books. My first instructor was a bit of an anvil and gave me some stick about my fall rate.

But those wingsuit people look like they're having an awful lot of fun. Thinking that my snowflake configuration will be an advantage in one of the disciplines that looks the most appealing... well, that's encouraging.

[edit: speling]

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Being a Linux user, I can't even view their web page.

Clicky? (Of course, if you're running your Linux on a PowerPC or a Sparc or an ARM or a... you get the idea, well, this is no use to you. I think there used to be an OSS Flash player project, but I can't find it in the 2 seconds I just spent looking. I'll just assume it's dead.)

Be warned though, it will make you want to smash something anyway. On balance, I'd skip the Flash download; being able to read websites like that only encourages them