Blahr

The problem stems not from the jumps he made in the 70's, but rather, the acid he dropped in the 60's or, more plainly, he is smoking crack :-) ; ; ;

Jump from your back porch and use a fitted sheet as your main. I used to get nice openings but the landings werent all that good. Neither were the spankings, but it was worth it! Well, almost. They made F-111 look like Zero-P! Had a few total malfunctions too but managed to get through em alright. I knew I wanted to skydive at age 7 Once I started jumping ram air canopies (a few years later) the openings were a lot harder but the landings much nicer :-) At age 38 I dont get spankings all that often anymore either. Almost never. Really!

Might work more easily on rigs set up with B-12's on the leg straps

I got my boss to do a tandem. I got to go on the same load too! I had my A by then so I did a rediculous solo exit for his benefit. Too bad I didnt get to see him in the door! We werent allowed to follow tandems out. He never went back again but I credit him for giving it a shot. Actually after trying it himself, it cemented the idea even more firmly in his mind that there was something wrong with me :-)

Some of us (me anyway) used to be pretty well fucked from drugs, lost the job wife kids the whole deal. Hard core. Worked long and hard to get clean, and KNOW where that road leads. I prefer to not tell people how to run their lives (or what they should or shouldnt talk about ) but I'd also rather not listen to people tell me how they are destroying theirs for fun. Its hard enough dealing with all the beer I dont drink! My 1st chop, whenever that happens, they get rootbeer If they dont like that, tough titty :-) I wouldnt normally express this opinion, but you DID ask.

"If Only" by me :-) Just finished mixing it!

I'd say DONT JUMP, just fall off. If you push off hard you could make life very interesting for the pilot.

Amen. For a lot of folks this is about ego. I dont know about you fols but most skydivers I know have BIG FAT ego's. Nobody likes to feel like the newbie or the student. They wanna swoop with the big boys. Sometimes someone has to say "Too fucking bad, you arent good enough for that yet" I'm damned if I'm gonna let my 16 year old son jump into a supercharged whateverthehell 6.0. He might THINK he can handle it but the odds are better than average he would wind up dead. In this country we protect our young and inexperienced with rules and regulations. They dont usually appreciate that until they are older and wiser, but we do it anyway. Its for their own good. So listen up boys and girls, you might not like being regulated but a lot of you are too young and inexperienced (emotionally, not physically) to be allowed to continue to let your egos call the shots. You might not like being restricted but its for your own good. I am young and inexperienced in this sport. I DONT mind if there are rules that govern how I can progress. They are there for MY safety and the safety of the people around my inexperienced ass. The suggestions that have been put forth offer me ways to progress faster IF IM READY. Not a bad deal if you ask me and not a bad trade off for being allowed to participate in one of the most exciting activities there is while still maintaining a good margin of safety. I am NOT young or inexperienced in life. I can see that a lot of you are. Maybe if you are lucky you will live to regret how idiotic you sound. Some of these people here are trying to offer solutions to a deadly problem and all I see is them catching a lot of crap for their trouble, time, and caring. You know who you are. What solutions are YOU offering instead? Or is bitch and moan all you can come up with?

If this was true, I'd be 68 times dead by now.

Thats how I feel too. Nervous in the door then once your out the nerves seem to disappear. Right on! I hate the ride. Especially if I'm in "the hole" where to co-pilot seat used to be and all I can do is stare at my toes. Once I'm out I'm ok :-)

Don't get complacent. Two friends of mine died in a canopy collision at a DZ with an enormous landing area when only 10 were on the load. Amen to that. As soon as you begin to think you are safe or immune, the probability that you will be killed doing it goes up by a factor of 10 or more. Complacency kills

Texas dropzones from www.uspa.org Austin Skydiving Center, 50 miles east of Austin Eagle Flight Skydiving, 30 miles southwest of Ft. Worth East Texas Skydiving Club, LLC, 15 miles west of Longview Ground Rush Skydiving Club, 65 miles east of Houston Skydive Aggieland, Inc., 70 miles northwest of Houston Skydive Dallas, 50 miles northeast of Dallas Skydive Houston, 25 miles west of Houston Skydive San Marcos, 25 miles southest of Austin Skydive Spaceland, 25 miles south of Houston Skydive Temple, 35 miles north of Austin Sky's The Limit Parachute Center, Inc., 56 miles north of Corpus Christi SPI Skydivers, 15 miles east of Harlingen

I'd say that if the videographer is an employee of the DZ and you are paying a fee to the DZ for the video then it would be appropriate to give a small gratuity if the video came out real nice. If it is an independant guy that you are paying directly for his work then no, I wouldnt give him a tip, he is already getting paid for it.

I have only 68 jumps right now, but I've stood up 61 of them (the bad landings being in the first 10 jumps) and I have not had any sprains, strains, or broken bones. 2 of them were tandems where we did butt landings intentionally. A couple bruises and a scrape is as bad as I've gotten. On the whole I'd say that tandem landings are harder than solo jump landings but wing loading cn make a big difference here :-) Chris

Gotta save that one for my wife! And people say I like to live dangerously when they hear I like jumping out of planes!

They are shoes for people that hate babies...on the lawn.

I get that far, then reach, then pull, then i seem to get distracted for a few minutes...

From what I saw, the folding client for Solaris is gonna be out soon :-) Run about 200 instances of it on that puppy and you should see your name up in lights pretty darn fast!

Hell yeah, thats what i like to hear. I jealous i haven't got to play with a 15k yet. For the low low price of 3 or 4 million bucks you too can feel the power! Actually this is my first time working with hardware of this magnitude. Previous experience was limited to quad cpu E450's and 420 R's Its cool

True true. Its the third party apps...like folding@home for instance, that would have to be ported as well. The out of the box linux version wouldnt work. And CDE blows! I'm a command line geek anyway so that doesnt bother me much.

There are versions of Linux written for SPARC processors (example here), but to be honest, I'm strictly an x86 man and haven't used Sun systems (though a little birdie told me recently that Solaris boxes are for sale at Boeing surplus, so I might take a shot at it). Yes this is true. However, as the OS must be written to run on the sparc, so does the software. You CAN run Linux on sparc, no problem. But you cannot then just install any ol linux software on it. It must be specifically written to run on the Sparc version of Linux in the same way that you can run a version Solaris on an X86 cpu but you cant then just run any solaris software on that box. If you want to break into the UNIX world then: 1. You rock! 2. You would probably be much better off starting out on a Linux/x86 machine than a Sun/Solaris machine

See previous posting about wanting to keep my job

Actually I see in their FAQ that there is indeed a Solaris version in the works...

I bet you are a man that knows his share of dead baby jokes :-)

Yep. Once again, welcome to the club. Thanks. Any Solaris versions on the horizon? There are distros of Linux that run on Solaris systems, and I'm confident that the Folding Initiative has been ported to Linux, because SETI@home was. Yes, I'm running it now on Redhat. That doesnt mean that it will run on Linux running on a Sun box. the software still have to written for the 64 bit sparc instruction set.