loudawg

In class C and D airspace you don't even need that much to be considered under the ATC umbrella. All you need to hear from them is your callsign, and you're good to go into that airspace. For example, if you make a call to ATC, and they respond with "Cessna 4008V, standby" and then they start making calls to other aircraft, you're still all set....pretty strange....almost seems too lenient.

If I'm not mistaken, isn't the proper procedure to pull Red before pulling Silver? If he had done that, maybe there wouldn't have been such a mess at hand...who knows....it's what I've learned, anyway.

My family has generally been pretty supportive of me jumping. I bought my little brother a tandem jump for his 18th birthday this past March, and so the whole family came out to watch. My Mom admitted that after seeing how graceful the canopy ride down is, she feels a lot better about me jumping. She still doesn't really like it when I say I'm going to jump (like last night when I told her I'm going this Saturday), but she doesn't sit there begging me to stay home. I can understand her fear though, because my older brother died in an accident less than 2 months after he turned 21, and since I just turned 21 barely over a week ago, I think she just wants to see me make it past this age, since none of her kids have yet. It's really kind of tough on me sometimes too, because I almost feel that I'm setting myself up for a similar situation. I mean I just recently started jumping quite a bit, and am so motivated to jump like crazy all summer, so I'm definitely increasing my risks. But at the same time, I am comfortable with what I do, and being in the sport for over a year now, I know quite a bit about it, and how everything works, and to me it makes things seem not as "scary." And to top things off, I'm not afraid of dying in this sport, or dying in general. The only thing I'm afraid of is putting my family through all that pain once again....I just can't bear to think back to that night when we had to break the news to my mom about my brother. The bottom line is, I won't stop jumping and shelter myself just to make it to age 22. That is living in fear, and I won't let fear rule my life. I hope I can make it to an old age, but, while not pushing things to the limit, I will live my life to the fullest, and whatever happens, happens. Ok, this may have gotten a little off subject. I'll stop now

I'll be there on Saturday, so count me in on the sunset jump! I guess I'll be meeting Rosa for the first time this weekend! Happy birthday! Oh, and just look out for the tall guy there, and it'll most likely be me

I threatened myself with death on accident a few years ago. I was extremely stupid. I took a friend from high school flying for his first time in a private plane. The clouds were kinda low (about a 2,500 foot ceiling), but I still wanted to show him a good time, so I decided to put the plane into an aggressive stall just under the clouds. I will swear over and over that everything was perfectly centered, and that I had that plane perfectly neutral, but it went over into a nice spin. Well, I've never been in a spin without my instructor. I couldn't believe how instinctlively I pulled the throttle and slammed that opposite rudder, while holding a little bit of down pressure. I could immediately see the textbook diagrams in my head. I neutralized the spin pretty quickly, but I think I tried recovering too fast and ended up putting it into a secondary stall. I was more gentle the second time around, and eased it back into level flight only to see the roofs of houses only maybe 500 feet or so below me.....that was NOT cool. To make things even worse, I knew that the ground in that area was at around 1,200 feet MSL, so I really had only 1,000 feet or so of elevation doing these maneuvers. I didn't think about it at the time, but I knew. Well, luckily, my friend thought this was all part of the plan and was laughing his head off while we were plummeting toward the ground. LoL. Anyway, maybe this wasn't quite the same kind of "threat" that this thread was intended for, but hey, it was an interesting story nonetheless. Oh, and don't ever get into a Zenith. The biggest POS airplane you'll ever fly. I also found out after I landed that the certifications for spins on the plane was revoked 2 weeks prior to this incident. Makes me feel a LITTLE bit better about myself, even though when it all comes down to it, I am completely at fault and I made one dumbass decision. Oh well, I cheated death once again.

1. Whats your name? Lou 2. How old are you? 21 3. Why did you decide to start jumping out of airplanes? I love being in the sky. Tried it once, never stopped 4. Are you single or taken? Married? Single 5. Do you have kids? No 6. What do you drive? '98 Eclipse 7. Have you ever done a kisspass? Nope, HELLO girls where are you? 8. Where do you live? Southern California (Corona) 9. Do you have any pets? A cool 80 Gallon fish tank 10. How many jumps do you have? 39 11. What color eyes do you have? Hazel? 12. What is your nationality? Macedonian 13. Have you ever dated someone you met off the internet? No 14. Favorite Movie? The Matrix 15. What do you do when you arent skydiving? Work, go to school, snowboard, wakeboard, fish, backpack, program, fly airplanes, play tennis, the list goes on. 16. Have you ever BASE jumped? No 17. If not... do you want to? Yes, once I get much more experienced 18. Do you have siblings? 2 brothers (only one of which is alive) 19. Where do you want to travel to the most? The other side of the world (went to Europe once already) 20. What's your favorite color? Blue 21. Where was the last place you flew to ( not skydiving )? Detroit

That's just . . . wrong. LoL

I moved from Sterling Heights/Troy, MI to southern Cali and I'm sure glad I'm here in Cali now! It's probably a move that'll be well worth it...nothing to be scared about

Any distro will do the stuff you are saying you normally do. Gentoo has a steep learning curve at first, since it does NOT have any kind of user friendly installation program. You just gotta follow the manual and type all that shit in yourself. Once you learn it though, in my opinion it's the best, because it only installs what you tell it to, and you don't get all the crap the other distros load by default. Plus, everything is compiled and optimized for your system. And Portage is just so cool. It makes it sooo easy to install packages. It does all the dependency calculations for you and stuff. It's the only one I use now. If you want something to get more experience on first, though, choose an easier distro like Mandrake which is very user friendly, or Fedora like mentioned before....Fedora seems to be the distro of choice for everyone that I've talked to in the computer lab at my university....I'm all about Gentoo though, and I get shit for it, but still I think it's the best. Like I said, once you figure it out, it is so easy and things work beautifully (and fast too). As far as the stuff you want to run, all those games you mentioned work great under Linux either natively (UT, I have it installed right now), or using Wine (like Counterstrike, which runs awesome using Wine). Your photo editing can be done using the GIMP, which, in many ways, is much more powerful than Photoshop. I use Gaim for chatting online, which supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, and a bunch more. It's a great program. Every day I have people asking me to fix their broken Windows installation, and it makes me happier each time that I am a 100% Linux user. No more rediculous problems that Windows gave me (and others). I don't wanna bash Windows and claim Linux is the ONLY way to go like many do. For the general user, it's a good operating system. For me though, the headaches aren't worth it, and Linux is the OS of choice. I am so much happier with it. I just wish there was more widespread support for it by the major software and hardware companies. Maybe one day . . .

www.gentoo.org :-)

Yep, I turned 21 on Tuesday...how cool is that? LoL. Now I don't need to get Mike or anyone else at the DZ to buy the beer for me. Is this a beerable offense, by the way? I think it probably is. I guess next time I go to the DZ I'll have to bring a few packs to celebrate (again). The crappy thing about my birthday is that I had a final from 7-10pm, so I was stuck studying all day and testing all night. I tore it up though, and I feel confident that I'm getting an A in this class, which is supposed to be one of the hardest in the entire undergraduate course. I took my last final this afternoon, so I'm finally finished for the summer! Now I can concentrate on making a bunch of skydiving money and making a lot of jumps! (And saving up to buy my first rig)

This thread is still alive? LoL.... amen on the beer though

Make sure you stop by Elsinore. I'm a young and single college student too

Hey, I might be around this weekend. Not sure. I just did 4 jumps today, and I better sit down and see where I am money-wise before I come down this weekend. If I do though, it'll be on Sunday. I'm gonna be at Bridge the Gap for sure though, so whoever is signed up, I'll see you there! I can't wait.

Yeah, I thought the MGD I brought would be sufficient for now. Guess not