bert_man

worse... i jump a round reserve... which means I jump a round chute at the most unexpected time...

If someone even thought of doing such a dastardly deed, they had better think to PM me a copy... -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

Just talked to BM and they are sending me a new suit, this time shipping it in a box rather than an envelope. They said it's in stock, so it should be here relatively soon

French fries are great, but IMHO, HP's suck. Dell are pretty good though. The best option would be to have somebody build you one. AMD CPU's are the shiznit. If you are looking at processors and notice that the AMD processor costs more than the intel, just remember that a 1.5ghz AMD typically runs about as fast as a 3.0ghz pentium 4. They are just designed differently. If you want to get all the service and support, and don't plan on doing a whole lot of upgrading in the future, I'd go dell. -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

Really? I never actually die in my dreams. I don't even wake up at impact. I'll have a double total mal, and perform a book-perfect PLF and stand right back up, wiping the dust off my jumpsuit. Is that a sign that I inwardly, truly believe I'm invincible, even though logic says otherwise?

That's part of the addiction in skydiving as well. Though we are falling with gravity, we have to use the wind every bit of the way. It takes a really good sense of balance and awareness to be able to do what you want in the sky, as well as a strong understanding of the aerodynamics involved. It takes a ton (thousands) of jumps to learn to do it really well. Not to mention that you only have 45 seconds (freeflying) to a minute (flat-flying) to learn before you have to save your ass, land, pack, manifest for the next load, etc. They both require a certain amount of balls. In fact, I trust my skydiving equipment more than I would trust protection that I placed into rock. Every aspect of my skydiving gear was engineered to work a certain way. Climbers (trad, aid, bigwall) have to take what they have and find a crack to jam it into and trust it to stay put. One other major similarity between skydiving and climbing is the necessity for dependence on others. In climbing, your belayer could drop you, a partner could screw up a knot or unclip the wrong rope, or place bad pro. In skydiving, somebody could collide with you, deploy below you, screw up a pin check, etc. In both sports, that trust really helps bring people together.

The movies are actually quite accurate. It is commonplace for somebody to throw their rig out the door then jump out after it just for kicks. We can even have a deep conversation over tea in freefall or under canopy. Freefall can last as long as you need it to, so you have time to do whatever you want. After all, once you leave the plane you stop falling... you're just floating up there. When we open our chutes, we pop back up in the air. And what are you trying to say about vertical limit? You mean you can't actually tie a rope to yourself and jump off thousand foot cliffs with a big bottle of neon green nitroglycerin and catch yourself on the other side by whacking a few ice axes into the wall? Now, Touching the Void, that was a good flick! (and documentary). I'm afraid that guy has more balls than I may ever possess.

What skycat really is saying is that trad is a style of climbing where you jam your nuts in a crack. Your rope is attached to your nuts, and there are many different shapes and sizes of nuts to experiment with. No rack is ever too big, though the bigger they get, the harder they are to hump. As in some other areas of life, if your rack is too small, you can always spend a couple thousand $$ to make it bigger.

y'know what? I know of quite a few skydivers that came from the climbing community, including myself. I think this little merger could be good for skydiving in general. Think of all the climbers we could corrupt and convert to the dark side!

it was probably a software robot that got your emails and pulled the keyword "skydivers" out of the context of the page. The dude probably wouldnt even know that he had spammed you. That is why many people refuse to post their email addy online without encrypting it like saying "brett (at) clear view studios (dot) net" -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

yes, run. While you're at it, let the bass from the speakers run through your sneakers -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

oh jeez... *grabs a bag of popcorn and sits down with a cozy blanket*

haha get this... i just logged into my rc.com account that i stopped using two years ago (right before i started skydiving) and check out what I had listed in my interests: Well, two years later, 221 jumps, 9 wingsuit flights, 9 boogies, 1 malfunction, 3 roadtrips, and countless cases of beer have confirmed it. Skydiving is sweet. edit: don't feel bad, squeak... the same thing happened when I came here. Now I have a gay looking underscore in my name and I haven't even seen a 'bertman' since i've been here -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

In mine there are two 45-degree bends in the mylar stiffener. There are also pieces of shattered mylar visible if you hold the suit upside down and look into the air inlets. This might explain why a seam in the leg wing blew out after two jumps, and there are little holes and cotton-like pieces hanging out of the trailing edge of the leg wing. It's as if the shattered mylar pieces are sandblasting the inside of the wing So much for those envelopes they ship them in... -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

40 seconds in 1500 ft? is it a low-altitude high-speed pass or something? or is this something I get to look forward to when i get good? -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

holy shit, what suit do you fly? And how high do you open? -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

you can do everything right driving down the road and still die as well. I like to see it as risk vs. skill. You can drive defensively down the road with a foot always on the brake pedal, seatbelt on, obeying traffic rules and you'll probably be fine. If you suck at driving, this is probably the best option. Or you can have some fun and buy a fast car and drive fast and recklessly. If you suck at driving and you choose this option, it is very dangerous for you and others. Or, finally, you can buy a fast car, but only drive fast on a track in a controlled environment with the proper training and practice, only after working your way up from defensive, slow driving in order to develop the proper reactions and skills. This could be made to be as safe as a granny driving down the road like, well, a granny. It is inherently more risky, but precautions have been taken to greatly reduce the risk of human error, equipment failure, exposure to the unskilled hotshot you may be sharing the road with, and extraneous variables that can't be predicted. Loic Jean Albert could make his 'death-defying' wingsuit swoops down mountain slopes less dangerous than driving down the road with your granny, if all of the proper precautions are taken and he has a realistic attitude toward his abilities as a rigger and a pilot. I think people percieve skydiving accidents as more serious because of the way you die and the finality. They think "the chute doesn't open, you will die a grizzly death." Then they think of the uncertainty of a car accident where cars can be flipped multiple times and people may or may not be injured at all, forgetting that people die from fender-benders too. My .02 -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

that was firefly suits. -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

I never thought about looking at the horizon to stay level. Great tip, I'll definitely try that next time. I also find myself kicking my legs forward a bit after pitching to saddle myself into the harness right before/during deployment to soften the whiplash effect. Is this a good practice when done properly, or am I just being a pussy?

That could be it. The only other person that I have to jump with (who has a wingsuit) only has 3 WS jumps so he isn't jumping his camera. Maybe someone has a telephoto lens that they could shoot me with from under their canopy

I recently got my hands on a new phi suit and I really like it. My openings, however, suck. One of them even dislodged my reserver handle, somehow, and it was banging into my chest after deployment. I've managed to slow them down, and rotate myself after pitching to minimize the whiplash effect during opening. The problem now is line twists. I usually get 5-7 twists. I'm jumping a sabre 170 loaded at 1.4, so line twists for me rarely result in a spinner or anything, as I typically make sure that my risers are even. I think the twists could be due (in part) to my gear. I have an 8' bridle and (i think) 24" PC. I've been told that it is highly recommended that at least a 9' bridle is used. Could this be the cause? I have been packing the dbag without rotating it forward, keeping the gromet facing up to try to reduce the chances of the bag catching a corner of the main tray. For the record, I've put 8 jumps on it so far, and before that I had one jump on a prodigy (got a sh'load of line twists on that opening too, but one wing disconnected when I pitched, so the fact that I did a 180 during deployment might have been a factor ) -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

hehe, I recently saw the same thing, but they said Evil instead of Problems. -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

What if the laser receiver was somehow tied in to an AAD on your main? Then you'd be effectively taken out of the fight (if you had more than 2 people), and everybody would know when you got zapped -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

That's what makes the most sense to me. I'm not a pro swooping tour veteran by any means, but it seems to be much safer this way (with the toggles slipped over the palms of your hands, through 4 fingers). Take, for example, the two-fingers-through-the-toggle method. Not only does this seem to be more stressful on your fingers/tendons etc, and reduce your available power if you have to stab out of a low turn by introducing a 'weak link in the chain', but it just seems like a toggle drop waiting to happen. Take the following example: You use index/middle fingers in the toggle, and the same fingers for the dive loops. You initiate a left front riser turn, and partway through the turn, you realize "oh shit, i'm way too low," so you drop the riser so you can stab the toggles and save your ass from a rough landing. As you drop the riser, the toggle catches on the riser, and you end up slipping your fingers out of both. You realize this immediately, but you have already given a sharp stab at the right toggle. With all of your extra airspeed, combined with the sharp toggle stab, you swing out from under the canopy a bit, and find yourself diving at the ground even more. Since you were already so low that you were stabbing out of the corner, this sharp toggle turn only compounds the situation. In a panic, you reach up to find the left toggle again (which is now flapping in the wind) and just as your fingers re-enter the toggle, you feel the shock of mother earth snap both your femurs and dislocate your hip. Or you collide with an obstacle (or person), due to the heading change caused by the right toggle turn. If you have 4 fingers through your toggles, and they are seated in the corner of your thumb, around your palm, your fingers are completely free to grab risers, dive loops, give a high five to the guy you landed next to, etc. There is very little risk of dropping them, and you don't need to use any effort in your fingers to do anything with them. It just (for me) feels much more natural. What do you think? -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving

...pulling an all-nighter to catch up on the work that I didn't do during the day because I was thinking about skydiving. Now I'm still thinking about skydiving, not getting any work done, and I'm just going to be even more tired tomorrow. What the hell is wrong with me? (edit) And why is it that I just happened to post at exactly 4:20 (my time)? Is this some kind of sign? -Ghetto "The reason death cannot frighten me, is because life has cured me of fear." Web Design Cleveland Skydiving