dorbie

I wish you'd use the appropriate terms for these, like decision altitude instead of substituting phrases like hard deck. It implies too much IMHO. Testing a cypress like this is only like testing a fire extingisher if you test it by first setting your house on fire. That's how flawed the thought process is, and you don't need to be an experienced firefighter or skydiver to know this. This is not just about a neophyte skydiving questions, I've asked my fair share of those and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Recently when I was jumping at Skydive Dallas, DFW approach was from another direction most of the time but if the weather forced DFW approach anywhere near the DZ then ATC imposed a ceiling on the drop planes. It keeps you under their traffic, but you get out at 9000 instead of 13500.

This is the best review site on the web for digital cameras: http://www.dpreview.com/ Probably too much info to digest in one day. But the hot items tend to be in the "most clicked results" on the the right hand side, for example: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canona95/ What you should get depends heavily on whan you want to use it for, but when you decide where you want to jump in the reviews & comparrisons on this site should help you choose.

If by 'weeded' you mean 'assassinated' and if by 'we' you mean 'derranged gunmen'. Sigh! Am I in the wrong forum here?

But it seems you don't know what tat you want but you want something "just to get a tat" now. OK the art might mean something if you contrive another design that you have no firm idea about it yet so why another tat at all?

Yikes!! I wonder what the Relative Humidity at Lost Prairie is. Looks like this ear problem is pretty common.

You'll find that you're all asymmetric now and may have trouble walking in a straight line, standing up straight etc. This is a very dangerous condition that if allowed to persist for long could be fatal. The only solution is to cut the right pinky off to match the left. Cauterize the stubbs on the hotplate to staunch the bleeding and you'll be fine. No need to get the doc he'd only charge you for the same info.

More info here: http://www.paramax.de/mikeeng.htm Bigger & heavier than I thought.

Perhaps so, but there's nothing instinctive that tells you not to test a cypres like that. Simple logic and 2 seconds of thought should tell someone not to do it. The issue is not training, experience or any other such thing, it's plain old intelligence IMHO. If you need to ask someone if you should test a life saving device where your life depends on the test's outcome then you have a screw loose.

Do you mean put a tube up through the eustachian tube? Surely you can't mean anything else. I'd definitely try menthol medicated chews or nasal spray before I went for the tube option.

The info on their web site has changed a bit recently, but I think it's largely the same w.r.t. rigs. http://www.uspa.org/membership/travel/rigs.htm#tsa http://www.tsa.gov/public/interapp/editorial/editorial_1147.xml

Bwahahaha That was an awesome read. Jolt should change his name to Bounce. There record is pretty good, only 3 out of 12 entrants were killed in the competition. Where do I sign up, I want some "trophies" to treasure.

With your rig or with your life? That is afterall what they're ultimately charged with protecting

Yea he probably just looked like a damned hippy. what? whats that supposed to mean. Hell no!

Yes, this is the patented "train yourself" program. You tie the corners of a bedsheet together and jump off the roof. Bedsheet: $15 Hospital bill: $485 The USPA recommends AFF. More expensive but less painful. Hey don't knock the homegrown rigs, it woulda saved this guy if he'd managed to stay in the harness apparently: http://www.praning.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=289

I had similar sensations when I started jumping. It felt like there was fluid in my middle ear, some frequences seemed muted and swallowing caused poping/flushing sounds in my ears. My eustachian tubes were never blocked though. It cleared up, I think what helped clear it was going SCUBA diving, unbelievable the crud that ended up in my mask after a couple of dives. I think the cause with me was ascending sitting and descending on my belly tended to leave a little bit of mucus in my middle ear each jump wit a cumulative effect. That's just a wild theory of mine though. It was certainly caused by the constant changes in pressure that I wasn't used to. Not sure why it cleared when SCUBA diving, maybe the different orientation when pressurizing and depressurizing. I'm not advocating SCUBA diving as a treatment :-).

The correct way to handle this is to discuss it with a bunch of people on dropzone.com rather than your wife and grandmother. They're sure to know what's best for you & your family.

Yep the NASA software came along after the keyhole stuff, it's free but it doesn't have the same data & features. There's nothing difficult about GPS, it's trivial by comparrison to everything else these applications do. You can get a serial connection to a GPS device and get a simple WGS 84 coordinate, there's even a standard interface. For software to use this info is trivial, especially if that's the coordinate system native to your application. I've seen the Keyhole stuff connect to a GPS device and move the view to track your position, I just don't think it was productized (circa 2 years ago). The NASA stuff could no doubt support this with equal simplicity. This stuff will definitely reach the ordinary person (at $30 for Keyhole and free for NASA with source code you could argue it's already there considering the ease of adding GPS) your cellphone may be be supporting this stuff sooner than you expect. P.S. IMHO this image based stuff is heavily content driven so it's not enough to have the software, you need data and this kind of data is a very large complex problem, at least to get global seamless homogeneous data. To get any worthwhile high resolution coverage you're talking about absolutely massive quantities of data, and then after processing you have to have the server infrastructure & bandwidth to serve it because it can't be stored locally unless you're only interested in local data. Add to that issues of updates and data versioning and you begin to see the complexity of a working live system.

I think you're missing the 3D interractive aspect of the software. Although you can't really swoop in the keyhole software, (the 3D eyepoint movement is driven by the GUI) it's fast and very interractive even while you're waiting on data, it also caches data you're used to using locally but it's not a flight simulator with a canopy model. The GUI isn't designed with flight in mind (although there were prototypes internally...). It is 3D and you do 'fly' around in 3D using the mouse & GUI to view the data. As I described the PRO software has a number of enhanced features, like overlays, 'movie' animations, high resolution printing, and data import from GIS packages. w.r.t. other's comments the Keyhole software has a back end authoring & server suite and the front end client software. It's not really an API... yet. It uses WGS-84 coordinates and is compatible with GPS, it can even support GPS tracking now, but this would fall into the realm of bespoke engineering, there's no API or plugin format I know of yet, but I've been away from the company for a while and I know they'be been working on a bunch of improvements and contract stuff on the client side. Adding lots of GPS data is straightforward really, the problem is doing it cleanly in a way customers can exploit it with their own data and perhaps search it, filter it, label it etc. They may have done that by now.

I used to work for Keyhole before Google bought them. I wrote the image processing software that builds and blends the global database from multiple image sources and wrote some of the 3D rendering software. With Google funding behind them now they'll be adding higher resolution data over larger areas as time goes on. The data over any particular area is only as recent as the time the aircraft or satellite flew over to take the images. It varies from place to place but the whole process of data collection and orthorectification can be quite expensive. Coverage is a bit hit & miss for now driven by image availability. If you really want to see what the system is capable of go to downtown San Diego, there is ~3inch data there, very impressive. Technically teh system could do this over the whole planet. The Las Vegas strip has some pretty good data too. The highest resolution data in the database is outside the VAB at Cape Canaveral, there's ~1.5 inch data of a space shuttle taken by a photographer on the roof of the VAB. You can just about see the tiles on the Space Shuttle. If you want to see some cool 3D try Salt Lake City and /or the Hoover Dam. The basic license is about $30 and that lets you connect to the database for a year. There is an enhanced version of the software that allows you to add your own data on the client side, for example dragging and dropping an aerial photo of your own DZ onto the client then stretching it to fit in the correct location. AFAIK this is part of the more expensive "Pro" software though. It would be great if they shipped it as a standard feature, but they've gotta make their money I suppose. You could use this drag & drop feature to add your own more recent data and/or higher resolution data to small regions like your local DZ. The drag & drop supports transparency from PNG format images so you could for example draw a landing pattern diagram and superimpose it on a 3D view of your DZ, then rotate it for various wind directions.

Hey knock it off, what's the point of giving the guy the questions? At least keep it general. I suspect they may have changed with the new SIM anyway. I don't know how often they revise the test but once a year with the new SIM would make sense. You're *supposed* to study for the test, it makes sure you've at least read up on the basics. Giving someone the specific questions is not actually doing them a favor, probably the opposite.

Perris has a *lot* of space, the student landing circle alone is massive and it sits in the middle of an even bigger flat triangle. Much less for you to worry about flying your pattern.

Changed stuff like pull altitudes, clearances etc. New stuff like CRW rules & related info, night jump rules & related physiological & FAR stuff, misc stuff like freefly training (yea...?) and altitudes and just about anything else you can think of. The test is multiple choice so it's not very difficult but you will need to study your SIM. There were a few trick questions in there when I took it for example some questions applied to pilots and not jumpers and so required a different answer. Last I checked if you fail you can retake the exact same test 7 days later, no charge, so don't sweat it.

Yea he probably just looked like a damned hippy.

Strange. I own a new Triathlon and it's almost always pro packed, I have about 80 jumps on it and it is consistently *very* soft on opening, softer than any other canopy I've jumped. It always snivels for a long time. It does seem to have a large slider on it but that's what it came with. Even with my own sloppy pack jobs it opens well.