colinl

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Posts posted by colinl

  1. I don't think it's about the numbers, rather about the attitude. I feel more inclined to take seriously argumented opinions made by posters with a bogus licence number, but who seem to have an habit of posting interesting messages since a while, who are eager to take a step and consider others' points of views without dismissing them as crap as soon as they disagree, ... than people who are sure they're right in any occasion and have a very thin margin of tolerance.

    (I promise, I really don't have a licence #)

  4. Here's a new whuffo question you may not have heard: When freeflying head down, do you feel a blood rush to your brain the same way you feel it when upside down on the ground, against a wall? Or is it different, because you go down the same way the blood does? :|
    (I'm actually interested in the answer :$)

  5. Quote

    I sure want to hook her up with a tandem. Then when she'll have a job we should be able to pursue on this. Right now I only should try to stop thinking about it because I'm completely broke :))



    Hey, it's done! Clo jumped this afternoon and she loved it :) (the avi is 65 megas)
    I feel that we're going to go back and learn to skydive by ourselves!

  8. Yeah, cats... A while after we got ours (rescued her from the street, looked abandoned -- and was), we started to discover how many details you have to pay attention to, or the cat would ruin something. Once we left a nice piece of meat in the kitchen's counter, waiting for the oven to heat up we left the room. We get back here, and the cat had taken the meat down to the floor and was proceeding to eat it. So we begin to yell at her, so that she can be sure she was doing something forbidden... Guess what, instead of running away and let us forget her, she just laid down on the piece of meat, you know just in case we hadn't seen it...

    We learnt the lesson and always close the door now when cooking meat...

    And last week we were preparing salad, went away to buy something. We didn't bother to close the door, do cats like salad ? Nooo... Or so you think! She did exactly the same thing and completely destroyed it in about five minutes.

  10. So, there's a monkey I know of... Not that it's mine or anything, mind you... Anyway, that monkey tried parachuting about fifteen years ago. At this time the technology wasn't anything near perfect, and Monkey gave up after trying to jump with plastic groceries bags.

    Now Singi-Singea (it's his name. He's from France.) wanted to try again, this time with professional gear, that is to mean : a home-sewn round parachute ! After the long engineering phase came time to test the brand new canopy.

    The first tests were quite disappointing. Streaming malfunctions, tensions knots, line entanglements... Thankfully he managed to track beautifully and land on soft pillows each time - which is the only reason he's still there to share the joice of his first successful experience!

    Finally it was decided that static line jumps would be more easy at first. The static line anchor has been provided by my girlfriend Clo, always willing to help - as long as noone's looking. And little monkey made his first jump, and it has even been filmed.

    This is not perfect yet. Monkey insisted on getting a high-performance canopy (round... yes...) about 1.5 square feet; and as monkeys can't flare, he's getting hard landings. Well.His choice!

  11. Quote

    Do the tunnel first, then do AFF. Forget RAPS.



    Why exactly ? I had the understanding that starting with static line was a good way to learn to handle the canopy first, then learn to handle the freefall, instead of doing both at once like with AFF. Which some people could prefer (Personally I'm thinking of it).

    Or I am mistaken and is RAPS not the british word for SL and something else ?

  13. Hi there,

    In case I'm not the only one to love rollerblading here... (and I'm sure I'm not! ), here's a short video of a crazy guy who's probably born with wheels under his feet.

    http://www.rollerfr.net/videos/freeskate/ROB.avi

    Bonus question, do you consider rollerblading more or less dangerous than skydiving? I'm not sure about it; I suppose the injury rate is much higher for rollerblading, while the fatality rate is probably lower, but I have no numbers to back that up.

  15. Quote

    This didn't happen to me, but to someone in my club, a couple weeks ago. She had done 2 tandems and AFF 1-5 out of a cessna that only went to 12000 feet. She went down to Lake Wales to finish her AFF during collegiates, and exited the plane at 15000 feet, and when she got to 13000, she saw her altimeter said 1, thought she was at 1000 feet, and pulled! :D



    That's better than the contrary ;) Plus, it makes for a real nice,long canopy ride ! (although I hope she was last on the load?)

  16. Pushed my younger sister into a bunch of nettles. My mother taught me how it felt, by making me jump into the same bunch after said sister complained. Both of us spent a few days itching like hell.

    Ran after my sister, armed with a hammer, around the house for about ten minutes to freak out the babysitter (my sister was aware that this was the goal and I wasn't going to wound her). The babysitter told my parents she didn't want to see us ever again.

    Tried to fire a very old and unmaintained 22LR handgun into the basement's wall, and realized later it really could have misfired (the barrel was badly aligned) and I could have blown my hand away.

    Climbed up on an abandoned warehouse's roof with friends. While crossing the roof without staying near the ridge,I put my feet on a piece of plexiglas used to get light in the warehouse but wasn't visible from outside with the sunset. Fell 10 meters straight into concrete, feet forward (which is the only reason I didn't die, in fact) ; that crushed my two ankles and L2 vertebra, and I spent 1 month in hospital then 3 monthes in a wheelchair with a corset.
    This one was approximetely the last stupid stunt I pulled...

  18. Quote

    I heard loading video games on a laptop is not recommended because it takes up too much memory?

    The only game I would want to load on it is Flight Simulator.



    Depends on the game! ;)
    a laptop and a desktop ship with similar amounts of memory (RAM), usually smaller hard drives (40 to 100 GB in today's laptops).
    A laptop CPU is usually slower than a desktop one (often in the 1.5-1.8 GHz range, 2.8GHz for desktops). Graphics cards in laptops could eat about any video game thrown at them apart the latest and greatest stuff like Doom3.

    However usually a laptop for gaming isn't very practical: the LCD screen doesn't always react fast enough, and you'll have to hook up a mouse - don't even think playing Flight Simulator with the touchpad :S

  19. Quote

    I just remembered something... I dont know about IBM now. Their consumer PC and laptop division was sold off to a Chineese group ayear ago or so. Not sure if the quality will be the same now.



    Yes, it's now "Lenovo".

  20. For what you want to do an Apple seems perfect. If you have a tight budget, you can try ASUS. Good hardware and very decent prices. Don't know about the support though.

  21. Quote

    they can just remove that disc and fuse the two vertebrae together, and that can reduce mobility somewhat but I have no idea what that would do to everyday things...



    I have L1 to L3 fused together (following an L2 burst-type fracture), it doesn't change much. I can still touch my feet with my fingers when I bend. But L1-L3 is lower in the back that L5/S1, so that could be different for marcin.

  22. ...in the house. I'm wondering whether you, as skydivers, where the quality of your pack jobs saves your life, were as much subject to domestic entanglement that we whuffos fight against?

    I mean, I can't seem to ever be able to take a single power adapter clean out of under the desk. It's always messed up with the rest of ton of cables sitting there. Same goes in the servers bay at work. I can't even untie my shoe laces cleanly - although shoe-lace-tension-knots seem to only happen when I'm really tired and want to go to bed now.

    Do you face the same problems?

  23. Quote

    Quote

    If your TI ever says to you: "I'll explain how to land on the way down", RUN (do not walk) to your car and GO.



    That isn't a fair characterization. I know many many tandem instructors and some of them use this method so as to not overwhelm their passenger with a bunch of instructions before their first skydive.



    Before doing my tandem my TI and I watched a video explaining what I was expected to do (now I'm reading these forums, I know I wasn't expected to do much ;)), and the video told how I should put my legs forward before landing. Then, at about 1000 meters high, my TI asked me to do it in order to check I understood. Quite a good way to proceed, in my opinion?