FlyingRhenquest

Looking to start out as a tunnel rat eh? That's fine. I think technically I might qualify since I think I still have more tunnel time than freefall time. Got my wingsuit on order too, expecting it to come in November - December timeframe. If you were a gymnast that might help. If you were a gymnast 50+ years ago, maybe not quite so much. I always feel like if any exercise is going to help you, it's probably going to be Tai Chi. It's slow, precise and relaxed. It doesn't take a lot to steer in the tunnel. First 5-10 minutes is probably going to be spent just learning to balance on the air column. I wouldn't advise more than 10 minutes in there the first day you go. Everyone always seems to tense up their first time and make it more work than it has to be to stay in the air. 10 minutes under those conditions are quite a workout. I have all my tunnel sessions up on Youtube. You're welcome to browse through my channel and watch everything from my first session in there to my last one if you're so inclined. http://www.youtube.com/user/FlyingRhenquest. You'll have to click "Load More" to get to my first 7 minutes in there, last year between my AFF levels 2 and 3. I don't think it'd help that much though, unless you're the kind of person who can learn to ride a bike by watching videos of people riding bikes. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

1) Nothing quite drives that knife home like bumping into an ex somewhere and obviously being happier than they are. 2) When it's short it says "Shorties!". When it's long it says "Shorties bar and grill! Best Barbecue in all of Texas! Open Monday - Saturday 10 AM - 7 PM! Bring all your friends and come on out! Eat at Shorties!" I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

You work to live, not live to work I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Friend of mine got spanked a lot on his Sabre 1 and ended up getting a pocket sewn into the slider by a rigger. Apparently this has helped bit. It might be worth talking to a rigger about whether your openings could be made any softer with the gear you have now, before you make a decision in the two-to-three-grand range! The Safire 2 I have now opens like leaves blowing around you on a fall day. I'm also a bigger guy. Lately I average about a 130 MPH fall rate, but have not had a particularly bad opening on the safire yet. If you're looking for a canopy with soft openings, that's where I'd start (See if you can find someone to let you jump one!) My Mirage G4 has some really nice padding on the shoulder straps and legs. If you don't have that, you might want to look into the possibility of getting some added. I don't know if how tight the straps are would make a huge difference in the opening shock. There are a lot of factors that go into that, but I don't think that's one of them. I've just come off jumping a lot of rental rigs that didn't quite fit me in a variety of ways and that's not one of the things that made a difference. It might make a difference in how that shock is distributed through your body, though (Which I think is equally important.) I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Reminds me of a joke I heard a while back. A Texan, a guy from Colorado and a Californian find a magic lamp and rub it. A genie comes out and says "Thank you for freeing me! I'll give you each one wish!" The Texan thinks about it for a second and says "I want you to build a wall around Texas, one mile high, so no one can get in or out!" Genie snaps his fingers, "Done!" The Californian says "I want you to build a wall around California, one mile high, so no one can get in or out!" Genie snaps his fingers, "Done!" The guy from Colorado says "So there are now walls around California and Texas, one mile high, so no one can get in or out?" The genie nods, "yes!" The guy from Colorado says "Fill them both with water!" I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Just gaming on my PC this iteration. Sony's alienated me with their sins of the past, the new Xbox does not sound like a console I'd care to own and my PC's more than up to the task at hand. Though I think I've put more hours on Dwarf Fortress lately (Even with all its game-killing bugs) than all my steam games combined. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Cool! I was just watching one of my tunnel videos today and getting the itch to go down there again. Maybe we'll bump into each other heh heh

There are a number of potential issues with GPS data really. Above a certain altitude and speed the GPS is not supposed to function (Ones that do are regulated as munitions.) However, I'm always well below the altitude and speed. I forget the exact numbers but I think it's over 30-40K and faster than 300-400 mph. It's just the cheap GPS in the phone. There are decently high precision models you can get that would probably be accurate enough to give you decent logs for your entire jump. I'm pretty sure the Flysight would, and I'll probably end up buying one when the wingsuit comes in, anyway. It's easy enough to add a new file format -- you just need to implement a new factory for it. Once I add another, I'll probably set up a proxy object that just forwards the file to all the real factories and forwards their coordinate notifications on to any listeners. All the rest of the code would remain the same. I'm planning to use a similar idiom to parse jumps out of files with multiple jumps -- design a "skydive" object with interesting data in it and create a factory class to build them. That'd make it easy to isolate the strategies I want to consider to isolate the different parts of the jumps. Converting to ECEF and using a criteria of "The first point after the jump starts that's less than 10 meters from the previous point" seems to be doing a wonderful job of detecting canopy deployment. The gpx2kml.cpp file is kind of jumbled at the moment as there's a lot of code in there I was using to explore the difficulties involved in doing something like this. Once I clean it up a bit, there should be almost nothing other than option handling in that file. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

What do you mean "fail"? You got out of it! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

It often seems to me like society likes to revel in its fear. The media is always trying to whip people up into hysterics. If "Normal" is being a frightened sheep so paralyzed by fear you can't act to save your own life in the face of danger, I'd rather be crazy. At least I'm in good company. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I'm totally stealing that. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Yah, this is why everyone got on my case about ninja shoes. It was for my own good really, since I like all my toes! And there's no RELIABLE video evidence that I EVER jumped on the things. _> I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Yes. Those people are projecting their fear onto you. They are so terrified of the idea that your ability to face it is incomprehensible to them. By proxy, you have dragged them along for your jump, and they react violently to it. Just look them in the eye and quietly tell them "I am not afraid." I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Do you remember if you were looking out toward the horizon on the good landing? Once you get the sight picture locked in, you'll just "know" when to flare. If you're looking down it's easy to get freaked out by how fast it seems like you're going. I'm sure that led to a lot of my high flares early on. I still have to occasionally remind myself where I need to be looking in the last 30-40 feet. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

They did mention that skydiving is a sport of waiting, yes? You spend more time waiting than you do anything else. You can still be learning during that time though! Even if you're just sitting there watching the packers or listening to the other skydivers, you might not understand what they're talking about but it's amazing what you'll pick up through osmosis! Don't be discouraged by the occasional long wait times. I went through the same thing last year. Two or three "bad" days in a row then you get to do your jump and it's all worth it. That's just how a sport that relies on weather conditions from the ground to a couple miles in the air can be sometimes. 'round here if I get too bent out of shape at the weather I just pop down to the vertical wind tunnel for a while. You never get a weather hold there! Just... the occasional blizzard trying to get there. Heh heh heh. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Ooh, you might be interested in some of my C++ libraries up on Github, then. The gpx2kml one is designed to take a GPX data file from the android "Mytracks" program and convert it into a KML file suitable for display on Google Earth. It has some rudimentary support to analyze a jump and detect canopy deployment. It's still pretty rough -- I find the exit point in the GPX file manually and trim the data down. Eventually I want it to pull the jumps out automatically, but I haven't got around to writing that bit yet. Always too busy jumping out of airplanes during prime weekend programming time! I've found my Android phone is EXTREMELY unreliable as far as GPS coordinates go. One of these days I'm probably going to have to break down and buy a flysight and write a factory for its data format. Still, I've gotten some halfway decent tracks from it, which look freaking awesome on Google Earth

Funnily enough I already go back and read my old ones. Even in a year it's odd what you don't remember about a specific jump until you go back and read. I think that's why I'm logging more now. Going back every so often reminds me of the trouble I had landing for the longest time. It really brings back the first jump where I had a really stable exit -- we flew around for 15 minutes trying to find a hole in the clouds to jump through. It reminds me that there was a period of time when I was having hard openings on a rental sabre. I have also have an enigmatic entry about "rental rig 4" saying that it sucks and I should avoid it (Think it had a tuck tab that always wanted to come undone, and had opened to line twists for me on a couple of different occasions. Which was probably MY fault!) Really a LOT has happened over the last year! I like the idea further on down the thread about logging tail numbers, too. Gonna have to do that for the planes I jump out of from now on, I think. I feel like I only have to log that info once, maybe I'll make a spot in the front of the book for them. I don't like the little log books I've seen. After looking at several (And paragear telling me I needed at least a $25 order when I tried to buy a $9 hardcover one) I just got a spiral notebook. I usually do two or three entries on the front of each page and leave the back open for any additional notes. Everyone seems surprised at it, but it works for me. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I notice the more I jump the more epic my log entries get. My last high pull made 8 lines of remarks -- exit altitude, deploy altitude according to my altimeter, how long I spent under canopy, yadda yadda yadda. The first entry in here, jump 25, says simply "Lost helmet. Pulled @8000." There's a long and incredibly funny story behind all that, left untold! For those of you who still log, what do your log entries look like and have they gotten more or less epic as your jump career continues? If you don't log anymore, why did you stop? Except Pops; with 999999999 jumps, you'd need enough sheets of paper that your log book would be approximately 15 miles high (I learned on my first job that 1000 sheets of paper are approximately 1 inch, so it's pretty easy to do the math.) So it's understandable why he wouldn't log. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

The AFF students here get talked down on the radio... if they can hear it. Between that and the AFF ground school instruction, I was able to get on the ground mostly undamaged most of the time. I sucked (Suuuuuuuucked) at landing for a long time. It's probably still the part of skydiving I do that needs the most work. I can't think of anything else (skydiving related) that I suck at so much. So what do you do in AFF? Be prepared to PLF every landing. There were a few jumps in there where I actually committed to PLF landings (IIRC 5-6 jumps) just so I could improve my PLF. Flare, PLF. Flare, PLF. Good PLF came in handy when the lighting guys set us up a downwind night landing the other night, let me tell you... The DZ here has a nice beginner-level canopy course where they teach flat turns, rear riser flight and flares, finding level flight and stall recovery. In addition they help you clean up your landing pattern and go over your landing on video with you. I had a tendency to want to ride my brakes on final because I was freaked out by how fast I was descending. Instructor put a stop to that, quickly. All the course material is in the SIM, they just present it in a more-digestible, less theoretical manner. Even with all that I still sucked at landing for a long time. Probably still do. Another couple hundred jumps maybe I'll be able to land on a Smurf. Or a puffin. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

A canopy course would put you right a lot faster than asking about it on these forums would. Leastwise not unless we can see you landing. Much easier to see what you're doing than trying to have you describe it. A canopy course instructor would typically video you and go over what you did and work with you to get your canopy flight, pattern and landing in order. I did one before I even completed my A license. I'm probably going to do another one whenever I finish recovering for paying for my gear. I'm a big fan of the canopy course. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Right out the door's fun. We got a little higher the other day on our quest for the perfect spot, and I ended up fully deployed at the altitude I usually exit at. I was playing with the front risers so I was still "only" 550 seconds under canopy, but it was still a nice ride down. And I did take some time to enjoy the view

Hill's the bit where your horizontal velocity from the plane is being converted to vertical velocity of falling. You don't instantaneously start falling down (out of a plane.) You have some inertia carrying you in the direction the plane was traveling for a period of time. I have almost everything I need to qualify for a coach rating. Frightening, isn't it? Maybe next week at around 6000 feet or so I'll get a buddy to help me reenact this scene for the benefit of the AFF level 1 students on board. Meh heh heh. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

It doesn't bother me Yes, I prefer to edit for specifiicitityness.

Heh. If you can get AFF 1-7 at Lodi for $1000, would you do it? If you save yourself $1000 or so on training and spend it travelling there, you're really not saving that much. $1000 is a pretty small percentage of what you spend on the sport, ultimately. How much have YOU put into skydiving so far? I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Heh. We expect a full report on how you did! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?