FlyingRhenquest

I used to have to drive a lot for my job and had a CB in the car. So I used to talk to them a lot. Good folk, and they have to put up with a bunch of crap from non-professional drivers. They also have the best information about road conditions for the next few hundred miles. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Addressed to various drivers on my way home (You know who you are) 1) Come on you goat-fuckers! You don't need to stop to turn right at a green light! (They're probably too busy FUCKING GOATS to drive well.) 2) HANG UP AND DRIVE! 3) Your vehicle is equipped with a MAGICAL DEVICE which allows you to SIGNAL your INTENTION TO TURN to OTHER DRIVERS! Here, let me show you how it works! Sorry, had to get that off my chest. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

It's probably legal to farm that in Colorado now, too... I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

THAT'S what I thought you were doing in the 1st place...hence the caution & warning light. I think given your earlier posts you should do a tandem and evaluate your interest from that standpoint. You MAY find you don't have nearly the 'fear' you think you have! I never did a tandem. I think if I tried to do one now I'd accidentally pull the guy I'm wearing on my back as a parachute I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I don't know if it's camera angle or what but for that entire jump you look lopsided for some reason I just can't put my finger on. Like you're bent to the right somehow. A good example is at the :39 second mark, it looks like your right leg is fully extended and off at an angle and your left leg is in the arch position I'd expect. Weird. It might be how your rig is riding on you. I kinda wish they'd let you go around once so I could see from that angle. That probably wouldn't have been very safe, though.If you have the same problem in the tunnel, see if you can get the tunnel instructor to help you do some 360s so you can see your body position from all angles. Is the rig comfortable and the leg straps tightened to the same length on both sides? Does it flop around on your back at all? I'm guessing that if it's body position, your wind tunnel instructor will spot the problem and correct it quickly. I'm also curious if you'll have the same problem in there with so many landmarks you can stay relative to. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Oh, well there's a LOT of waiting in skydiving. Waiting on the ground, weather holds, the ride on the plane, waiting for AFF instructors to be available, etc. It's best to put that time to good use asking all manner of questions. The first few times you have no idea how long it takes to put the gear on and spend 20 minutes wandering around with a rig and jumpsuit on. Hopefully your instructor will use that time to deliver a briefing on the dive flow and practice the exit at the mock-up rig. They usually go over the dive flow at least once on the plane, as well, just to make sure you remember it. It varies from DZ to DZ. IIRC the first jump at the one I found was $300. That jump was more expensive due to the six hour ground school we had prior to the jump. The price goes down as you do more jumps -- the first three jumps take two instructors and were a couple hundred bucks. Then it goes down to one instructor and gets less expensive. Kind of depends on your DZ though. I'm not sure how much you want to shop around for AFF training though. "Bob's Discount AFF Training" might have a "buy one jump, get one jump free!" special, but I might have some concerns about the quality of that training. But it might be great, too! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Well now it mostly feels like flying. You ever have a dream where you go flying? It feels kind of like that. Those early AFF jumps and tunnel sessions reminded me a bit more of trying to balance on a bicycle the first time without knowing exactly how to do it. Then they take the training wheels off for the first time 3 minutes (3 jumps) later and you find yourself just doing it... There's a lot of other discussion about fear and stuff after you asked this question. Before our first jump they introduced us to a door mock-up where we could practice our exit on the ground. Several times during my training they told me that there was no difference between climbing around on the door mock-up and climbing around on the plane at 12000 feet. I didn't believe them at the time. Just recently I found myself saying that to an AFF student who probably didn't believe me either. Here's the thing, and I'm not looking to do it or take any unnecessary risks, but if there were some life-threatening emergency that forced me to climb out the door of the plane without a rig on, I feel like I could do that now. Because I KNOW it's no different than climbing around on the mock-up rig on the ground. I know my footing will be good, I know that my grip won't fail. The only difference is in my mind. I had a dream after I had this realization where I had to jump from a high platform (200-300 feet) and catch on to the rigging of a hot air balloon, and I did it without fear because I knew I could make the same jump on the ground without a problem. I didn't set out to conquer any fears when I started this, but that's kind of nice bonus to the whole experience anyway. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Standing at the open door of a plane at 10000 feet doesn't seem as frightening as standing on a ladder at 20 or 30 feet to me. Everything looks so different up there it hardly even registers. Just breathe and don't let yourself panic. We all had to take that first step. I got a look at the video of my first jump and I didn't remember feeling as frightened as I looked in the video, but I did it anyway. It was no less scary for anyone here, but we all did it. No matter what happens on your jump, it doesn't speak badly of you as a person. Exiting a flying plane is an extremely unnatural thing to be doing. Just relax and enjoy the experience as much as you can. You only get one first jump and it'll never be quite the same again after that. Once you're out the door, it's just awesome. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Most of the studies I've found state it doesn't help that much. The problem isn't that you're steering with one hand, it's that texting or having a conversation is actually pretty distracting. You tend to just make small talk with passengers and mostly tune them out. Hit the safety course with a passenger sometime and have them ask you math questions while you drive the course and see how well you fare. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Well feeling the wind is way beyond what most of us get on that first jump. Took me quite a while to really start feeling it, even in the tunnel. Since I really started noticing it, I've found a spot outside the window of my car where I can rest my hand in the burble of the mirror and have it be perfectly stable. If you try that, don't let it distract you too much from driving. It really is pretty neat. Maybe try it as a passenger... I got video from all my tunnel session and you can see a very clear progression. I still find it astounding to think that it's really only a couple hours in the tunnel and a couple hours of freefall to get me to this point. Something about your life being in danger really speeds the learning up! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Like sushi? I Googled "Seattle awesome sushi" a few years back and drove to the first place that popped up; http://kisaku.com/kisaku/. It was, indeed, awesome. Certainly worth a 3000+ mile round trip drive. The traffic there would drive me insane in a matter of days. Next time I go, my strategy will be to park at a hotel on the edge of town and take public transportation around. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

'course, back in Monkeytown when I started my career (Before the advent of cellphones) I went by some idiot on the interstate who was driving very erratically. I glanced over while passing and he had some big-ass book propped up on his steering wheel. People don't need technology to be stupid. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I mostly just see jackholes with cell phones glued to their ears. I went down to SVCO the other day and the timing was such that I got to drove home on I25 at rush hour. I was actually surprised at the relative lack of general stupid shit that day, but at one point someone did try to change lanes into the motorcycle I was behind. Fortunately they weren't doing it quickly and the motorcycle noticed and honked before I had to be a witness. Three or four years ago I saw some woman come out from a liquor store parking lot, cross four lanes of traffic and run the motorcycle in front of me off the road. She kept right on going. I put my flashers on and helped him stand his bike back up. He was pretty pissed off about it. I would be, too. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

That was in reference to the OP's note that a lot of the web services infrastructure is written in java. Maybe you could tell I wouldn't be terribly sad if a lot of the web services infrastructure died in a fire (Which is probably what would happen in Java died in a fire.) I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Java may not be commonly used in front-end web design or for desktop applications (meaning "normal" computer/web users like you can survive without it), but as a general software development and run-time environment it is extremely widely used (including a a lot of web servers). Meaning if it did somehow "die," a lot of websites you use today would explode. Yeah, but it really does suck for all those things. The whole damn application stack sucks, from the stateless protocol to the leaky-ass middleware companies write to the shitty scripting languages that have been glommed into today's browsers. Flush the whole damn thing down the toilet like the messy dump it is and start over! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

That's likely to be different for everyone. I got into hang gliding in the 90's but didn't stick with it. I held off on skydiving for so long because I thought I wouldn't like it. Turned out I liked it. Go figure. Even if you don't stick with it, so what? As long as you don't run out and buy $10000 worth of new gear before your AFF1, anyway. It's a new experience, which is what you were after. If you don't like it, go find some other new experience. No big deal. I enjoy the vertical wind tunnel almost as much as I enjoy skydiving. Maybe you should try that, too. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

They specifically told us they wanted us to do one early so that we don't completely freak out if an emergency bail-out is required. They also mentioned in AFF ground school an altitude below which we should go directly for our reserve in AFF. I don't recall if it was 2000 feet or if it was higher for us AFF students, but if I find myself in freefall below 2000 feet, I'm going for my reserve. They're approximately the same thing. Exiting the plane a few thousand feet lower doesn't change how long it takes to cover the first thousand feet or the subsequent thousands of feet, and I know how long THAT takes. Exiting at 5500, I have 15 seconds before I reach my current deploy altitude. Even though my early exits tended to be awkward, I was always stable within the first thousand feet. At 5500 feet, I knew I had... time to get stable. At 2000 feet, I probably would have thrown the reserve from an unstable body position a couple seconds after leaving the plane. Never had a chance to test it. What does an AFFI with a student do in that situation? Just out of curiosity... These days I can throw a couple seconds after leaving the plane. I think it was 5 on my last high pull, and only because I'm paranoid about deploying closer to the plane than that. That wasn't a requirement of our CC. I opted to take the course about halfway through my coach jumps because canopy flight and landing was the thing I felt like I was the worst at, at that point. I knew I had time to get stable before pulling, so I did. I did tend to deploy a few hundred feet lower than the more experienced people in the CC course due to this, but it wasn't a huge liability. I still had time to get my exercises done and set up a pattern on each jump. I'm planning to take another one when my canopy comes in, and that bit will be a lot easier now, I think. As long as I remember to cock my pilot chute. True, but in general I feel like I should have stuck with the climb-out exit facing the wing until I could exit stably. Retrospectively I think I'd have learned stable exits more quickly had I done so. Excellent! Now think about doing it with a couple of practice throws in that position. There's a problem with that...do you see it? Hint: Remember your aircraft emergency procedures? Well it's not something I'm likely to be doing in an emergency, or in a hop and pop. Under 2000 feet is not a good time for freeflying. My objectives are get out of the plane, get a flyable canopy over my head and land safely. I'm confident I can do that. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

It wasn't until after I got my A license that I started having instantly stable exits. Some of the things you take for granted after nine hundred million jumps take a few while for some of us noobs to learn! The 5.5K hop-and-pop still wasn't bad -- there was enough time to get stable and pull. I did a bunch more for the canopy course, too. I think at least a few of those I dove out ass-to-the-wind, which didn't help my stability that much. I've favored the dive-out exit since I learned it, but retrospectively climbing out would probably have given me more stable exits at that experience level. Now I can do a stable exit in a back-fly, which was something that never even crossed my mind as a possible feat while I was a student. Stable exits and everything my instructors had been trying to tell me about relative wind just clicked one day and I was able to do it. You get there, just some of us (me) are slower learners than others. Fortunately, I'm not competing with anyone! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Sounds like you've already learned one of the harder lessons in the sport -- relaxing makes you fly better! I love flying in the tunnel too -- just put another 12 minutes in yesterday, though nothing's quite like a sunset high pull out at the dropzone. Though everyone here says tunnel flying isn't much like skydiving, I think an experienced tunnel flyer like you is less likely to experience sensory overload on his early jumps. Just remember to keep an eye on that altimeter and pull a the correct altitude! Don't be all like head-down carving on your first jump -- AFF instructors hate that! Heh heh heh I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I feel pretty much the same way, so I bought a new canopy. Problem solved. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Hmm. If I feel that bad I don't jump. But I also haven't really gotten sick since I started skydiving. Didn't get so much as a cold or the flu this winter. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

For some reason I'm always more nervous before going in the tunnel than going in the plane. As soon as they start the fan up, I'm fine. Last time I was in there I had no objectives other than to play around and relaxed the moment I hit the air. It made a pretty big difference in my flying, too. I think tension and performance can create a feedback loop for this stuff -- you tense up, which causes your performance to suffer, which causes you to worry about that and tense up some more. Just take a breath, smile, relax and have fun! By the same token, if you're relaxed you'll fly better, have more fun, worry less and the feedback loop will be a good one. Even if you don't think you're doing so great in there (or on any particular jump) you're still learning something from it and the experience will improve your flying. It's OK to have a tunnel session or a jump you thought wasn't the greatest performance. From what it sounds like, you're way more prepared than I was going into AFF. All this work may be expensive, but if it keeps you from having to repeat an AFF jump down the road, it's probably paying for itself! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

We have one in the otter that says "Fasten Seatbelts Below 2000' AGL". I want one of those for the dash of my car. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Tell them you're gay. Then say just kidding, you're a skydiver. They'll be so relieved, they won't bother you about it at all! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Second part linky http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80YWygLOMugp I'm still pretty sore today. That was about twice the amount of time I've ever spent in there up to now. I felt much more confident in there than I have in previous sessions -- even in the last one I did a couple months ago. I think without any particular objectives I was just able to relax and play with the wind a bit. I went back and watched my first session in the tunnel, which I took right after AFF level 2, and the progress I've made is quite clear. Even with that I can see where I'm still a little wobbly, but I'm quite pleased with the last year. Just as I'm looking back on my first session and am like "heh", I'm sure I'll look back at this one in a year and feel the same way! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?