FlyingRhenquest

Oh. Would any medical travel insurance cover a skydiving accident? You might still want to get some for the full time in case you contract an unpronounceable disease in Vegas. It could happen! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Insurance for what, exactly? I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I'm sure it'll be fine. A couple decades ago someone made a spelling mistake on my driver's license with my middle name. I've never been able to get my driver's license changed although my passport says something different. I mostly just use my middle initial and wave my hands vaguely. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Cool! And don't forget to breathe! That's easy to do on those first few jumps! I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Yikes! I'm glad to hear you're still with us! Yeah, insurance companies are damn near worthless. I've put tens of thousands of dollars into company plans over the years, and every single time something's come up, they've managed to weasel out of paying it. All my stuff so far has been fairly "minor," making bills of not much more than a thousand dollars each time. Given their track record, I don't expect them to come through if there's ever one in the tens of thousands of dollars either. Maybe you should emigrate to Canada. Or France. I hear France has the best health care system in the world. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Hmm. Check the control panel. I vaguely seem to recall there being an esoteric "fonts" option, either under Fonts or in your video card driver settings, that would allow you to enable stuff like sub-pixel aliasing and font smoothing. Win2K should have reasonably solid truetype font rendering. They were doing stuff like that much earlier than then. I don't recall if the MS Truetype core fonts came out before Win2K or not. I think they did, so they're probably already in the OS. I've been installing them on Linux machines for as long as I can remember. It might be worth poking around a bit if you do a lot of work on Win2K, but the industry has moved on from there. So it might turn out you're just kind of stuck with that. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Was that under Linux? You can do some stuff to improve the font rendering, but they're fairly obscure things and not set up by default on every distribution. If you google around on Linux font rendering you can find some documents on the subject. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Is it this one? http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Open+Sans I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Awesome! Amazing what a difference relaxing makes, eh? I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I've ordered stuff from Germany that's taken a month to arrive. DHL yay I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Hm. I like the idea of a medical checkup. Just to make sure you don't have something else going on. Explain the situation to a doctor. 14.5 is a bit higher than you'd "normally" go. I've had visitors from sea level fall out of the car at 12K up on trail ridge road. I try not to take them up there on their first day anymore. So maybe the altitude got to you, or maybe you forgot to breathe during your jump, or maybe your instructor did a high G turn, or maybe something else entirely. If it were a little closer to when you did your tandem, you could contact the DZ and ask him about it. He's probably forgotten by now though. I'd want to rule out the "something else entirely" first. If a doctor says you're fine, maybe do another tandem or two and see what happens. Or come out here after Memorial day and have someone drive you over the top of trail ridge road, to see if you might just be sensitive to altitude or something. There might be less crude ways to do that. Or you could just choose to not pursue this particular sport. It's your life you're putting on the line here, and ultimately only you can decide what risk you're willing to accept and what precautions you want to take. If you still want some flying and the experience of watching your savings account shrink, you could just go be a wind tunnel rat. It's less gear to buy but you can still blow a couple hundred bucks on a weekend if you want to. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I'd want to get a handle on what you experienced. Some of the symptoms sound like hypoxia. Did your tandem instructor have any insight? Did he do a high G turn? Did they put you on oxygen? What was the altitude you jumped from? That's definitely not something you want to have happen on a solo jump, and it's probably not something you want to mess around with, either. The scientist in me always wants to say "ooo do it again and see if it happens again!" but that seems like potentially bad advice. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Doesn't look like my morning latte or occasional caffeine pill counts My caffeine addiction has more to do with being a programmer than being a skydiver, though. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Oh sure! You probably don't want a brain surgeon or a lawyer from El Cheapo U. For a programming position in your average company, it doesn't really matter. I'd give a lot more respect to an portfolio of code up on github. I have yet to run across a candidate who has claimed to have one, though. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

It was in the 40s (Farenheit) in Colorado today, but -30 at 10K feet for our second jump. My fingers are still thawing out. But I've managed to jump all winter. I don't really have to jump again until May, now, and there will be plenty of nice days between now and then. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Well the other thing is we never really look at where the degree's from. It just gets you to the interview. Once you get there, El Cheapo U is as good as Harvard, at least for a technical trade. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I personally don't have one, but I did do a lot of college work in the field I was interested in. It probably has held my career a bit, but my career's been so all-over-the-place that it's hard to tell. I've always been more interested in cool technical work than briefcases full of cash. It doesn't hurt that there are briefcases though. I've interviewed candidates for positions in my company and I've found that a degree really isn't an indicator of quality. I look for someone who's enthusiastic, attentive and likely to work well on my team. If they're enthusiastic and attentive, they can learn what he needs to know. If they think the interview's a chore and I'm just an obstacle to a fat paycheck, I assume they'll exhibit similar traits on my team, and I won't recommend them. A degree WILL get your foot in the door with HR, but so will a few years experience. They pretty much stopped asking after I had five or six years in the industry. More to the point, what you really need is to enjoy what you do, take pride in your work and always keep learning about your trade. These are things a university can't teach you. As they say in the Wizard of Oz, "I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma." I'm pretty confident, now, that if I can land an interview for a programming position, they'll give me that job. I know what interviewers look for (or should be looking for,) and I know how to show them that I know my shit and will work well in whatever environment they put me in. This is also something I haven't seen them teach in college. But I think that is something they could teach, if anyone ever thought to. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

So which is worse for your health; not farting or being ejected from the plane by a mob of angry skydivers? I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Heh, it's an old car. That's what old cars do. Having to nurse a dying old crapmobile along on duct tape and WD40 is all part of growing up! My first car needed $2000 in repairs within a couple of months! Of course, the benefit of buying direct from a person versus a dealership is that a person might feel "guilt." Used car dealers have their guilt organs surgically removed when they get their business license. He might have been better off repairing it, if it'd have mostly run for a couple years after that. It's tough to find a decent car for $1900. Pretty much anything you're going to find at that price is going to be on the verge of death and will need a fair bit of repairing "real soon now." As long as the monthly cost of keeping it running is less than a car payment, it's really not a bad strategy. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

They're much worse about just freezing funds in your paypal account, but I have heard of cases where they've put a hold on funds in checking or just taken funds out of checking without notifying the account owner. Google on "paypal sucks" and you'll find all sorts of horror stories. I definitely wouldn't give paypal access to the account I pay my mortgage out of. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

As others have mentioned, there are a lot more protections on a credit card. If they really screw up, you can dispute the transaction through your CC company. If I had to work through a checking account with them, I'd make one specifically for paypal that I don't pay anything out of. If you receive money through paypal, never let it sit there either. Get it out of paypal and out of your paypal checking account ASAP. They can still fuck you over if you're doing big transactions through them, but you want to take precautions so they can't fuck you completely over. As far as I know they're not really regulated in any company. They're nowhere near as trustworthy as a bank. Think about that statement for a moment. That's really saying a lot. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

There's a lot about that story that doesn't add up. Any opening at that altitude should result in cabin pressure being lost and the oxygen masks deploying. The crew isn't going to keep trucking on to wherever. I'm guessing that there was some whistling around the door and the guy freaked out about it. Now in that situation I could see the crew putting blankets around the door to try to get him to settle down. It wouldn't surprise me if he got a chest infection on the plane though, you're wallowing in the filth of several flights worth of passengers, in close quarters, with recirculating air. What exactly do you think is going to happen? I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Dunno, actually, I never use the password management things. They seem like a reasonably good idea, but you're getting in to trusting someone else's security again. It might be worth the risk for strong passwords everywhere, though. XKCD has some valid observations about password strength as well. I'd still want to mix it up a bit if I were following his suggestions, and not all sites will allow spaces in passwords or passwords that long, but a phrase is easy to remember and nearly impossible to brute force with any methods I've heard about recently. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

Usually all roads lead back to your E-mail. Every site you subscribe to (Probably including your bank) handle password resets through it. Plus if you leave mail up there (Which I do but shouldn't) they can go back through it and see if they can find anything good. Ever have anyone E-Mail you some official-ish document with your social security number in it, or anything? So you want to be careful how you access that. Make sure that you move sensitive documents down to your computer and delete them, make sure your password is different from anywhere else, don't access them with unsecured wireless networks -- It's trivial to watch traffic on an unsecured network. Even if the network has a password that everyone knows, its traffic is encrypted and a lot harder to watch. Don't access your mail on machines from machines that the public can use (Library computers or whatever.) You have to trust their security as well as your security, and you don't want to do that. Using different passwords is pretty important. If your E-Mail password as the same as let's say your password to this site, then if this site's security is compromised and someone gets their password file, it could lead to the compromise of your E-Mail password. Again it boils down to trusting their security as well as your security. It's always best to minimize how often you have to do that. You can have great security practices and still get hacked, but the easier you make it, the more likely it is to happen to you. Most of the guys out there are just trolling for easy targets and won't waste time with the more difficult ones. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

I used to use Debian, but the distribution has a kind of "fallen-into-disrepair" feel to it lately. I couldn't even find an ISO image last time I went looking. It's not like it's hard to change Ubuntu's UI. I just installed E17. I don't even use Gnome or KDE with it, stock E17 does everything I need it to. You can also install KDE and choose that as your desktop environment instead. Once you do that, it's just another .deb-using distribution of Linux. I might feel differently if I ever had cause to upgrade the kernel, I suppose. The only deal-breaker I noticed with Unity was its inability to do any sort of focus-follows mouse in the current release. I've been using FFM since the 80's (On Sun workstations) and I'll be damned if I'm going to turn it off now. You can even get it working reasonably well in Windows. I've never liked software that thought it knew better than I did how I should work. That's why I mostly avoid Windows for everything other than gaming. I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?