sfc

parchutist arrived two days ago, skydiving yesterday. There is a great shot of the 24 headdown record on the skydiving cover.

Does he have any other good stuff?

0:0:0 Working saturday Snowboarding sunday

I must be stupid then, I read them all. At least I'm closer to the end of the newbie now...

http://www.zen15631.zen.co.uk/bb.mpg

I went from a spectre to a stilletto 135 in Jan and have about 60 jumps on it now. Loading about 1.3:1 I had one line twist up until last weekend, just a 1/2 twist. it flew fine. I have been really careful with body position and making sure the leg straps are even. On the first jump of the day, had a really long spot, thanks sebazzz.., and pulled after a short track without paying attention, three line twists, a hint of a turn in the canopy, but ok. Bad body position I think. Two jumps later, getting lazy, dumped without paying attention to the body again, 1 1/2 twists, and I had a spinetto, scared the crap out of me, lots of horizon behind the canopy, spinning on my back, I couldn't even begin to get out of it, almost went for the handles but I remembered someone telling me you can pull on the risers and correct it if you are lucky, so I used my body to pull down hard on one side and it recovered to straight and level and I was clear by 2200. The rest of the day I concentrated on body position and I had mostly on heading openings. From what I exerienced I think it is soooo important to keep the body position goo right up until you have a full canopy, not just while you are pitching. A question for the eliptical experts. Did you change your decision altitude when you went eliptical, what do you do to make sure you don't get distracted while spinning, with back to earth you don't have the visual, I had no idea when I cleared it, I had to watch the video to remember.

kazaa doesn't do MACs. try http://www.zeropaid.com/php/top_prog.php?frm_where=1&frm_where_type=mac It lists mac friendly fileshare programs.

It is very wrong to download software without paying for it. I could never support such criminal behaviour. However, when I want to share my own personal files with the world and download shareware and other free legal stuff I find kazaa pretty cool. It is a completely legal piece of software and strongly warns you about the badness of ripping off software. http://www.kazaa.com/us/index.php There is a really good patch for kazaa which gets rid of the pop-ups and adware, you can get this from http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/02042003b.php

Look at this http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,880445,00.html George W Bush Unsuccessful Texas oilman. His prospecting company, Arbusto, was on the point of going bankrupt when it was bought out by another company, Spectrum, which in turn was bought out by another oil firm, Harken, which kept Bush on the board for his contacts, primarily with his father. Dick Cheney Before becoming vice-president, Cheney, below, was the chief executive of Halliburton, the world's largest oilfield services company. Halliburton does not drill for oil but it sells everything to the corporations that do the drilling. It also provides housing and services for the US military. Condoleezza Rice Before coming to the White House the national security adviser sat on the board of Chevron. They were clearly happy with her strategic advice and Bush family contacts as they named an oil tanker after her. Don Evans Old Bush friend from Texas oil days. Evans stayed in the oil business. Before becoming commerce secretary, he was the chairman of Tom Brown Inc, a $1.2bn oil and gas company based in Denver, and also sat on the board of TMBR/Sharp Drilling, an oil and gas drilling operation. Gale Norton Environmentalists objected to her appointment as interior secretary because of her oil links. As a lawyer she had represented Delta Petroleum. She also ran an organisation called the Coalition of Republican Environmental Advocates, co-funded by BP Amoco.

HP LaserJet 6L. I spent a whole afternoon taking it apart and cleaning it, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

I've got a box of 30 rubber balls that light and flash up when I throw them against the wall or my boss. Looks kinda cool when the lights are out. I have three mini-pumpkins from 2001 that dried up on my monitor. There were 4 but one went mouldy and I had to ditch it. My printer sucks, it keeps on taking two sheets of paper every time I print, I have to feed it one sheet at a time it takes forever to print anything But my favorite toy is my jelly bean machine I got for christmas last year.

and fun with the fence?

And there were 28,663 gun related deaths in the USA according to the CDC. It would be hard for the terrorists to kill that many in a year in the USA. This would probably save a lot more non-terrorist gun deaths than terrorist relate ones.

Right on bodypilot. If the current U.S. objective in Iraq was about oil, why not just take over Kuwait? Or how about just make deals with Iraq and buy it from them? It's about control and economic stability, the US doesn't want to steal the oil, they want to be able to control it and they want a piece of the action. Back in the 70's when OPEC turned off the tap there were huge problems in the western world, gas rationing etc. It damaged the western economies. Sadam is messing with things by selling his oil in Euro's instead of Dollars, creating general instability in the area (which makes oil more expensive). The idea is to stop all that. We have the Saudis and Kuwaitis friendly with us and giving a reliable supply of oil, if we get rid of Saddam we can put in a new "Western friendly" leader who will do the same. Plus we will break all those oil contracts that would have gone to french oil companies and give them to US and UK ones. Once this is over the US will have troops stationed in the two largest oil producing contries in the world, with friendly governments in those countries supporting them. That will guarentee a reliable cheap supply of oil to the US for many years to come, they will have effectively broken the OPEN cartel and countries like Venezuala won't be a factor, so if they go on strike again the gas prices will not jump. Take over Kuwait, well we already have, do you think the Kuwait leaders will screw with us after we a) liberated them from Saddam abd b) have hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in their country. The same applies to Saudi Arabia.

Is a used one ok?

I am having a treadmill fitted in my car so my girlfriend can help our with the gas millage when we go to the DZ. Maybe if we fitted a methane recovery system to the seats in the jump plane we could run the turbines off skydiver gas.

i scare the crap out of myself everytime I jump at a new DZ. At home we always get 15K regular as clockwork, and I usually look at my alti at 5K just before my audible goes off. Go to new DZ where we get out at 12.5K, the audible almost always beats me on the first 2-3 jumps, when I get back home, I have a few jumps breaking off high, now this isn't scary. I think you get more used to freefall time rather than altitude, especially in vertical, where the ground isn't so in your face.

happened to me on my first tandem, the JM pointed it out, it was an awesome visual.

I'd go with the 190, I got a 150 spectre at the same wing loading as you on a 190 when I had 50 jumps and put 650 jumps on it. It seemed very fast at first after having jumped 210s especially in low winds but 100 jumps took care of that. It rocks and I still love it, and I'll be sorry to see it go when I sell it in two weeks.

I live on the west coast and I think that

We have 4 skydivers in the office, several others have done tandems. Only time my boss looked worried was when I described my cutaway in detail. He still thinks I'm nuts, but in a nice way. The company did a little piece in the company newsletter about a couple of us, with pictures. I did try to see if they would like to sponsor us with some gear, but it didn't get very far.

It would be like someone stealing your rig.

Thankyou, some of the other posts are a little naive when they suggest that the US is the only country in the world doing anything and that everyone should be eternally grateful for it. Can't wait for the movies about this war, "The USA saves the world", or "The USA beats Saddam". Don't tell me, some of you believed hollywood version of the U-571 where all contributions of the non-american allies was removed. A Brit.

Snow? None of that over here, 6 jumps today, but it was a bit chilly at altitude.

f#*%ing san jose, I hate to think what it is like in san francisco, they are usually 10-20 cents higher than us.