skybytch

Depends on what you consider to be effort, I guess. I'll happily reply to emails all day long instead of carrying the stuff to the car, driving to goodwill and then carrying the stuff in. I might do that for a bag of clothes but I ain't gonna load and carry a heavy TV. And email is basically free. Gas is expensive. I'm cheap.

I'm home doing homework all day today so it's not like I don't have the time. I just think it's funny what people will do/say when they're trying to get something for nuthin'. No way would I put the address in an ad - the last thing I want is more traffic on our street.

In my neighborhood I could probably put them out front with no sign and they'd be gone in no time...

I put an ad on craigslist this morning to give away a tv and a cd player. I got 14 replies in less than 2 hours. Trying to be fair, I gave the address to the first guy who said he could pick up today and told him that I'd move on to the next person in line if he wasn't here by 2 pm. Since I know people often flake on these things, I told the next person in line that I'd let him know at 2 if they were still here since he said he could be here at 3:30. The third person to say they could pick up today emailed again asking what city I'm in - duh, I only mentioned the city twice in the ad. So I replied telling her what city and that two people are ahead of her but I'd get back to her at 3:45 if the items were still here. Just got an email back saying that her husband is in town and could pick them up right now. WTF? I'd be pissed if someone told me they'd hold something and gave it to someone else before I arrived so I again told her I'd let her know at 3:45 if they are still here. The fourth person to say they could pick up today is also drooling, so far I've heard from her three times, the last time almost demanding that I let her know immediately upon realizing that the other three people have flaked. WTF? It's not like I'm giving away high dollar items! It's an 18 year old TV and a CD player that skips when it gets warm fer crissakes! I think next time I want to give something away I'll just put it in front of the house with a "free" sign on it... this is too much like work. ;-)

So? If the OP had said he wants a Sabre2 that is is 40 sq ft smaller and Bill had come back with the Pilot recommendation your point might be valid. But he didn't. He said he's thinking about a Pilot that is 40 sq feet smaller than his Tri. Bill suggested that he jump Pilots of larger sizes first. He also suggested a Silhouette. Your advice is good but your first comment comes off as sour grapes.

Props to CNN for mentioning the tandem instructors name - Sgt 1st Class Mike Elliot Also, the article mentions that the museum renovation was paid for with money "raised privately."

The old $1 per jump thing. If you can buy a new one for $1300 then one with 1000 jumps on it is worth about $300. Whether it's unsafe or not depends a lot on how you define unsafe, where the canopy was jumped and how it was cared for. If it spent most of it's life in a dusty environment or if it spent a lot of time sitting in the sun waiting to be packed, the fabric is more likely to be weakened than if it was kept out of the sun (sunlight is nylon's #1 enemy) and/or jumped in a less dusty environment.

He did two AFF's for sure. After the first one (using a specially built Telesis container and Alti II IIRC), he was awarded an honorary D license. The second one is when he hit his head in the Skyvan on exit.

Add my thanks to all those who are serving or have served. And to their spouses, kids and parents too.

Saw the footage on the news this morning. The Knights made us look good again.

And never forget that nobody cares about you but you. How much would it suck to die in a field wondering when your buddies are gonna find ya...

If you think that flying a 170 at 1.3 is the same as flying a 105 at 1.3, maybe you don't know as much as you think you do. Or in different words, perhaps you don't yet know what you don't know.

He could be an exporter. The guy likely knows nothing about parachutes; he probably fills contracts for clients outside the US regardless of what they are for. The ones I dealt with were usually a PITA to work with... but the money came through. Get a good down payment before you place the orders and require that the balance be paid in full prior to shipping.

They did.

Even better is this website. Wish books were the best part of the weeks leading up to Xmas when I was a kid.

I thought all we were good for was holding tension?

Which just goes to show you that even people we assume know something sometimes don't know as much as we'd like to think they do. Quoting from my previous post in this thread -

I know why people downsize too soon. They want to go faster. There's nothing wrong with wanting to go faster. What's wrong is skipping the part where they learn the muscle memory, sight pictures and judgment that it takes to go faster without hurting themselves and/or others. Do I care? Yeah, I do, for a number of reasons. I'd rather not have to land in the south field because there's an ambulance and a fire truck in the main landing area. I'd rather not have to listen to someone whining about not being able to jump because they screwed up and hurt themselves when they likely would have walked away from the same mistake made under a less aggressive canopy. I'd rather not have to attend the funeral of someone who might be alive had they not skipped the parts mentioned above. And I'd really rather not see one of my friends get hurt or die because some guy decided that he was ready for a canopy type/size without having developed the basic skills necessary to be safe in the air with other people at the higher airspeeds that smaller/more aggressive canopies produce. Do I coach people? Not really. I don't know enough to really coach anybody other than very new jumpers but after watching/videoing several thousand landings (swoop and non-swoop), many with my s/o-canopy coach standing next to me providing commentary, I know enough to know when a landing is good or not. If someone asks, I'll happily show them the video if I got it or tell them what I thought I saw. Most times I know that I don't know enough to offer any advice; that's when I'll suggest they talk to one of the people who do know. I'll also offer to show the video to someone if I think there is something there they can learn from. Whether I show them video of their landings in the future depends a lot on their attitude. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between someone who wants to learn and improve and someone who is sure they already have it all figured out. From what I saw, you stalled the canopy on your first landing, you flared unevenly on the other two and you were reaching with your foot on the last one. These are things that you're better off learning not to do on a larger, more forgiving canopy. Just because you pulled it off (ie stood it up) doesn't make it a good landing. I've got video of plenty of people who stood up landings where they didn't finish the flare - that's not a good landing, thats a lucky they can run fast landing. What makes a good landing is an even flare at the right time and the right speed and to the right point with a solid finish that has the feet meeting the ground with zero downward momentum and the slowest possible forward speed for that canopy/wingloading/wind speed. Whether the jumper stays on their feet or not after that is irrelevant.

Wake up toasty warm in my sleeping bag several miles from civilization, with my favorite person and my dog curled up beside me. Enjoy a hot cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal. Pack everything up and hike to the car. Drive home and relax for awhile. Then we'd grab the slackline and some lunch. Find a couple nice trees, have a picnic and spend an hour or so playing on the line. Then back to relaxing at home with the newspaper, computers and maybe a hockey game on TV until late afternoon, when we'd grab the rigs and head to the dz to catch the sunset load. After a skydive and a red cup or two over good conversation with friends, back home to have wild monkey sex and then go to sleep.

2:2:0 Two very good drunken storytellers kept a few of us entertained Sunday evening; one of them impressed us all by balancing a bottle of Captain Morgan on it's edge (and I have video proof). It's probably wrong that we were all that fucked up by 8 pm and we didn't start drinking til sunset. But damn it was fun, and I'm not even close to hungover this morning. Two very good freefly jumps, about the best sitflying I've ever done - I touched someone!! And I've got video proof of it too.

Question for the US people... About once a week I get someone else's mail (wrong name and/or wrong address) in my mailbox. Some of it is obviously intended for a previous resident of this address but some of it obviously isn't. That which isn't junk mail I put into the outgoing mail slot in the hopes that it will get to the right person eventually. Yesterday I was expecting an envelope to arrive with a check in it. The sender is a large institution who can be trusted to send checks out on time. I watched the mail lady finish with the cluster box that my mailbox is in (there's six cluster boxes in a row). When I went out to check it, she was still throwing mail into the other boxes, all the while chatting away on her cell phone - which I've seen/heard her doing pretty much every day. The envelope I was expecting was not in my box (she did manage to get all the junk mail in there though). Seemed a bit strange to me as every other time I've gotten a check from the institution it has arrived the day after it was supposed to be mailed. I was worried but figured there's always the possibility that this time shit happened to me and the envelope would be there on Monday, so I didn't say anything to her. When we got home from the dz last night one of our neighbors (the cool one, thankfully) knocked on the door. Guess what she had found in her mailbox? Yup. The envelope that I was expecting. I'm lucky that it went into her box and not the other neighbors - if it'd gone there I'd probably have never received it. Now I really wonder how much other mail I'm not getting - never did hear from the school regarding my scholarship application and the notifications for those were supposedly only done by mail. So my current dilemma is - do I say something to the mail lady? Or do I go to the post office on Monday and ask to speak with the postmaster? Or what? I don't want to put anybody out of their job, but I do think that I have some right to expect that something that is mailed to my name at the correct address actually be delivered to my mail box... and I don't think I should have to pay for a PO box or a box at a mailboxes etc or similar place for that to happen. What do you think?

Would you prefer to read articles about skydiving written by non-skydivers? If not, where is non-weak content supposed to come from?

History lesson - Once upon a time there was a forum on dropzone.com that was named "Talkback." At one point, those people who love to, using the term loosely, "argue" about politics, guns and religion (PGR) seemed to be taking over the forum from those who wanted to post about sex, boobies, alcohol, pets, and other non-PGR, non-skydiving related things. One day, after much whining from several of his green minions (who were tired of policing those who can't "argue" about PGR without resorting to personal attacks), His Royal Redness got fed up and shut it down. Oh, the inhumanity! Yes, it was a dark, dark day in dz.com land. The other "topical" forums (and the PM inboxes of HH and the green ones) were flooded with indignant postings from both camps. After a few days and much discussion in the Dungeon (that's where the green ones hang out and talk shit about those who aren't green), HH decided it was time to create separate (but equal!) forums - one for those who prefer their non-skydiving related forum activities to be free from the taint of PGR and personal attacks and one for those who prefer their non-skydiving related forum activities to be free from the taint of sex, alcohol, pets, boobies, links to funny websites, and copy/pasted emails and photoshopped pictures. And thus, Speaker's Corner and The Bonfire arose from the ashes of Talkback to become what they are today.

Yeah, like the fact that overstuffed rigs look like shit and the fact that packing 170 sq ft of slippery snot into a bag designed to hold 150 sq ft of slippery snot isn't much fun (especially for those who don't know who to pack yet), which in and of itself can and has led to people downsizing prior to their skills being ready for it. But it can be fun to watch and listen to some poor newbie struggling far more than is necessary to pack their main...