DrewEckhardt

It's not as colorful as "Eat pus oozing syphillitic donky dick and die!"

Kitty bellies are very soft, but kitty claws are very sharp.

Ignore it. The friend link doesn't ask for confirmation. Combined with laptop touch pads that move the cursor and click when your hands move around and you're bound to have friends you don't want. I've sent at least two friend requests accidentally that way. And one intentionally, when I wanted to see if a single click would actually send friend invitations. It does.

Jerry Loftis, 1998. The first guy to skysurf in the US and first commercial skysurf board maker. Thousands of jumps. Took some time off to have a baby, wasn't too current on emergency procedures, had a malfunction with a high cutaway, never pulled the reserve handle. Had a Cypres with new batteries that was turned off.

It's too hard. No one in my first 4-way round (starting with no grips and finishing two head-up, two head-down) had under 500 jumps. If you live some place which doesn't have turbine aircraft and jumpable weather year-round and/or wind tunnels it's almost not worth trying. Paying money to hang out and just look at other people in freefall is not fun. It's much better to do 2 and 3 ways that work with people you know than take a chance on bigger jumps. Where bigger jumps are desireable for social reasons, flat and tracking formations are much more likely to work, be fun, and be safe. Any one who can track can fly a wingsuit; and just 200 jumps with instruction are believed sufficient to prepare people for the extra handles that need to be pulled if there's a malfunction.

Yes, positively, every single time. Except when the "wingsuit" is a rigid wing that may have jet engines.

Which is more likely to occur? That's for you to decide. Um... are there stats on the % Nearly zero it's going to kill you. Nearly 100% that it's going to save you if you don't pull because you're having too much fun or get distracted dealing with a high speed malfunction. That happens surprisingly often - I even know an airline captain who'se managed to fire a Cypres. Cypresses fire when you meet their activation criteria. Adrian Nichols managed to do that under an open canopy (exceed a 78 MPH descent rate) when swooping and died. I can't think of anyone else who was killed by a Cypres. OTOH, the Cypres has nearly eliminated low/no-pull fatalities. We haven't had any in the US yet this year, just one last year on a wingsuit which wouldn't have been going fast enough to fire an AAD, and a couple in 2006 with people who had no AADs. The Cypres was introduced in 1991 # of Cypresses vs low/no-pull fatalities 1991 110 14 1992 830 8 1993 3170 7 1994 6490 11 1995 9890 6 1996 14190 6 1997 17990 2 1998 21700 0 [email]

Yes. You have to hate the sin but love the sinner. One of my best friends is actually a Republican.

Jay Moledzki swooped 678 feet at Mile Hi (our thin air is very good for swooping). Luigi Cani has landed a JVX 37 in Perris Valley. Dave Barlia, Loic Albert, and a handful of other guys are flying wingsuits at altitudes below 10 feet down ski slopes in the Alps. Lots of us from all over were extreme enough to get titanium rods, plates, and screws installed.

With decent credit you'd be spending $9-12 a month on interest to own a brand new one which is 1/3 to 1/2 what many DZs would charge you for rig rental on a single jump Long-term, using up the time remaining on the Cypres, inspection cycle, and batteries runs under $12/month whether you have an original Cypres 1 (should be less expensive to purchase but has $85 battery replacements) or Cypres 2. AADs are not that expensive.

In Colorado you can get married any place you want and the parties to the wedding are allowed to officiate so you don't even need an ordained minister. We had a guerrilla wedding where we put all the wedding guests in a stretch limo, drove up to our favorite romantic spot, got married, and then moved the reception to our favorite restaurant. Burner's website says they fly out of Colorado Springs too.

The last time I did that the damn thing spun up. Could have just been the way the last person to use the canopy packed it; or it could have been how the shape of the D-bag interacted with the container. Fortunately I keep a spare rig in my car so I was back in business as soon as I got a ride back to the hanger. You also want the D-bag tight enough to have a staged deployment if you're unstable when you dump which is more likely given a 0-airspeed exit from a hot air baloon. Switch canopies, D-bag, and do a continuity check.

What tax break? Dual income couples with similar pay an average of over $1100 more in taxes than if they were single. The higher tax brackets aren't double a single person's, one partner can't itemize while the other takes the standard deduction, a partner with less income can become ineligible for things like the eduction tax credits, at higher incomes the exemptions and deductions don't phase out at twice the income of a single person, you can only subtract $3000 of capital losses drom ordinary income as a married couple versus $6000 when living in sin....

There are two classes of problems: 1. Image Retention, a lighter left over image. This goes away by itself. 2. Wear. The phosophors permanantly dim with use, with the amount of dimming dependant on how hard you drive them and an initially higher rate of wear. 2.1 Uneven wear. Normal but uneven wear (from watching letter and pillar boxed sources) will even out with white washing as you get past the initial brightness drop out and the percentage of time with non-uniform output drops. 2.2 Burn. Local areas of high contrast can cook off enough phosphor that you'll never catch up with white washing. That "Pause" or ESPN logo is going to stay.

The same way you move forwards or backwards. You rotate about the relevant axis (roll) and thrust moves you. In a belly to earth position, you reach out with the arm and leg opposite of your intended movement direction. Sitting you angle your legs sideways and balance the turning torque with your upper body.

It's more like 60% more. With 100W more energy consujmption and average electricity costs of 10 cents/1000 Watt * hours each hour of operation will cost you a penny more than an LCD. When you're spending thousands on a TV that's not enough to matter.

Rear projection sets are much less expensive, although some DLP implementations cause headaches/eye strain in some people. Obviously the light path requires a lot more space than a flat panel. Digital projection systems either block (LCD) or selectively reflect (LCOS/DLP) light so there's always some leakage and black can't be black. The bulbs wear out too and cost hundreds of dollars to replace. Some plasma sets are extremely susceptible to burn in and asymetric wear. Even after setting the contrast to a reasonable 65 I have "pause" burned into my Samsung 5054 from the few minutes the DVD player has been left in that mode and having watched 25%? 4:3 content the center is dimmer than the edges. Other plasma sets are supposed to suck less. The plasma cells need to be pre-charged which gives them a little bit of light emission and poor black levels. LCD blocks light from the rear with some always leaking through so black levels are poor, although computer controlled back lights can fix this. Unlike phosphor based (CRT/plasma) and DLP displays the LCD is always "on" which results in motion blur unless you buy a more expensive 120Hz set. IOW, they all have problems. You really need to go down to a store (home theater) which displays the sets under reasonable lighting conditions so you can figure out what offends you least. A smaller TV for daylight viewing and bigger screen + projector for serious movie watching may be a better choice. Even a 60" TV isn't big enough to provide an immersive cinematic experience if you're going to sit more than 7 or 8 feet away.

It's fucking jumping out of a plane, society as a whole could care less how many points you can turn, you make no major contributions to society, like a cure for cancer or AIDS. If asked to drop a student @ 3.5 k to help the dz out you reply " I have to concentrate" and then get pissed when someone dose a woohoo on take take off and spend the whole ride taking invisable grips and giving the evil eye to those who are having fun and bitch about the camera men who are in back filming tandems. Got news for you, no one gives a fuck about your special needs other then those DZO's who kiss your ass and stroke your ego. With high end prostitutes selling for only $1500 an hour (Madam Heidi Fleiss's rate for her girls) you damn well better get close to perfection for $2000 an hour which is the price tag attached to free-falling from airplanes assuming $25 jump tickets and 45 seconds of working time. This is especially true now that you can get spend an hour in a wind tunnel with 3 of your friends for less than a tenth that at under $200 each. Some people are reasonably flexible on "close to perfection." I'd like my planned formations to build once for difficult jumps and repeat a few times for simpler ones. Some people are more particular (total formation repeats in the double digits, first digit not a 1) and others less (just want to see each other in freefall and not die). Obviously the situation figures into this. People expect value for their money. I love spending $5 on a plate of Tacos, but for $25 I want filet mignon.Skydiving as cheap as possible with actual costs split on a club plane I'd go as far as packing students to get them on there to pay their share. When paying for a DZO's fleet of aircraft and cars anything which detracts from my jumps is just an unnecessary value decrease.

1. No instructor can guarantee that you won't be a bone-head, plant your feet on landing, and break your ankles. 2. Not all instructors are the same. I'd definitely point friends and family at specific instructors to jump with and completely forget about some others. About 17/10,000 skydives result in injury requiring treatment, 6/10,000 trips to the emergency room, and 1.8/10,000 hospitalization. Tandem fatality rates are very low - less than 1 in 400,000.

Monk fish liver (yes), sea urchin genitalia (yes), jelly fish (no), sweat breads (beef thymus, yes), beef heart (yes), beef and pork tongue (yes), tripe (stomache, I love a good bowl of menudo or pho), steak tartare (definitely; my favorite modern french joint grinds up a fillet mignon), carpacio, iberian acorn ham...

That depends on the plane and jumper demographic. A lot more experienced jumpers will take the fifth seat in a C182 for the short cheap ride to a hop and pop than a $20+ 45 minute ride for a 10,000 foot solo. More experienced jumpers will fill a few hop and pop slots on back to back turbine loads mostly filled with students (like early in the morning - there are places where lots of experienced skydivers sleep until 10) when they wouldn't take a solo ride to altitude and would be on at most every other load. With a turbine hop and pop I have no canopy traffic to deal with and can make a jump every fiteen minutes, get my fill, and go home to do other things. With rides to full altitude there's traffic to deal with and a landing every thirty minutes. The hop and pop is decidedly safer, more fun, and more time efficient.

I've been jumping Reflexes with cordura pouches since 1998. 15+ hours of sitflying. No problems. The pull force is lower than a spandex pouch although F111 pilot chutes stay put fine. It's definitely more durable than spandex. If you wad up a pilot chute it's probably easier to get it stuck than a straight (or tapered) spandex pouch but that's not an issue when you don't use packers and consistently fold your pilot chute in a reasonable way (I like Brian Germain's)

The United States arguably worked a lot better when we governed ourselves closer to more libertarian ideals. We didn't need free speech zones, could own private war ships, were not subject to unreasonable search and seizure, with no federal drug laws didn't have the largest per capita incarceration rate in the world, had no illegal immigration problem, etc.

A chest mounted analog altimeter is a lot nicer for people on the opposite side of a flat formation, it's easier to distinguish "low" from "not low" and get a rough trend when visibility is limited (peripheral vision, lost glasses, etc), and you should be figuring out how to fly an accurate landing pattern based on what you see rather than precise altitudes. They get stuck when they fail though.

At 6k with an in-control plane, do whatever kind of exit you want. You've got about 28 seconds before you reach 2k minimum opening altitude. Play. Depends where the dropzone is and how nice the alternatives are. An extra 3000 feet under canopy may get you over a mile closer to the dropzone or a more pleasant landing area like a soccer field or golf course.