DrewEckhardt

1. Unless you've gotten to the point where you'll be keeping your rig for a _long_ time (I put 600 jumps on my last main and have about 900 jumps on my main rig) you might want something easy to sell. That means neutral inoffensive colors. Dark grey, black, etc. on the container. No pink canopies. 2. You will sweat like a hog when packing on hot summer days. A dark center cell (I have a royal & white canopy, with a black center cell) won't show dirt as much. 3. Dark jumpsuits are friggen hot in the summer sun. I've always gotten black & white checkerboards with black ass+knees (you will fall and sit on grease/dirt); added royal blue racing stripes after I wore the first one out. Next suit I might just get white with the black patches and royal racing stripes. It's your gear. Buy something that suits YOU.

Yep. I usually wear a jacket in the summer. I usually find the thermostat settings to be backwards from what I want. In the summer when I arrive wearing shorts, short sleeves, and Tevas they freeze me. In the winter when I'm wearing fleece, long pants, long sleeves, and hiking boots they broil us. A couple weeks ago when it got hot, they finally opted for a warmer setting. We had insufficient cooling capacity, so the facilities guys diverted airconditioning from the offices to the machine rooms. At least the computers didn't have to sweat...

I'd back up to before my last job change. Accept my old company's counter-offer, skip selling my old town house, and skip the relocation.

The last time I flew with a rig I had my cat with me and decided that I'd much rather put the sporting equipment in the cargo hold. Paid about $20 for $5000 in added value insurance (Alaska (sp?)'s per-person maximum). Pretty insignificant compared to the plane ticket, rental car, etc. that goes with the typical skydiving vacation. My home owner's policy also covers equipment stolen outside the home (used that coverage when some schmuck stole my camera helmet at Quincy) and I don't recall that excluding checked lugage. The caveat there is that some policies limit off-site coverage to some fraction of your total ($50K of stuff at home means $5K elsewhere). That also has a replacement value rider that pays for the actual cost up to 4X cash value at the time of loss. That said when given a choice I carry a rig on with me. While some one else will cover the financial loss, they're not going to provide custom replacement gear for an event I've taken off work for and flown to another state or country.

Yep! Remembering and thinking about that is almost enough to get me laughing

I've seen a reserve split into 2 and 5 cell pieces held together by the single reinforcing tape at the tail following a Cypres fire on a jump where an AFF instructor got knocked out by the student's D-bag. Yes.

No. Going through the downsizing checklist only means that you can do those things when you're thinking about them under ideal conditions. It doesn't mean you'll instinctively do them when things go wrong. 50 jumps are definately not enough to adjust your muscle memory and perceptions; or to yield a high probability of something going wrong after which you get to test yourself with less risk than you'd have under a smaller canopy. It's not unreasonable. It is somewhat arbitrary. Everybody's different and the effects of each canopy change are different. When I switched from a 134 elliptical (Batwing) to a more radical 120 (Stiletto) after 200 jumps, totaling about 600 jumps the thing wouldn't always swoop in a straight line. It hurt to walk for a few months following a hard landing where I lacked the experience to recognize how low I was and correct it without popping back up high and stalling. Going from a 155 to 135 square with a lot less jumps under the 155 hadn't caused any obvious problems. You're the only one with all the information, but don't yet have the experience to evaluate it. 600 jumps before getting to my Stiletto wasn't enough to have me making fully informed descisions. Another 600 jumps under that Stiletto (after which I still had a lot to learn) showed me that I didn't know a lot before that, and provides enough of a yard stick to show me that 300 jumps under a 105 arround the same wing loading (1.6 - 1.8) hasn't been enough to get that dialed in. People have a limited number of datapoints. Lots of us mostly got away with things that weren't good ideas - I only bruised my heels. Deciding to down size sooner because some of us were lucky isn't prudent. If you were to downsize as fast as allowed by Brian Germain's WNE chart you'd be spending up to 200 jumps at a size. I'd also suggest a year-per-canopy minimum so you get a wide range of conditions (winds, density altitude, currency in places with seasons).

Because it's a lot of fun to fly in freefall, it's fun to fly and land smaller parachutes, and the scenery is great. It's one of the few things that calls for enough attention to be a viable distraction from the rest of life.

For your savings to return 80% of your current pay indefinately (long term disability) you'll need 20X your annual salary. That's not realistic for those of us who aren't old enough to have been paying into our retirement accounts for a few decades or fortunate enough to have bought into a hot housing market long before things got out of hand. The best plan is to have an employer who provides long-term disability insurance as a benefit with you paying taxes on the premiums - I pay $12/month to get 60% of my salary tax free if I'm disabled. That's better than what I take home now after I contribute to my 401k and the governments get their share. The next best would be to have an employer that passes on the group plan cost to you - like $40/month which you pay for with post-tax dollars.

You should know how high or low you are throughout your approach. Once you've started to turn If you're high, maintain the dive but reduce the turn rate with opposite front riser so that you loose more altitude getting to your final heading. If you're a little low, add harness input to increase the turn rate without changing your descent rate. If you're lower, swap front riser input for harness so you maintain turn rate and start leveling out. If you're really low, use both toggles to stop your descent and then finish dealing with heading.

You beat me to that one_________________________________ They're exceptions that become insignificant when you divide your risk among thousands of companies. You get a 3% inflation adjusted rate of return for bonds (might loose 10% in long-term bonds in a bear market), 4% on large company stocks (40-50% loss potential), and 6% on small company stocks (50-60%). Even after incurring the biggest historical losses you're a lot better off than Social security at .5% for the typical worker.

Social Security is a bunch of government programs including disability insurance, life insurance, and a safety net for old people with insufficient funds to retire. With the government and the necessary tax burden at their current size, these programs need to exist but should be treated like other government functions, with a line entry on the budget and funding from general revenues. Currently Social Security is also a mandatory retirement savings plan with attrocious returns. An average earning male born after 1966 will get a .5% inflation adjusted rate of return on Social Security. Low-income black males with a shorter life expectancy are likely to have negative return rates. Assuming the retirement age isn't increased, FICA taxes don't go up, and social security benefits increase with inflation (all of which Congress can change with a pen stroke) I'll need to outlast my statistically expected lifespan by five years to get a 0% inflation adjusted return on my investments. If I took my current investment out, made the same contributions in the future, and got a 3% inflation adjusted rate of return from investing in low-risk high-quality bonds I could get $134K a year for the same 15 years: over 4X my social security benefit $72K a year until I die at 100: over 2X my social security benefit $44K a year forever: nearly 30% more than my social security benefit with $1.5M in today's money going to my heirs As it stands the numbers are $32K a year with a big fat zero going to my heirs. Which would you rather have? Privatizing the social security retirement plan is the only reasonable idea to come out of this administration although I wouldn't trust them to implement it.

Opiate = hydrocodone, oxycodone, codine, tramadol, morphine, etc. APAP = acetaminophen Vicodin and Lortab are hydrocodone + APAP. Percocet is oxycodone + APAP etc.

You can take up to 800mg of ibuprofen 4X daily (may cause stomache problems) plus 1000mg of acetaminophen 4X daily (may cause liver problems especially if you also drink alcohol). If that combination isn't enough, you can smoke a little marijuanna and replace the acetaminophen with a opiate+APAP combination (they include the acetaminophen so recreational use is limited by liver damage) Pain sucks.

Good flick; got me started on a Bogart binge. Not the least of Bogart's work (_Dark Passage_ was a little weak but still good) but not the best. So far we've also watched _Key Largo_, _The Big Sleep_, _The Maltese Falcon_, and _The African Queen. The first Bogart+Bacall matchup (_To Have and to Have Not_) is near the top of my Netflix queue, and there's another Bogart film or two in there.

Whatever YOU drink. I've brought Bridgeport IPA, Boulder Hazed and Infused, Sammy Smith's, etc. I left a half barrel keg of Arrogant Bastard behind for my first out-of-state move with instructions for our skydiving restaurant + bar owner to serve it to my fellow skydivers. Then there's what THEY drink. I don't think Corona is beer. If you are in mexico, even Tecate cans are tastier. Not being much of a beer connoisseur, I don't want to run the risk of an UNPLEASANT suprise. I need some recomendations. Money is mostly no object.

Because we're bored out of our skulls and repeating ourselves beats re-reading our horrorscopes and today's news....

The part between waking up and going to sleep. I left a job where I worked with 10 of my friends from a previous company, I could work on what I wanted provided I had business justification to upper management, where the DZ was 10 minutes from work and 15 from home, with inummerable fine dining establishments near by, where we had liquor stores with beer departments the size of entire 7-11s, where I'd be done with my mortgage in 13 years, and where I believed an equity event with a six figure pay-off was imminent. I joined a job based on promises to be working on larger projects that I'm not, with people that are leaving, with job duties that would have bored me a decade ago, where my friends aren't, where the DZs for experienced skydivers are 1-1.5 hours distant (my herniated disc hurts after being in the car that long), where I've found three decent restraunts, where the state has a liquor store monopoly and grocery store beer choices are limited, where my hobbies are in boxes with 10,000 pounds of crap in my garage, where I'll be paying off another $165,000 on our home over the next 30 years, and where the cost of living is otherwise 15% higher. I'm completely pissed apart from being happy to no longer own a townhome that shares a wall with a rock drummer and being able to get great seafood. Voluntary separation would mean eating relocation costs, real-estate commissions, etc. and I'm not going to let these assholes screw me that way financially.

You could put a healthy number of jumps on your canopy to open up the stitching holes and make it easier to get the air out. That part of the packing process on my Stiletto with 1200 jumps doesn't take much longer than with an F111 canopy.

Turbines often land at about the same time as the jumpers so there's no way you're going to pack fast enough to make back-to-back loads - the best you'll do is every other load. With each load taking about 15 minutes a seven minute pack job leaves plenty of time to walk back to the hanger, pee, pack, replace broken rubber bands, gear up for the next load, and dirt dive. It's fast enough.

Your canopy goes about 2% faster per 1000 feet of density altitude which corresponds to a 4% size decrease. DZ elevation is usually at least 5000 feet MSL and in the summer it's a lot warmer than the standard temperature for the altitude. We've measured 9,000 and 10,000 foot density altitudes at the Vance Brand airport. That gets exciting.

My one irrational material desire is a 1996-1998 Porsche 911 Turbo (type 993, last of the aircooled Porsches).

The SIM states that you should meet all of the requirements for a B or higher license, which means 50 jumps plus live water training. In 1997 when I had less than 130 jumps (first log-book).

.08% would be more like four beers in an hour for a 170 pound guy. Less than three for a 120 pound woman. The other thing to note is that many states have a lower limit for a lesser charge (.05% gets you Driving While Ability Impaired in Colorado) and a couple pints can be enough to push you over that. Six shots in an hour.

While you could jump by yourself the same way you might play solitaire or do things not spoken of in polite company, most people enjoy skydiving as a social sport where they interact with other people in the time between leaving the plane and landing. That means some sort of formation. The formation can have grips or not (tracking, flocking, and follow-the-leader dives). Freefalling formations can have people in vertical (freefly) and (hybrid)/or horizontal (traditional relative work) body positions. They can be going straight down or moving across the sky (tracking/flocking). You can build formations in wingsuits or under canopy (CRW). A lot of people also like flying small fast parachutes close to the ground. And a few people like lots of spinning or falling in aesthetically pleasing positions (sky surfing and freestyle). All of those provide an up-close frame of reference - mountains with trees, ski slopes, roads, etc. With skydiving anything you didn't bring with you is a mile or two away and just hanging out in the breeze isn't that exciting.