DrewEckhardt

That sounds kind of odd..... So if someone breaks into your house, and steals / destroys a bunch of crap you can only claim 10% of your policy value? No. If your house burns down or is burglarized you could collect the total $30K or whatever the limit is. If you're at a boogie only $3K of gear with you would be covered. Rigs can cost a lot more than that now.

You're supposed to report _all the income you earned_ whether your pay was in money, goods, or services. Even bartered transactions are covered. If you worked for three chickens and a cow you need to include the value of those barnyard animals on your tax forms. The intuitive thing here is that the total which went into your account is revenue; jumping to improve your career as a skydiver (practicing to get that AFF rating or tandem video slots) is a business expense; and other jumps are profit.

My camera helmet was stolen at Quincy. Rather than accepting the number I paid for the camera the insurance company insisted on talking only with the local electronics retailers. The settlement using local prices minus the deductable covered what I paid - about $1500 (about 15X my annual premium) and change. While my insurance may have gone up it wasn't an interesting number.

I’d not agree with that as a generalization. Canopy size is usually inversely related to experience (lots of jumps = small canopy) I've observed that among recreational skydivers canopy size is more often an inverse function of age; presumably due to strong correlations between age, conservatism, the accepted practices when we started skydiving at similar ages, and girth. At 31 my AFF instructor had Stiletto 107 and 120s, I have no beer gut, and I jump a 105. I know 40-60 year olds with more jumps than me who started when their instructors had steerable rounds or squares that didn't work well beyond 1.0 pounds/square foot, who'd be the same size without their bellies, and are under 150-170 square foot canopies. I also know younger guys whose instructors jumped cross-braced ellipticals, who've yet to develop beeer guts, and are under smaller canopies in spite of fewer jumps. Arround here the recreational flat RW crowd is mostly older and vertical RW crowd mostly younger. So as a rule the freefly groups here have faster canopies than RW. Instructors seem to have more uniform wing loadings that vary little with age when sex is constant.

No. People fall faster because they have less drag. Less drag means they take longer to loose their speed along the plane's direction of flight. With good exit, an average jump run speed, and no winds flat then freefly gains ~600 feet of separation. With an up-wind jump run this exit order results in even more separation because the flat group is in the winds a third longer so they drifter farther. As they approach opening altitude their drift will become the same as people under canopy, although they are in the stronger upper winds for substantially longer. With a five second climbout, deployment along the line of flight, brakes unstowed on deployment, and canopies that can hit 40 MPH in level flight, freeflyers exiting second could just make up the difference. Tracking in a different direction, brakes stowed, and slower canopies all make it impossible to undo that separation even if the freeflyers do nothing. With smart people not flying back to the DZ until the previous group is open you can even avoid problems when some one in a previoous flat group tracks towards you.

Some German sheppards, schnauzers, and poodles I've met have all been more agressive than the pit bulls and rotweilers I've seen.

No. It's probably a scam. I only pay beggars in what they claim to need. If they claim to be hungry and really are they'll take the food; if they're professional beggars they won't. If I believed the story I'd offer to stop by the nearest pharmacy for formula or call a cab and pay for the ride up front.

Lacking the social implications that lead to Mrs. degrees the gay population should consist of more dual-income couples. Such couples would have a marriage penalty not a bonus. So allowing gay marriage should inrease federal tax collections without raising marginal rates or reducing deductions/exemptions. We can have both "no new taxes" AND money to pay for the war effort.

I like to go hand-held for slider down and stowed for slider up. I wonder about the pilot chute influencing heading and therefore like the idea that all of my pilot chute tosses are what's worked well before. Slider up the object is farther away so it matters less.

A smaller parachute is faster and increases the severity/fatality rate of landing errors. More experience makes jumping one less dangerous but does not eliminate the risk. How bad of an idea this is depends on the specific jump, dropzone elevation, the individual's past experience, training, how recently they've jumped, etc. Many people with at least a thousand jumps jump a larger parachute than the accepted standards allow for.

I dowload my protrack contents about every hundred jumps so I can look at trends in fall rates or whatever. By adding log book totals, plus the skytronic total, plus the manifest printout covering the period when my protrack was missing, plus the protrack total, I know how many jumps I have.

I never had a hard opening in 600 jumps. Other people's experience is similar. They don't open as slow as a Spectre but aren't anything like a Monarch or Sabre. They don't spin up any more often than many other ellipticals. They were many people's first elliptical (mine was built arround 1994) and ellipticals will spin if you open both in a turn and with line twists. Failure to fly through the opening or deal with problems early makes this more likely. Trim problems are also an issue. Compared to the squares that were popular when Stilettos started to become common this was a problem. With a modern frame of reference it's not. Newer designs equal or better the Stiletto's performance in all areas. Most notable are longer recovery arcs, lower stall speeds, and perhaps better response to harness input. The Stiletto does have nice control pressures and is pretty peppy - I didn't find anything I liked better until I jumped a Samurai. You won't beat the price of a used Stiletto though.

- Wingsuit BASE - Rear riser swoops - Jump into my wedding (my fiancee thinks I and the potential best man should jump in) 100 weeks and a day after our first date, 10 years and 10 days after my first jump.

I've watched children under 10 drinking in Europe, and German drinking age is 16 for beer and wine without parents present (no minimum with parents, 18 for hard alcohol). It's 16-18 in much of the world. It works fine. When drinking is illegal for children living at home with their parents it becomes a forbidden fruit that they abuse once out on their own. At least four college students in Colorado have died from alcohol poisoning this year.

I've done nearly all of my main pack-jobs myself since I started using my own gear at jump #13. It took a _long_ time at first but I got much faster.

7-10 minutes of my own time for the main.

I've worked for two small companies (one being Drew's Software LLC) that didn't provide health insurance. The rest all had great medical plans - small co-pays for most things, the full cost of glasses without designer frames etc., $250 deductable for the year, any prescription for $20/$10 generic, etc. That's EXPENSIVE. COBRA for medical, vision, dental was about $350 a month. The health services I actually used were a tiny fraction of that so Blue Cross/Blue Shield catastrophic (and prescription!) was less than 1/4 the price even when you factored in the increased costs. Staying in (expensive if you're using COBRA) group planes means they must cover pre-existing conditions, although the rest of us can find less expensive insurance elsewhere when we separate from employers offering those plans.

It may be worth noting hat this is the last year you can claim the blue-book value for a donated car. In the future you'll be credited for the actual sale price if the charity liquidates in 30 days; no clue what happens otherwise.

Arm everyone (including passengers) who can pass a qualification test with handguns and Glaser safety slugs. No terrorist is going to live to storm the cockpit. The pilots are a good place to start. If they're going to go nuts and kill people they'll do a lot better flying the plane into something. If some nut is going to break into the cockpit and take their weapons, he can do the same thing. There's no safety decrease from armed pilots.

Blue Cross/Blue shield for guys under 30 was ~$80 a month with a large deductable (the idea being that a few thousand dollars is an inconvienance, although $50 - $100K could loose your house, retirement savings, etc.) the last time I checked. If you can't afford that you can't afford to stay current when skydiving. With no assets financial protection is less of an argument. There you might want to be able to choose sports doctors where the goal is to have you active, running, jumping, etc. instead of just walking.

We don't do Christmas presents. We buy each other gifts year round when the inspiration strikes us. I happened to be inspired recently. My SO is easily woken by noise and usually sleeps with a radio on. And I like to give useful gifts that the recipient wouldn't buy for themselves. So I got her Etymotic Research noise isolation ear phones.

Most of the recruiters I've talked to were simple keyword matchers. I talked to one on the phone about high-availability software I've written and after some face-to-face interviews discovered he was looking for a _systems engineer_ not a software engineer. While I know about multi-phase commits, quorums, etc. I haven't a clue how to mesh a bunch of Cisco routers together. Some were looking to sell me out at long term rates for short-term contracts with no guarantee of keeping me busy in the future and them making a healthy profit . When doing short term work I'm going to charge enough to handle down time and pay myself a reasonable salary. IOW, no big loss. A call from a company founder on his way to securing Series-A or a contact in the startup/VC community would be something else.

FICA is a regressive (you're only taxed on the first $87,900 of salary that hasn't been diverted to other benefits) 12.4% (you don't see the employer's share if you're not self-employed) income tax. Today it has nothing to do with providing retirement savings. Social security payouts are a budget item like any other social program, defense project, or pork pie. It's a horribly inefficient way to provide for people in their old age. 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. Inflation adjusted bonds return 1.8%. Long term the stock market averages 7%. And no one can leave unused Social Security savings to their children! Depending on your circumstances, you could invest half your money in bonds, half in the stock market, loose the entire stock market investment, and still have higher retirement benefits than you'd have with Social Security! For most people Social security is a horrible waste.

Nudity is a big deal because people confuse it with sexuality and we retain a puritanical streak from the first settlers. We have nudist beaches and resorts. The attitude didn't come about - it's always been here.

Depends on ambient temperature and weight fluctuations. DZ elevation here is 5000 feet MSL. In the summer the weather unit at the end of the runway has reported 10,000 foot density altitudes. Current exit weights/canopy size: Min: 170/105 = 1.61 Max: 175/105 = 1.66 According to the WNE forumula: On a cold day 2.0 - .2 for size - .2 for altitude = 1.6 On a hot day 2.0 - .2 for size - .5 for altitude = 1.3 Same wing loading for the last 800+ jumps not on my wingsuit or BASE rigs (before belly shrinkage my exit weight was 200 pounds on a 120).