DrewEckhardt

Yes. A replacement 15.6" 1366x768 screen can be a $60 - $100 part. You might be able to get a low mileage used one for less from some one who replaced it with a higher resolution part.

Forget about grilling because that requires charcoal to achieve good flavor. While I can waver on the benefits of lump charcoal versus briquettes, gas is NOT an acceptable substitute. Get into smoking with an electric smoker using auto-feeding wood flavor pellets and computer controlled temperature. The best BBQ (pork shoulder) I've ever eaten came out of one of these http://www.bradleysmoker.com/bradley-original-smoker.asp with this computer controller to get a better handle on temperature http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=14&products_id=151&zenid=2443dbb149c4d9041377326461a1e34c Having bought/rented a new home (government mortgage and real-estate market manipulation on behalf of PACs made buying a single family home a dumb idea, renting produced the neighbor from hell and would run $2500-3000 a month for something habitable/well located/without shared walls, but the arithmetic worked for buying a double wide trailer on a rented piece of land) with space for such a thing I'll order that combination this week. You might be able to combine an electric grill with a separate smoker box but I've yet to sample the food resulting from such a setup.

Sure but that will take a harness made to measure which is about a $400 retrofit to an existing container. This will be interesting next summer. Who's the smallest skydiver you've ever known? One of my friends had a 90 pound skydiving girlfriend under five feet high, and I saw one of the Mullins boys (Jeff?) jumping when he was just 12 years old.

The University of Colorado at Boulder. There's a Cessna DZ for hop-and-pops 5 miles from campus and turbine DZ 16 miles away. Fort Morgan is probably under an hour too. There are plenty of winter days over 40 degrees (my limit for choosing to skydive) and there were never any months I didn't jump over the decade I lived in Boulder. Eldora ski area (the trees are great after a dump) is 20 miles away although lift capacity is limited and it gets skied off so on weekends you'd want to drive an hour and a half + up to the continental divide where Loveland isn't too touristy and is right off I70. Copper Mountain, Winter Park, and Arapaho Basin aren't much farther. Unlike many public schools built on cheap land in the middle of nowhere there are other things to do around there (one of my friends brothers got a speeding ticket doing 140 MPH to get away from the University of Missouri at Rolla, when I visited the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana they told me their students went to nearby St Louis (80 miles) for the weekend, etc.)

You've forgotten about Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman murders followed by a low speed chase involving a white Ford Bronco, a long trial producing quotable lines such as "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" acquittal in criminal court, and finding of liability for wrongful death in civil court.

This year we were introduced to The Mountain Winery which has an outdoor amphitheater. It's a small venue so you can actually see the artists and noise regulations mean that the concerts are over by 10:30 so you can be home for your regular bed time. They also have fine dining with a prix fixe menu. We saw Stevie Nicks The B-52s with opening acts Human League and Men Without Hats (Obviously Safety Dance was performed live but sadly there was no dancing crazy chick or small person) Creedence Clearwater Revisited (the original CCR minus the Fogerty brothers) with Three Dog Night.

Absolutely. After moving to the Bay Area I noticed that using your turn signal as in the rest of the country to signal intent to change lanes was dangerous because it causes people behind you to close the gap you were headed to and it's not just the old hippies. Executives in AMG Mercedes, soccer moms in minivans or SUVs, young guys in sports cars, nearly everyone does it except for Hispanics where the only rational explanation is that they're uninsured or here illegally and need to be on their best behavior. Whilst on jury duty lunch break I was talking to another juror about driving in California, and he said that he taught his sons to not signal until they were already changing lanes because that's safest. I hate people who merge into the bike lane far enough before their right turn that they'll be waiting there for a light cycle or two.

It's more selfish to bring children into a world where they'll be squished between limited job availability + dropping wages (seemingly competent labor in less expensive emerging markets and increased productivity do that) and increasing costs of living at the other (government intervention in the housing, education, and health care markets on behalf of corporatist interests does that). Even if you're financially well-off enough to provide a middle class lifestyle for your children indefinitely, their reduced opportunities for self-actualization and progress beyond the odyssey years can't be good psychologically.

The whole world doesn't work that way. I work mostly for companies which have an 80%-90% chance of failing. The last crash cost the investors about $20M and one I suspect to be circling the drain will probably end around a $35M loss. Between was a $360M exit on $160M of venture capital + debt. The sad thing is that the probable drain circling company abandoned a product nearly identical to what a competitor built into a business with a $3.1B market cap on $111M of venture money and $234M raised in their IPO (IIRC their cap reached $1.8B at that point). My resume head line including "to learn new things and make different mistakes than before" never precluded a job offer anywhere I wanted to work. Entrepeneurs who crater get funded more often and with better terms than first timers. Most important is that I get a lot of opportunity to do whatever I want provided it's good for the business and we don't have room for the unproductive people and their fiefdoms that make life less pleasant.

Built to match the length difference specified in the trim sheet. Longer than they were but not as long as unshrunken lines would be.

It's the sunset load, cute chicks flash the pilot for extra altitude, some one in your group gets hypoxic and catches their foot on the seatbelt so you take forever to climb out, you have a long spot so you're landing off, and the low light means you don't see power lines until you're almost on top of them so you make a low turn to avoid them for a down-wind landing on an asphalt road. If you down-sized too fast before that you're more likely to - Loose more altitude turning than expected and fly yourself into the ground (this can be avoided with the proper control input, but that takes practice and when you get it wrong a smaller canopy will loose more altitude) - Over-control the canopy so it dives steeper than you'd like either flying you into the ground or leaving you with more speed than expected. (The first two have led to fatalities) - Over-control the canopy after plane-out so you hit an obstacle beside the road. - Suffer from situation overload, freeze-up, and fly yourself into the ground. (Every time I've seen this it's only been broken bones) - Not get away with an incomplete flare that worked well enough landing into the wind and with larger sizes. (This tends to be more a face plant, road rash, and torn container/jump suit situation, but one guy killed himself falling forwards onto his chest-mount altimeter) Landing into the wind in a smooth grassy wide-open field is ridiculously easy and not the situation you want to be choosing your canopy size based on. Some day you will be landing down-wind, on hard ground, after a low turn, and with a turn after you've started flaring perhaps all together. You want to pick a canopy which lets you handle that and practice all the skills before you need to use them after bad luck/judgement get you into such a situation. Some people say you should listen to your instructors and down size if they say it's OK. That's the wrong attitude to take since either they haven't seen how you've been performing with off-field down wind landings and not seen enough to give that advice or you've been doing it enough that they noticed and thereby shown bad judgement which suggests you don't downsize. Sticking to Brian's formula (about 1.0 + .1/100 jumps, with less wing loading in some situations) and being more conservative if they tell you to is the right thing.

I dont think there is any way to get through to the future Sangis of this sport. Its still too abstract on video, especially if the video is of some one that you do not know or care about. Most skydivers think we're special snowflakes all unique with our own strengths. This leads to the canonical new skydiver advice to "listen to your instructors" "who've seen you fly" when it comes to down-sizing, the implication being that those instructors can some how recognize skydivers' specialness and approve of more aggressive downsizing protocols which is complete crap. People should be sizing their canopies based on the worst possible situation: It's the sunset load, cute chicks flash the pilot for extra altitude, some one in your group gets hypoxic and catches their foot on the seatbelt so you take forever to climb out, you have a long spot so you're landing off, and the low light means you don't see power lines until you've almost on top of them so you make a low turn to avoid them for a down-wind landing on an asphalt road. not the sunny-day scenario of into the wind in a sunny wide-open field that's neither hard nor taxing and gives skydivers an incomplete picture of their abilities. Instructors and a skydiver could only observe that they're ready for a premature down-size if they're getting into such situations on a regular basis and handling them successfully. Either that hasn't happened and there's no basis for the special snow flake recommendation, or the skydiver in question is short bus special in the judgement department and shouldn't be downsizing faster. Other sides to this are operating at a sufficiently low mental arousal level, developing muscle memory, and learning situational awareness. People perform best in situations that are stimulating enough that they're not falling asleep, but not unfolding so fast that they're overwhelmed where things like freezing become common. Premature down-sizing makes it easy to over-stimulate yourself and do incorrect things like hanging onto a front riser or two until impact. You need enough jumps in slower situations with bigger canopies to get used to it so that's less likely to happen. Although you can almost yank controls as far as you'd care to with impunity under larger parachutes, canopies get more sensitive to control inputs as they get smaller, whether intended or not. People with too few jumps on intermediate sizes instinctively make the big movements which worked on large canopies but turn little ones into the ground at unsurvivable speeds. Situational awareness means you've been doing things long enough to notice that things aren't right hundreds or thousands of feet before you're in a dangerous situation. People need to ease into things, with a hundred or few jumps on the next larger size and easing into larger turns making it easier to notice what's wrong so they're less likely to hang on controls until it's too late. Following Brian Germain's 1.0 + .1/100 jump wing loading formula (with more complications) seems to work well on those counts and combined with practicing the skills enumerated by Brian and Bill von Novak radically reduces your chances of ending up in the incident reports. Instead of telling skydivers to follow their instructors' advice which probably won't be based on enough information and allows people to ask around until they get an answer they like we should be telling them to follow Brian's writings unless complicating factors (bad depth perception, poor accuracy, not flaring far enough to avoid running, etc) noted by them or some one else suggest they be even more conservative.

By the time my Stiletto 120 got to 500 jumps some of the outer lines had shrunk 6" versus 1.5" on the center cell lines. Even with new brake lines the openings were squirlier than with a fresh set.

Yes.

Both. Princess Buttercup has true love with Westley who is most womens' fantasy - a guy who'll rescue them from the world, is independently wealthy, and will cater to them "as you wish." Then you have the sword fights "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.", professional wrestlers, pirates, politics "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never to get involved in a land war in Asia", monsters in the form of rodents of unusual size, and the makings of a guy movie apart from gratuitous sex and nudity that a PG rating doesn't allow. Trade. Offer to watch a classic guy movie (Bullit and Vanishing Point come to mind as the greatest car chase movies ever) in exchange.

It may be better to serve the 300,000,000 people already here with lower labor costs. America became the dominant nation in my great grand parents' time when everyone was welcome except the Chinese (due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882). Most pay taxes. They just can't cash in on things like Social Security benefits and are more likely to be among the 53% when they have taxes withheld but don't file to claim credits like EITC. As of 2005 the Pew Hispanic Center used census data to estimate 11.1 million illegal immigrants with 850,0000 arriving annually suggesting 10.3 million in 2004. In 2004 the IRS received 9 million W2 forms with mismatched names and social security numbers with taxes withheld on 75% of them or about 6.8 million. The same year the IRS received 2.5 million individual tax forms filed with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers instead of SSNs with many ITIN holders believed to be illegal immigrants.

Never more than the time it would take to drive to the next nearest dropzone without a long wait. At two hours that gives you more than 100 miles to work with. Where that's not an option and wait times are averaging two hours it may be time to stop being a local jumper and start spending long weekends at the nearest (California, Florida, Airizona) destination DZ once a month.

My current mortgage is with a credit union that wouldn't talk to me unless I was making a 20% down payment with an 80% LTV. They also required employment verification on company letter head for the preceding two years, two years of W2 and 1040 forms, a letter from our landlord confirming what our rent was and that we'd paid it on time for the last year, and my most recent pay stub before closing. Doesn't seem reduced to me.

I think we should hold financial institutions to higher standards than bookies, but that's just me. Me too, but the issue is that they had to cover the bets made because of policy, not because they wanted to. Nope. Under CRA banks are required to "help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions." Lenders were allowed to meet those requirements with arguably reasonable + sustainable loan programs like the Fannie Mae Community Home Buyer's program requiring a 38% debt to income ratio, 5% down payment, 95% loan to value, fixed interest rate, fully amortized loan over 15 to 30 years, and no more than one late payment in the preceding two years. The were no longer permitted to "redline" neighborhoods which were primarily lower class where they previously refuse to write loans which otherwise met the underwriting criteria.

Hardly. CRA mortgage pool returns have been higher than on similar conventional pools. The mess resulted because the banking and real-estate industries could profit more from unsustainable loans (they got paid when properties sold and loans originated + serviced with government sponsored enterprises and private investors assuming the risks) than with traditional products + underwriting standards, enough people in the housing market could be talked into buying property with unsustainable price tags, and enough investors could be talked into picking up what the GSEs wouldn't. This was aided and abetted by the government acting (through things like conforming loan limit increases of over 75%) on behalf of powerful lobbies (the National Association of Realtors and National Association of Home Builders were the first and fourth highest spending PACs in the 2006 elections).

Machina Dynamica's Teleportation Tweak is at least as effective, far cooler ("The fundamental principles of operation of The Teleportation Tweak are quantum teleportation and mind-matter interaction"), and a better value for your money at just $60. http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina60.htm

Even a short line set like on a Stiletto is about 10' long and 2" out of 120" isn't even 2%.

Would not work too well with each skydiver managing 1/3 - 1/2 horsepower totaling less than 5 HP a side versus 550 in a -20 engined otter.

Sure, although with a canopy budget over $500 there are choices which open softer, are more fun to fly, and stall at a slower speed.

I don't think it's time to start having fun until the orthopedic doctor tells you that running and contact sports like rugby, hockey, and American football are OK. While your doctor probably has no clue about the potential collisions involved in skydiving/vertical wind tunnel use he's almost definitely treated high school and college athletes who participate in more mundane sports.