DrewEckhardt

No - your steering lines have shrunk (they only last 200-300 jumps). You want them long enough that the tail isn't deformed in normal flight and so that you have a full flare available. This is more critical on the Stiletto because the toggle stroke length is short, especially on a Stiletto. No. While more fun it won't get you any more flare out of the canopy. While it takes a little more precision you can even get great landings from half brakes. Definitely.

Rectangular F111 seven cell. These days that means classic accuracy and demo parachutes like the Parafoil. Tapered designs are more likely to spin-up and ZP moves around more when being packed.

+1 Kinda funny how some of the posters can't seem to get their heads around the notion that, instead of having "health insurance," you just pay for health care if you get hurt or sick. It's not that simple. I can choose to self-insure my car for collision and comprehensive coverage and pay less than the insurance company would to get it fixed by some one competent but lacking an ASE certification. Both the insurance and repairs come out of money which has already been taxed. Without health insurance, I'm going to be paying a _lot_ more because I can't get the rates the insurers have negotiated with health care providers and there's no end-run around the AMA. $300 in blood work that I might negotiate to $150 can be $12 at the insurance company's rates. With health insurance, most Americans can pay with pre-tax dollars which can make our money go 100% farther than it would with post-tax money. Without, medical expenses are mostly paid with post-tax money (all earned income is subject to FICA/Medicare, and medical expenses are only deductable to the extent they exceed 7.5% of your AGI when itemizing which only makes sense once you exceed the standard deduction). And there can be no more than a 3:1 price difference based on age, so young healthy people will be paying far more than they did before.

Yes. While HIPAA makes it illegal to keep people out of group plans due to hazardous activities, it still allows cause of injury exclusions. Millions of horse people and motorcyclists have been unable to get that changed.

What kind of skydives are you doing? The one scalp wound I've seen was to a woman who decided to exit after a pilot stalled a King Air and rolled it over.

I have a pro-track which I can't hear except for the flat-line but continue to use because that should be enough and it makes an acceptable log book. When my altimeter broke I jumped, broke-off when the rest of my group did, and pulled when it looked right. The pro-track indicated that I'd dumped within 100 or 200 feet of where I usually pulled.

EIFF claims 22 mph full-flight forward speed for their accuracy canopy loaded at .65 pounds/square feet. Having jumped F111 seven cells around that wing loading in 20 MPH winds without going backwards that seems right. Speed increases with the square root of wing loading. Double wing loading and you get a 40% increase in speed. This ignores what happens following speed inducing maneuvers and that perception isn't linear.

Yes. That can get you a rig within a week (a few days to ship, a day plus for your favorite rigger to inspect everything and repack the reserve).

My wife gave me a 3 liter bottle of Oaked Arrogant Bastard for my birthday one year. Definitely tasty. More complex and flavorful but without going overboard like the double bastard.

Oskar Blues Dales Pale Ale is tasty and comes in cans that pass muster with the beach and pool police. Old Speckled Hen, Murphy's Irish Stout, and Bodingtons are all excelent ales packaged in widget cans although you do need a proper pint glass to enjoy the contents. Unless you're eating sushi (Asahi or Kirin won't poison your pallet) or hanging out in Germany/Mexico there isn't a good reason to drink lager (being stuck on a commercial flight where there's only canned Heineken is a bad but acceptable reason).

Arrogant Bastard (a very tasty and well balanced American strong ale) although I tend to drink mostly lighter beer in the summer; currently a mix of Racer Five IPA (a nice live ale, what Bridgeport aspires to be) and Anderson Valley ESB. Lagunitas and Bridgeport IPAs are backups due to being a little short on flavor. Blind Pig is my favorite IPA although I'm not partial to the $4 a pint price tag (for bottles from the store - the damage is a lot worse at a bar). I only bring beer that I like to drink but include a six pack or two in the mix of something which won't offend the fizzy yellow beer drinkers too much - generally some form of amber or American pale ale. Most skydivers subscribe to the free beer philosophy which is to say free beer is the best beer and don't get too particular about the specifics.

Lived with house mates ($300 for 1/3 of a 3-bedroom unit instead of $600 for a 1-bedroom apartment), drove a 25 year old car that I paid cash for ($0 car payment not $300), rode a bicycle most places instead of driving... Other people have turned to packing parachutes for $60 an hour.

Because while other states have legislatures who write the laws, California's gubernator does that himself as supreme leader? Since moving to California I've learned that it has a legislature just like the other states. The Senate is currently 64% Democratic with 25 Democrats, 14 Republicans, and 1 vacancy. The Assembly is 63% Democratic with 50 of them, 28 Republicans, and 1 vacancy. They've been that way within a seat or two since at least 2000. On top of that you get Republican In Name Only governors who are happy to rubber stamp whatever comes their way out of the legislature. This is all ignoring that the same thing would have happened with the Republicans in control. They'd also have fed at the trough of high tax revenues when the economy was doing well with future spending commitments based on boom times, and suffered as wealthy people's dividends and capital gains disappeared since California depends more on income tax than other states and has the most progressive rates so its revenues are tied most closely to the economy as a whole.

Your canopy is overloaded for classic accuracy - something like a 260 would work better at your weight. For other jumping there's nothing wrong with what you're doing.

I've collected $500 plus shipping costs on projection lenses USPS managed to loose somewhere between here and Europe. Took about two months of waiting and a couple of phone calls.

This is America. We work long and hard but don't drop dead like the Japanese. The only vacation we need is some of our national holidays (10 or 11 days at most companies) for some time with our family and a few three or four day weekends. I haven't been on vacation for more than one or two work days since 2005 when I got married and took a 10 day honeymoon where we missed six days of work. Many companies have nice vacation packages (two weeks a year, often increasing to three with a few years of service), but it's often a bad idea to take advantage of those (people might not steal your monitor, although they may take over your projects) and with the unstable economy cashing out your vacation can go a lot farther than unemployment insurance. You can have fun when you retire. Invest 25% of your pre-tax income in index funds, don't breed so you can keep doing that, and you should be able to keep your current inflation adjusted salary indefinitely when you retire in 20 years. I wish I'd had that wisdom when starting my career 17 years ago. In all seriousness, the job market sucks. While domestic things will resolve we're a long ways off from wage equalization between the first and developing worlds (with 2 billion people in India and China alone). The job market is especially bad for young people - there are too few entry level jobs, and it's a lot more attractive to hire some of the surplus experienced people for the same wages those positions used to command. Or give them to unpaid interns. Or paid interns, where the parents have paid a few thousand dollars to have their children placed at unpaid positions. You don't want to fall back on American unemployment insurance which can be just 1/8th to 1/4th of a professional salary. A job you enjoy in a location you want to live balanced with a few healthy vacations (you can get a pair of 9 day vacations out of the standard two weeks) each year is the most prudent course of action.

If today is an average day in the USA, some 80 - 100 people will die from gunshots today. Satisfied? It's nice that even when suicides are included guns are involved in an insignificant number of deaths. Every day over 750 Americans finish the slow suicide resulting from obesity and over eating. We'd do better regulating Big Macs than Mac 10s.

In and of itself taking a break may not make a difference, but going through a period of unemployment between jobs means you have less leverage in salary negotiations. I think I settled for $10K less than I had been making when I did that. I'd see if any of the offers will accommodate a start date a couple months in the future or a sooner start with unpaid time off if that makes them more comfortable.

I'm partial to mid-sized sport touring bikes. Comfortable riding position, hard luggage you can lock rain gear/shopping/skydiving rig (a Givi 50 liter case) inside, reasonable insurance because they're "mature people's bikes." I bought a Triumph Sprint Executive 900 in 1998. While right-sized with a Union Jack on the fairing and sonorous exhaust note the quality control just wasn't there (first engine rebuild under warranty at 8000 miles). I should have bought a BMW R-bike and would suggest looking at a used one.

Find multiple challenging and/or new things to do. Flat RW, vertical RW, CRW, wingsuit formations, swooping, etc. And do other things. Some days I'd rather stay home and play with my power tools.

Except many people jumping canopies beyond their current abilities are unguided meat missiles in the pattern and landing area who risk running into other skydivers in the air and on the ground. I don't like getting hit by people in over their heads.

A college degree demonstrates competence in the part of one's field that's popular to teach and acceptable to test. Legend had it that my favorite professor failed a third of her sophomore data structures class which was a degree pre-requisite. Most of the grade came from implementing software and having it pass automated tests just like you do in well-run companies post graduation. The vast majority of the graduates I interviewed as a working software engineer who'd made it through the program were competent. Parents weren't too happy with their children's grades and she wasn't allowed to teach data structures. There was a noticeable decline in graduate quality.

Everything. The property needs to be sold or mortgaged to pay the tax.

I would have disagreed suggesting 'demonstrated competence in the subset of one's field which is popular to teach and easy to test' as an alternative until my favorite professor was no longer allowed to teach a core sophomore class (the administration didn't like how many people she failed) and I personally observed the graduates I was interviewing go from generally high quality to generally not competent.

I've worked for only one small company which matched and IIRC it was minor (like fifty cents on the dollar for the first one percent of salary). The majority of big companies I've worked for did match. In most of the matching cases the match was not immediately vested.