DrewEckhardt

I starting packing for myself on my 13th skydive, which was after 7 AFF jumps in which students don't pack for themselves and 5 on rental gear before they let me jump a rig without an AAD. There's no good reason not to pack for yourself once you have your own rig. Saving $5 a jump and being able to get back in the air soon rather than waiting for a packer are great reasons to pack for yourself.

As other people have pointed out, it's a standard thing for renter's and home-owner's insurance. Two caveats to watch out for: 1. Some policies put a limit on "off-premesis coverage" as a percentage of your total contents coverage. IIRC, mine was 10% so I needed to buy $50K worth of coverage to have insurance on $5K of sporting gear outside my home. 2. Standard policies are usually for a depreciated value that may not replace what you lost. You want a replacement value rider. If it helps I live in Florida and rent my place. Thanks in advance. G. P.S. I tried searching the forums before posting this.

Flipping it 180 degrees lets you roll the loos fabric from the tail on the inside so everything stays together. For small enough canopies (a 135 works) and big enough hands you can hold the resulting pack job with one hand (like a foot ball) and slide it in the bag.

If you work in software it is.

When you're getting a $6000 refund you need to fire your accountant. If you'd paid the right amount of taxes and put the money in CDs instead you'd have about $100 in interest to spend on skydiving or an OK dinner for two. Accountants can do wonders for you up front. Telling you how much to pay yourself as an employee and how much to take as profit distributions from your S-corp (not subject to the > 15% tax rate for both halves of FICA and Medicare) is worth something. Telling you that your hourly rate isn't as high as their other clients in the same profession is worth something. Once it gets down to actually filing income tax returns, they are unlikely to do better than your favorite tax program (Turbo Tax, H&R block's Tax Cut, etc). Especially for those of us whose fortunes aren't "ineresting" who get assigned a junior firm member to do our taxes. I spent $450 the last time I let my accountants do my taxes plus over an hour reviewing their work to find out why their numbers disagreed with my back-of-the-envelope estimate (they left off one page out of a unified 1099 which they'd received. Oops!) It would have been less work and money to just dump the numbers into my computer up front.

I just got back from the grocery store getting more plastic cups in which to mix T-88 epoxy so I can join my glued up tops with the bottom part of my current stereo sub-woofer construction project. I am finally progressing from MDF with butt-joints and paint to better sheet goods, sold wood accents, and more interesting joints. Baltic birch plywood, yellow birch heartwood lumber, shiplap joints on the top and bottom panels, lock miters on the feet, edge lap joints with an extra set of shoulders on the braces.

Nope. I worry about being crippled. I worry about providing for my family after I've died. I worry a little about painful slow deaths. Death itself looks OK.

Yell, cuss, go for a brisk walk, eat a nice meal, have a few beers, and snuggle up with my wife and cat.

I like gunsamerica.com.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7938947.stm]clicky It's good that he's starting with the minimum allowable sentence. Hopefully the Iraqi parliament will quickly pass a law granting a pardon.

Slash per-capita spending so the money going out is in-line with other states. Colorado does fine on all counts with a 4.63% flat income tax rate (using federal taxable income, where personal exemptions are $3650 and not the $294 you get in California, and Colorado property is exempt from capital gains) and sales tax just 2.9%. Washington state doesn't have enough highways but otherwise does OK with a top income tax rate of 0% and sales tax rate of 6% apart from the roads getting too crowded. In California, it's 9.55+1.1% SDI on income and 8.25% on sales. Both rates are the highest in the nation. The property tax rate looks OK - just 1% of assessed value plus voter approved bonds but assessed value starts at the last sales price and the obscene cost of real estate in pleasant neighborhoods close to jobs means the amounts are 3-7X other areas. In allegedly expensive Boulder, CO as of 2006 I paid $1500/year on a modest town home I sold for $266K. A similar property in Washington cost me $425K to buy and $2880/year in taxes. Something similarly located near jobs, dining, and good schools could exceed $1M and over $10K/year in taxes.

Not the greatest thing ever, but they are really tasty.

I sure hope my Cypres never suffers from ADD! Especially not below 1,000'! The OP edited his original post from "I have a Cypress" to "What an ADD cypress is"... Not for nuthion' ...but I don't have a AAD, because I do a lotta demos. Given that most Cypres fires come from people suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder that leads them to be too caught up in what they're doing to pull at a safe altitude 'ADD' is a better acronym than 'AAD' just like 'AAD' is more descriptive than 'AOD'.

In a man cave, you don't have a femine sense of aesthetics that precludes a permanantly mounted front projection screen that's bigger than any plasma you can buy (or at least one that costs less than a porsche) let alone fit under your eastern king sized bed. Marriage is about compromise. I sleep in a white canopy bed with 12 pillows and my favorite honey watches the plasma TV a couple feet from its foot with a Blueray player and ethernet connection to Netflix. I'll probably install the stereo subwoofers in a couple weeks, with the only objection being that they're one of my fine wood working projects and "too nice for the bedroom".

It could be worse. The boss could let him assign you work and/or make decisions critical to the company's success or failure.

Uncoated 0-3 CFM fabric looses porosity as you pack and jump it. PD's cross-braced Excalibur was allegedly too porous to land at less than modern wing loadings after 300 jumps. Older designs with rectangular planforms and the aerofoils used at the time don't shut down as well as more modern designs. I touch down with less forward speed under my Samurai 105 at 1.9 pounds/square foot than my Monarch 135 at 1.4, and would not jump a square canopy loaded over 1.5 pounds per square foot at elevation on a hot summer day especially with a tail wind. I think PD's current recomendations are pretty close to the limits you want to observe if you'll ever end up at a higher elevation DZ.

Give them a gift basket with a little 3-in-1 oil for the squeak and a gag for the woman. Or just think about how lucky you are, since they're not coming _through_ the walls. I had a room mate once that got quite physical with his girl friend. When we moved out we had to patch the resulting drywall holes.

While sleeping I kicked through a glass candle holder and the half-inch particle board shelf it was sitting on. Got blood on two walls plus the vaulted ceiling and had to wear sandals for over a week. Another time I woke up screaming while diving off the bed but didn't get injured. My (now) wife was pretty surprised.

Velcro is the superior toggle stowing method. Provided it's well-maintained, it prevents toggle fires. It gives you a place to stick your toggles to free up your hands for other things under canopy. It positively stows the brake toggle line so it doesn't get tangled on anything. Packers are unlikely to cause a toggle lock-up with velcro. Provided that you bother to stick the toggles on immediately after landing it doesn't cause appreciable wear. Spectra steering lines need replacement due to shrinkage long before they become fuzzy.

Easy to answer. The fairest approach is to divide the cost of government by the number of citizens and collect that much from each. That's a poll tax. Impractical and unjust but entirely fair.

B.A.S.E. Impressions a film by Edgar Kraus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKP_Eohol4

Intentionally: BASE jumping with a chartered Jet Ranger providing transportation and lift service for over $100K per freefall hour. Unintentionally: a three second freefall from a bridge followed by a bad landing. About $48 million per hour of freefall, with some of the cost being lost wages and a lot picked up by insurance.

If having medical insurance isn't going to make any difference as to quality of care when it really matters, what is the point of spending money on medical insurance? They only have to provide emergency repair - stop the bleeding, splint your bones. They don't have to perform surgeries or provide physical therapy that will help you regain full function. They also don't have to do it for free. When you have nothing to collect that doesn't matter, although having a job, savings, etc. makes you vulnerable.

Lawrocket, in light of your reply and considering the Bush administrations' "special renditioning "programs, would you support the kidnapping of CIA agents and American government officials? Blues, Cliff American government officials? Kidnap them? Shit. Fucking kill em, while you're at it. Start with Congress. No. Bankers, C-level executives, and congress creatures acting out of self-interest and ignorance have done more damage to our country than Bin Laden and his Merry Men. We should just broaden a few terms like extending "terrorism" to include "economic damage" of the sort we're now suffering and allow extra-judicial rendition to jurisdictions better equipped to investigate and prosecute such crimes without being hindered by our judicial system. If we send them to a place like China which executes financial criminals and they end up dead, they won't cause any more problems while our hands remain clean. In the 21st century that's how the United States works. You people need to get with the program and be more American.

I want to understand the second part of that, do you mean the fundamental balances caused the real problems and they should be preserved? There are fundamental balances that need to be preserved for things to work. Currently we have imbalances which can't continue to exist. Those are the root cause of our current economic problems which aren't going to get (permanantly) better until they're fixed. People can't spend more than they earn without running out of money. When lower cost labor is an option companies can't employ over-priced employees without loosing market share to companies that do allowing them to sell goods at a lower price. Unemployment, the foreclosure crisis, and the slide in stock prices are all just symptoms of the real problems which are going to take some time to catch-up. It's going to take a while for companies to scale back employment to the levels needed to serve sustainable demand and for the housing and stock markets reach where they "should" be based on the fundamentals. The trick is getting there sooner with less pain and overshoot.