champu

There's a number of people who are predominantly belly fliers that I've taken out on coached jumps to teach them some freefly basics. The first jump is always funny (and challenging to stay with and get good video of which is why I love it) but after a few they usually make some good progress. Invariably they get back to belly flying and often months will go by before we get a chance to jump together and work on their freeflying again. When we do eventually get back to it I will say this, the second shot at it always goes MUCH more smoothly than the first. Maybe they just forget that it's "supposed to be difficult."

Don't forget the obligatory "Drop something in a small bowl of water" footage...

I rarely drive these days, pretty much only to get to the dropzone. I'm within walking distance (

I've had very poor luck taking sunset load shots with the sigma 15mm using auto-focus. In low-light / auto-focus my sigma 15 tends to do the "course tune" routine where it goes rail to rail to find the correct focus point, taking almost two seconds to settle out. My Canon USM lenses do a much better job in these conditions. Unfortunately I've had no opportunities to jump my 580EX with the sigma lens, so I can't report back there.

I don't want to get silly. Unless you mean those one point dives you do. Star, flash, Star, flash, Star, flash (repeat as necessary) (of course the omission penalties really kill your score) Also known as "mmmmm...."

I roll on the other side (see attachment) but regardless that's going to be a fun piece of glass to play with. Enjoy!

So I can learn more about religion by giving as much weight to people who insult, antagonize, and ridicule someone's religion while he makes a very honest attempt (IMO) to explain it? If people disagreed respectfully and rationally, it'd be different. I interjected because I thought many of the responses were far from that. Backing up a bit, my response was to your question about why I might continue to discuss religion with someone who disagreed with me, even though they weren't "forcing me to read their posts." I said my interest was more in the reasons for believing, and less about the beliefs themselves. And if I'm ever antagonistic, it's towards flawed logical constructs used to promote beliefs, again, not towards the beliefs themselves. As for my, "who's learning anything" comment, I've made dozens of posts in religious threads that have presented sociological theories that took me a while to come to and that I considered thought provoking. Often they end in a question that either gets ignored or responded to with a quote from a Bible that does nothing but take the discussion back into a circle. I guess people just want me to go away.

I generally join discussions in speakers corner to provoke the use of more sound arguments, sometimes from people I agree with, sometimes from people I disagree with. Occasionally this necessitates being blunt. Religion is a topic of particular interest to me, because the more I discuss it, and the more people I discuss it with, the better understanding I develop of why people tend to believe the things they do. Sharpening and refining my explanation of why religious indoctrination works as well as it does is a hobby of mine, much as finding a particular verse from whatever scripture is applicable to respond to a given question asked of your religion passes the time for others. To each their own, I suppose, and I'll leave it to the outside reader to decide which of us is actually learning anything.

Never argue with a fool; people might not know the difference.

I'd be careful employing arguments like this, particularly around here. It may help put to rest attacks on what you believe, but the statement stands at odds with the ground rules you lay down before you study so much as word one of the Bible. Do you find it easy or difficult to relate to skeptics?

Once I lower myself and I have my knees bent I'm quite comfortable there and could hang out for a while if I had to. I actually open up my shoulders and have my back more towards the front of the plane, that makes my move as I leave less complicated and I feel more balanced that way. Opening up like that does expose you to more wind though, and if you're jumping from a caravan the extra prop blast you get right there might make that harder to do. Exits are funny, nothing works for everyone and from every plane. But you start out with something and tweak it until it works.

I have to admit I hated leaving front float until I found something that works for me, but now I rather like it. I'm exiting from otters, but something similar may work from a caravan, it's been years since I've jumped a caravan, but I don't remember them being that different. My setup is this: I put my right foot near the front of the door and grab the inside bar with my right hand. I swing myself outside and press my left hand flat up against the bottom of the wing (being careful not to grab/hold onto anything that moves) I then position both my feet in the door squished all the way forward, and slide my right hand off the bar and onto the leading edge of the door frame as low down as possible and kinda squat down so that my knees are bent at almost a 90 deg angle. This gets me in a reasonably balanced stance and leaves the rest of the team with as much space as possible. How do I leave? well, here's a video of a couple exits On the first jump (the right way ) I fall off, going directly to my head with my chin down and very little drag out so that I can get "below" them a little bit, after the first second or two, it's business as usual. On the second jump (the wrong way ) I jump out, smacking the back of my head on the tire, and having to lean on Mel for a second while both my camera and vision come back into focus... ...after that, it was business as usual. ...but yeah if you climb that far forward... don't jump out away from the plane. /edited to add: Oh... and the camera is a PC-105 with a royal-lens 0.3x

Get this man a cigar.

Dedicated miniDV decks / VCRs are going to cost you more than a miniDV camera with a firewire port on it.

7:22:0 Seven holes in my forearms and lower back from being in and out of the hospital last week. But by Saturday morning I was good to go for the weekend and was able to make... Nineteen VRW camera jumps. A two-point fourteen-way FS jump for someone's 100th. Video/stills for an eight-way head-down sequential. And the best jump of the weekend: three of us from our VRW team ambushed a four-way FS dive for one of the belly jumpers' 1000th turning it into a sweet hybrid about a third of the way into it (everyone was in on it except she who was later thrown in the pool. The look on her face when extra people swooped in and docked on the formation was priceless.)

To clear up any confusion, the next time someone asks you, "What religion do you subscribe to?" you say, "Christianity." and then when they ask, "Oh really? What sect?" you say, "Atheism." /edited for freshness

This trend doesn't really change, it's just your definition of "really good" and "really bad" that change. It's okay to be humble and think you suck, but don't talk yourself out of seeing yourself get better.

So you're saying I don't get the little "Arts & Entertainment" wedge to put in my trivial pursuit token? ..curses... ...foiled again...

Wasn't that the war where a bunch of future Canadians invaded the USA, made their way to Washington DC and burned the White House down to the ground? Damn war mongering 'nucks. That'd be the one, yes... When Darius started talking about battling Canada and apologizing for how silly his "hypothetical" situation was I started laughing.

Lex Luther in Superman.

Well, since you mention it, there was the War of 1812... That involved blockades, capturing of civilian sailors, under the table arming of enemies, etc. ...as the world turns I suppose... Escalation is the real culprit that we need to be concerned about, it's how we ended up mired in a war to begin with. In the end what's more important? Peace? A better life? Or hurting people back for what they've done?

Being what I'll call passive–aggressively misanthropic regarding issues such as this, I don't see much of a point in fighting to keep a potential child's development going only that they may then be born to a mother who'd just as soon have aborted them. In other words, if the mother doesn't want the child then I, as an un-elected and not necessarily representative spokesperson for all of society, don't want the child. ...rather dark, I understand that... I do, however, find myself in a dilemma as my feelings about protecting the unborn from the mother's intentions conflict with my feelings about how to handle charges against someone where a pregnant woman is attacked / run over by a drunk driver / etc. and the fetus is killed.

Planks constant is ugly whether you remember it as ~4.136e-15 eV s or as ~4.134e-27 stone furlong^2 millenia^-1. The only advantage of the former over the latter is that if you're using Plank's constant then you are probably also already using eV and seconds. This is not an advantage of using SI, just an advantage of SI's common usage in certain fields. And we all know how proponents of a more wide-spread use of the metric system feel about using that as an argument in favor of a particular system. I know the Boltzmann constant as -228.6 dBJ/K and while that isn't technically in SI units, it works very nicely with what I use it for without any added conversions.

Remind me again, what are the SI units of colloquialism?

...which is why I rather like dB... ...although it too is a screwed up unit of measurement. decibel. One tenth of a bel. Who the heck uses bels?