champu

I try to make a point not to be judgemental about what others consider to be a good time. Keeping in mind a fair number of people consider what we do to be insane. I used to get worked up about things like frats, TRL, and bolting wings on the back of front wheel drive cars. But honeslty, if people enjoy it, good for them. If it gives them the release they need at the end of the week, fantastic. Whether any of it actually makes these people happy is anyone's guess, but that's really none of my business.

I guess I'm one of the real die-hards. I live in the midwest and it's been months since I've gone more than a week without being on the dropzone. I'm hoping I can squeeze a jump or two in saturday morning before the wind and rain comes. And hey, if no one gets to jump that day it'd certainly earn its name "Safety Day" wouldn't it...

It's actually more of a linear algebra proble- someone shoot me.

but have you ever lubed the cube to be able to solve it faster? yeah uh... me neither. /edited to add: check this out

a friend of mine in high school had that shirt. I always wanted one that said "girls will believe anything."

Yeah, it was supposed to be some new long lasting adhesive and it turned out to not stick to anything very well. Some guy made a pad of paper with it to stick memos to things. They were originally made to use around the department, and somehow a document made it's way up the food chain with a post-it on it. I guess someone took notice. As for the best invention: The 24V cordless reciprocating-saw.

as far as the initial attraction, most normal tricks work. Flyers, meetings, making sure to plaster all your members with loud colored t-shirts that say "SKYDIVING" on them. A simple, easy to read website with a section directed to people who have no idea what's going on is good too. To retain newbies is hard. I think it's great when people come to do tandems, I kinda chat with them for a while after they jump and I usually run the whole "getting their license" thing by them. This usually doesn't work, but it has a couple times. For people that take the first jump course, they get put on "the list". people on "the list" are encouraged to get the t-shirt, submit a brief profile to go on the website, and have me get a mug of them to go with the profile. I send an e-mail out to all these people once a week with a quick news blurb, updates on accomplishments (licenses, new rigs, getting off student status, etc) a joke or two, and ask to see who wants to jump that weekend. The whole idea is, I try to make it feel like an on going thing, something to look forward to on the weekend besides just getting wasted at a frat party again.

grab a coach and do at least a couple simple two-way dives. perferably without the wingsuit...

keep in mind that a signifigant amount of spam comes from hijacked servers/clients. If e-mail starts costing money, we're going to start seeing even more spam-sending worms making their way around the internet. charging for e-mail would certainly suck for any group or organization that uses e-mail to send newsletters to it's members (cough*university skydiving clubs*cough)

I got a protrack about 10 jumps ago or so. I set it at the breakoff altitude, at my pull altitude, and at my hard deck. So far on each of my jumps I've been turning to start my track as the first alarm goes off, and waving off as the second alarm goes off (haven't needed the third alarm so far ). I know I've only done it a handful of times, but even when set directly at the altitudes you want, I think it can act as a backup.

I think a lot of people take personal decision making skills for granted when razzing other skydivers about choosing not to jump. It's kinda a knee-jerk response to say, "relax you'll do/be fine" because butterflies come up in this sport so often. If someone had a gear issue come up that was making them uncomfortable, I'd definitely try and reassure them riding the plane down was the right thing to do. Tandems are completely fair game though.

or just "F$%^ THE ATKINS DIET!"

like Blahr said, does it make a difference in finances? if your general expenses haven't changed much recently, any raise = profit. do you rent? have your lease rate gone up? have jump ticket prices changed at your dropzone recently? has... well okay that's pretty much the only expenses I worry about...

Bullet Bill (super mario bros reference)

someone apparently wrote a simple version of this worm and since then we've been seeing all kinds of different variations on it. The only real difference being what efforts the author has gone through to make the e-mail look authentic to get you to click the attatchment. The attatchment is always some executable file with an extension that most people wouldn't recognize to be executable (pif, scr, com) or a zip file that contains such a file. If you don't click the attatched file (which would run the program) you can simply delete the e-mail and be just fine. With this latest rendition, I actually had a decent chuckle when I got e-mails from the "teams" of the two domains for which I'm the sole operator. I wish I had a team, it would certainly make my life easier

well then what the hell is the point of going on vacation?

A lot of things can make tandems/new students stop skydiving, the cost, the people, the effort. And, believe it or not, some people just don't enjoy it that much. I've also not done a tandem, I went directly through the student progression to get my license.

The worst part is that there is virtually no one on the level that we're at that can't miss a day of work to be sick. It's not as though they're buttressing the company against total failure at every waking moment of their life. Just start wearing this shirt around them.

I overhear all kinds of weird out of context things, but usually I try to shut them out before they rot my mind from the inside out. "If it wasn't for my horse, I never would have spent that year in college."

although not very impressive with it's other statistics (4V preouts/mp3 support would be nice) Alpine has started making head units with built-in XM tuners so you just need the antenna and not a seperate tuner box in the trunk

It took me over a year to finally shut up about skydiving. A good way to get that "everyone should definitely jump at least once just to try it" feeling out of your system is to run a club for a while...

Every dropzone should paint yard markings in the landing area, and have a football and several sets of shoulder pads on hand at all times.

two problems with that idea (don't know if you were serious) 1) I don't believe you're allowed/supposed to use a canopy that has ever been jumped as a main as a reserve. 2) there's not going to be a d-bag/bridle attatchment point on the reserve...

http://www.ddos.com/ large companies don't really have an excuse for letting d-DOS attacks get the better of them

I've gotten a couple hours of sleep since Saturday night as I've been doing coursework pretty much non-stop. about an hour ago I came home from the lab and now I can't fall asleep. I've completely broken myself.