pilotdave

I work in a stereotypical cube farm. Reminds me so much of the movie office space. Except here there are pictures of the comanche helicopter EVERYWHERE. I think I'll need to find a nice skydiving picture to put up for a little variety. Dave

DH made a whooooole buncha planes in England before they started in Canada. Whole lotta ugly planes too!

http://www.skydivingmovies.com is up and running! A few files are still being transferred, but it's basically ready. The site is now running on a dedicated server provided by cyberskydive. It should be much faster than the previous servers. And for the best part... cyberskydive will be designing a web based front end for the server. Finding the videos you want will be easier (and better looking) than ever! Thanks a LOT to cyberskydive for providing the hosting and the site design. And of course thanks to Craig Poxon for providing the skydivingmovies.com domain name. Oh, and thanks to Cablevision of CT for removing my upload bandwidth restriction they imposed for running the server on my own computer last week. Dave "If it's not on video, it didn't happen."

Well, other than the possibility of a bad spot, a downwind jumprun would mean the open canopies from the freeflyers would be heading in the same direction the next groups are drifting in freefall. Those RW jumpers might be opening just a few hundred feet directly over the freeflyers under canopy. Sounds like a bad idea. Hence the

I bought a square1 weight vest. I'm a bit smaller than you so I bought 12 lbs. I used all 12 once on a 5 way which very quickly became a solo cause I got waaaay low and couldnt get back up. I've found 6 lbs is adequate for me to jump with people nearly twice my size, at least on 2 ways where they can focus on falling slow. For some RW jumps, I've borrowed a couple pounds from other people. 8 lbs seems to work well for me. With my weights I can only choose between 6 or 12 lbs. If you're going to buy a rig soon, you might consider getting one with weight pockets built in. That way, under canopy, the weights pull on the risers, not you. And yes, my wingloading changes by a few hundreths when I wear weight. Never noticed a difference. Dave

well, skydivingmovies.com is up and running at it's new home. Currently about 16% of the site is uploaded. It's been chugging along for the last couple days at 10-17kbps (REALLY slow). I just got off the phone with the cable internet tech support and found out they have cut off my speed due to "constant uploads of large files." I explained that the sooner they shut it off, the sooner the uploads will stop. So they did. It's not exactly blazing at the moment but the speed has about doubled. If it keeps at this rate, the site should be stocked in.... well... a couple more days. edit: up to 100 kbps. YAY. Dave

How about freeflyers out first with a downwind jumprun?

I got to fly the Comanche flight simulator today. Only problem is the screen and motion were shut off. Woulda been REALLY cool if they were on, but it was still cool with just the instruments. The sim is a comanche cockpit mockup in the center of a sphere sitting on top of a platform that can move in 6 directions. The sphere acts as the screen, so you can see almost 360 degrees around. The instruments are all on bigass flat screens so there was more to look at then just a few dials. It was pretty cool. Don't think I'm quite qualified for the real thing just yet.

The problem's on my end, not yours. I've noticed my temp server has been maxing out at 17 k/s for the last day or 2, and my connection has been just completely slow. I wonder if the cable company didn't appreciate the 15+ gigs downloaded over the last week from my computer. Since starting it this morning, 9% has finished uploading. Gonna be a long time unless I can fix my speed problem. The good news is that I found some really cool software to manage the syncing of the two servers for me. It would be perfect if multiple mirrors were running. Dave

ok, one more update. The temporary server is down to conserve bandwidth while I upload to the BRAND SPANKING NEW SKYDIVINGMOVIES.COM! (It's not available for public consumption yet. I'll make it available when uploading is done.) Problem is, all of a sudden my max bandwidth for uploading dropped from about 500 kb/s to about 17 kb/s. No idea why. So uploading 11 gigs is gonna take.... a while. Someone else can do the math. Anyway, it's started, and it'll hopefully keep going all day. Almost there! Dave

Temp server has had an IP address change. Now up and running at ftp://67.87.75.159 and hopefully at skydivingmovies.com soon. Dave

Woohoo! My college skydiving club (http://www.umdskydiving.com) is #1 for US skydiving clubs with a ranking of 2,842. Of course their system is a little messed up and the ranking is based on ALL the school's websites, not just the club site. The only review for the site is actually a review for the business school's website. Works for me though...the link still takes ya to our club's site (which I designed)

Maybe he put it there for a few seconds just to get some funny video. Definitely not a good idea (nor a legal one) if he did it for a long time, but it's not THAT dangerous during the jump run. Yeah, he's flying VFR and needs to be able to spot traffic, but at the same time he's probably getting traffic reports from ATC. Course even during IFR flights, it's still the pilots responsibility to see and avoid while flying in VFR conditions, and VFR traffic separation is only provided if ATC isn't too busy, but still, if it was just a few seconds I don't see it as a huge deal as long as everyone in the plane was ok with it. Dave

Surprisingly the bandwidth use hasnt been a problem for me on the temp server ftp://24.45.154.64. Over 14 gigs downloaded over the past week and I haven't noticed a thing. The only problem I've had is that my internet cuts out every once in a while until I restart. Happened overnight the last couple nights and again this evening. But the good news is that a more reliable server is on its way. A 40 gig dedicated linux server on a T1 connection is up and running for me. I have no clue why configuring it is taking so long (it's working for anonymous access but I can't upload anything yet), but it should be ready within a few days I hope. Uploading 11 gigs will take me a while but I think it'll be worth it. I may or may not continue to run a mirror from my own PC... havent decided yet. But anyway, thanks for the help. This really is a perfect legal use for kazaa. I just like having everything in a centralized place if possible. Just easier to find what you want that way. But with all the server issues, kazaa is definitely an alternative. Dave

I mentioned to a blackhawk pilot the other day that I did a half hour in an R-22. His response was "you're a braver man than I am!"

you sure it wasnt QCWLICON? That's "IBM ThinkPad ConnectUtilities related" according to http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup_all.php Dave

by the way the server supports download resume so if you connect with an FTP program you could start right back wherever you left off. And to make you feel just a little worse... someone just downloaded the whole thing in 2 minutes and 6 seconds. Dave

To anyone that just got cut off when my internet connection decided to temporarily die, sorry. To apologize I raised the max number of files each person can download at a time to 5 and raised the max download speed to 80 kb/s (though the modemers wont notice any change). Dave

soon as nobody's downloading it, it'll be moved to HERE (/dropzone.com/ folder). edit: Who's the silly AOL dialup user thats gonna be downloading all night?

Actually once I have real work to do I won't mind so much. But right now my biggest goal here is to stay out of everyone elses hair so they can get their work done without babysitting me. But I don't have any REAL work to do so I have been doing some online training and reading the "Comanche familiarization" manual which is cool but it gets boring after a while. It goes into detail about every (unclassified) system on the helicopter. Shows pics of every freaking valve in the hydraulic system and stuff. Very interesting reading, but dry. Once I get all trained and I really get work that I can do, I'll have plenty to occupy my time. Dave

Sangiro, with all the fancy CGI that this site uses, it shouldnt be too hard to change color schemes and stuff on the fly, right? How about making a version of the site that looks like microsoft excel or word or something. Hell, anything in black and white with no pics would work. Just has to be convincing enough for the people walking by and the occasional boss sneaking up. This is killing me having to do work at work!

musgrave@manifestmaster.com Nice guy... gave me permission to post all his videos on skydivingmovies.com (/musgrave). Dave

Currently running at ftp://24.45.154.64 . Will be back at skydivingmovies.com soon. The new dedicated unix web/ftp server is up and running on a T1 line. Once it's configured, I'll get to uploading the 11 gigs of videos. Dave

malfunction pics at http://www.skydivingmovies.com/mals and videos at ftp://24.45.154.64 (for now, skydivingmovies.com coming soon... for real this time.) Dave