pilotdave

I have one at school (home for a couple more weeks now). It faces my TV and updates every 60 seconds. Kinda hard to watch tv that way. I tried making it a live one but I can't cause of the way the network in my house is set up. Dave

Mine was a gateway until I upgraded everything in it. Only thing gateway about it now is the case. Its an Athlon XP 1700 now with 512 megs of ram and a total of 90 gigs of hard drive space. For the next 2 weeks I'll be using this crappy Dell laptop, running WinME, which I inherited after my brother got too frustrated with it and bought a new laptop. As soon as I get back to school I'll get XP on this thing and see if it works any better. It has problems like diagonal rows of keys just not working for a while, and the touchpad has a mind of its own sometimes and moves the cursor very slowly in a random direction. It's also a crappy model that can't have the floppy and CD drives installed at the same time. There's no room for both. But, it can get online which is all I plan to use it for. Dave

So the SIM is written based on internet research? Do they have a bibliography at the end? Do they properly cite all their sources? I can't wait until they start doing research from TV and tell us we don't have to breathe in freefall cause our skin will absorb the oxygen. Dave

My rigger (or at least the guy I'm paying to pack my reserve) is a full time college student who does rigging in his on-campus apartment. I'm sure his roommates love that. Last time he packed my reserve he made a house call and did it at my apartment. Good service I guess. Dave

In my very limited experience I've noticed the freefall isn't too bad. It's the canopy ride when you really feel the cold. My hands were really the only part of me that were really affected by the cold when I jumped at Cross Keys' freezefest last winter. Pulling was no problem. Hands didn't get really cold till I was under canopy. Having your hands over your head decreases their blood flow so they get cold. I wear football reciever gloves with a pair of knitted stretchy gloves underneath. I wouldn't be comfortable with thick winter gloves. Also, if you wear a full face, get ready for it to fog up on opening. I just open my Z1 a crack just after opening and its fine. Dave

If my rig wasn't 400 miles away with a lazy ass rigger (hi andrew, in case you're reading this), maybe I could get some jumps in before florida. No such luck. Hey Florida people... any chance water training could be arranged there? I want me a B license. Or maybe I'll skip that and wait for the C. I THINK I'll hit 100 jumps before the end of september. Dave

How do I book a seat in a raft for a raft dive? See ya there, Dave

Cant wait to see it. I wonder where all the participants' videos went. Some of em must have been wearing cameras, right? According to one article I read, there were 300+ of em in the air with 100 spectators on the ground. I bet there were more cameras in the air than on the ground too!

I have the kodak dx3600. Picture quality is decent (http://www.skydivingmovies.com/sunshine.jpg), but there's a bit of a delay between hitting the button and when the picture actually takes. Also a pretty slow shutter speed. Makes action shots pretty much impossible. Other problem is battery life. I got mine used with a rechargable battery. The battery wasn't THAT old, but it would only charge enough to take literally 2 or 3 pictures with flash by the end. I bought a new one (VERY hard to find the right battery, which was $15), and the life is much improved. Mine's got a 128 meg flash memory card which lets it take way more pictures than I ever need to (over 700 at the lower quality, which is good enough for internet use) or something like 20 minutes of video. If you want more info about that camera, PM me. I really can't say if I'd recommend it or not since I havent tried any other cameras in the same price range. Dave

Got an email today that a ground based video will be uploaded the first week of january (the guy is away from home now). Apparently he's got quite a zoom lens and the video is pretty clear. I'll post when I have it. Dave

boosters sounds SO much better than booties. Maybe I'll start using that and see if it catches on. I am such a trend setter, ya know? Dave

My friend recently took one of those handheld wind meters along with him. Under his fairly lightly loaded Stilleto 170, it read about 35 mph in full flight. I'm sure there's all kinds of error in the measurement, but thats a LOT faster than I would have expected. Dave

I'm a newbie so don't do what I tell you, but I had a PC in tow (due to a shrunken kill line). I went with option C, yanking the bridle. Everything worked out fine so I'm glad I did it, but if I was in the same situation again I'd cut away and pull the reserve I think. When it happened, I found myself grabbing the bridle before I even thought about it. It just happened. Reached back and pulled it in one motion. The whole thing from when I realized I had a problem to having an opening canopy probably took 3 seconds or less. I don't know where the instinct to yank the bridle came from, cause I never learned to do that. It just happened. Dave

JUST SAY NO TO CAFEPRESS! There's a better option out there for t-shirts. http://www.zazzle.com. The quality is FAR FAR FAR better. I've bought shirts from both places and they don't even compare. Zazzle has a much smaller product line at the moment, but they claim that they'll start offering more products soon (been saying that for a long time though). Log in to their site using the beta username and password they provide. It works. You can design customizable shirts on there. That way, for example dropzone.com could design the basic shirt, and leave a spot on the chest for everyone to enter their own username. Cafe Press uses heat transfers (iron ons) to put the images on the shirts. Zazzle uses a much more advanced technique. I assume they have a machine that prints directly on the shirts or something. The image has the same feeling as the rest of the shirt (unlike iron ons or screen printing). They offer (for now) t-shirts, sweatshirts, and posters. (only white shirts are offered). They were very easy to deal with too. I think it took me about an hour from the time I found their site to the time I designed a shirt and placed an order. A single t-shirt cost me about $20 including shipping. A bit pricey, but about the same as cafe press. I've also washed the shirt a few times now and the image hasn't faded at all. The only way for shirts to cost a reasonable amount is to have a large quantity of them screen printed, but for customization, zazzle is the way to go. I used it to make a prototype of the t-shirts my club was about to order from a screen printer. (http://www.umd.edu/studentorg/cpsc/tshirt.html is how the real ones look. The zazzle version had the colors reversed.) Dave

Thanks for the vids. Moved them to /students/jumpinduo_tandem.wmv and /misc/jumpinduo_coachjumps02.wmv. Dave

Why thank you! Oh. Yeah, files. Someday I'll compress em to WMVs and make them a reasonable size. Someday. Leaving my cable internet for almost a month tomorrow. Probably wont be doing much with the server during that time unless I can move files without watching them first. Dave

Here are the results from the Adrenaline Rush Challenge. There were 4 competitors. Their increases in heart rate from rest were: 152 150 140 82 The higest peak rate was about 237 bpm, on exit. One guy reached 233 just before his off landing. His heart rate was 186 at exit and 152 as he walked to the door. Dave

sure... ftp://ftp.skydivingmovies.com/public/from TV/tlc-challenge.mpg and ftp://ftp.skydivingmovies.com/public/from TV/tlc-challenge2.mpg. Right click on these links and save, instead of watching them streaming. It works better that way. Dave

The learning channel did a show a while ago called Adrenaline Rush Challenge. One part of it was an AFF level 1 jump. Each competitor did a level 1 jump wearing a heart monitor. Before the jump their resting heart rates were tested. Whoever had the smallest rise in heart rate from exit to touchdown won. Pretty interesting to see where first timers actually get the most nervous. I wonder how they'd compare to experienced jumpers. If you've got fast internet and time to kill, you can download it: /from tv/tlc-challenge.mpg and tlc-challenge2.mpg (96 and 60 megs). Someday I'll get good at compressing those. Any wmv making experts out there wanna share your favorite settings? Dave

Havent seen it but a bunch of people have said it absolutely sucks. I wouldn't waste my money on it (or anything else by its creators). Dave

What a bitch. Have you offered to let 300-way.com host it? Maybe you could even get permission from whoever took the pic. It's a really cool idea. Dave

Who wants to pay when you can sit for hour after hour downloading? Oh... yeah.

Still havent touched it... Now I never will. Thanks for the warning!

I don't know if headdown has the rights to most of the clips they have, but they gave me a list of files to remove so I did. I was able get a number of them back when they appeared on another site which gave me permission. Both claimed to "own" some of the same videos. I would think in the case of this particular file I couldn't get in any trouble for having it, unless the producers of chronicles came after me, not headdown. A lot of videos on headdown are just kind of public files at this point, like the naked big way video. Others are videos of the owners of the site. Hard to know which they own and which they don't. Dave

Oooh! I'm gonna file a complaint with the FCC before I call them back. http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/complaintfile.html. It's easy! Dave