pilotdave

Get it replaced... Mine has a TINY bit of movement, but nothing like what you're talking about. I don't think mine moves enough to make any difference (for skydiving). Dave

I've been kicked in the face, and recently had a friend fall and "slip n' slide" out of a CASA... she got some major road rash on her Z1, and did damage to a riser and chest strap. It would have been UGLY if she was wearing a protec. Next day she got kicked on exit and cracked her visor. Again, the full face probably saved her from injury. Same jump, a guy with an open face got kicked in the mouth and was bleeding in freefall (nothing major). The protec might offer the best head protection (though we haven't seen any comparative testing to prove that), but a full face can provide better protection from less serious impacts and scrapes. Dave

Well, that's true about high performance landing accidents... that's much more like a motorcycle accident than what I was thinking of. Dave

Yeah, when the new drive went in, Matt also upgraded the operating system. Something on the server config wasn't set right and the server was going REALLY slow. Something was apparently eating the memory, so eventually it crashed. He's going to reboot tomorrow, but we have to track down the real problem. Dave

DOT ratings would mean nothing for a skydiving helmet, and mean very little to a motorcycle helmet. The desirable attributes of a helmet depend on what you're doing... which is why we don't skydive with motorcycle helmets and it'd be pretty useless to wear a skydiving helmet on a motorcycle. I once visited a US Army helmet testing lab... mostly helicopter pilot helmets, but they run tests on pretty much every type of helmet. They showed some comparisons of motorcycle helmets vs helicopter pilot helmets. Totally different uses, totally different types of protection. I'd LOVE to see a comparison of skydiving helmets though. I really think a lot of them would fail any kind of testing miserably... A hard hit to a poorly placed rivet or bolt might concentrate the load to one point, making the hit worse. Would be really interesting to compare materials too... Dave

A quality analog altimeter (altimaster) will probably last you your entire jumping career. Can't go wrong with it, and it's a pretty inexpensive purchase (as far as skydiving gear goes). You can switch to a digital later if you want or add an audible, but an analog is a good thing to have in your gearbag anyway, for when your batteries die or whatever. Dave

http://pilotdave.smugmug.com/popular/1/93338964/Medium for one I took. Not a real cute pic... he looks much bigger and older than he really was in that pic. But I think it's one of the nicest pics I've taken. Dave

Not sure I'd agree with that, although I only own a Z1. The mamba visor seems to scratch up much more easily than the Z1. And I've had no problem with the visor latch on my Z1, which I probably have 800 jumps on. I've replaced my visor twice... once because it was scratched up, and the second time when it arrived in FL cracked thanks to Delta's baggage handlers. Only tool required to change it is a quarter. Although I used a bunch of tools and took forever the first time I did it. The second time only took a few minutes. The mamba seems pretty nice, but I wouldn't say it's any better than a Z1. I actually thought about getting a Mamba a while back to replace my Z1, but after seeing a few of them, I'd go for another Z1 if anything happened to mine. Dave

Ha...haven't seen that question in years now. That was up there with AADs and RSLs as topics that have been beaten to death when I started reading rec.skydiving in 1998. The answer back then was "we're not telling." Hopefully that hasn't changed! Dave

That's up to the DZO. The only non-uspa DZ I've been to required USPA membership to jump there. The DZO at that DZ didn't see the benefit of group membership, but wanted all jumpers to have USPA insurance and licenses. Dave

It's definitely running slower than before... I think the config files need some tweaking. I think there are some minor php errors that come in huge numbers filling a log file, which is slowing down the whole server. Just gotta shut off the error recording for the nuisances (or actually fix the problems, but that's just not my style). Edit: well, that wasn't it. Still slow. Hmmmm. Dave

Where'd you find that picture of me?? Dave

Yeah, seriously, quit your bitching! And we all know Dave doesn't really exist, liar! Dave

Hey, it's not easy to find and not very well advertised as being different from the dropzone listings on the site. Needs to be better integrated. Dave

Not sure if you missed the dropzone locator on this site... it does pretty much the same thing: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/dropzone/finder.cgi?state=ca&city=perris&search=addr&country=us&rad=200 for example. Dave

Yeah, I used to just use robots.txt to keep them all out. I've looked at ways to control what parts of the page google looks at and what parts it ignores, but I don't care enough to do anything. Dave

Yeah, I get a lot of activity from google on my site. I used to block all search engines to keep people away, but once we added the google ads, we needed to let them index the site so that the ads would be relevant. Otherwise it was just putting up generic ads which was really annoying. But it's pretty funny what happens when google indexes random pages on the site. At the top of every page is the search box, with the 7 most recent searches showing below it. Well those recent searches get indexed as page content... so you start to get some very weird results in google. For example, somebody once searched for "sexcam" on SkydivingMovies.com. Then it showed "sexcam" at the top of a page that got indexed. Well, a google search for "sexcam" placed SkydivingMovies.com on page 1 for a while. The page you'd end up at just said "No results found for sexcam." It happens all the time now with all kinds of keywords. Happened recently with searches for "els van doren video." We don't have that video, but we're currently the number one result on google. We used to be on page 1 for "nacked girls" too. A few weeks ago I started noticing TONS of searches on SDM for things like "_s" or "m" or other really short, weird terms. So I started logging the IP address of the person doing the searches. Turned out to be google! Well, it's not really their fault. They just keep visiting search pages on SDM and get logged as if they did the search. I had to start blocking their IP addresses from the recent searches list... but they have a whole lot of IP addresses... Dave

This one didn't do so well: http://pilotdave.smugmug.com/gallery/2408672/1/126195042/Medium. Ok, it was found the other day in the middle of a street a long time after it was lost (not sure how long, but months I think). And it had obviously been hit by a car or farm equipment. I saw a Z1 that landed right on the DZ once... no problem other than a cracked visor. It was knocked off on exit. The first 2 jumpers in that group landed, started to talk about the jump, and then it came crashing in right in the landing area. Pretty amazing that it fell so slow. Dave

What video are you looking for? I might have a few of them on my hard drive... Dave

You realize this thread is from 2004? To the eleventy billion people that PMed me looking to beta test the new site, it's 2007 now. Dave

The SDM store (http://astore.amazon.com/skydivingcom-20/) works through Amazon.com. I just pick the products I want to sell on my site, and they do the work. I then get a small percent of the profit, which goes toward paying for the Amazon.com hosted file mirror. I can't set my own prices though. Right now I'm mirroring 1.6% of the site (1.4 gigs) on Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service. So far this month, we've transferred nearly 100 gigs from Amazon alone. And this has been a pretty quiet month. Amazon's hosting is very cheap, but sales from the store would have to go WAY up to actually pay for the hosting... especially as more files get backed up there. BTW, if you enter Amazon.com by clicking any of the ads on the bottom of SDM.com and then make a purchase of anything, I get the referral credit even though I'm not advertising that product. One more way to donate to the site. Dave

...so that Matt can install our new 750 gig hard drive! Probably tomorrow or sometime soon. Shouldn't have to be down for very long. If anyone's interested in helping Matt pay for the new drive, donation links are all over the freaking site. Dave

Got windows movie maker? Just import it, clip it at the beginning and end of the section you want, delete the rest, and save. Dave

BTW, if you want to see a fatality, there's THIS one from a while back at the Eiffel tower. Wingsuit jump gone bad... Dave

Uh huh... we have 6S now... Adds Safety. It makes sense in manufacturing, but in an office, well, it moves the mess to wherever they don't check. I have coworkers that labeled their computer mouse, phone, etc. Dave