dorbie

Careful what you wish for, this could end with a requirement for a camera rating and a $1500 course you have to take before taking the test.

Ouch, probably the worst reason to jump camera, misguided and actively dangerous.

Didn't it used to be 100 jumps? I forget. Anyway I'd say lower than 200 but only because I think 100+ or 150+ is not an unreasonable threshold. It's a possible distraction but there are many possible distractions. How long before some committee decides it should be 500 jumps, that'll take a few bounce POV videos I guess. Skydivers are great at moving the goalposts once they make the grade and raise barriers to entry for new jumpers. Then insult them for claiming to have "mad skillz" for doing what we did and in this case what folks in other sports do all the time without incident. 100 jumps used to be a pretty high respected number of jumps. Now you're still a noob because experienced jumpers want to feel special. Is this really enhancing safety with lessons "written in blood" or BSR creep encroaching on the freedoms of newer jumpers and diminishing their fun in the sport?

Giving him a clear weight target is the fair thing to do. I just shed some weight to get my fat ass under the reserve TSO. I made a couple of jumps today. Respect for sticking to your original offer, there's nothing worse than getting one story from a DZ one week and another 2 weeks later.

What about when it's our elders perpetuating the mistakes? Same thing as when the older generation, who grew up not wearing seatbelts in cars, don't wear them today: rules, social pressure and reproach, if and as needed.. Ahh the good old days when cigarettes were "physician recommended".

OK, here's the audio circuit for the Asteroids ship fire "pew", (not fully working yet). Every sound effect in the game has a unique analog audio circuit, my board has a busted pew pew sound and it led me on an "adventure"... That's 4 chips + other components and three different input voltages just for one sound effect. Its not even amplified:

Geek! Reminds me that some 35 years ago, before we could afford a digital plotter, I made an interface to use an analog x-y pen recorder to draw crystallographic contour maps from the output of a PDP11. That reminds me that back in the day I programmed a PDP 11 with a Tektronix 4010 vector display. I also manually digitized topo maps but we had large pen plotting tablets to do the job. You had to manually degauss them with a magnetic bar occasionally. Primitive stuff, and aging by the time I used it. The real surprise with the Asteroids machine is it's not truly an analog vector display. It is quantized by the 10 bit DAC and if you look at the signal closely you find "pixels" or rather digital quantized discreet values in the deflection voltage signal. If I knew what I was doing with this scope I'd have grounded the probes from the outset. Real electrical engineers are rolling their eyes at this stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0DAXM0GOL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkf_dFvJHnU

Yup, the FAA discusses specific restraint systems that have got nothing to do with going around waists but are approved for looping through the main lift web of a parachute harness. See discussion with pictures at the end of this document: http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/AC_105-2E.pdf I did not know I was supposed to loop around the MLW when connecting like this until I saw this document. Useful information.

What about when it's our elders perpetuating the mistakes?

Skydive, that'll fix it.

I drifted out of the sport after about 6 or 7 years. I never considered myself a non-jumper, my rig was in the closet but moving location, family commitments, combined with small obstacles like needing a repack with no rigger (meaning a drive to the DZ would not get me the immediate satisfaction of a jump but would mean I could jump a month later), conspired to discourage me from participating. I'd probably have drifted away sooner if it wasn't for the Load Organizers at Perris keeping it interesting before this. Unless you're doing something novel, even skydiving gets repetitive and a bit stale. Anyway, I recently got back to jumping and there have been a few additional unanticipated obstacles, but they're getting eliminated. Anyway, you can quit passively through simple lack of interest and activity in the sport without being pressured by anyone and without making a conscious decision to quit the sport. There are lots of choices on a weekend with what to do with your time, when Skydiving becomes stale, and crosses some threshold of crap you have to deal with to get it done it can fall well down your list of priorities.

Wait until the school has a Christian appreciation day and atheist kids are sent home for protesting it because the Christians may riot. Under the holding this is not something that is disallowed. Not only is the speech restriction content based but the heckler's veto is now established. Either ban all flags at all times or ban none. Agreed. The rulings make me very uncomfortable. It is an absurd ruling. It seems like prior restraint of the potential victim of an imagined crime.

Politically correct free speech only please. Students who don't know this are taught it the hard way.

Lodi a.k.a. Parachute Center - 2 weeks ago. I go for a checkout dive, never been to this DZ before. I put on my seatbelt and other jumpers start telling me not to bother, they don't leave me to buckle up, they actively dissuade me from it. An AFFI says to me, "It's not enforced here", so you have Tandem PAX, TI's, AFFIs, up jumpers and nobody was wearing a seatbelt. Now if you belt up in that environment it's almost pointless, there will be 20+ meat missiles flying around if shit ever happens. I don't know what set of rules this DZ operates under but it ain't FAA regs.

That'll buff out.

please delete

He should be chopped.

So he buzzes past canopies in flight, pulls low, doesn't chop when he should and can't kick out line twists (that were admittedly excessive). The only thing he did right was reach his rear line groups to affect a half assed flare. In the end he concludes "F'ing line twists bro". If this sky-god thinks line twists were his problem then he learned nothing. Try not to kill anyone else when you bounce, and please place your crater as far away from the tandem PAX as possible please, we don't want to upset the tourists.

Well the clicky didn't work, here it is clean: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=122495

More like Apr 7, 2002. Here's the link for anyone who wants to read the discussion: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=122495

I don't buy this meteorite theory for a second. It's a small stone packed in his rig that was ejected during deployment and caught up to him. There are many solutions for speed and scale, that "experts" have been working on this for months does not outweigh the half a dozen orders of magnitude greater probability that this was a small stone in his rig.

There wasn't just knowledge of the O-ring problem, there was a detailed investigative analysis ignored by managers and some idiots who called the non-burned portion of O-ring on previous flights their safety margin, with pictures of the O-ring cross sections etc. So they had a failure condition on multiple flights and called the remaining ring after the failure their "safety margin". This was institutional madness. It's like flying an aircraft, losing a wingtip that just falls off and then saying you don't have a structural problem because only 10% of the wing fell off, leaving your with a 90% safety margin. Feynman didn't figure out the O-ring problem after the disaster, Roger Boisjoly and team at Morton Thiokol did an excellent job and figured out exactly what was happening BEFORE the loss of vehicle and delivered a detailed report. He had recognized a correlation between O-ring blow by and launch temperature. He tried to stop the flight when he saw weather reports the day before the flight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly

FIFY At least the OJ trial erred on the side of acquittal, which is how the system is supposed to work.

Apparently society is a lot worse than some criminals when it comes to being able to kill someone. There's far too much two-faced concern getting in the way here.