mdrejhon

Your girlfriend is a paramedic?

Hey! There looks like there's enough land for a dropzone across the street! Just kidding, but a Northeast skydiving resort (ala Perris and Eloy) would be very interesting. Ah well, one can dream... That does bring up another question -- what are the actual dropzones that are the nearest to the windtunnel?

You mean he hadn't started working with the closing loop when he boarded!? Packing the parachute on the jump plane. That's nuts

I got information about how to get on to my back, and how to do recovery several times (half barrel roll advice was given to me more than once), including coached jumps. But on solos, I just went ahead to attempt back turns without asking questions - so nobody taught me how to do turns on my back. I experimented on my own. So it's not entirely the instructor's fault. After all, I have had already been jumping 30-40 times and I no longer needed to always tell instructors the complete details of exactly what I was doing on every solo jump - just the type I was doing and pull altitude (belly, tracking, etc, and what pull) for jump run safety purposes. I was a human frisbee (stable arch-to-sky, about 0.5 to 0.75 revolution per second) for only a few seconds and my recovery was sufficiently fast that I quickly forgot about it that I didn't even tell the instructors afterwards except to say that half barrel roll worked great for me.

Maybe you can get Bev to send you a free jumpsuit in exchange for them using your designer on their website! I bought a jumpsuit that unintentionally looked similiar to somebody else's, because I had no jumpsuit designer - I was going by a mental picture. I like the jumpsuit a lot, just wish I was a little more careful on color choices.

That's easy. Bonfire.

Mullin's King Air is legendary for being the world's fastest climbing full-time sports jump plane (right?). It'll have come up and down a minimum of 4 or 5 times by the time I am finished packing

That's what I do. Arching works wonders. When I found myself on my back but not spinning. Then arching worked like magic. BUT... back at around jump 30 or 40 or so, which is when I think my flat spin on back happened, it was a "longish ago" in relative jump number terms, arching like hell didn't work at all. The centrifugal force kept me in a stable back-to-earth position. That immediately made me nervous. One second later, I tried a half barrell roll. Poof. Whew. I'm safe now (6000 feet). I was trying to do a figure-8 on my back (a requirement for a CSPA license), and one time, trying to stop the spin caused me to spin faster, so I was already spinning too fast to arch back to belly. I fell back to what the instructor taught me -- that arching works, but if I ever want to get out of "back-to-Earth" faster, just do a half barrell roll. So that's what I did... Distorting body position (balling up, delta, etc) all seem to be legitimate ways to exit a flat spin on a back, I'll most certainly try these at some point, especially when I am praticing real sitfly next year... If any newbies are reading this -- never forget to arch, it will nearly always work... Just helps to find out from an instructor to know what to do when arching "unexpectedly does not work like before such as in flat spins on back-to-earth". (most common with fast flat spins on back especially if you're a newbie who don't know how to sitfly yet) This is not relevant to those people who know how to stop a spin while you're on your back....you just stop spinning before flipping over....but newbies like me about 100 jumps ago, ran into this problem of (A) unable to stop spin (B) unable to arch to flip over, and needed Plan C.

I use a PQI USB stick -- it's less than one quarter the size of a standard jump drive, and less than the thickness of two credit cards. So it easily fits behind my driver's license in my wallet with only a bulge similiar to slipping a credit card or two behind it. It uses a special connector that's smaller than a USB connector but fits in a regular USB jack. Essentially a jacketless regular USB connector. It's totally sealed so the card is water resistant (even more resistant than a SD card). I have never lost data on a memory card before (yet) -- not even when one of my cards was exposed to water and went through the laundry machine. It's true that flash degrades over time. Normally, good modern flash memory recover very well by using error correction techniques and moving data around to avoid bad memory. It's a shame to hear that the software behind the secure part wasn't resistant to such degradation. But cheap stuff don't always have that well-designed resistance to errors. If the content is still there, is it possible that some drivers got messed up? I've heard of this happening before. Another possibility is that power shut off while data was being written to the jump drive or the jump drive got removed too quickly after you finished copying files. (Some computers use write caching on jump drives, which means you must wait a few moments before removing -- or hit Ctrl+Alt+Del once to flush the disk cache)

I dare I can spot myself MUCH better than somebody did during my night jump at Lake Wales last month. They dumped almost the entire pass off the dropzone, fortunately I was on a second pass and I landed right at the landing dropzone. The spot looked slightly long even from the exit (was waiting for people to exit, so had no opportunity to jump sooner..), but I had a preplanned 5K open so I took it.

LO's are fun.... I took advantage of them at the boogie weekends at my dropzone to get a bunch of RW jumps (4-ways through 9-ways). And when I travelled to Florida. Easy when a turbine airplane is around (big dropzones or boogie days), but much harder when only a Cessna is around. Regardless of which dropzone I've been to.

Hop and pops aren't that bad... On a brief visit to a new local dropzone (one that's open during freezing weather up here, there was a few icy puddles in the landing field), I asked some CReW dogs if I could "watch" them play at a distance. Jump out right after them. So I did a few high altitude hop n pops and watched a stack and a side-by-side be built from a distance. I don't do any CReW at this time (yet anyway), but since I don't freefly yet till next year (so I declined to be part of a freefly group), it was more fun than jumping alone. Just stay your distance and be familiar with matching sink rate... And, no, the coldness wasn't bad, wearing a sweater under my jumpsuit. It's something that somebody of my jump numbers is allowed to do, as long as I have basic training on proximity with other canopies and knowing how to keep a requested minimum distance... if you're only able to do hop-and-pops but don't want to do CRW: Be a CRW spectator from the air! Might need minimum license, not sure... Ask instructor.

Clicky: www.skytunnel.net

For some reason, I can't get this one out of my mind: JUMP, JUMP, JUMP! I Have Caught Jump Fever, JUMP, JUMP, JUMP! I Have Got To Go Up There, JUMP, JUMP, JUMP! Freaking Freeflyers, JUMP, JUMP, JUMP! Blue Skies, Skydivers.

Interesting. I shall try that delta barrel roll technique the next time I test a solo backfly. My half barrell roll out of a spinning backfly was somewhat clumsy (centrifugal forces) but I still got bellydown quickly. The delta barrell roll is probably a more smooth exit from a backfly spin.

The latter. Two GeForce7800's running in tandem rock the fucking house. Damn. I can almost buy a second rig for that price.

Quite true. The golden days are gone that selling just 10,000 units made the game profitable. Maybe an Extreme Sports Adventure Pack covering a lot of extreme sports activities -- then now we're getting somewhere. Close enough. Maybe. Assuming the game engine is flexible enough to make it pratical to program so many extreme sports in one. Only if it does not become a crappy jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none... Or, scripting and modding might be the best way to pull this off in a grass roots manner... Total Conversion, Expansion Pack, etc. Those don't need to sell nearly as many...

For a game to get mass market appeal and to become profitable, I think it has to encompass a huge amount of skydiving and BASE sport. Regular jumping, BASE jumping, swooping, you name it, the whole echilidia. So that it can appeal to a skydiver audience and a BASE audience. It could all use the same 3D graphics engine, and reuse a lot of the same 3D models (with a few minor tweaks). Then maybe it'd hit a big enough market to actually be profitable. While I am just a mere skydiver and I am looking forward to my first Bridge Day jump, or similiar arch bridge trial jump someday in my lifetime, I would think that broad appeal is needed in order for such a game to be made profitable. /// If this is a grassroots effort only, another idea is a Total Conversion style modification of an existing videogame, to turn it into a BASE jumping video game. This might be a lot easier, depending on the game. (Could GTA theoretically be modded to become a BASE jumping game with BASE specific goals?)

I can't really sitfly at all, yet! (Although I can backfly a little now, just enough to the point of doing a figure 8 on my back). And a couple of ride-the-slide sits, but I don't consider that real sitfly. I'm concentrating on bellyfly for now... I've never hosed a linked RW exit from a Cessna, but I have often hosed them from a Twin Otter. (and on my 100th, but we recovered, thankfully and built to a 9-way!) However, I did rapidly get better with RW after my 95th jump with lots of bigway pratice from 4ways through 20ways. I fly to my slot about half of the time in bigways now. I have burbled myself a few times and burbled one other person a few times, but fortunately have not wrecked an entire formation while flying to my slot, thankfully. Gonna keep working at it. Less of a bellyflopper and more of a bellyflyer.

Interesting. I did several backfly jumps to fulfill a CSPA license requirement I needed to be able to do a figure 8 in a sit or on my back. Since backfly was easier than sitfly, I decided to try it backfly. Nobody taught me to backfly beyond how to enter that position (a half barrel roll) or told me about flat spins, but I already was taught backfly recovery: A half barrel roll back onto my stomach, which I did successfully several times. On one of my backfly jumps, I went into an unexpected flat spin. No big deal, I'll just half-barrel roll back onto my belly and arch hard. That's what I did, and I recovered quickly since I already knew how to stop a fast belly spin. I had momentum from my flat spin, but half-barrelling still worked, and now I had an easily-correctable belly flat spin. At first but I took only a few seconds - so I think I burned less than 1000 feet from a back flat spin to a non-spinning belly-down. Nobody warned me about flat spins, but I was told the fastest way to recover from a backfly (for my experience level at the time -- there are probably better and more graceful techniques too): A half barrel roll. I seem to remember I praticed many of those before praticing backfly turns, so I had no problems recovering... I did a jump dedicated to half-barrel roll pratice, and was able to do it reliably before I attempted any back fly turns... Eventually I'm gonna learn how to sitfly, but I only wanted to pass the CSPA license and speciallize in bellyflying before I try any real freefly.. (I was able to do figure 8's on my back to meet the requirement. I think it took me four or five backfly specific jumps before I could do it reliably less than 45 degree off-heading) Again, talk to your instructor if this is appropriate for you... don't try anything from these boards without passing them by your instructor first...

About $10,500 Canadian for this year. Including my Florida trip (windtunnel and Deaf World Record). I think future years will be more like ~$3-$4K from now on for at least 2006 and 2007, now that I am licensed, have my own gear. Of course, there's going to be a bump or two when I get to a Sabre2 150/135 possibly (or similiar) paid partially for by the sale of my Sabre 170 but only when I'm able to do everything on billyvon/Germain/Scott Miller downsize checklists, at least as far as my 170 is safely able to. Oh, and maybe a few travelling boogies. And eventually Canadian Formation Record. That's gonna cost me some extra penny.

Someday I want to attend a beach boogie such as www.kenyaboogie.com where all landings are a beach landing. I'll have to wait until a C license though, I don't want to expose my rig to salt water

If you get bored of this - I can volunteer to burn all the CD's and mail them out, if you'd like. Or you could be responsible for North America and I'd be responsible for Europe/Asia/South America. Use of a CD burning program that has a multi-copy feature, makes it as easy as removing and inserting CD's without needing to click any buttons -- the burning starts automatically everytime you insert a new blank CD, and a full CD completes in just about 3 minutes per CD with a fast burner. Don't forget to get a CD from Stu Wilson (deaffreeflyer). It has the photo that I most want, a self-portrait of myself after my first night jump!! Note: A single CD should be able to hold about 500 photos at an average of about 1.4 or so megabytes apiece. If you got them in TIFF format, convert them to JPEG at a setting of about 95% image quality or thereabouts (no lower than 92% please) but don't reduce the size of the photos. If they are in 8 megapixel format and slightly soft on a computer monitor, a slight bicubic downscale to 2048x1536 or 3072x2048 is probably OK (but no lower, please) in order to squeeze all the pictures onto one CDROM disc. Publishers will probably want TIFF, but us on-screen computer slideshow users will be happy with high quality JPEG's, because most computer monitors max their sharpness out at about 4 to 5 megapixels when scaled to screen size. If you have lots of difficulty with this, I offer to volunteer my services. I have done this for weddings to give discs to all attendees, including one where I burned them on a laptop "on the spot" - so that attendees got the CD's the same day before the left!

Hi, I like to view them through my digital projector slide-show style, so I need the original resolution digitals... I'd be willing to pay for them... but how do I get all of them without getting prints, for example? You're right about resolution. I should add, however, that I made an amazing 36"x48" poster from a 3 megapixel source. You just need to postprocess the photo (JASC JPEG deblock filter, very slight denoise filter mainly on chroma, judicious careful use of unsharpen, and bicubic scale to 3072x4096). This was of my fountain pen photograph, found at http://www.marky.com/pictures and people can't believe it came from only a 3 megapixel source... A true 15 megapixel source looks a lot better though, but people couldn't tell the difference from a normal 35mm film enlargement. Surprised it came from a lowly 3 megapixel Olympus point-and-shoot. But that's offtopic anyway ... What I really want to use is do slideshow through a laptop connected through my home theater projector. Slideshows from digital photos look great on digital projectors, but original resolution source is a definite need. If anybody from DWR has some original resolution photos (especially photos that include myself), I would be willing to purchase the original digital stills on a CD or by large GMAIL attachments. Not that I know of. I can see that the first photo is about 33kb... You'd have to buy the prints through the service to get the full resolution. They do offer a wide variety of sizes and objects to print on though that are cheaper than what the videographers in the sport charges... I mean, $18.00 for a 16x20? I have paid no less than $60 for that size of a big way before, but the resolution was very high. Unless it was an expensive hi-res camera, these photos won't look good on anything bigger than 5x8...

I did a 9-way formation skydive for my 100th. Was really worth it. I did the preliminary dive planning -- signed up as many good jumpers and instructors as possible for the jump. Got the manifest guy to do a PA announcement in the packing area to recruit some jumpers. That turned out to be 9 including myself, plus a video guy. http://www.marky.com/misc/skydiving/jump100a.jpg (9-Way) http://www.marky.com/misc/skydiving/jump100b.jpg (9-Way) http://www.marky.com/misc/skydiving/jump100c.jpg (SPLAT! But I'm obviously still alive!) I'm the black jumpsuit with the red helmet. Dammit. I caught the jump fever now. I must do a jump in near-freezing weather. Time to go to PARAMAX or Mile High, I guess.