MarkM

I'm with State Farm and they're pretty cheap with bikes so long as you have your car with them.

They're too busy making kick ass rigs.

Are you jumping very infrequently? If you don't do a lot of jumps when you go out to the DZ and take long breaks between jumping that might contribute to your anxiety.

Even if it hadn't been cocked, you're supposed to check your gear before you get on the plane. It's the jumper's fault for getting on that plane without taking 2 seconds to check the kill line window.

I've had this twice on my rig. But my packer always checks to make sure the PC is inflated after the pin is set(swings the PC around). It's no big deal to just pull a little of the line out to make sure it really had just slipped, or if it really bothers you you can have the packer repack the PC. It takes what, 2 seconds to check your kill line window before putting your rig on?

Seen it open at SOBE once too. It was kind of unusual for that DZ, but the view was good, Olav was working the door and I sure as hell wasn't going to say anything about it to him. I figured most DZs kept the door closed so the pilot didn't have any extra drag on takeoff.

Hmmm, next time just put your foot on her and give a little shove : 6 : 1 6 jumps, 1 beer owed for my first heads up falling position. Not quite a sit yet, but it's getting there.

Buy a lotto ticket, because from the way the incident sounded you're the luckiest SOB on the planet. Keep doped up and get well soon.

Damn dude, that pretty much sums it up perfectly. I have no idea if there's anything beyond death, but when I'm at the door of it, I want to look back and be satisfied with the life I lived. A big part of that includes how I treated other people and if the world was a better place because I was in it. I don't need to cure cancer, just make sure a few people here and there were really glad I was around.

I have a Triathlon which doesn't snivel too bad. I like to prep for deployment at slightly above 4k: I turn to face where I want to fly after the opening(towards the LZ and facing away from anyone else) and mentally calm down. My set pull altitude is 3500, but I'll usually start a relaxed throw between that and 4k. I figure if I total I should notice something wrong by 3k and that'll give me 10 seconds of useful time to figure out the problem and deal with it. Usually by the time I flip up my visor, collapse the slider and turn towards the LZ and unstow my breaks I'm at 2500. That's worked real well for me in getting back to the LZ on long spots and allows me to pick a pattern that's traffic light. If I see everyone doing a right hand pattern, I'll fly over and set up for a left hand one. If I'm in a group dive I prefer to break off 1500 feet above my deployment, but even breaking off at 5k sometimes means I won't make a 3500 pull. Sometimes one of those will have a deployment go a little low towards 3k, which doesn't bug that much. I'll do a 3k, I just prefer 3500.

Did both, but it's hard to say since my level 1 AFF wasn't a "first jump" and my level 1 SL jump was. Personally I was afraid of failure more than anything else and I think AFF has more going on that you can fail on.

Jeez. You do one spanish inquisition and they never let you live it down

Hmmm, morality is a type of behavior that is set by any given society. People in that society should be moral, because otherwise that society couldn't function well with itself. Societies that don't function well are wiped out by those that do. At its core, morality is a social structure based in our biology. Just like wolves have an alpha male that sets structure in a pack, humans have laws, religion and moral codes. Moral codes can be the least strict of the structures and most easily bent or adapted within our constantly evolving societies.

Uh yeah, that's what really happened.

Heh, now every DZ dot commer that's passing through Sebastian knows how to annoy skybytch.

What I don't get is why we can pack, repack and jump a main 1000 times and it'll still be good, but do 20 repacks or so on a reserve and it's worn out?

I don't think it was a good article, because it didn't really cover the alternate side of the issue. Personally I'm "pro-wall", I think building walls between nations is needed from time to time, but I prefer a less biased coverage of it.

I don't think it's men that will be making the choice, the women will. If women as a whole start going just by looks, rather than whatever they go by today, then makeup for men will probably catch on.

It's happened. I'd like to die like my grandfather did, a quick heart attack at a family event surrounded by the ones I love. Though I don't know if I'd want to go at my granddaughter's wedding reception like he did. Pros: What an awesome positive event to go out on. Cons: Kind of sucks for your granddaughter, may be considered a bad omen for the wedding by some

The truly sad thing is, in 50 years this could be the norm. The common makeup women wear now only started in the 1920's. I'm sure at the time there was a lot of negativity over it. Personally I wish the trend would go the other way. I really like women who go more au natural.

I will definately get a couple more full capacity mags for my Glock 19C. I already have 2, but could use some more and I'll probably toss my 10 rounders. If I lived in the countryside I'd definately get a nice rifle. I hear AR-15s are just fun as hell to shoot. But I'd doubt I'd be buying any new guns, my 19 and 26 are perfect for urban areas. Actually, it'll be nice just to be able to have a good supply of full capacity mags. One benefit my 9mm has over higher cals is it's supposed to be able to hold more bullets.

That's really the core problem. The terrorists during 9/11 used freaking box cutters for Christ sake. Are you telling me a plane full of 100+ people can't take down a couple guys with box cutters? The problem is people are brainwashed to bow down to authority. Don't do anything other than inform the authories and sit around like a helpless sheep waiting to be saved. We don't even teach critical thinking in schools. Civics class? Debate teams? Screw that, just sit in your chair, memorize what I write on the blackboard and regurgitate it back up for the exam next week. I mean shit, she was complaining about eating utinsels in the restaraunts between flights. "Jesus No! He's got a butterknife! Don't move!!!"

I'm very non-acheivement oriented when I skydive. Most skydivers I run into seem like they're competing against themselves, they're sort of on a strict path to become better and better. I can understand that desire, but don't share in it. Some of them don't really grok that and it's caused a little friction for me now and again. I do have loose set goals, but they're mostly skills or abilities I'm looking to improve on to make myself safer or to open up new areas of the sport. If you wanna freefly you gotta learn to sit. If you wanna skyfly you have to be a skilled tracker, and so on. So you can't not have goals if you want to do more than fly on your belly solo. I spent a large part of my life driving myself on goals and it had a destructive impact on my life that still follows me. Skydiving for me is, as totalwreck put it, pure therapy.

So is there a class of guys that go around saying, "All my best friends are female"?

Was that supposed to be "protection"? Hmmm, Freudian slip?