faulknerwn

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Everything posted by faulknerwn

  1. faulknerwn

    Snow

    Snow in Central TX! And a lot of it! Craziness. Have an inch or two already and its sposed to keep snowing all day...
  2. We have a guy coming out to do AFF who is a double amputee above the knee. He's done several tandems with no problems, but we're going to need to figure out AFF. We have a tunnel at the dz now so we're definitely going to do some tunnel time figuring things out. We've also got emails into some Pieces of 8 skydivers for their suggestions. Things we're trying to figure out - harness fit - i.e. make sure he doesn't accidently fall out of the harness.. Balance - legs versus arms and body position and such in freefall. He can't really move the lower legs - they'll be locked in place. Landing - we don't want a bad landing causing further injury. PLFing may be hard and/or sliding landings since he can't pick up his legs. Any ideas and or suggestions on how to help him fulfill his dream of learning to skydive would be greatly appreciated. FYI He is miitary who was injured serving his country.. We want to help him...
  3. Look in the classifieds on here. Or post your expired one for sale. I sold a bunch of dz ones to a Russian here a year or so ago for $40 each..
  4. I love Dublln. Definitely the Temple Bar area for partying and such. Touring the Guinness Factory is a must. They have a bus tour thing during the day where you can get on and off at your leisure at various sites.. I did a pub crawl when I was there - I think mine had something to do with Dublin writers or something but the tourist information center had lots of info on the various ones. It was actually a lot of fun. Visit the IPC parachute center while you're there. Great people, real friendly. Just watch out for sheep! And good luck finding good food in Dublin - only good food I ever found was in pubs (standard pub fare), and for breakfast - the Irish can make a good breakfast.
  5. Yeah I had 48 jumps when I got off student status. Did 20 actual static lines, and a bunch of freefalls. Did 2 attempts at AFF Level 2 but when they sent me back to Level 1 I decided that I would go back to flunking static lines cuz it was cheaper :-) I always pulled though! Funny thing is - I don't even hold the record for student jumps on my dz. A 60ish year old lady did her AFF a few years back and did like 43 level 4's. I think 49 jumps total.. She was too stubborn to quit just like me! She's got about 800 jumps now.. Heck, I remember hearing the story a few years back by a very famous skydiver - he actually had an AAD fire on student status!
  6. Did anyone fall from an airplane and survive? Oddee's post today: http://www.oddee.com/item_96967.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Oddee+(Oddee)
  7. Within a week or two depending on weather
  8. We have a PAC 750 here for the spring. Hope for good weather!
  9. That picture was taken in Florida (where this tunnel was moved from.) I meant to take some pictures of its assembly yesterday but forgot and its raining now so it'll have to wait...
  10. We are installing a 10 foot wind tunnel at Skydive Temple right now. Wind speed is about 125, so belly-flying or really slow freeflying only. Its all here from Florida, and is being assembled right now (the rain slows things down a bit though!) Hopefully it will be open soon!
  11. I'm a geek so I'd take a book over a video any day of the week. I work well with 1 on 1 instruction but most classes go so insanely painfully slow for me I fall asleep. My FJC 16 years ago took 2 hours cuz it was one-on-one and the instructor didn't insist on going slow when I understood stuff.
  12. I would actually say the opposite. On a big canopy where minor adjustments take a bunch of movement - land with both toggles in one hand. On a small canopy where an inch of toggle can have you turning into the ground - land with stowed and PLF. I've actually done a fair amount of steering up high with both toggles in one hand - and its a challenge! All your instincts are backwards. No way would I do it down low because I am pretty sure I would accidently hook turn myself into the ground. If you have even the slightest history of shoulder injuries - on a few jumps now when you have 2 good shoulders - try to steer with both toggles in one hand (and its very often not your dominant hand) Even better - try to stay close to a buddy flying nearby (not docking or anything but close enough you can recognize what you're doing) and see how preicse your steering is. Every instinct is kind of backwards and certainly me, and I'm certain many others, would find it very challenging on small canopies. If I had a one-handed landing on a small canopy I would never attempt to do two handed cuz its way too hard to do minor corrections without unintentionally flying yourself into the ground. I would in a heartbeat on a big canopy because it takes so much more effort to hurt yourself. I highly recommend trying it up high now with 2 good arms and see what you think.
  13. I actually disagree there. It takes me 15-20 minutes to put out a DVD on Imovie/IDVD but with all sorts of built in cool shit. The standard intro from IDVD has their skydive morphed into a photo album and they LOVE it. Our typical Mac Transitions have pages of a photo album flipping though - it looks cool. Many of our tandem students have said they sent friends here because of how cool their video was - and it wasn't because of spectacular video-flyer-heroics - it was the cool shit that Mac stuff does out of the box. I am trying to get a green wall done here soon because Imovie does a great green screen effect with no effort and it would be cool on the videos. The standard response I get from tandem students is that our video looks more professional than others - and in all honesty its the software which does insanely cool stuff built in.. The nice thing is - I can do all that fancy shit and the actual editing time (not import or burning but actual editing) is 2 minutes on a slow day, 1 minute on a fast one. Its made so easy. The burning and such takes time, but the video guy can be moving on to the next thing, and tandems don't really mind hanging out for 15 minutes after a jump cuz they're so excited...
  14. Yeah I would pull reserve, use left riser to steer, and PLF with the brakes stowed. My reserves are in the 120-135ish range, and I know how much coordination it takes to steer with both toggles in one hand. Its frigging hard to do well especially when incapacitated! I'm not coordinated enough to pull it off low to the ground...
  15. How bad is the fogging issues on the Raynox? Looking around, that lens is twice the price of the Raynox at Adorama... Its a lot of cash for a lens.. I just have always jumped cheap lenses with no fogging issues so wonder whether its worth spending all that extra money.
  16. Do you have any fogging issues with that? I currently have been jumping a Sony PC330 with a cheap Ebay lens and have never had any fogging issues. But I was reading on here about tons of people having major fogging issues with Raynox lenses.. I just found a barely used cx100 on amazon for $299 so I snatched it up, but am now contemplating lenses. Was not sure whether I wanted the Raynox 3035 or the 5050 - I currently use a .45 on my current camera and its wide without being fisheye. I wasn't sure how fisheye the smaller Raynox lens would look. And in researching it I came across the fog issues.. So this is what I'm looking for: A lens which matches similarly to a .15 or so on the Canon 10-22 still lens Not crazy fisheye - don't want to make the tandems look funny Not prone to major fogging issues Which lens would be best? Anyone? I do live in Central Texas where we do have clouds and humidity. My current setup NEVER fogs - I'd love to replicate that. And its just a cheap $30 Ebay .45 lens
  17. I found a web page which listed lots of possibilities for fixing things from reregistering to dlls to nuking the updates history. It's all working now yay! (and you people are more useful than my facebook friends - they gave me lots of helpful advice like 'reboot the router'
  18. Actually I should say it's almost fixed :). I can browse webpages but I decided to run windows update since if he didn't have sp3 who knows what else he didn't have. It just spins forever and never stops
  19. Woohoo! Sp3 did the trick. It must have mucked something up the first time it tried to install. Thanks everyone for the help!
  20. The netsh stuff didn't change anything, nor did a winsock fix program. I'm downloading SP3 now (on my Mac) and will try to install that next. Since that's what he did right before the issues started maybe it will help..
  21. Yeah I was a Unix Admin for 15 years and exclusively use Macs myself :-) That's how I solve having Windows problems. Unfortunately others seem to bring these problems to me! Got a good night's sleep and will try some of these suggestions this morning!
  22. It does have symantic but shutting off it and firewalls doesn't change anything. Will try hijack this in the morning. My suspician is definitely that some file somewhere got corrupted when he blue screened he only has sp2 on this machine - I wonder whether the update he said to install that bluescreened was sp3? Will ask him in the morning nsswitch.conf in unix tells the box what order to look up names (dns nis hosts )just wonder whether there is a similar file inbwindows that got corrupted or something
  23. Surprisingly enough it doesn't work. I still can't go to it except by ip is there an equivalent of the unix nsswitch.conf in windows?