base851

"When we grew up and went to school there were certain teachers who would hurt the children in any way they could..."

Heh. You obviously weren't anywhere near Houston then. We're about as close to "dusty & dry" as Alaska is to sub-tropical.

You are correct sir. It's the same principle that makes Chinese food taste better with chopsticks. As to why I put it in SC. This place has the best flame wars and I like stirring the pot (pun intended) from time to time.

Everything else from the lesser 49 is a cheap imitation. Discuss...

Fair enough, you can have my hook knife. But you'll get my inflatable ducky when you pry it from my cold, dead hands...

1. Purple Mike 2. Ted Biggs 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Since when do internet threads stay on point? But regardless, my point was, people will look at you like you're insane if you don't wear an AAD, yet a hook knife has far more utility in far more situations and people don't even blink about not wearing one. As far as water landings go, I bring my hook knife and inflatable ducky and I'm good to go.

If I had a to choose between jumping with a cypres or a hook knife, give me the hook knife. Yes you might ruin some gear, but I'll take a rigging repair bill over a trip to the morgue any day.

I'll try. Basically all I'm saying is that everything we do is ultimately our own choice and responsibility. But choices should also be informed ones. A DZO who fosters an environment of safety is going to naturally also create an environment where I and others feel comfortable jumping, and of course that benefits the DZO. But the fact remains that the DZO doesn't force me to get onto the plane, exit the plane or ride down with the plane. These are all my choices which I alone make and which are ultimately my own responsibility. So if I go off and do 140 hop-n-pops in order to meet a technical requirement, get into a wingsuit, jump out of a plane and wind up frapping in for whatever reason, who's responsibility was that? Personally I think it was the jumper's.

I just finished reading that letter. My first reaction was "A former BOD member and current DZO can't possibly be that big of a moron." Now, perhaps I'm wrong on that, but I think the real point of his letter isn't that wingsuiting is safe but rather his objection to the onus for a new wingsuiter's safety being on the DZO by policing jump numbers. I'm interpreting his comments about wingsuiting in general as sarcasm and a bit of pushback to the wingsuiting community. In this sense I agree. My attitude about DZs, DZOs and safety have toned down quite a bit after taking up BASE jumping. To me, it's really quite simple. 1. There's only one ass in a parachute harness. 2. Don't write a check that your ass can't cash. When you buy a jump ticket, a DZO owes you one thing... a seat on an airplane. Everything else is your choice and your choice alone. All of this said, a 100-jump-wonder is writing a mighty big check if he decides to huck himself out of a plane in the skydiving equivalent of a straitjacket. Why? Because you will need every bit of confidence, calmness, awareness & knowledge of the principles of flight to keep your ass check from bouncing. And, as luch said, a 100-jump wonder doesn't know what he doesn't know. Hell, I have around 600 skydives and 250 BASE jumps and the only thing I know with certainty is that I don't know shit.

Squeeeeek! That means "heyas!" in flying squirrel!

Wheeee!!!! That was fun daddy! Let's do it again!

Didn't the King of Spain, or some such guy, play the banjo in Deliverance?

Yeah. Chinese food is one of those deals where you either don't know what it is, or you know, without question, PRECISELY what it is... because it's staring at you....

Bonus points to people who can eat Pho with chopsticks....

With chopsticks. And if you don't know how to use chopsticks, you're an uncultured buffoon. Discuss...

Just as a follow-up and correction on my end. I'm working with Klaus to solve the issue I found with importing one of my unit's GPX files. I was mistaken about the nature of the error, though... it doesn't crash Paralog to the desktop. And I must say that Klaus' responsiveness and service is excellent!

The irony of this is that I'm a more-or-less retired BASE jumper and never did wingsuit BASE. Now I'm into wingsuiting and sometimes feel like I'm the only one at the DZ who really doesn't have a big interest in BASE jumping in one.

There's a reason for this. An English friend said to me, I kid you not, "There are two tastes, sweet and savoury". I said "Well no wonder English food is so bad, you only got one of the four basic tastes right." That said, the English do make pretty kickass breakfasts.

Good to know, thanks! I'm a software developer myself so I can probably provide him with some useful debugging info. I'll send him a PM.

A couple of noobish questions about wingsuit RW & line-of-sight issues in light of the recent freefall collision incident. I take it the issue unique to wingsuiters is that we can't form up in a circle, unlike head-down & RW formations. Thus, spreading out is more of a problem because we effectively only have half (or less) of the sky to work with as other disciplines. Additionally, the nature of how we fly is such that our best body position requires our head to be facing in a direction other than the formation. Relying substantially on eye glances and peripheral vision would make it exceptionally more difficult to keep track of everyone... especially when they're travelling at the tremendous speeds that we can. Our big blind spot is above and behind. This may sound ridiculous initially, but has anyone looked into devising some form of rear-view mirror system... a la road bikers or something similar? I would think if we had some sort of assistance in seeing our blind spot, we'd be more able to figuratively "keep our head on a swivel" as other big way disciplines do.

My condolences to the fallen jumpers' family & friends. Fly free my brother.

Tracking Derby looks useful as well, thanks for the link! I've worked with Track Album and I'm liking what I see. One neat little feature is that you can highlight sections of the time graph, and a summary of just that section (including distance, glide ratio, etc) shows up in the left-hand panel. Nice for getting just the wingsuit-related data.

Paralog crashed to the desktop consistently when trying to read in GPX files. It's really an awfully buggy, unstable, expensive (for what you get) piece of software. Which is why I'm not particularly fond of it. I've been playing around with a similar program made for hang gliders called Track-Album. It works as advertised, and skydiving-related information can easily be incorporated into its logbook. It has some glide-related information but its difficult to find. Gonna keep on lookin'...

I may be in the process of answering my own question since I'm not a huge fan of Paralog. The hang-gliding and para-gliding folks also like to use GPS loggers, so I'm evaluating a couple of offerings that they mentioned. I'll keep folks posted on what I find.