DontPanic

I would answer: When you want to constrain a variable to interger values, and not allow the variable to ever become floating point. There are many instances where it makes sense to constrain a variable to whole integers, and where you wouldn't want/need to allow for floating point numbers. For instance, when controlling a loop, such as: for (i=0; i

Make sure and ask around at the DZ. I know Mike and Leanne will offer any advice they can. And we have a bunch of Baton Rouge people. About two years back, when we were still over at Moss Point, someone started a skydiving club at Tulane. Basically, they picked a day, and about 25 of them came over to do tandems (a very few brave souls did an AFF). I know you'll be Mike's hero if you can pull off something like that again.

He's from Louisiana, it's Mardi Gras camo.

It wouldn't surprise me if the State Troopers have trouble cobbling together an extra 150 running trooper cars also.

I literally waited for years to start skydiving because I wanted to go with some friends who talked about doing it, but always backed off whenever I started talking more seriously about skydiving. I'm glad I finally decided to go by myself, and I'm also glad I didn't intimidate them into doing something they probably didn't really want to do.

Hhhhmmmm, I wonder if they're going through this much trouble with all those houses in New Orleans.

I guess I must be in the Angelic category. After doing Beach Jumps into the Flora-Bama at ECSC's Memorial Day Boogie, and of course indulging in the adult refreshments offered at the Flora-Bama, a wuffo friend of mine and myself were driving back in separate cars and came up on a police roadblock. My friend was nursing his drinks all night long out of concern for roadblocks, but I didn't show as much foresight. They waved me right on through after a cursory check of my insurance and license, but had my friend pull over because he was having trouble finding his most recent insurance card.

41. I don't really have any regrets about starting when I did. I'm not sure how much I would have stuck with it 10 or 20 years ago.

That pneumatic brake system makes it sound just like a City Bus when braking during taxing. I had a real blast jumping out of that plane.

Personally, I have also found dialing in the accuracy of a lightly loaded Pilot a little more challenging than for some other canopies. I really like my Pilot, but it has a very flat glide path through a wide range of brake settings. That's great for getting back from a long spot, but makes you work harder for your accuracy. It's been good for me, because it really makes me work on establishing a good pattern, and using the different points of the pattern to dial in my target (as described in "The PARACHUTE and its PILOT" and other canopy piloting resources). I've been working on my C-license accuracy landings. As you've said, when you're with 10 other canopies setting up for their pattern and approach, I tend to concentrate on traffic rather than on hitting that 2-meter accuracy. But at my dropzone, I've had pretty good luck hanging back in brakes and letting most of the people land ahead of me.

Reminds me of that old come-on when you ask a girl if she wants to "try some of Doctor Bob's Magic Root Juice".

There something to be said for this answer. But, if there is too much data for this to be the answer, than I'd just get a second hard-drive, and install WinXP on the second hard disk, leaving the first hard disk alone. If you're not comfortable opening your box and putting in a second hard-disk, then you probably don't want to be playing with re-partitioning either. In fact, the first time you play around with re-partitioning should be on a box that you don't mind trashing if something doesn't work out.

Is it new enough to just send it back to them, and get your money back? Then you could buy another one with XP. And when you say you have all the disks, does that mean you have an extra XP CD (and license key)?

A side of this argument that I don't see anybody bringing up is that it is important to develop a coarse sense of altitude visually as a cross-check to your altimeter. Altimeter's fail. If you've lost altitude awareness, and don't feel you know what altitude you are at, you should probably pull. Conversely, your altimeter may be telling you 12,000 feet, but you may really be at 8,000 feet. I think it's an important skill to work on to be able to roughly tell the difference between 3,000, 6,000, or 9,000 feet.

I hope I didn't confuse too many people. I just wanted to say my observations from the weekend basically are in confirmation with what you are saying: Even 7 or 8 times is to much to make a difference in speeding up the opening. But I didn't want to make too many drastic changes all at once, so I tried 7 or 8 rolls. Again, sorry to be unclear. I was pulling the slider away from my body, towards the tail.

I was reading this post last week with great interest, since I have about the same issue with my Pilot 188. I began to try a few of the things I read here this weekend, so I thought I'd post my results. I wasn't trying to make any big changes, so I tried pulling the slider back some (but still leaving it well quartered), and instead of rolling the tail all the way down until I feel the pack, I backed off a few rolls, but still rolled the tail about 7 or 8 times. I never do anything with the nose, and kept that the same. With these changes, I couldn't notice any difference in my openings. Still snivelling about 600-800 ft. I'm not sure if a bigger pilot chute would help in my case, since my impression is that the pilot chute is doing it's job fairly well, but when I look up during deployment, my canopy sits there in a nice, orderly ball with the slider all the way to the top until I slow down enough for the slider to come down. As some people have noted, I can shake my risers to encourage the slider to come down.

Death is binary. I find life to be kind of nuanced.

Skydiving has more risk than many other things, but many common activities, such as driving a car also have risk. I have always found this post from 2 years ago illuminating. http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1230637;search_string=exposure%20hours;#1230637 Based on fatality rate comparison, you can calculate that a person has the same chance of dieing in a single skydive as driving 676 miles in a car or 29.5 miles on a motorcycle. Since most active skydivers will get several jumps in every time they get out jumping, you can tell that we encounter more risk than a typical driver will encounter. But skydiving risk is probably comparable to an active motorcycle enthusiast, depending on how active each is.

I did a single static line jump in 1997, but didn't jump again until 2004. Even though I took the FJC and made a successful static line jump, it didn't seem right to count the intervening years as participation in the sport, so I just consider myself to have started in 2004 in regards to "years in the sport".

We got tossed off Moss Point's Airport last fall/winter. We've set up camp about 30 miles North in the small hamlet of Lucedale, Mississippi, but we'd have a tough time getting a Boogie going at our current location. Our facilities are a work-in-progress, and we currently reside in a dry county. And we really do need to find a better time to have a Boogie than in February/March (unless Global Warming really starts to kick in). We're doing a respectable job of keeping the DZ going, but I don't thing any special events are high on the list right now. But we'd love to have you drop by if you're in the area.

Man, what an eerie coincidence. This thread just showed up in the Incidents forum about a demo fatality in Worm, Germany that appears to have involved a swoop. http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2404572;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. (Napolean)

We got six plastic chairs, and set them up like bowling pins. Then we got a jumper to volunteer to put on his helmet and lay on one of those creepers you use for training body position. Then we slide him head first into the chairs to see how many you could knock over.

I did my first tandem around jump 160 as a practice dummy. I thought I'd find it boring, but I was surprised at how much fun I had.

Now if you really wanted to make it "Extreme", you'd make it a game of strip poker.