Canopyflyer

Audiobooks.

Music is fine, but I actually find I will make more time to exercise if I’m listening to a good book.

I’m a RUSH fan that is neurodivergent…

You can probably guess.

Transistors.

The first working transistor was created in 1947. Before then it was just vacuum tubes. Less than 80 years later the modern world relies completely on its existence.

You use billions of them in your everyday life.

Hobby: Skydiving

1. Free fall is at most 65 seconds on a normal jump. My personal record is jumping from 28,000 feet and I was in free fall for around 85 seconds. That’s it, there is no such thing as a 5 minute free fall, unless you are looking to break an altitude record.

2. If you run up to a skydiver and pull their Pilot Chute (PC) out and throw it into the wind, nothing will happen. The gear is designed to work at free fall speeds. A 10mph wind will not pull the main out. If you pull on the PC bridle hard enough to actually pull the main out of its compartment… You will just have a main parachute in its deployment bag closed by rubber bands, or other method and it will just be laying on the ground. You will also get a well deserved punch in the mouth by more than one jumper. If you pull the reserve handle you will probably get murdered and there will be no witnesses, especially if the hanger was full of jumpers. They will just hide your body and you will have deserved your fate.

3. BASE jumping and Skydiving are as related as Hockey and Figure Skating. Sure there is some overlap, but one cannot do the other without training. Also BASE is an acronym. Building, Antenna, Span, Earth. Bridges fall under Span BTW. No, I am not a BASE jumper, although I have jumped the Bridge in WV. So yeah, I guess I have my S.

4. Yes, wing suites are cool. Wish I had more jumps on them.

5. You cannot talk in free fall. The old movie trope of talking back and forth is simply not possible. How difficult is it to talk in a car with the windows open going down the road at 70mph? Now, remove the windshield and drive the car 120mph…

6. The “parachute not opening” is not even in the top 10 concerns when jumping. The gear works and we jump with two chutes. There is a whole lot of bullshit that can happen before we get to deployment altitude. Not the least of which is just getting to the DZ in the morning. I always considered my drive to the DZ my most dangerous part of the day. Second most dangerous is being in the airplane. I’m actually relieved to exit the aircraft as at that point I have a better chance of making it to the ground safely than the pilot.

Yes, I have several of various types and use them extensively.

They are not necessary to cook, they are necessary to cook consistently.

One of my brothers adopted a baby from Guatemala. He was a beautiful baby that grew up into a good man. He is 20 this year.

I knew that my mother and by extension my father were bigoted. She had made numerous comments while I was growing up that revealed that aspect of her. With that said, I had never seen her act upon it though. During a phone conversation with her we were talking about my new nephew and she stated: “He’ll never be a real grandchild.” When I asked why, she flatly stated because he was Latino. To me that was the point that I lost all respect for her. My Dad was a massive enabler as well.

She also showed a strong preference for those children/ grandchildren that looked like her. Brown hair with brown eyes.

She died in 2011 the week that the tsunami hit Japan. My life became a lot better after that. Dad died last year and I did not even go to his funeral.

My girlfriend and I had been dating for about 5 months and were serious. We went for a day hike at a local park. Our conversation during the hike went to talking about the future and similar topics. Out of curiosity, I asked; “Do you want to get married?” Not meaning it as an actual proposal, but rather just to get her thoughts. I didn’t have a ring, nor was I on one knee. Yet she responded with an enthusiastic “YES”! We started planning the wedding the next day.

Here we are 20 years later, married happy as ever and our oldest is graduating high school and going on to University, our youngest is finishing up 9th grade.

I guess I found out what she was thinking!

Truth be told though, we were both 34 years old and neither of us had been married before. So it’s not like we were teenagers making a rash decision. We were thirty somethings making a rash decision. That’s different… Right?

The full story there is that we were at an Orthopedic urgent care. My wife has danced Ballet since she was 4. A bad jump resulted in a 5th metatarsal fracture, commonly referred to as a “dancer’s break” and a severely sprained ankle. She was in a boot and crutches for 5 weeks. Her ankle literally had all the colors of a sunset. The Orthopedist took her shoe an sock off and actually gasped.

My wife: Getting old sucks.

Me: It beats the alternative:

My wife after a few moment of reflection: Not by much.

You always were an asshole Gormon.

Raspberry, Dark Chocolate, Chambord. The Chocolate Passion Cookbook has my absolute favorite cake ever on its cover. My wife makes it for me every birthday. If she doesn’t make it for me, she makes it for our oldest’s birthday, which is only 2 weeks after mine.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Used this against my controlling mother, who liked to lay BS at my feet and make me think it was my responsibility to fix. When it was HER that caused the whole thing. The look on her face when I hit her with that phrase and just turned around and left was priceless.

There a LOT of things that are just flat not your problem, even if someone else tries to make it yours.

8 way skydive. Two friends were getting married and they wanted to do a formation skydive as part of their wedding ceremony. They were going to get married, then 8 of us would get into the plane and do an 8 way formation dive. Land and eat cake.

The problem was they were both low time jumpers, with about 70 jumps each. The other 6 jumpers were all highly experienced, so we tried to make it work. The jump in question was a practice jump about a month before the wedding.

The bride fell out of the formation and went low. Meaning she was below everyone else and was continuing to get even lower. People in a formation will fall more slowly than an individual.

The formation of 7 other jumpers gets to about 5000ft and she is about 500ft below us and just sitting there. She is making no moves to track out and it is becoming a very dangerous situation. Then she starts waving off, which is what you’re supposed to do right before deploying your parachute. We all see it, break the formation turn and burn. The jumper to my right videoed the whole thing. By happenstance I was the closest to her. The video shows me in a full track when she and her deploying main parachute come into frame. I might have missed her by about 20ft. Later she told me I sounded like a jet airplane passing by.

Everyone needed a change of underwear after that jump. I grounded her except for coached jumps, which I took on myself. I did about 15 jumps with her over the next month with increasing number of people until it clicked with her on how formation skydiving actually works.

We did not get to do the jump the day of the wedding unfortunately. Just after the nuptials were completed and we were to head to the airplane an intense thunderstorm blew in grounding the planes. We still held the reception in the hanger though and it was a good time. We did the wedding jump a couple of weeks later and sent the video to all the wedding guests.

But yeah, it was pretty fucking scary.

Told a janitor to not unplug the equipment rack in a closet to plug in their vacuum cleaner. Why they thought that plugging in their vacuum there, rather than just using the outlet not 6 feet away outside the closet is beyond me.

Further, why that closet wasn’t locked in the first place. But this was almost 30 years ago and it was another time in IT.

I spoke with the janitor and she started plugging in her vacuum in the adjacent outlet. Then I went to the director of IT and got the capitol cost approved to secure all of the networking closets in the building, which there were 6, one for each floor. Only the one floor was an issue as that closet also house a sink and drain for the janitors to use. There wasn’t another place we could move the networking equipment to without laying out a lot of money.

That might be true at this moment. In another year? It will be used by billionaires to buy another island, or politician.

SS will be privatized, then that private company will go bankrupt in the next few years and all the money in SS now, will be “mysteriously” gone.

Fellow X’er here. My wife and I have worked with a financial consultant for the last 20 years. From the get go she said not to count on SS at all.

We have always considered all that money we paid into it to be just… Gone. That’s pretty much a reality now.

I hope the billionaires enjoy what our money buys for them. It will probably be another politician.

I find distressed audio equipment and bring them back to life.

Here is a photo of some of the pieces I’ve worked on:

Top Shelf:

Adcom GP-555 It’s actually dead. I cannot get the left channel to work at all. Resoldered the entire signal path, replaced the opamps, cleaned the controls, bypassed the controls… Just cannot find where the issue is…

McIntosh MC7108: On/off circuit issues. This one I didn’t really fix, just bypassed the affected circuit, because I don’t care about turning it on and off via a switch. I use it every day.

Second Shelf:

Carver TFM-15cb: Needed new lights in the meters and the input level pots cleaned. That is all the one pictured needed. I have another one that required the same things, but also had to recap it. The one in the photo will need new capacitors before too long. Great sounding amps, but not very well built.

Bottom Shelf:

Soundcraftsman PRO-PA2X200: This is actually an amp my wife has owned for over 30 years. The power supply caps went out and needed to be replaced.

Here is a photo of said capacitors:

Been in a plane crash.

It was a Beech 18 that experienced fuel starvation on climb out. The pilot raised the gear and belly landed it in a freshly tilled corn field off the end of the runway. It was a lot like being in a car accident, just lasted longer with a lot more rending metal noises. The port engine was ripped off and was sitting about 50 feet behind where the plane came to rest.

It wasn’t cool, believe me…

Chili (I modified the “Joy of Cooking’s” McCleod chili recipe with fresh chilis and roasted red peppers)

Julia Child La Beouf Bourguignon (This actually gets better the longer it sits in the fridge).

Baked Ziti (Cooks Illustrated)

Chicken Tinga (Bon Appetite recipe)

Quite the metaphor mixing you’re doing there.

Must say I rather like it.