Man, was this a weekend for me and backups! The first one I needed was for my second advance free fall course at skydive101.com on Friday (My Saturday). I jumped out of the plane a little early and one of my two instructors was not ready and did not jump on my call. Thank god I had a backup. Once my shoot deploys, being this is only my second jump out of a perfectly good airplane, I look up to check my slider and make sure my parachute is deployed and everything is correct I did not see my brake handles, I said some curse words I won’t put in this blog, and then was like it is OK I have a backup. I was still at 4000 ft at this time, still having another 1500 feet to decide if I want to release my main and pull the backup, luckily I found my brake handles pulled down twice and they worked and everything was OK.
So I get home after a day of skydiving and having fun in the sun (it is rather rare in Seattle, though not this summer) and I notice my trusty old Windows XP terminal has multiple errors on it. I do the first thing I always do with my personal Microsoft machines and reboot it. Ouch no operating system found, bad hard drive! Thank god I ghosted that machine 2 weeks ago as I figured the old IDE drives had been on their last legs. Saturday morning comes around, which is a big day for me, as I am hosting a party that night at a local night club. I notice I have a few (8900) email messages on my blackberry, so I decided it is about time to delete some. I tell it to delete, look back at it and 4 minutes later it says APP ERR. PLEASE RESTART. Needless to say, you guessed it. It wouldn’t boot back up and I had to force an OS onto it, and restore from my backup of a month ago, which reminded me that I need to start backup my blackberry more often.
So the moral of the story is, it is always good to have a backup, and we have plenty of backup options for you, so if you don’t have one, I would suggest contacting SLales. I would also suggest everyone trying to skydive at least once in their lifetime.