Dallas Snowboarders: Two Weeks Later

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A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned DallasSnowboarders.com. We did some basic promotion by announcing the site in a few places online and started spreading the word of mouth. In the past two weeks we have had about 15,000 page loads. As of the time of this post, we have 29 registered users. If we can maintain such a good pace, we should be a very respectable looking community in a few months to a year. I bet we outgrow our software quickly.

Only time will tell if such an oddball nitch for a community will work out. We’re having our first get-together this Thursday. If nothing else, I’m glad to meet more local snowboard enthusiasts.

Snowboard on Pavement: The T Board

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T BoardI found an ad for this thing while researching a movie full of snowboarding ladies called “As If“. Now, I’m not sure who the target market is for this product. While I’m sure an all female cast will appeal to all those young ladies dreaming of becoming a snowboarding pro… I somehow think it might appeal to a whole lot of the boys. I’m not so sure about that box cover though…. So, back to the topic…

While researching, I happened across a press release for something called the T-Board. I’d reference the site I found it on if I could find it again. Anyway, thing looks like large inline skateboard. It actually looks like a whole lot of fun, regardless of how close to snowboarding it actually is. The only problem is, if I got one, I have no idea where I’d ride it… I live in a relatively flat area. Maybe I could get someone to pull me with a bicycle and tell people we’re land-wakeboarding???

Yoga: Recommended For Snowboarding

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Yoga PoseWell, I’m no expert. In fact, I’m just about as novice as one can be without being entirely clueless. I just completed (less than 30 minutes ago) my first Yoga class. While it was mostly what I expected, I was still surprised. Some of the positions really challenged me – to the extent that I failed to complete everything the teacher took us through… and it was a light routine.

However, it wasn’t so much the strength stuff that made me think this fit well for snowboarding. It was a combination of the stretching (pretty obvious) and the balance (perhaps a little less obvious). I sorta found myself looking at myself in the mirror while balanced on one foot and my arms raised up above my head thinking, “this is probably going to be really helpful.” When we were leaning way over to one side and the teacher was saying “you’re between two walls of glass,” it was easy to imagine myself trying to keep a nice flat stance while strapped to a board.

I’ve actually heard other snowboarders talking about the benefits of Yoga and even had a friend who’d stay behind in the mornings to do some stretches while the rest of us would hurry off to the lifts. However, now that I’ve tried it first hand, I can recommend it. I’ll also likely continue to do it.

My Kemper Storm 156

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Kemper Storm 156cm SnowboardI was digging around on google trying to find information on my old Kemper board (aka, the beater board). I’m pretty sure I got it in the spring of 01 so it’s probably either an 01 or an 00. It’s a Kemper Storm 156cm. It’s the first board I’ve owned, the board I learned on, and it’s been pretty good to me. I was a little sad to see that there weren’t any pictures of it online. I guess it’s just that old. Anyway, since google image search yielded no images of the Storm, I figured I’d take a picture of mine and put it online. While I found no pics, I did manage to find one short review:

this is a really good board! i bought it about a year ago and i only had to get it refinished once. the flex is increditable and its strong! i was doing stupid things with my friends and i saw a little jump so i tryed a frontflip over it and got my tail stuck in the ground. i thought that was the end of the good old kemper but when i can down on it, it flung the snow and dirt up! its very strong! and this board carves great and handles even better in the air! i can spin my 540s alot my clean. they use to be all skechy. its not the lights board but i like that. i would tell anyone thats a pretty good boarder to buy this board.

No award for grammar there… but I agree. It’s a fairly light board considering the age. It’s also very strong. And, oddly enough, I didn’t have to get this board waxed for years. I sorta left it outside for a winter and the edges started to rust so I finally did get it waxed and edged. Afterwards, it was slower than ever before. Maybe it was just a bad wax job, but I had to get several coats of wax put on to get it back to the same performance level it was at after years of riding without waxing. Strange.

It was cheap – boots, board and bindings were around $250. It’s a crap board compared to my 05 Burton Custom, but I don’t think I would have known the difference when I was first learning to ride… and besides, 4 years is a huge gap in snowboard technology. The Storm has taken a lot of abuse and I still loan it out for friends to ride – usually to learn on. Since it’s a bit shorter than my Custom (156 vs 162) and considerably more worn – I’m probably going to use it mostly as a park board from now on.

A week and five days away.

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My LaptopA week and five days from now I should be on a bus half way to Winter Park. If you ever read my journal, you already know this. So yesterday concluded my heavy weight training. From here, it’s low-weight/high-reps, lotsa cardio, and a slightly better diet.

My body isn’t the only thing I want to work on before I go. I intend to bring my laptop so I can clear the photos and movies off of my camera each day. The problem is that my laptop’s card reader isn’t currently working. I have a Dell Inspiron 630m with an integrated card reader running Ubuntu 6.10 aka Edgy Eft. What the hell is an Eft? Anyway, the Linux kernel that comes with 6.10 is 2.6.17. The kernel that supports my card reader hardware is 2.6.18. So, to get my card reader working, I have to do something I’ve never done (by myself) before: compile a new kernel. I’m nervous as I really don’t want to blow my laptop up. I *could* just use my external card reader… however, it irks me to have hardware on my laptop that I can’t use. Can we get three cheers for open source software? Still, it beats Windows XP any day of the week.

I’ve also been making the last of my purchases. Today I snagged a Demon Wheelie Bag for $60. I really have no idea what the quality of the bag is. Most wheelie bags I’ve found start at $100 and quickly run up to over $200. I barely missed a $150 bag for $50 on craig’s list recently (arg). Anyway, here’s hoping the Demon bag is good for the money.

I also took some time to try on helmets. I’m glad I went shopping instead of getting on online. I tried on a dozen helmets, easily. I found two that fit well enough to consider buying, and only one that I really liked. The best fit for my head was the Giro G10. (I would link you directly to the helmet on their site, but like so many companies, Giro doesn’t realize that using pure flash prevents people like me from promoting their products with a direct url link… less dumb please!). The helmet runs just over $100 (about $110). The built in headphones were another $30. That puts me at about $150 for a really nice setup. I was hoping for $15. Still, if I damage my head, it will probably cost more than $150 to patch it back up. I’m just having a hard time putting the money out. For this trip, I might just borrow a crappy helmet from a friend.

ZR700 w/my picAnd this brings me to my last purchase consideration. I would like to get a hand-held video camera. I’m on a tight budget. I think that a good zoom will be a pretty important feature. Given that the slopes are usually white, I don’t think I need to worry about low light quality. I originally thought I wanted a mini-DV cam. With all this in mind, I was originally completely sold on the JVC GR-D650. For less than $350, I can get 25x zoom and a pretty sharp picture. Then, for a comparable feature set, and slightly less money, the JVC was pushed aside for a Cannon ZR700. I still get the 25x zoom, but for less than $300. (By the way, if you’re reading this and you’re looking for a comparable camera with better low light, check out the Cannon Elura 100). However, all this research was focused on a miniDV cam. I’ve recently considered checking into other media and ended up reading this:

Given their ease of use and the fact that they potentially eliminate the need for media, it’s a wonder that hard-drive-based camcorders still haven’t replaced DVD-based camcorders in the post-MiniDV world. After all, a camcorder the likes of Sony’s Handycam DCR-SR40 can store as much as 440 minutes of MPEG-2 video in its highest-quality setting on its built-in 30GB hard drive. Dropping to the lowest-quality option bumps that up to 1,250 minutes.

The upshot is that the video is ready to move to my computer with ease. I imagine that this would save me a lot of time. I have no idea what kind of software tools have improved the miniDV to digital video file process, but the last time I did it required recording the digital video file real time. That’s no fun.

The downside is that the low end camera runs a couple of hundred dollars more. There’s also the fact that the camera has a hard drive. I don’t know if this is an issue or not. Hard drives traditionally don’t like being bumped hard, and this might happen if I wipe out while I have the camera with me. However, iPods also have hard drives, and snowboarders love them. In fact, I’ve never heard of an iPod’s hard drive being damaged when someone fell with it. (Does this happen???)

Anyway, if anyone has a camcorder recommendation, please let me know. I’ve got a week and five days to decide if I’m gonna spend the money.

14 Days and Counting

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Wil Filming JP in some deep powder.Well, I’ve got about 14 days until the snowboarding trip. A friend of mine linked me to and entry on Wil Everts’ blog called Day 45: Morning Commute. She sent me there to see the video on the page… knowing it would get me stoked for my trip. The first part is some snazzy lift riding (hard core to the bone, lemme tell ya)… but then, they go DOWN the mountain. For something so simple, it sure was wonderful. No crazy freestyle tricks or nutty grinds… just a wonderful run through some rather deep powder. And really, the powder was the star of this video. See the snap shot I took from the end of the video? That’s either Wil or his friend Wil’s friend JP. See the powder all over him? That’s not from falling down.

I can’t wait to go. I’ve been with my gym routine for 4 weeks now. This last time, I had a voice in my head encouraging me by talking about the snowboarding trip… so I over did it a little and I’m very sore. This made me realize that after this week, I should probably stop with the heavy weight lifting. I don’t think I’d have much fun if my body hurts before I even get there. So next week will be lots of cardio and lots of lighter reps.

I still need to get that helmet, snowboard bag, and video camera. I really want the video camera, but it might just be beyond my budget this year. Here’s hoping… if not, maybe I can borrow one from work. I’m also planning to get few drones under 100 as they can help me get great snaps of the region and of course me. I have seen many people stand on the sides and control drones right behind the people snowboarding to get great shots. I hope I get some fantastic videos of me snowboarding as well.

Anyway, I gotta get back to imagining myself in 4 feet of powder… I mean work.. err.. something.

Open Source Social Networking

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Social Networking is easy. Any user can jump online and join one of hundreds of social networking sites. The “friends list” concept is popping up all over the place. You can find social networks for posting pictures, videos, and even finding dates. Perhaps it’s the ease of use that enables them to be so popular.

What I would like to see happen next wouldn’t be as “easy” as our current batch of social networks. Because it’s not easy, I don’t expect the idea to ever take off. Still, I would like to see it happen just as much.

I would like to abstract the friends list concept entirely. This would also require abstracting the identity concept entirely (see OpenID and Sxip). Anyway, the concept is such that you manage a mast friends list somewhere. This would contain considerably more complex information than what most social networks offer now. It would allow for grouping, would show number of hops between you and another person, and would allow for public/private view management. Above all else, it would be build such that you are not locked into any one platform. If you build a personal home page, you could write an app that enables your social network. If you installed a piece of popular web software for content management on your personal site, it would include plugins to activate your social network.

Basically, what I’m getting at, is removing the social network from the walled garden of a service provider. Now instead of having a profile on a service, you have your own website that you can develop as you see fit.

I think that this concept will eventually happen in one form or another. It’s taking a while for the identity management stuff to catch on so I’m sure it will be a long time. I’ve thought about the problem in a few different ways and I’m not sure what the best method of solving the problem would be. Maybe it’s built on something as simple as defining relationships in your anchor tags.

Just thinking out loud about this one. If anyone knows of projects of this nature, please let me know.

A New Virtual Community: DallasSnowboarders.com

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There’s nothing particularly unique about the virtual community I helped launch recently. The community is for the small but quickly growing group of snowboarding enthusiasts in the Dallas area. Thus, the site is appropriately called Dallas Snowboarders.

Here’s our banner:

As I said, there’s not much unique about it. We used PHPBB as our forum software with a few extra mods for a photo album, calendar, and ability to post video. We stacked WordPress up front for a very basic content management system. We didn’t take the time to integrate the authentication databases so we turned comments off. We’d rather keep user interaction inside the forums right now anyway.

An important topic came up while working on the site… WordPress and PHPBB are almost exactly the same concepts in software with a slightly different delivery. What PHPBB would consider to be a thread, WordPress would call a blog entry. Someone posts a topic, other people reply. The differences are slight, but have a heavy impact. On the blog, posts are always ordered by the date of the original post, not replies. On a forum, threads are bumped to the top when new replies appear. Blogs are usually setup with only one or just a few people making new posts. Forums usually allow anyone to start a new thread.

Given that the data management for both pieces of software are so close to the same… We talked a long time about building one piece of software that did both. It would be very easy to use PHPBB as backend software for a blog. Create a forum where only select users can start new threads, write some new scripts to display the content in a blog style format, and you’ve got a blog. Once you get this setup, you can create unique forums for every user that wants a personal blog.

I’m curious if this is a good way to create two conceptual interfaces for the same data.

Anyway, I digress. DallasSnowboarders.com is one of the first communities I’ve been involved in launching in a while. The last time I checked, we were up to 14 users. We announced the site 4 days ago. I hope it catches on, I’m eager to meet local boarders.

Getting Into Shape

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Healthy FoodIn three weeks, I’ll be getting on the bus headed to Winter Park. For the past three weeks, I’ve been frequenting the gym in an effort to get into decent physical shape for the trip and consuming healthy CBD oil after checking the review of it from Healthy Body Healthy Mind site to make my hair and skin better. There are so many ways to use CBD Hemp Flower – making Hemp Flower an easy and approachable product that can bring a positive impact to almost everyone. I went every day for the first week and several times a week until now. Each gym trip I’ll start by consuming my healthy supplement (Isalean Shake), which you can navigate here to see more on it as it helps to build my endurance while I run. I’ll follow with some stretches, crunches, and leg lifts to keep some steady attention on my core with every work out. Then I’ll focus weight training on one region – either my legs, my core, or my arms. I also did some mountain biking and rock climbing in there to mix things up a bit.

I’ve also made an effort to eat more ‘good’ food. I still eat a lot of crap, but not as much as I had been. I’ll eat a really heathly dinner right after the gym only to eat a p b & j later on that night. Since I’m more focused on being strong and having endurance, I don’t mind eating a few extra calories. I’d rather eat a little too much than not have enough calories for my muscles to grow.

All this working out isn’t as fun as it was at first. It’s taking more and more effort to get up and go to the gym. Hopefully, it will enable me to ride harder without getting as tired. I was particularly out of shape one trip, and I spent far too much time laying on my back in the snow, panting. While I’ve exercised before most of my trips, this is by far the most effort I’ve put into it. When I get tired on the treadmill, I just keep thinking about carving… or I look at the pretty girls in the gym 😉
A nice side effect is the fact that I do still seem to be loosing fat and gaining muscle mass… so I’m looking a bit different in the mirror.

Blizzard dumps 18 inches of snow on Colorado

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Winter Park Cam ShotOMG OMG OMG OMG!

DENVER, Colorado (AP) — A powerful snowstorm dumped 18 inches of snow in parts of the Colorado mountains and spread eastward Thursday, snarling traffic and shutting down dozens of school districts.

I could crap my pants! Attached is a webcam shot of the town of Winter Park. I’m so freak’n excited!

Oh, and I have more awesome news coming up very soon… I should be able to announce it by this weekend. Life is good!