Bit-Shift.Net

First off, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

In my pursuit to get in at least 50 days of snowboarding this season I started my day off at six am, picked up my friends Meghann and Geoff and headed up toward the mountain. I had checked the weather forecast the day before and the Mt Hood Meadows condition report but none of it would prepare me for the horrors that lay ahead. On the way up, we were greeted by what looked like fresh snow. "Awesome!" we all said. But it was just an illusion. The temperature inversion mentioned previously was playing tricks. We arrived at the mountain around 8:30, suited up and waited for the lifts to start shuttling people.

We took our first run on the new Vista Express lift. What greeted us was mix of frozen snow where the staff had groomed, sheets of ice where they hadn't, and an assortment of obstacles like rocks, stumps, grass/dirt, etc... We took off, un-abated by the conditions that lay ahead, steadfast in our belief that all would be well. While all this was happening some pretty nasty looking clouds started to roll in blocking all glimpses of the sun, which means, nothing to melt the frozen wasteland.

We were scheduled to leave the mountain around 1PM so we could all make it on time to our respective dinner engagements. By noon we had all had enough of the ice and were getting pretty hungry. Bring on the turkey!

I arrived home, got cleaned up and proceeded to feast. Its now been raining for the past five or so hours with sub-freezing temperatures on the mountain. All signs point to fresh powder. Tomorrow is shaping up to be a good day.

Have a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend.

Meet your maker

I decided today while chatting with a friend on IM that I'm going to try and go snowboarding 50 times this season. I arrived at this conclusion by figuring I've got about five months left before the snow is all gone X eight weekend days in a month, plus miscellaneous holidays and random days off. A lofty goal I know, and one I may not meet due to injury and/or death, but I will try come rain, snow, sleet or ice.

This weekend was days four and five of my new goal and they were excellent days. Even though there was no new snow, what snow there was had been chewed up enough and warmed up by a weather inversion that it created the effect of fresh powder. I spent both days working on launching from jumps (aka 'kickers') and the associated landings, which I'm getting pretty good at.

I awoke Sunday morning to the weather man forecasting rain and a freezing level of 7000 feet (the top of the tallest run at Meadows is 7,300 feet). When my part arrived at the mountain we were greeted with the same torrential down pour I experienced Friday, things were not looking well, but we were here so we suited up and off we went.

By the top of butter cup I was drenched and my fingers were starting to get numb. Went down buttercup with our fledgling boarders once and then went off to a more challenging run (easy rider). I decided that this would be the last run of the day. This run required a great deal more speed due to the number of hills you had to make it over, or be forced to hike...not fun! I made it over the first hill just fine, but on my way down the I leaned forward just a touch too far and got a build up of wet snow on the nose of the board, at which point I started to cart-wheel down the hill, 5 in all I think, it was pretty spectacular! I got up collected my scattered gear, took a bow and high tailed it to my car.

I spent the rest of the day playing board games and getting dry. All things considered it was a good day.

Lessons learned:

• Water Resistant does not equal waterproof.
• A good friend can make even the most miserable experiences fun.

The difference between the snow conditions on Friday and those on Saturday redefine "Night and Day". As I was leaving the mountain friday afternoon it was just starting to snow. As I decended in elevation towards sandy the light snow fall turned into a torrential down-pour. Any normal person would have grumbled about the lousy weather, etc... but all I could think of was how much snow was fallling on the mountain. And snow it did.

When I arrived early saturday morning there was about a foot of fresh powder waiting at the base of the meadows ski runs. There were four in my group (me included). Two who had, for all intents, never snowboarded before, and two experienced, one of which being yours truly. For the first part of the morning the other experienced boarder and myself helped the newbies get aquainted with the hill and how to ride the lifts. After which my friend Meghann and I struck out to explore this winter paradise.

Mt Hood Meadows had just opened a new high speed quad lift, Vista Express, and it was still unfamiliar to many. As such, the lift lines were considerably shorter. I learned in a few minutes that the weather at the top of Vista was approaching gale force winds, but it didn't matter, there was fresh, untracked powder and good company.

After about four or five runs down Vista I was beginning to run out of steam and decided to call it a day (mountain was closing in 45min anyway).

I was in high spirits and looked forward to day three. Little did I know what awaited me the next day.

Arrived at the mountain around 15 minutes before opening. Perfect! Suited up and grabbed my board. Took one step on the snow pack and thought, this is going to be a painful day. It was all ice. Not to worry, I'll just take it easy. Right...

Second run of the day I was straight lining a run (going very fast) and went to carve around a corner and slid out on a icy spot. Bounced on my backside a few times. Got up and continued, no worse for wear. Wash, rinse repeat about eight more times. At this point its around 1pm. The lift lines are getting ridiculously long, due to people getting familiar with riding lifts and lift operation problems. Combine this with a biting wind and fingers that are going numb and I think its time to call it a day.

The car handled amazingly with the new snow tires (Dunlop Winter Sport M3). Executed a few hard braking stops without a hint of the ABS assisting and went around corners with no assistance from the traction control.

Final Conclusion: It was a good day. Can't wait for day two.

Mt Hood Meadows opens Friday, November 11th and I will be there. Theres 34" at the base and its only going to get better. Its been several years since I've been snowboarding and I can't wait to get back into the sport. I'll be spending the new few days preparing to spend as close as possible to 72 hours on the mountain this coming weekend.

I just hope I don't break anything first time out...

It's about 10:20 PM and I have tomorrow off. So naturally I'm up late and bored. I was reading a blog post on a former co-workers site about google indexing and got curious where I would rank if you searched for "bit-shift". So I loaded up my favorite web browser, pointed it towards google and off I went. Was I on the first page...Nope. Page two you say? Notta. When I loaded up page three I was beginning to get depressed. But Wait! There at the bottom of the page, second to the last link was Bit-Shift.Net. Woohoo! Atleast I beat out a link to an Intel article on 64 bit-shifting, HA! Take that Intel.

Note: if you google for "VoIP Eligibility" and select I Feel Lucky, you get to my site :P How cool is that?

UPDATE: Thanks to Greg Hughes for pointing out my spelling error. I apologize to anyone that took offense. Since then, I've moved up 3 positions in the search ranking.

The Mercury News is running a story of a cruise ship, tipping the scales at 10,000 tons, that outran two boatloads of would be hijackers of the east African coast. I wonder how big a wake it left...

Read the story here (registration required).

The mind is an amazing thing. Just when you think you have a handle on it, something happens to place you back at square one. Especially when it comes to that mysterious part of everyones mind, the subconscious, the black box of your brain. This quiz demonstrates how a seemingly unrelated idea can affect how we think. I was part of the 98% (you'll understand after the quiz). Where do you rank?

Take the quiz here.

Anyone who uses the internet today knows how valuable services that Google offers are. Their search engine helps us find exactly what we're looking for, their email service gives us rediculous amounts of storage and their ad service gives us lucky few some extra income. But how large will google become and what will they do with all that power.

This video plays presents some humorous and mildly disturbing glimpses of the future and how Google plays into that future. The United States of Google...?