Interests

Snow-Fizzle my Nizzle

Interests, Life

Lots of stuff has been going on in the last few weeks, I “ran” a Thanksgiving 5K race at 6:30am, I’ve been snowboarding twice, and I’ve been strangley motivated to get things done… just not this blog.

My thoughts on snowboarding in the Washington DC area.

Sometimes it’s not all that bad. I’ve been going consistently for about 3 seasons now and haven’t had any problems with the mountains close to the area. Whitetail, Roundtop, Liberty. But I think I’ve finally hit the wall, it’s not so much that the mountains are too small… because I get tired after about 40 seconds anyway. Its the value, we started out the season by going to Seven Springs, PA for the opening day. It’s about 3.5 hours away so a day trip is an adventure to say the least, but the prices are so much better (37 and 43) and almost the whole mountain was open already. Last weekend we went to Whitetail in MD and the prices sucked (53 and 56) and there were only 5 runs open, none of them black. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled now that I’ve seen real mountains and real snow out on the west coast. But I’ll have to say that I don’t think I’m going to go back to the smaller mountains this year, it just seems like wasted money. I am going to Wisp this weekend for the Wisp Days, $7 lift tickets! So we’ll see how well I can deal with the crowds of other frugal boarders.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I ride much faster and enjoy it more with a soundtrack. My new helmet has those speakers in the earflaps. I thought it was a little distracting last year but something is different now. It could be the choice of music. Nothing gets me down the mountain like Notorious B.I.G’s Greatest hits album.

and yes parents, that’s that “Gangster Rap”

and because I can, here’s a video of a kid taking a wicked header on the beach.

Solar Decathlon DC 2007

Interests, Life

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Oh Man! I was totally supposed to write about this the other day when it was fresh in my mind. It’s kind of hard to remember to do these things when there’s no encentives. I think I’ll just give a list of things I can remember about the event.

  • Totally cool architecture, even if they all kind of look like shipping containers.
  • How did they keep all the plants alive when shipping them in?
  • I didn’t see anyone from Ecogeek.org, Inhabitat.com, or Treehugger.com, I’m sure they were there somewhere.
  • The international schools are great at Design.
  • Having the electronics covered by a greenwall was an awesome design (puerto rico)
  • The recycled formica outside was really cool.

And now other thoughts…

The real cool thing about the event was just being around regular people that are trying to make an impact on the environment. I’ve been saying to Laurel that environmentalism needs a makeover. Hippies in veggie oil powered VW busses have been saying it for years and it isn’t working, they need a PR makeover. It needs to be cool! If you can get the rich yuppies to buy it then the rest will follow. Why do we want Mercedes and Designer Handbags? Because celebrities and rich people have them and we don’t (also they’re well made and cool looking).

So what’s my great idea really? Envy! That’s right Envy, the new tool of the environmentalist. I’m telling you this is the way to go. If you can get the people in McLean, Virginia to buy $30,000 golden Buddha yard art that also is a rain water collection cistern that will automatically water the yard without  using the public water supply then later when they’re popular you can introduce lower price versions to the general public. I want to make the H3 of environmental systems. I want to trick people into living green.

Later!

Dogboarding

Interests, Life

So after realizing that the last post accidentally stayed in draft form for over a week. I decided it’s time to pick up the pace with writing these things down. So this weekend even though we didn’t go anywhere we did get some snowboarding in. Let me introduce something I like to call DogBoarding. We have a unique deck at the house, I think it used to have an above ground pool because the highest part of it has a swinging gate. So we took a lot of the snow from around the yard and on top of the cars and made a roll-in to the backyard and then a ramp out in the middle. We originally thought that this would be enough to get speed, but we ended up making a second roll-in on top of the deck. So this run turned out to be a four foot ramp, 10 feet of flat, into a second 4 foot roll-in across the yard and onto a 2 foot ramp. It was pretty difficult but really fun on a snowboard and Jesse was out there to get some sweet pictures. It’s good to have the paparazzi around! Later the girls used it for sledding, which also made for some interesting pictures. here are a couple of them.

Flickr Dogboarding

Treonaughting

Interests, Life

So just a quick thought on having a smartphone. My friend Corey at work is always asking me questions about the best new phone to buy. Because he wants to “get his nerd game tight” he wants a smartphone. So I’ve been advising him on the new Treos and others. But What I’ve just realized is that ‘normal’ people aren’t ready for these kind of things. It’s just like my mom’s computer, she keeps complaining how slow it is, but really it’s just that she dosen’t do all the maintenance XP needs. So it gets clogged up with snowflake screensavers, greeting card programs, and product surveys.

I’m saying this because yesterday I had to re-format my phone. I’d been getting crappy reception and performance on applications so I decided it would be best to wipe it clean and start over. ( which it totally was, everything works fine now) But there’s no way Mr Avg phone user would be able to do that (without erasing all their data anyway) I guess I shouldn’t be complaining because this just means more work for my Cingular boys. Anyway, not a sermon, just a thought.

Later!