March 2005 - Posts
I had planned on this being an epic ski season. I hurt my back in the fall (burst disk S1–L5, bulge in L4–L5) and thankfully avoided surgery. I vowed to get my core in shape so I’d have a great ski season. I busted my butt at the Pro Club…I even did a bunch of cardio.
We went to Colorado over Christmas and I got 9 good days in. Then ONE at Steven’s Pass (where we have season tickets). 3 more (great days) in Colorado.
I usually do a cat skiing trip (www.kindel.com/revelstoke) each year to www.catpowder.com in Revelstoke BC with several friends the last week of Feb. This year we headed to Whistler a few days early…and discovered that our trip to Revelstoke was cancelled due to lack of snow. We made the most of it by skiing a few more days in Whistler (4 total).
And then the trip to Valdez to go heli-skiing with www.valdezheliskiguides.com fell into my lap. 4 more days of arguably great skiing (the terrain was epic, the snow was good).
So 21 days total. Not a bad count given the horrible snow season we had here in the NW. But not Epic. I think next year I’m going to be lazy and not bother getting in shape. That way we’ll probably have a great snow season.
Anyway, now it’s time to shift gears. As far as I’m concerned when ski season is over, it’s summer. Don’t get me wrong, I like spring, but as soon as the days start getting longer it’s all a blur to me.
To celebrate this, watch for the banner at the top of my blog to change to something that matches the season…
Given all the photos we took in Alaska last week (488 between Kevin & I) I decided to actually try out a few of the latest online photo sites. I tried both smugmug.com and flickr.com.
Besides allowing you to store your photos online, these sites encourage community around photos by supporting simple metadata tags on the photos and the ability to share and group your photos with others.
After playing with both, I decided I liked flickr.com best. I’m still not convinced “enough” to actually pay for a Pro account, but I have to admit I almost pulled the trigger and fessed up the $ yesterday when I hit my upload limit on my free account.
I really hate the web based photo interaction model. I don’t want to edit metadata (or my photos!) online. I want to use my favorite digital editing app (Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10) and have the photos I like the best automatically published, either on my home server (see http://www.kindel.com/revelstoke/2004 for example), or to one of these services.
I also don’t believe in using these sites as a “backup” or for “archival”. For one the upstream bandwidth even on the best generally available broadband connection can’t really support my needs (especially moving forward with the mid-range digital camera sporting 7+ megapixels and video). For another, the recovery is even worse: I can imagine trickling my 24GB of photos upstream, but when my local copy gets destroyed and I need to recover I want it now. What, are they going to mail me a HD? Last, none of these outfits has a track-record of reliability. What service level guarantee do they provide that if California slides into the ocean in the Big One my precious data will still be safe?
So I like the model of doing my own backup and archival (I am in control) and using online sites for publishing and sharing with others. And for that, Flickr is pretty damn slick (but not slick enough for me to cough up coin).
My Flickr photos are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckindel.
What a great trip. We went with www.valdezheliskiguides.com. There were some technical difficulties (we were grounded for 3 days due to an “incident” having to do with a rotor blade striking a sign), but in the end I got a ton of amazing, very steep, powder skiing in with my good buddy Kevin and saw some of the most beautiful terrain in the world. And I made some new friends.
Here’s some more pics. Yes, that’s me, and yes it was that steep.
I’m currently near Valdez Alaska, heli-skiing in the Chugach mountain range. All I can say is Wow. Two pictures to illustrate. My buddy Kevin took both of these.
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