kjl
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Posts posted by kjl
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I did not think The Departed was nearly as violent as, say, Goodfellas. There were a lot of rapidfire, sudden executions but again, that's just taken from the original Hong Kong movie.
I have a little bit of a problem with glorifying violence in media, but I don't think The Departed did that. Tarantino glorifies violence, as does, say, John Woo, but I think both of them do it in their particular artful ways that it sometimes becomes fun to watch again. Okay, the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs is just horrible, but Kill Bill is alright...
Maybe if our "real" world was not so violent and paralleling the movie set (or is the movie set paralleling real life ) it wouldn't be so badI guess for me there is a huge difference between fictitious violence onscreen and in real life. I don't mind seeing a good guy kill a bunch of faceless badguys in a movie, but I don't like seeing anybody get even a little hurt in real life. Watching Chow Yun-Fat double-wielding pistols and taking out literally hundreds of people in a John Woo film in a beautifully orchestrated balletic gunfight is the same as watching the Death Star explode; just good, cathartic, fun.
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I cut/paste a short discussion from another thread here in case others can help me understand more on board and equipment design.
Basically I have questions on the meaning of “damp” or “stability”.
Here are some random questions
Peter! When do we get to ride together again? I haven't seen you in.. what, 3 years?
To your random questions I give you random responses :D :
I would say "damp" probably is "better" if all you care about is how well the edge stays in in chattery ice, but I'd take "lively" over "damp" because I don't want to be riding chattery ice anyways, and I like using the rebounding energy to shove me into the next turn, or to help me get airborne, etc.
As a light rider myself (I'm a little heavier than you now, Peter - maybe 145; getting fat!) I have always liked heavier boards to help cut through the crud and provide just a little more inertia for myself. But equipment weight is pretty low on priority list.
Equipment-weight sensitive... sort of. As a shorter guy like me you naturally probably want to put your feet closer together (I ride with a 16.5" width while most guys are at least at 19" and most are up around 21"). The narrower stance width means you are standing closer to the center of the board, which gives you better mechanical advantage to bend the board. I tried a 19" stance width and immediately lacked the weight to keep the waist of my board (172 Speedster RS) contacting the snow on a hard carve.
I believe bindings are aimed at being as stiff as possible so there's no reason to have weight-specific bindings, and as for boots, with the BTS it seems like you have enough variation in flexes (the yellow spring is plenty flexy enough even for a light guy like myself).
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Am I the only one who hated "Little Miss Sunshine"?
Kind of ;)
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Can anyone enlighten me as how or why such a violent movie “The Departed “ won best picture? I thought it was one of the worst movies I have seen this year. Sure acting , directing all that was great – movie story, plot , scenes, blood, cruelty, and executions – that was bottom of the barrel crap but of course that is just my opinion.
I thought the plot, story, acting, and directing were all pretty good, though it was mostly a remake of an arguably better Hong Kong film. I don't think it was Oscar material, but the academy oftens rewards people if they have been shortchanged in the past. Goodfellas lost to Dances With Wolves?! Taxi Driver lost to... Rocky?! Ugh. Not that's any consolation to the films that should have beaten The Departed this year. I would have loved it if Little Miss Sunshine had won.
The amount of blood and violence is unrelated to how good a movie is, in my opinion; if the violence is unnecessary or pandering, that's one thing, but Deliverance wouldn't be the same movie without "those scenes" in them.
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Are there any hardbooter shops in Northern California????
Not really - Elite Feet at Squaw Valley supposedly carries Head boots. Not sure if they demo.
Do Hardboots have basically any flex side to side? (Meaning front to back on the board.)
No. There is supposed to be a little bit of side-to-side with standard clip bindings but there is essentially none in my stepins. I find the lack of nose->tail flexibility frustrating in hardboots if I ride flat angles on a soft board, but some people don't seem to mind so much. If you are very used to the soft boots you may be frustrated to lose the same feathery control in the ankles on the toeside edge in hardboots. Heelside feels the same. Again, this is only at flat angles - if you go steeper it's all good.
Would you recommend putting hardboots on my Ride Timeless temporarily to learn hardbooting? or just go for the whole setup with a new board and boots to start with.I learned by sticking my hardboots on my Never Summer Premier, which I understand is a similar board to the Timeless (pretty stiff, good all-mountain kind of board). I would recommend jacking the angles up around at least 45 degrees or so as soon as possible, as riding hardboots at softboot angles (I ride 39/21) is just like riding softboots except awkwardly, and not anything like riding hardboots on a carving board.
Good luck! There are lots of northern Cal riders on here, and you should also check out tahoecarvers.com. There are regular carvers at Kirkwood, Mt. Rose, Squaw, and Alpine, at least, and some may have extra boots for you to try, depending on your size.
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I really enjoyed the Silberpfeil when I test drove it at the SES. Fun, poppy board.
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Colour me corrected. That's a very common notion that the H2 is a Tahoe, Yukon or Denali (never could tell the difference between those three). So I will bash on Hummer for a) less than stellar off-road worthiness, b) unbelievably bad cargo room for its size, c) weak front tie rods (common YouTube video demonstrating this), d) leaf springs, e) having lots of useless plasti-chrome bits, f) being the ultimate Poseur truck. But not for being a Tahoe/Yukon/Denali.
It's kind of even more pathetic that they ended up with such a worthless piece of trash if they actually designed it from scratch.
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I just hate it when people bash on things incorrectly with bad information. If you want to bash on Hummer, use real problems that they have, such as the Weaker-than-it-should-be front tie rod, the four wheel independent suspension (although it does work better than I would have expected), and the fact that they still use Leaf Springs on their trucks.
RE Hummers: It seems like for any combination of traits that you find important in a car (utility, cargo space, mileage, handling, ability to parallel park on a hill in San Francisco, etc.) that there is another car that does the same thing but better, and with less of the "look how big my wang is" factor. I think it's hilarious to see them in SF; what do they do? Circle around for a parking space until they give up, go back home, and take BART in?
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I don't want to be responsible if your liners melt into a gooey mess at the bottom of your oven, but my liners had a small tears (not sure if they were as deep as yours) and they remolded fine.
I don't know what's in there, when I looked into mine it looked like fancy expandy foam, not fancy amorphous jello (otherwise I guess you'd get a big loose bag of goo when you baked the liner, instead of a puffy still-foot-shaped thing), so I am pretty sure it will be fine.
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you lost me at "survey"
I'll paraphrase it for you:
The French aren't snobs.
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I've remolded liners with torn skin and it was fine (it did not pour out of the hole in the oven or anything like that).
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OK - the tally for SKIER-X:
Ten skiers taken off the hill on toboggan.
Five taken away by ambulance.
One having surgery.
Good lord - out of how many competitors?
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I can't tell you how often I've consulted the Almanac since you wrote it. Thanks, Scott.
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kjl - I can't even imagine the patience you must have trying
to DRAW a stereogram. That rocks!
Hey, a fellow Lightwave guy ;) I switched over to Modo for modeling but I still render in Lightwave.
It's actually pretty easy to draw stereogram doodles, like trefoil knots and braids. You just draw one and then lightly draw the same thing a little over to the right, and then go over it again nudging everything that's supposed to be in front. I just did this one in a few minutes - it doesn't work very well since I'm out of practice, but you can probably see that if you had to sit through European History classes or whatever 3 days a week that it probably wouldn't be that hard to get good at them :D
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The wierdest part is the 3d image is crisper and clearer than either of the origional photos.
Yeah, that works in "real life" too. i.e. when you go to the eye doctor the smallest line of letters you can read with both eyes open is smaller than you can read with either eye open by itself. It's especially weird when, like me, one of your eyes is significantly worse than the other. My left eye totally sucks and my right eye is OK, but both eyes open is still better than just the right eye by itself. Weird.
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2 eggs with a lot of cheese.
4 slices bacon
2 sausages
OJ
Water
at the beginning of a snowboarding day.
Water from the camelbak all day
Clif Bars on a lift chair if I get hungry at lunch, but usually nothing till
4:00 or so.
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The only thing I can think of was even firm pressure would dull a file..Just use enough to keep the file/guide in alignment...
I was pressing significantly harder than that. Maybe that was the problem. Really, you just lightly skim it on the surface and it peels off metal?
provided you do clean the teeth out properly with a file card.Is there a "wrong" way to clean out the teeth? I was dragging the card horizontally so the bristles travelled along the length of each tooth (didn't want to go against the direction of the teeth so the teeth would be filing away the bristles themselves, and with the direction of the teeth just had the bristles skip over all the stuff I was trying to clean out).
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Yeah, they do look really cool when the subject is close. Like looking at an extremely intricate miniature diorama. Everything is super 3D.
Post more when you get a chance! I want to see a 3D roostertail going from BG to FG, kinda like:
:D
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I used to draw stereogram doodles in highschool - little 3D knots and things - so I am super extra turbo used to looking at those. They look really cool! The cameras were pretty far apart, right? Makes them look like tiny little model people ;)
Thanks for sharing - bring your technology to the SES - would be pretty awesome to see a huge roostertail shot in 3D!
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Don't have the boots, so take it for what's it's worth.
I'd:
1) Take the boots with the old locking mechanism in place in whatever position you ride and mark the boot with a marker so you know how much forward lean the boot has normally (or if you know you definitely want more or less forward lean mark that location).
2) Assemble the BTS and loosen the nuts all the way without exposing any interior nut threads (loosen meaning outward from center; letting springs expand as much as possible). However long the BTS is at this point is its neutral position.
3) Take out old locking mechanism from boots.
4) Bend boot so forward lean matches your marks.
5) Line up BTS and drill wherever the holes are.
From that location you have the most options to adjust things later (you can apply more preload by tightening both nuts, or add or reduce forward lean by tightening one nut or the other).
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That first pic of Patrice is sweet. Since when did he start wearing a helmet?
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173 Speedster RS and 172 Tanker.
Giant, fast turns and powder float as yyzedcanuck recommends.
Can't wait.
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Ya, I got that the first week of riding this season. Bad enough that I couldn't bend forward with my legs straight. I think it is getting worse every year, and I no longer think it's simply because I'm getting older - I think it's because I'm getting better and pulling way more g's the first day out after 7 months of sitting on my butt in the summer.
Lots of gentle stretching, and lots of lower back strengthening seems to be helping it out a little.
(big version here)
(big version here)
Academy Awards - Best Picture
in The Lodge
Posted
Yeah, I think he was paying homage to (stealing from) the ultraviolent Japanese and Chinese action sword flicks. The severed limbs and gushing blood are not new to those genres.
I agree. That ear scene was still hard to watch.