kjl

Trent: that is a sick toeside picture. Holy smokes! Nice riding with you last weekend; see you next year!

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about the Olympics, or who watches it, but my guess is: 1) Young people don't watch the Olympics, so not a ton of people are actually watching snowboarding at the Olympics. 2) The Olympics is not smart/proactive/capable enough to win over young viewers who would rather be watching Nitro Circus. Thus not much emphasis on snowboarding in the Olympics.

Oops - sorry :) Try again: http://vimeo.com/9418797

Here's my "style" :p http://vimeo.com/9418797 Most of the footage is from this year. In the 3rd and 4th clips I look just like you.

I seem to have completely avoided the dozens of cameras at the SES the last 2 years, but I do have a few videos I can upload tonight. You can see my avatar though - like you: reddish/rust softshell jacket, black pants, black helmet. Also, backpack (with a similar cross-chest strap), goggles, facemask pulled down over chin :) Same boots, too, maybe? Track 325s? Our toesides look similarly relaxed, but our heelsides look different. Bummer I only saw this thread recently - I was in Aspen all last week (Feb 1->7) - would have been pretty funny to ride with you out there :)

Weird - what happened to "run what you brung"? I'm pretty sure once upon a time most of us here (myself included), had the "scalloped undulating" heelside problem and then solved it, before we were riding springs, metal boards, or reverse cambered nose boards. For me, it happened because I was unwinding (counterrotating) at the end of my heelside turn. I would start out the turn looking downslope (which was rotating my hips towards the nose of the board) and finish still looking downslope (which slowly unwound my hips towards the toeside edge of the board as the turn progressed), and at the end of the turn the board would undulate and the track would scallop.

How about the fintecs?

Yeah, totally agree - in a full "butt-on-boots" tuck you got nowhere to go, so being taller than that for maximum ability to crunch or stretch as the conditions require is key for sure. If you look at both our avatars I think we both have a pretty healthy stretch in our carves :)

Heh, nice - I actually learned with hardboots and hard bindings on a Never Summer Premier like 7 years ago! Yes, the sidecut radius of that board is pretty tight, but I was able to learn stuff on it until I decided to take the plunge and get a board, too. If your toes are getting smashed up against the front of the boot, cranking the crap out of the ankle and shin buckles to hold your feet back may help. In general, I feel the snugger the boot the less it hurts. I wouldn't sweat the setup or the technique. On day 1 you were probably tense, stiff, awkward, clumsy, etc. (just guessing from my experience), making weird things hurt. I would just get out there and get comfortable on the board, and at some point your leg will stop killing you. But to answer your question, it depends who you ask, but carvers generally put more weight on their front foot than a skiddy softbooter normally would, and so some carvers have the front leg go tired first. Doesn't happen to me, personally, but it certainly happens to some. But like I said before, I bet it's just because you're being awkward at this early stage. I actually disagree with carvedog - I have a pretty stand-up carve now (sometimes), but I think at the beginner stages it was useful to get low. Bending the knees increases your ability to deal with "stuff" like bumps or imperfections in your technique, and also makes it easier to commit to initiating a carved turn. Standing up and relaxing is something that's easier done when you're comfortable with how carves feel and you know it's going to work on a given slope and conditions and speed, etc..

Hah, I was just thinking before I got to your post... it's like looking into a mirror! :) I'm sporting a new gray jacket this year, so it's really like looking into a time machine.

This one? http://classic.mountainzone.com/olympics/nagano/graphics-a/crash.mov

Hah, cool; I didn't know you were taking pictures from the lift! Trent, it's a camera; I was getting some leg-cam video... Will have to wait till next week to post, though...

Dialog was typically bad in the way James Cameron's dialog is always terrible. Story was predictable. The "nature hippies good; evil greedy corporation bad" thing was annoying, as was the "white man rescues primitive tribe yet again" thing. But: He made me care about the characters, I was fully immersed in the world, and, most importantly to me, James Cameron plays it straight. By that, I mean he is confident enough in his storytelling/moviemaking abilities that he never winks at the camera by throwing in fart jokes, crappy one-liners, gratuitous T&A shots, overdone variable-speed camera crap, or anything sucktacular like that. Even when he has characters say one-liners they fit the character and the story at the time. He never does any obnoxious "gee whiz that was awesome/hilarious/boobs" in a way that pulls you out of the movie, even though there are a lot of "holy crap that was awesome" moments in there. Gotta admire the guy for sticking with a coherent vision and really trying to make a great movie instead of phoning it in, even if he can't write exposition to save his life. Michael Bay and George Lucas, I'm looking at you. Oh, and the effects were unbelievable - it made me totally embarassed about all the CG work I've ever done. All the stuff I've done so far is child's play. But Robert Zemeckis, with his "performance capture" atrocities (Beowulf, Polar Express), should just give up now, and never make another movie.

Yeah, but at flatter angles, toesides are way, way easier than heelsides. If you can hold the heel you can certainly hold the toe...

I have the Dainese impact shorts - they fit under ski pants, though they kind of make you look like you have diaper butt. http://www.dainese.ru/photos/2443.jpg They have femur protectors on the sides, as well as small pads that sit over your hip bones, which I think are more at risk as hardbooters due to our forward stance.

I have the Dainese multisport jacket (w/ shoulder pads, forearm pads, etc.) and I like it: http://ski-tuning.com/dns_multisport.html Some of the motorcycle jackets I looked at had straps connecting the shoulder pad piece to the back and chest pieces, which severely restricted arm movement. See if you can try one on in a store first to make sure that your range of movement is not impeded and that you can fit your jacket over it.

Doh - I totally recommended he pick that board up; hope it rides OK. I really, really love mine (maori mask) - hope he is not disappointed in his. At least he is getting it for cheap. Hopefully it at least is also designed to be ridden with the bindings set back. Thanks for the info.

Cool - thanks! Is that the same year as the one on the far right? I have the one on the far right - the dark blue top and the black base with the tribal face near the tail (although on my topsheet I have a thin raised grey plastic face thing near the back binding that I don't see in the picture - picture might just be too small, though). -- Ken

Hey, Sandy - a friend of mine is looking at a tanker that I believe is #7 in the very first image you posted (3 blots down the centerline between the bindings, red base). Do you know what year that is, and what the quality of it is? Thanks!

I am actually kind of flabbergasted to hear somebody in the medical field reject vaccines or counsel against them. 1) I am a believer in personal rights and informed consent - however, vaccination is more about just yourself. For example, if you have a highly contagious disease like ebola you are forced to go into quarantine, despite the trampling of your personal rights and informed consent, because it is for the greater good that you do so. 2) Protection from the great illnesses of humanity relies mostly on herd immunity. Since almost everybody is immunized, there aren't that many carriers of, say, typhoid fever, walking around, so you are highly unlikely to catch typhoid fever, whether or not you are personally immunized, but this relies on the fact that everybody else is. This is sort of like the prisoner's dilemma. The analogy would be: if everybody is standing patiently in line, you could certainly get to the front faster by being a jerk and pushing in at the front, but this is only because everybody else is playing by the rules. If everybody thought as you did, it would be a giant clusterf***. You are almost guaranteed not to get typhoid fever because everybody else is playing by the rules and are immunized - thus there are not waves of typhoid fever epidemics washing through the country to get you sick. 3) The risk/reward benefit as applied singly to individuals is flawed, due to point #2. Yes, there may be a slight benefit for an individual to avoid a vaccine, due to side effects of the vaccine (though, unrelated side note: autism is not one of them). However, the real risk/reward is between 1) our current way of life plus a slight risk of vaccine side effects and 2) life (just a hundred years ago) when the population was continually and regularly ravaged by smallpox, typhoid, consumption, polio, yellow fever, measels, mumps, etc., when you were expected to live until your mid 30's. Side note: Herd immunity doesn't need 100% of a population to be effective. Most diseases seem to need ~85% of a population to be immunized. I would be OK with a fairer way to determine which 15% get to avoid vaccinations, like choosing people who are higher risk for the side effects to avoid them. However, letting people choose on their own seems like the wrong answer. I saw a few months ago a report that, despite the fact that people who are opting out of vaccinating their children comprise such a small percentage of the population, they tend to live near each other due to the demographics of who chooses to do this, dropping the percentage below/near that critical number locally, and have resulted in localized outbreaks of diseases that were mostly eradicated long ago. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm57e222a1.htm http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immunization29-2009mar29,0,3148179.story

Oh, yeah I know - it's all over youtube and the stuff pops up on content aggregators regularly as new generations of internet people rediscover his work every year or two. It just bums me out, for a number of reasons. Out here, we slave over our shorts and films, fixing minute details for months and years, as do the many dozens of modelers, animators, audio guys, layout guys, camera people, etc., etc., and then when you see it show up in a youtube video and it's been compressed down to a postage stamp, has compression artifacts all over the thing, the color's all screwed up, the audio's jacked, plus they're giving it away for free, it's like somebody stole the last 4 years of your work, pooped on it, stuck it in a blender and gave it away for free, and then 10% of the people taste your hard work blended with poop and go, "Man, that was really awesome!" I feel even worse for Don Hertzfeldt; since he's an indy animation guy, he is (probably) scraping by, and his income is directly tied to how many DVDs he manages to sell, whereas I draw a salary and am also backed by legions of faceless, terrifying lawyers. Yeah, I agree, though - his stuff is hilarious. I think I've seen all of his films in animation festivals where they usually bring the house down. There's something even more awesome about seeing something as simple (in terms of art) and ridiculous as his stuff projected on a giant theater screen.

It's not an "internet thing", nor is Billy's Balloon. They are short films. Sorry for the hijack, but it hits close to home, so to speak: From Don Hertzfeldt's website: As Don often says, he shoots on film for a reason and prefers people to discover his work as nature intended, in a proper theater, TV, or on a well-made DVD: "there are many ways to see movies these days. they're not all good ideas. there is not a single film student anywhere in the world right now dreaming of making her first movie and premiering it on a ****ing cell phone. if you've only seen a movie on the internet or via some strange miniature device, in many ways you haven't really seen it yet. you're missing so much. youtube is great for home videos of your cat falling off the roof but it is not really the proper setting for "cinema." watching a compressed, blotchy video in a little window while checking your mail and visiting three other websites at work sort of downgrades it into a novelty. movies are meant to be seen in the dark, hopefully with an audience, and with your undivided attention. that last one is non-negotiable. "it is an inevitable thing to deal with and of couse we're not interested in harassing fans, i just hope people understand that what they're downloading is kind of the equivalent of drinking a glass of fine wine after it's been filtered through a sewer. it's not really the same wine after that" Freeing animated short films from the dungeons of the Internet was a large part of the motivation in creating the Animation Show: a semiannual theatrical tour that strove to find new ways to preserve and exhibit these kinds of films in their highest quality possible. Our own DVD series of Don's work meanwhile serves to get his stuff out there looking and sounding as good as possible outside of a movie theater.

I agree with you sort of, but just to play devil's advocate, I would say that the size of a car is not the only factor. A smart car I would guess is not very fast, maneuverable, and probably does not have much in the way of crumple zones, etc., so it would be akin to the ultra compacts that I vaguely, vaguely remember (from that study I mentioned in my first post) sharing the top 10 most deadly vehicles with the SUVs. I have a Subaru Impreza sedan, which handles really well, and given the choice between my car, and my car with an extra 1000 lbs of steel bolted to the frame, I would choose my car as it is now, despite the fact that the other one would win in a head-on collision, as I think the increased maneuverability and braking performance would make me much less likely to get into an accident in the first place. But the big car vs smartcar? Yeah, the bigger one, no doubt.

I'm just confused as to why you are only looking at "who loses in a head on collision" to determine safety. The thing you should be looking at is "in which car am I more likely to die?" If light trucks/SUVs are more survivable in a head on collision but more likely to be involved in a head on collision in the first place, and much more likely to roll over and kill you, or slam into a telephone pole and kill you, or drive into a ditch and kill you, then SUV's "lose" in survivability, even if they "win" in head on collisions. My house in Richmond, CA "wins" for grizzly bear protection over somebody who lives in Tahoe. My house is NOT safer, though, since I am way more likely to get shot in Richmond than the other guy is likely to get eaten by a bear.

Just as with the flu vaccine arguments, individual anecdotal evidence is meaningless :) You will find small car owners who have been horribly injured or killed in accidents who would have been saved by a larger vehicle, and you will find SUV owners who survived an accident who would have died if they had been in a smaller car. But if you choose to drive an SUV over a small, maneuverable car for your own safety, you are choosing wrong. Look at it this way: You have two doors: Go through Door A, and you have a 1/1000 chance of being killed. Go through Door B, and you have a 1/100 chance of being killed. A million people have gone through both doors before you, and if you look through Door A, you will see a whole bunch of dead bodies in there. Nevertheless, Door A is a better choice. Even if your good friend died in Door A, or if gruesome pictures of people who died spectacularly after going through Door A get posted all over the internet :)