Transistor Rhythm

I'd take the Voelkl on less crowded days, because the first few days you will need to concentrate on yourself not on everybody else. If you've been riding for 10 years you're probably a better rider than I am, and I ride a 178 Hot Blast without any problems. The stability due to the length and relative stiffness were helpful for me to become a better rider because I could really trust this board, and with trust in your equipment you become a better rider. Also because of the stiffness, it's not going to carve when you don't reallly dig in the edge, like some "new school" softer boards like Swoard or certain types of Virus. I expect the Voelkl to respond similar.

Just a "yes" would have been enough ;)

Isn't just downloading the .torrent file enough for other people to join in on the torrent? If so can anyone put up the second and third episode .torrent-files somewhere?

Just skipped through the first episode, pretty cool they're running a show like this on MTV. I think it can excite a lot of people about alpine boarding :)

Click the link, and then scroll down a little (you're still using that old CRT monitor? ;) ): So how much have you been paying them Nils? Boards have been becoming wider but more like 20cm average instead of 18cm and there are some wider boards like Swoard (+clones), a few Virus models and PureBoarding. That's still not much.

It's hard to look at a picture like that in the middle of the summer :( but it grasps the beauty of carving just perfectly, hip almost touching snow, board bending in the middle of the turn:) They look a bit less Black Pearl-ish in the nose section than I remember from the pictures posted in this thread earlier, but those images don't seem to load at the moment. Still they look like like great boards to me, especially when I keep in mind those are about the cheapest alpine boards you can get

So the new HFP's are tested on the new race Doneks? ;)

Your toe and your heel are in different places if you look at the edge. If you're doing a toeside (regular), you need to pressure your rear toe more to get even pressure across the edge and heelsides vice versa. One of the reasons they have invented asyms I guess. With asyms your toes and your heels will always be (at least a bit more) on the same place of the edge.

What is decriminalization gonna get you? Ofcourse keeping users out of jails is already a big step forward, but where do they buy their drugs? From who? Still the same gangs. Legalize the whole production chain. If it's not illegal to do it's not illegal to grow. Tax it. Use the money you get from the taxing and not locking up people or trying to lock up people to address the gang problems, because they will try to shift to other sources of income after the drugs money dries up.

I don't like the temporary title, "Mannual" makes me think of mostly funny things: - Poorly translated instructions found on "Made in China" products advising things like "Not use prooduc inside dogs or foggy day!" - Some yearly gay magazine - Some guy from Spain with a big moustache

It would be great if there was such an amount of money to be made for manufacturers in this sport the magazine would have 50% of advertisements, so I voted for that. It would be a clear sign to the world about the future of alpine. However I would say it shouldn't be used to make the magazine cheaper, but just to increase the quality.

Why wasn't anyone complaining about the single brandedness of Tankers 'n Tahoe? :rolleyes:

- Our numbers are not close, drug use is about half in The Netherlands compared to the US in about any substance - The Netherlands were always about as liberal about drugs since the sixties

The biggest problem is the fact it's not legal to grow or sell in big quantities. Netherlands was never allowed by America to totally liberate cannabis (afraid it might worked probably), so they went a bit in between. Coffeeshops only can stock ridiculously low amounts of pot officially and they're not even allowed to buy this low amount at once. So any coffeeshop that is checked most of the time violates the law, making it easy for the government to close shops at will. It used to be grown by people that were unemployed or other hobby growers, but since the government is getting more succesful at cracking down on growers, it's now steady in the hands of organized crime. Also there's problems with drug tourists buying drugs in the Netherlands, all types of drugs are cheaper and better quality than anywhere else in Europe (except for the places where those tourists come), at least it used to be so, also for drugs like heroin or cocaine, not produced in our country. The illegal drugs are not sold in coffeeshops so those people are served by drugs runners, mostly also not from The Netherlands. Still all those drugs, low prices, good quality and no jail time for users didn't lead to more people doing drugs: http://www.rivm.nl/vtv/object_document/o1507n19087.html The government was succesful in cracking down on XTC production labs and cut their resources off. So a lot of people got into cocaine and others got pills that were containing dangerous alternatives to MDMA. This was the start of a wave of powder cocaine use. The people stopped smiling.

160 pages? For 15-20 including shipping? Do you think you find enough advertisers for something like that? I really like thorough luxurious expert magazines like SoundOnSound or C'T, but their reader base is at least tenfold of 3000 people. But it would be great reading material! Things I would like: - Hardboot centered (so also off piste on swallowtails) - But not totally excluding skiing and weakbooting - Information not on the internet (so have better pictures and more in-detail info) - Ultimate carving spots (you might get advertisement money from reviewed resorts too) - DIY tips like snowboardmaking, boot enhancement, binding tweaking, waxing, etcetera. - Pre-season testing of new boards - Make room for different types of carving, like racing, extreme carving, eurocarving more virus oriented, freestyle carving, etcetera - Get to know some interesting non-expert people into carving Ofcourse

It's the fake pills that are really dangerous. But you wouldn't know because they look the same and most people can not get to tested pills, let alone get to medical quality pills.

Take a curve in very slow motion and from a few relevant angles maybe, stopping it and explainig everything that happens at every part in great detail, show it a bit faster again only pointing at different phases and movements, then again a few times at full speed and maybe with helmet cam so you can relate it better to your own riding. If you take every type of snowboard turn from full skid to slarve to slalom to totally laid out carved turns and anything in between (narrow and wide boards have variations in technique too) you could fill maybe two DVD's. Fifteen minutes per turn should be a piece of cake! ----------- Hans comments should be mandatory at any place where people are learning something about snowboarding!

You can recognize a hill full of beginners by just counting the helmets. The less helmets, the more beginners I hear rumours about mandatory helmets for everyone in certain places in Europe. I believe most Germans wear helmets anyway because somebody in their parliament killed someone in an accident, since then the sale has skyrocketed.

I always thought it's the alpine board not the hardboots that make it harder to ride crappy conditions. Haven't tested it out fully though, but the softer, shorter and wider a board is the better it seems to handle in those circumstances. Are you riding the same board with both setups? On my old Hot Special I can follow jibbers around all day long doesn't matter how crappy the slope is, we seem to suffer alike. On any bigger, stiffer and less wide board I can do it too - but I'm not having anything remotely resembling fun doing it.

If you went down and left and walked up past the rental desks there were a lot of boots and boards like 2m rad air tanker, titanal kessler, f2, and i think sg and virus and maybe even pogo too. I was only interested in trying on the new Head Stratos Pro boots and getting mine repaired at the time so I didn't take full note of what was exactly there.

Tried Riml? Sport4You? Nobody seems to talk about Sport4You but they had all types of hardboots on sale and a vast selection of boards!

I saw a Nordicboard at Axamer Lizum this weekend (too bad when returning rent ski's for a colleague at the end of the trip so I could only look and not test it ), and the difference between a Nordicboard and a traditional or more modern monoski is that it has two plate bindings mounted on top of a ski binding, so it would always release both legs at the same time. I can see other problems rise if your legs are bound to a small piece of metal but it won't be half as bad as releasing one leg while the other one is mangled still in the binding. I've decided will never ride a monoski if it's not a Nordicboard, why take that extra risk? Now I could see a similar setup work in conjunction with Vist or Hangl plates. It would be interesting to find out!

Can't imagine how impressive it must be to be on it and to be almost floating through the sky! What's the biggest height above ground it reaches?

I remember the Scalpel having a really, really soft flex. Only torsionally stiff. I think a lot of modern carving boards are softer, but this one still surprised me. It had loads and loads of grip, but it was sensitive to bad weighting. I remember having a crash with it and looking back up to my line and it was altered drastically in diameter before I dropped out of it. Maybe I was a bit on the heavy side for the board too (+/-90 kg) but it seemed to do it by design. It will probably respond perfectly to someone that has mastered the alteration of turn radius through flexing the board techniques. I guess the Vampire is a bit the same as a Scalpel if you describe it as a sheet of paper. Too bad you didn't try the newer SG's as they rented them in at least two places this year in Soelden! I wish I would have tried them as well as a Pogo too...but Soelden is just like a candy store, you can't eat it all at once

About 14 meter SCR? Maybe a bit too big to start out on....