Dan

Bryan, I'm really sorry to hear about your injury. I can only imagine how frustrating this must be - hope that you recover soon. As far as Mike Jacoby's helmet, it's nice of you to get the word out to the BOL community. I pity the poor sucker that tries to wear that to the hill...is there a place in the U.S. where he'd be able to get away with it?

Hey Mike, likewise! Thanks for showing us the locals' powder stashes. Will look forward to seeing you again at MBES if I don't have another chance to head out to Bachelor before then.

Hey Kirk, could be. I just looked at her site and she is definitely riding a Proton. The same model I ride, in fact, though I imagine there's more than a few differences in HOW she rides it.

ha ha ha, if I ever get around to posting the e-mail exchange I had in December with a Nigerian con artist, you'll know exactly what it is. He was posing as a Nigerian woman who wanted to rent a room in my house...sent me a photo that was obviously stock photography of a model and asked me for mine. I sent a link to the Goatse image. His response was something like "Oh, a sight too horrible to behold." :lol: N.B. If you don't know what Goatse is, do not Google for it, lest you accidentally view it. Go to wikipedia and look it up there.

Congratulations Sean, that's awesome. Hope you get good exposure from your Olympians.

But...but...blue flames=COOL! Red flames are pretty cool too, but those blue flames really knock me out.

I did a summer Snowperformance camp at Timberline a few years ago. Lisa Kosglow was one of the coaches, and she mentioned that one of her teammates on the U.S. Olympic Team was competing on a stock Proton. Can't remember who it was, unfortunately.

:lol: ha ha, that would be the noble thing to do, for sure. Tell you what though, once I've gotten my Arbor broken in (i.e., put the first ding in the topsheet), if you ever make it up to Portland, you're welcome to take it for a test drive.

Hey Surfinsmiley, thanks for the tip! I've never done this before, so I don't really have a good idea of how to go about it. Now that I think about it, I see what you mean. And I guess that you'd be asking the deck to hold a lot of weight with not very much width if you cut it down to a pintail too. How do you take the edges off, or do you just cut through them when you add wheel wells? (Or do you leave them on and place the wheels inside them? That would be kind of cool.) I have a Dirtsurfer too, but haven't gotten to spend too much time on it yet. It is a good conversation starter for sure. I had one amusing day when I was running laps down a hill and getting rides back up on the bus. About half the drivers agreed that the Dirtsurfer was a skateboard and could come inside the bus, the rest of them said it was a bicycle and had to go in the rack in front of the bus. (I wouldn't have minded, but it really wasn't a very good fit and - though it never did - it seemed like it might fall out.)

Whoah now, what about the Trojan War? I believe you need to add "4. Women" to your list.

The guy pulled some Jedi stuff ("These are the snowboards you're looking for...") and I wound up with all four (!). Assuming the deal works out OK, I'll just keep one Arbor and try to unload the other stuff, probably in a week or two. Then go on a diet until I'm small enough to ride the 155...:)

Hey Jim, heck would love to join you, but Wednesday isn't going to work for me. Depending on conditions, I may try to head up on Thursday. I still need to break in my 4807: I've got bindings on it now, but haven't put it on snow yet. Hopefully some day this week will be the time.

Check out the 8th photo; the one of Philip Scoch on a GS course. Think this is a direct link: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/2006/01/11/gallery.snowboard/index.8.html What's going on with his bindings? What are those, some kind of dampening mechanism?

Holy smoke, Arbor carving boards! Looks like they're both 155 cm though...too bad. I love my Arbor freeride board so much I sent him an e-mail anyway though. :)

Overheard this weekend when I was riding my Arbor freeride board with plates: "That's one of them skiboards." Huh? Kind of crossing the line from ignorant to stupid, wouldn't you say? "Look, he's riding with skiboots," I could understand, but it's hard to see how anyone could look at an Arbor and think it was anything besides a snowboard. On the other hand, I get a lot of positive comments lately, especially from lifties, things like "you guys rip" and "I'd like to try that." I only started hard booting in the 2000/01 season, but I feel like we're more visible (at least at Hood) now than we were then.

Hey Kriss, Do those Nogomers go inside or outside the glove? What size are they?

hell yes. There's a thread around here somewhere with a picture of my last road rash from this summer. I pretty much suck at longboarding - I'm a menace to myself and those around me, but you've got to have something to do in the summer, right?? Can't say I know that much about the gear I'm using either...I have an MLY longboard deck (apparently they made a few skateboards before they folded) with Indy trucks and Kryptonite wheels. This summer I think I'm going to hack up some old snowbards I have in the garage and turn them into pintails. It will probably be the best thing that ever happened to that old Burton...

Heck, I was really hoping to see your pooch lifting his leg in the half pipe.

Hi Schell, yep, I'm afraid so - sold the board and bindings in November. And Bryan, I was at Meadows yesterday and it was a pretty darn nice day. Really want to go up on Wednesday, but don't think I can get away from work.

The answer is clear: sell it to me for a song. :) Seriously though, I've been surprised at how often I ride some boards I'd thought I'd retire two years ago. (primarily my freeride board, which still gets pulled out for powder days all the time - not as good as a dedicated powder board for the first 45 minutes, but it's a sweet ride in teh chunky, lumpy hacked-up powder that you ride for the rest of the day). Unless you need to dump the Axis to buy something else, why don't you hold on to it until the end of the season and see how often you really ride it? If it really doesn't get any minutes, you can sell it at the beginning of next season - it's not like the sale price is going to drop if you wait a season.

bike, skate, snowboard...I wear a helmet for everything. Last night my 18-month old nephew (sister's son) had an "I'm still figuring out this socks on wood floors thing" event, fell over backwards and hit his head. I turned to my sister and proposed getting the little guy a helmet which she could just have him wear all the time. Overkill maybe :) I've actually heard people say "helmets are too expensive, and you have to replace them after every crash." Um...yeah. Because the contents of your head aren't worth $50-$100 to you.

All-you-can-eat pricing sounds pretty interesting, doesn't it? I think they're not the only people to offer that though, are they. Anyway, if MS decided it's important for them to compete in this arena, Urge will be a contender. They've lost about $1 billion/year on the Xbox since it launched. Compare that to Apple's $1.3 billion in income in 2005 (and just $276 million in 2004) and it's pretty clear that if MS decides to buy market share in this space they'll be able to do so. I'd guess that Microsoft will be in the online music space until "owning the living room" isn't fashionable anymore.

Crap! I wanted to go, and Nykos (game controller maker) invited me to their "hospitality room" to get liquored up (I freelance as a game journalist very occasionally and Nykos' PR folks don't seem to know the difference), but my day job is keeping me in town. Meanwhile my co-workers from my day job are checking out s*** that they don't appreciate, like the various water-cooled Xbox 360 mods I've been hearing about. Hey Randy, if you have the chance, take a peek at those Xbox 360 cooling solutions and let me know what you think: are any of them suitable for ham-handed amateurs to self-install?

Here's a thread on another forum that answers the original question: http://tetongravity.com/forums/showthread.php?p=302117 Apparently, it's the same as snowboards: as many as you can get away with!

That's interesting. In the films that I've seen it looked like the teleboard would only do skidded turns, which is why I wrote it off. Do telemark skiers carve turns?