jason_watkins

Tempting, but I'm gonna pass until there's coverage at least to the bottom of palmer. Zach: Mike covered it all. If freeze levels happen to be high, timberline has more terrain further up the hill. Meadows has more stuff below the trees if there's really high winds. Otherwise, they both should be good. Meadows has a good bit more variety of terrain, particularly steeper stuff, so it's definately worth the drive over. I've been on the hill christmas day the last 2 years... it's typically not to bad. Pretty nuts the days following though :rolleyes:

Once again I have to mention the instructor that just hangs a ghetto blasta off his backpack. Pure comedy gold to see the looks on people's faces as he blasts by casually bombing the hill.

I have some Koss KCS-50 headphones, and they fit right into the ear muffs of my helmet nicely. They're pretty good sound quality as well. I imagine you could cut the little behind the ear clips off them and velcro them into prettymuch any helmut that has ear coverings with a little depth.

yeah, I remember reading their future plans document off the forest service site at some point. They have plans submitted for a bunch of lifts, including a heather lift... but they seemed to be focusing on the new destination resort they want to build around toward hood river.

I mean, let's face it... we all just wish meadows would save their $$ for a lift going straight up heather :D I hope the new lift pulls away some of the sideways skidders from cascade.

Just getting in line. I'll take it if it's not gone already. Email to jason_watkins@pobox.com

I bougt some arcteryx Minuteman pants toward the end of last season. They're great. Best fit I've worn with the pre-sown bend to the knee, very lightweight too. We'll see how many seasons they last, but the overall impression is bulletproof. They've spoiled me, and now I covet a better jacket. They're the same material as the Theta SK, so check out the Minuteman bib version if you don't like the fit and features of the Theta. I found them at a signifigant markdown locally. Sierra trading post carries arcteryx closeouts sometimes, but they're often goofy colors. Sounds like a trip north would be the best deal for you. You should be able to try on the line and see what you like somewhere local to the seattle area before you decide to drive up though.

"Riding Giants" is also quite cool and has been showing on cable around here (one of the stars channels I think). Also amazing and more snowboard related is "Touching the Void."

Hi Necro. I'm in a similar situation to you: freeride oriented, and switched to hardboots last season due to ongoing ankle pain. I can't match your days on the hill, and really only have 1/2 a season of hardbooting experience at this point. But, the transition issues are still really fresh in my mind, so I'll chip in my 2 bits. So far, I've found hardboots superior for all riding. The level of response is totally different. I mean, I find a lot of softboot gear is "quick", as in you can swish the tail around rapidly... but with hardboots, you get instant response while also sticking SOLID edge pressure. You can jam it and the board will cut around fast. You just have a ton more leverage to control the edge of a longer board at higher speed. We get the same wet snow up here, and it's all good. I've had one deep powder day in hardboots, and it was just as much fun. It does feel a little different though. A bonus goes to hardboots on hard refrozen days: in softboots I'd be bummed, but with hardboots it's consideribly easier to (try to) carve iced groomers. I'm still not quite as competant with hardboots as soft, but I see every indication that I'll end up riding more aggressively than I ever did on softboots given a little more experience. I do feel like hardboot riding is quite a bit more technical: you really need to be solid and accurate in your motions. Expect it to be some work and adjustment when you first go out. If you're into the fast and smooth style of riding, I think you might really like a hardboot rig. There are a few riders here that I try to keep up with that use hardboots everywhere: steeps, chutes, bumps, etc... so don't worry about hardboots being to limiting, as long as you don't get a monsterously overstiff setup. The best news is: I've had *zero* ankle issues with hardboots. They completely solved that problem for me. I was able to try hardboots relatively easily and cheaply by borrowing a skinny freeride board (from MikeT, thanks!). So you could get a single board that would work with both setups. The donek incline is a good example of a board that you could ride with both hardboots and softboots, if your feet are small enough or your angles high enough in softboots to fit. I have the 413 boots Mike mentions, and it's fairly easy to upgrade them piece by piece with much better liners, a 5 position lean controller, etc. If you stay with hardboots however, I'm fairly sure you'll want to move to a board narrower than even a narrow freeride board: it just rides a lot better once you've made the hardboot commitment. There are deals on alpine boards on ebay, the classifieds here, or even sometimes blemish boards/seconds from the carving specific manufactures like donek. Bindings you could go cheap... but I'd advise not: if you don't like the hardboots, you can always sell a good condition pair of bombers or cateks for a price pretty close to their original retail. I imagine you could get in touch with some other tahoe area carvers through their website, and perhaps get a chance to demo equipment or face to face advice: www.tahoecarvers.com For softboot gear definately look into the flow bindings. You'll probibly want the stiffer models, which unforetunately are harder to find and more expensive, but they are very comforible, very solid ankle hold. I personally don't think you can do better than flow for ankle hold in softboots.

Unless I'm mistaken, I thought the original F1 active suspensions done by lotus were hydrolic servo. They worked, but considering F1 tracks are already quite smooth, and the horsepower and weight penalty of a hydrolic system is signifigant enough to moot the advantage. Link. I'm amazed bose has a linear motor and amp efficient enough for this to work.

Save that email MikeT, knowing certain timberline employees, they might be PITA about it. That's kickass news.

Either sounds fine by me. If it came up to a coin toss, I'd just pick the earlier weekend. Is timberline's 2004-5 calender up anywhere? They usually have that competition sometime early in May, might want to dodge those days. Where's this Pow-Pow heaven on Mt Hood? :D Actually, I don't have enough seasons to compare, and hindsight is very biased... but I recall quite a few great powder days this last season. Alpental: you may get your wish, durring 02-03 there was a fairly powdery day at timberline in May.

I read about that wooden mirror. Way cool. Yeah. I've read that the ceo of EA is the highest salaried person in BC. They're makin' money. The problem is, it won't be you. When I burned out on games I went elsewhere. A buddy and co-worker stayed in the industry, and ended up working on two rather successful titles (medal of honor, call of duty). What does he have to show for it? About $80k in total. How much did those games gross? Well over 100mil. If the developing company had been an equal share partnership, how much profit would he have gotten on top of the salary they paid him? Probibly around $500k, depending on the details.To make any amount of money or have any future of advancement in the games world, you must have an ownership stake. I was in for all of 2 years and 2 projects, but even I could see that. And even then, you probibly have to self fund each title, because the deals offer to 3rd party devs by the current publishers are extremely poor. If you're not an existing player or funded from outside, you don't have a chance of doing better than work for hire at a fairly poor rate.

Skate: what do you do for Alias? EA is a game mill. They always have those big booths because they really burn through their employees. Their pay is somewhat substandard, which is really low considering the game industry as a whole pays less for the same skills than corperate america. GDC is a probibly the best place to try to network into a game industry job. E3 would be a close 2nd. GDC gets a bonus for many of the presentations actually being worth attending. E3 has babes. Even if you have a degree, game companies will value that less than demonstrated skill. Ideally, they want you to have worked on a game that shipped. Failing that, for a programmer, they'll want to see work on mods, technology demos, etc. Personally, I'd advise most people to stay out of the game industry unless you've got a real big love for doing that work. You'll have to accept reduced pay, long hours, and high stress. Career security can be pretty good, but job security is poor: you'll be moving to where the work is. God knows it kicked my ass. Raven Shield is great, but I've avoided buying it for the simple reason that I played *way* to much Rouge Spear a few years ago. I need to spend time doing things that are productive :D

I'm curious if anyone is using these, and how they'd compare to using diamond stones with file guides to maintain edges after setting bevels with steel files. So are his side and base bevelers basicly jigs to sand down the edges? Sounds like a horridly slow way to put on a first bevel, but perhaps good to maintain one? Anyone know what the fabric for the wax burnishing is? A variation of scotchbrite?

There's a whole class of algorithms from the computer vision people that work very well on that sort of problem. You can find the math under the topics "image flow analysis" and "motion compensation." It's the same basic technology as mpeg compression for a dvd, or soft-ware assisted slow motion like the bullet time effects in the matrix. I like the camera on a board idea, but my guess is it wouldn't give you any data that more useful than the comments of a good coach just eyeballing a normal video.

I thought the tables under the HRM lift were ok this year. I could clear them, and I'm the biggest puss ever when it comes to tables. I agree tho, the beginner park at timberline season before last was exactly right for a newbie like me to get some comfort in the air without danger of death. I'm in awe of people who can hit jumps that big and not kill themselves. I can't recall seeing a single person hit those any of the days I was up. One of my buddies aparently overshot the medium tables on the mile at timberline this spring. I say aparently since he had a concussion and can't remember what happened. He was told by patrol he overshot. If it hadn't been for the helmet, who knows how bad of shape he'd be in.Of course, I don't think that's going to stop him one bit from charging harder on those tables next season. :rolleyes:

quest: check out the hard attack movie thread. There's quite a few nice inverts in that. My favorite out of that movie is a backflip tailgrab... looks pretty cool and different at high stance angles.

So, just calling things how I see them: I think freestyle snowboarding is going to be surpassed by freesking. Physics are on the skier's side: they're going faster, bigger and spin more. They have more freedom to move their body in the air to stall or change direction. Imagine the sorts of things high divers can do in the air. Not that freestyle snowboarding won't remain popular... but once it's surpassed in technical level by skiing, there may be an oppertunity for the snowboarding market fashion to grow beyond freestyle. Snowboarding is also very young... as riders get older, I think they might become more receptive to alpine equipment. And I also expect more senier skiiers to convert as knee problems make them look toward a single plank. I've been slow to convert over to hardboots. And I think that's typical for someone in my age bracket. No one wants to be the kook on the hill, especially among those 25 or younger. As long as the stores and media focus exclusively on freestyle, there's a fairly large portion of freeriding snowboarders that might like hardboots, but will never look at it as more than a curiosity. Actually, my more hardcore freestyle friends *get* hardboots. They understand what a carved turn is all about, and they can see what the advantages to hardboots might be, even if it's not what they're interested in. What happens when these kids start getting older,, and have broken themselves enough that they don't want to be hitting 60 foot tables anymore? I also think the equipment is going to continue to evolve. Softboots have been getting harder, ski boots softer. At some point, there's going to be a good, stiff and secure step in boot that bridges the two worlds. Some riders who try that might find they like hardboots Who knows, but myself, I see a lot of oppertunity for hardboot snowboarding in the future, especially if it gains some media exposure. It's not likely to happen from boardercross though. Wide courses with lots of jumps, lots of room for passing make for better spectating so I expect softboots to be dominate there in the future.

Man, we're totally geeking out here. As part of a funny co-incendence, I bumped into this paper while browsing at work this morning: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~bennett/Proscenium/Proscenium.pdf Most of it is typical professional researcher fluff... but one nice consequence of relating video frames spatially is that establishing tracking is pretty simple... a lot less data entry. And it doesn't depend on image flow analysis or anything else that tends to fall down and go 'boom'. You only have to click enough corrispondence points to build a good spline through the 3d volume. Video tracking would definatley be the cheapest and simplist approach... but you'd be limited to analysis of pretty short course sections where the rider was visable from a single location. Hrmm... it might not be that hard to impliment. I'll keep it in the back of my head as a good project if I decide to learn how the video codec api works on windows. Edit: I'm not sure you *can* calculate the fastest line through gates. Even if you reduced the rider to just the cg over the board, that's 4d + the board/snow interface which is probibly horridly complex. Running an optimiation through that could be ugly. And in the real world, angulation and the rest of body positioning looks to be key, so you'll end up with many more degres of freedom. *Way* beyond math skills I can ever imagine myself having. Someone in that field like Hodgins might be able to do it.

gps is 3d btw... if you think about it, it *has* to be, since we're standing on the surface of a sphere and it's comparing 3 or more distances to locate a point (4+ in general for R3, but we can be pretty sure you won't be OUTSIDE the gps satalite array). The stuff the FAA has put in place for automating landings (WAAS) might be good enough to get real world positions for a snowboard or ski racer... but I wouldn't bet on it being a practicle product. There was a Phd thesis on snowboard physics that used differencial gps. Don't have the link here at work, but I seem to recall it was a chick at stanford. WiFi like 802.11 would be the wrong protocol... and I don't think the hardware is going to give you an accurrate and low latency read on signal strength... so it's probibly impossible to triangulate off it. I still think it wouldn't be all that critical to use real world locations. Even just accellometer info will give you a huge amount you can't see. Looking at video data along with accelleration, you get feedback for what impact each little movement had on your cg. If you _really_ wanted real world location, I think radio or ultrasound locators as used by robotics and motion capture would be the most reliable. But not cheap, and time consuming to set up. An accellometer rig could be as small as a pda tucked into a belt to track the rider's cg. The only other option I can think of is infrared reflectors with multiple cameras... as is also used in motion capture.... but you'd need plenty of cameras to cover a decent sized race course.

It might be useful. In auto racing even a simple intertial data record can show all kinds of bad habits. You'd be surprised what a track day with a g cube can show you. If you could build a such a system for ski racers, you might have worthwhile market. Especially if you could synchronise an intertial record with some video analysis.

Doh, sorry Dan, we totally geeked out here :). KJL: didn't Pixar poach one of the lead developers on SquareUSA's photon mapper? I guess you're talking more about the user experience than the rendering pipe, but maybe you'll be getting some enhancements then. Speaking of CS, I can't wait until they start making maps specificly for the HL2 engine. Good times.

Nope, I hadn't heard of F-Prime. That is impressive... I mean, the idea for a caching progressive tracer has been around for ages... but the practical issues in actually making it work scare me. Lightwave must have a pretty good plugin api as well. A buddy of mine was aquainted with some newtek employes about 10 years ago back when they were in KS. I played with ancient versions of lightwave on the amiga toaster actually. Great fun. Did a little bit with later windows versions, but not much with the ones after the rewrite (version 5?). Someone showed me Messiah the other day. I gotta say, the lightwave guys *get* it. Shortening the feedback loop is so key.

Ohh yeah, you're right, I'd missed that. Hrmm, that's a little more expensive, it requires a deferred texture read. Still, current hardware handles any pixels shaders up to about 20 slots with impressive speed. Indeed, we'll see. I may be proven wrong, but I'm more optimistic. With irradience caching we already can generate a sufficient photon map for some reasonabibly interesting dynamic scenes in real time. The place where gpu photon mapping lags more than map density is the number of samples used in the local radience estimate. Most film quality photon map renders use 50 nearest neighbor samples. Gpu implimentations have had to settle for more like 5. Noise much? Bleh. But, there's some promising work with splatting instead: http://www.irit.fr/recherches/SIRV/VIS/Photons/docs/lavignotte-paulin-graphite2003.pdf The limit that hurt splatting most was lack of floating point frame buffer... which is now now no longer a problem. What remains for this familiy of rendering methods is just the awkwardness of the streaming ray triangle intersections on the gpu. The stuff MS has been discussing for the next major revision of Direct X looks to greatly expand the memory model... and that's what I think will be the key. Once you get to where you could visualize a decent density photon map at 60hz, everything else will come naturally. Maybe that threshold is further than 5 years out... but we'll definately cross it. The same way photon mapping suddenly made things bi-directional path tracing had done for years (with render times bordering on eons) practical and quick, we'll see that happen realtime sometime in the near future.