tufty

It was one of the first reverse scams to get widely publicised, a guy on the somethingawful.com forums was selling a powerbook and someone tried to scam him - it all got turned around. Hilarious story. http://www.p-p-p-powerbook.com/ Here's the 'p-p-p-powerbook' in its full glory:

Oh, American pants. .... Simon

What you need is the dirtsurfer patent. US6398237 Simon

http://home.swipnet.se/ansar/s.html Mad as a hatful of fish. I wanna try. Simon

"Is that a snowblade?" (kid on board asked instructor as I scooted past them) Heheh

L@@K!!! R@RE!!! G@ F@ST!!! I'd put it down to stupidity on the part of the buyer. It's possible that the last minute snipe by trenchdigger1096 was a shill bid intended to push everyone up to their maximum (being 116$ over the 'at the time' highest bid) before backing out and offering to the second highest bidder. eBay can be very full of wankers. Simon

Looks over at freeride board, with a layer of wax still on it... Yep, I do the same for freeriding, except I don't even bother to scrape it at all. Warm crayon on, iron in, leave it at that. Although I've only been out once on it this season, just enough to take off the storage wax job :) Scraping or not scraping in such a case doesn't really matter, IMO. If you are going to scrape, do it cold, and as you've bothered to do that, go the whole hog. But I'm no master. Simon

Heh. I had a go at this today. Carving one way or another, fine. But I managed to stick myself in a big pile of snow doing a heel-toe transition (left it too late, ended up buried in a big pile of snow at the side of the piste). More practice required, I think. Simon

Ace. Didn't want to be seen as being overly agressive / negative, but I've seen a few dodgily modified helmets in my time, and the results of that, both humourous and not so. Sounds like you've done your homework, and I'm sorry if what I said was all old news to you. Have fun. I'm still not sure that I'd trust your helmet 100%, but hey, it's liable to be a long way better than my current bobble hat, so let's leave it at that. Shame you're so far away, though. My VF500 needs a new paintjob, and it seems like your paint guy is pretty damn good. As a vaguely amusing aside, story concerning the only other person I know who wasn't a pro bike racer and who had a professional custom paintjob done on a helmet. Let's call him "X" (and no, this was not me, this is the story as told to me) "X" spends 2 months wages on helmet plus custom paint job. Helmet arrives back from shop. "X" heads off on bike, with newly painted helmet, for a few drinks with buddies. "X" has a few too many, decides to leave bike and go home with someone else. Who has also had a few too many, and highsides the bike. "X" is flying through the air, and realises that a: he's not got gloves on, they are in the paniers of his bike. b: he's wearing a very expensively custom painted helmet. c: the road is coming up fast. "X" does what all sane human beings would do and puts bare hands over helmet to protect it. After all, he can grow new knuckles, right? Don't do that :) Simon

Hell, yeah. It looks very well done, the flame thing isn't really my cup 'o tea, but it's certainly not boring. Oh, and using the "n" word, even in jest, with people over here really causes a lot of offence. Best not to. 1/2 shot Jagermeister® herbal liqueur 1/2 shot Rumple Minze® peppermint liqueur Simon

Well, that depends very much on what paint is being applied, how much of it, what outgassing occurs during curing, how that outgassing affects the resin that was used to make the piece, etc etc. Which bits of race cars get painted? I can almost guarantee that the carbon parts that have to deal with stresses and not painted in any way, and that even if they are, they are dealt with in a very controlled manner. Remember, when you're making a race car you know _exactly_ what resins were used, what proportions or resin to curer to fibre, what temperatures the autoclave was running at when the piece was manufactured, all that stuff. What you're doing is not even remotely comparable. You've taken an out-of-date helmet made with some unknown resin mix and some other unknown reinforcement, stripped it using rubbing alcohol, and then applied another paint which is full of other unknown chemicals to it. You might be safe, you might not. That's all. If a helmet has aged for four years, even in its box, it's four years old; it's no longer new. Helmet materials do age (admittedly mostly through UV action and being knocked about), and they have a shelf life. I wouldn't trust my head to a questionable helmet,[1] although it is likely that manufacturer's claims of helmet lifespan are highly conservative. Tests for ski helmets are different to tests for motorcycle helmets, it's true. Over here, EN1077 for ski helmets and ECE 22-05 for bike helmets. EN1077 covers, among other things, "Visibility, Field of vision, Shock-absorbing materials, Penetration tests, Mechanical testing, Impact testing, Strength of materials, Durability, Ageing tests". Helmet manufacturers simply wouldn't be allowed / financially able to sell helmets if they didn't meet rigorous standards, and those standards are designed to cover the activities for which the helmet is designed. Standards testing is, I believe, carried out not against a range of helmets, but against all the various colours and paint schemes within a range of helmets, at least in the motorcycle world. In the same way that I would not trust bicycle tyres on a motorcycle, I would trust a dedicated ski helmet in a ski crash more than I would trust a motorcycle helmet in a ski crash, and vice versa for motorcycle crashes. They are designed for fundamentally different things, which is why the standards applied to construction and testing are different. Aaaaaaanyway, please don't take this as flamage, it's not how it's intended. All you should be aware of is that by taking a (presumably out of manufacturer's sell by date) helmet and modifying it, you have absolutely no comeback against the manufacturer should it fail. And that if in some bizarre accident it should fail in such a way as to injure someone else, it would be you that was liable. Simon [1] Of course, I don't have much of a leg to stand on in the "I wouldn't use it" argument, as I've already stated that I don't wear a helmet when I'm boarding[2] :) [2] ...although I am shopping for one.

On a related note, where do you find board gear for kids? My son just turned 6, he's a blast on skis (to the point where I find it difficult to follow him) and wants to try boarding. I've seen kids plates on eBay (and it's going to be easier to find ski boots for him than snowboard boots, I think), but finding short boards is a nightmare. None of our local shops have anything less than 135 (he's only 120cm tall, and 21 kg) which is going to be rather too much plank for him I think. Simon

I think you're losing out on the € -> $ conversion there, over here the Swoards are only marginally more expensive than a 'stock' major manufacturer's alpine board - hell, it's only the price of an upper-range burton freeride board, for gh0d's sake. As for the style - I love looking at it, it looks like a load of fun. Sadly, when I ride, if I get that close to the snow I'm in the process of crashing :) Nils, if you're heading up the Val d'Arly any time, drop me a line. Simon

Maaaan. That's an _awful_ lot more politik than how I would have phrased it. It's immensely sad that it has to come to things like this. I can see why it's come to it, but it makes me sick to the core. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone involved in alpine boarding (if not alpine sports generally) are in it because it's what they love doing, not because it makes them mucho dineros. Ambulance chasing lawyers are in it because they think they can make a painful incident into someone else's fault, _anyone_ else's fault, and make some profit by driving someone else's business through the floor. I despise them. I've seen this happen before, in a completely different (although probably equally esoteric) environment, where somone hired to do a performance regrettably damaged themselves very badly, and was then pressured into sueing the venue for what was essentially their own fault (failure to check their own personal equipment). The result was a case that dragged on for years, and an awful lot of bad blood. Simon

Never mind that. Auto-pilot. That way you can go up, get hammered in the altitude bar, then bomb down executing perfect carves all the way to the cheers and plaudits of all and sundry. Proximity of technique to the extreme carving technique would be a simple relationship with exactly _how_ hammered you get: Just a few == 'Bomber' Technique A few more == Eurocarving One too many == Extreme carving (aka "I can't stand up any more") Or maybe they could just head on out and do a few runs for you, leaving you to stay in bed and dream of hero snow. Simon

1-2 mm, surely? 1-2 cm is - ummm - quite a lot. :) Simon

One can also build one's own kites. Loads cheaper if you go with a 'known good' design, and there's a huge buzz to being beaten up by something you made yourself. http://www.foilmaker.co.uk or http://www.surfplan.com.au/sp/ are good places to start I'm waiting for a day when there's a serious amount of wind to get out and (snow)board with my toys. I haven't been buggying in ages, although I keep looking at the slopes, and then the buggy, and then the slopes, and then the buggy, and the word "downhill" pops into my mind... Simon

The paint may not change the durability of the fibre, but it may change the durability of the binding resin. And as you said you'd 'stripped' it, I assume you used something to clean it up? Also generally seen as a no-no. Still, it's a helmet that is what - over 4 years old now? It's well out of its safety period, and fit only for the bin. Still, it looks very nice. I wouldn't want to trust my head to it, but it looks very nice. Simon

Depends. Look at the specs for the XBox 360 (3 x PowerPC processors), upcoming PS3 (Multiple Cell procesors) etc, some PC games might be essentially single-threaded, but not many these days. Hell, most of them are driving the GPU pretty hard, which could be seen as multiprocessing. Remember 'Tempest', the 1981 Atari vector arcade game? It had 3 processors, as did almost all of the vector games out of Atari in the day. :) Games programmers will take everything they can, and then some more. It won't be long before there are (PC) games that require multiple processors (or at least dual cores). All of which is mildly offtopic, though. Apple's OSX is a Mach kernel with a BSD wrapper layer around it, nothing to do with Linux. It's basically a system that's been in development since 1991 or so (NeXTStep). It's great for working, not terribly wonderful for gaming, partially because the graphics cards on macs have been until recently well below 'gaming spec' unless you bought a top-of-the-range mac, and of course because most of the games are developed for Windows. Booting windows on the new Apple hardware is going to be tricksy, there's no BIOS, it uses something different. Nothing to stop you running windows in a virtual machine, though, I would guess. Although quite why one would want to is another question entirely. As is usual, people are saying "they are too expensive", but the price carries its benefits - they are generally in the same price bracket as an equivalently specced machine from a quality PC supplier. My Mac Mini, bought as a stopgap machine when my powerbook's hard drive smoked earlier this year, has been on, almost permanently, since delivery. We had a power outage a couple of weeks back that my UPS couldn't handle, so I had to power off, it took me a couple of minutes to remember where the power switch on the mini is; I've only used that switch 3 times. Uptime is only limited, for me, by the interval between security updates, and I drive the machine pretty hard. Simon

That first photo is real caption competition material. Glad to see he's protecting other people on the slopes with the helmet, too. Simon

By all accounts they do work, yes. It's a system that is pretty common over here on the budget ranges. It seems to be putting things backwards, though, it's better to keep something warm than to let something get cold and then have to reheat it. I'll stick with mittens and the need to take them off to cool my hands down on the lifts rather than having to stop and warm my hands up... Simon

I'd suggest that GPS measured speeds should be taken with a large pinch of salt unless it's point-point average speed. According to Garmin, their equipment is accurate *on average* to 15m or 3m if you have WAAS equipment and coverage. So, although a GPS might give you a reasonable measurement of average speed over a course where you're running more or less straight from point to point (think racing someone down the line of a chairlift, for example), it's unlikely to give you a sensible measurement of 'speed over the snow' at any given point in time. Expecially for a carver, who is likely to be pulling turns that approach the equipment's error margin for measurements (especially over here in yurp, where there is no WAAS coverage) I'd question 54mph if it was a 'point speed'. GPS samples every 0.5 seconds. 54mph is about 24 m/sec, assuming a worst case error of 6m (2 x 3m average accuracy) between two samples, that's +- 25% of the speed. As regards flat out speed, there's probably not much difference between the speeds an average rider could attain on a freeride setup and the speeds they could attain on a carving setup. In the same way that anyone can get on a musclebike and twist their wrist to do insane speeds in a straght line, pretty much anyone with a modicum of control and a quantity of nerve can point a snowboard down the fall line and go flat out. Terminal velocity in such a case is liable to be dictated more by air drag due to stance than the board unless you're a dedicated 'kilometre lancee' freak anyway. For the average rider, it's when you start adding turns into the equation that the men get sorted from the boys, as it were. I am quite confident that, given a good tune on both, I could go as fast in a straight line on my freeride setup as on my alpine setup before the self-preservation instinct took over. But I know I can turn while holding more speed on my alpine setup - turning hard at speed on my freeride setup can be a brown-trousering experience... Simon

Never tried heated stuff, but mittens are the dog's pods. Even when it's -20c or so, I have sweaty hands in my mittens. They have pouches for putting heat packs in, I dread to think how cold it would have to be before I needed to do that. I only wear gloves when I'm working, when I'm skiing or boarding, it's mittens all the way. Get them too big rather than too small. Simon

In that case, no, I don't use them. Now, I'm probably going to come across like the skiers who "don't like snowboards, they are too dangerous", but here's a quick unscientific breakdown of what we see injury-wise over a general season: Skiers : blown knees, mainly, the occasional broken arm Boarders : Wrists, ankles, concussions Snowbladers : could be anything There's not really more of one or the other, but of the 5 helicopter rescues (i.e. serious hospitalise or die deal) we had where I work last year, 4 were snowblade users. The other one was a guy who had a heart attack on the slopes. snowblade injuries do seem to be more serious. Why does this happen? 1 : Non-releasing bindings (the majority of snowblades etc have bale bindings, not 'safety' bindings, although that is changing) 2 : Ease of use - pretty much anyone can get down almost any slope with them, no skill involved. So you have beginners hurtling completely out of control at warp speed down black slopes. I'll say this much. Of all the people I know that work on the slopes over here, not one of them has a pair. Although I know a few who have ultra-short carving skis... Simon

Are we talking splitboards here (snowboards that convert into a pair of AT skis), 'approach skis' (short skis with AT bindings) or snowblades (super-short skis, generally with 'bale' bindings)? I know people who use both of the former, and am somewhat pulled towards a splitboard myself. However, having seen a shin snapped at the boot cuff already, I won't be going near the latter. Simon