This is a neat project that entertained me for 15 minutes, but it's not problem free. [via Kevin]
Monthly Archive for January, 2005
It had snowed buckets the week before, and this was supposed to be a weekend trip, but there were three problems:
- I forgot it was a holiday weekend, which meant it was extra busy.
- The storm was over, and the temperature had suddenly jumped up to about 50, so I was pretty wiped out by mid-day.
- E-ming felt like he was coming down with something.
So at lunch we decided to turn it into a day trip, and that was probably fine.
- Date(s): Saturday, January 15th
- Who: Me, Eming.
- Getting up at 4:30 am still sucks, so we got up at like 5 and got out the door at about 6... So we got on the mountain at almost 10.
- It was hot, and again I was riding in just my fleece. So far this season, I've had spring skiing in November, December, and January. What's going to happen come April?
- But at least this time, there was some good snow to be had if you looked for it. Eagle bowl and Sentinel bowl were both pretty nice.
- I moved my front binding forward two holes, which turned out to have probably been too far, because it left my left shin in a lot of pain -- especially on the long traverse at the bottom of eagle bowl. I need to remember to move that back one screw before this weekend's day trip.
- We didn't jump too much, because there were kind of too many people around. We did ride the superpipe once, though, and that thing is scary! At the top the walls are pretty much vertical, AND icy. The correct way to deal with this is obviously to go up and *jump* and turn around, but that's scary because your body is parallel to the ground if you do that -- but it's icy and steep so edging the turn is also pretty damn hard. I'm not sure the superpipe is a skill I really need to acquire. =)
By the way, here's the intro graf I sent out when I started at A9.com more than a month ago now. It seems like a pretty reasonable "who I am these days" graf, so here we go:
"Oh boy, this is the part where I have to write an introduction that somehow makes me seem both incredibly interesting to know and work with, but not show offy either. Here goes: Benjy like the mouse, not like the dog. Went to Berkeley, majored in Cog Sci (the "other" CS). I worked at NexTag.com after graduation, and now I'm happily here. My hobbies include snowboarding, music in languages I don't speak, and looking for parking in San Francisco. I look forward to working with y'all, and if there are any scrabble fiends out there we should get a game going at lunch sometime.
And as Jim and Alex discovered yesterday, you probably won't want to be in the room if I'm playing table tennis."
And if you haven't checked out A9.com yet, you totally should.
Heh, I may have to get that "I had an [iPod] before you knew what one was" shirt. Because it's true.
Oh, there's a lot I could say, but let's leave it at this: I already ordered an iPod shuffle (the "Do not eat iPod shuffle" footnote is pretty great), I kinda want a Mac mini to use as a home server, I'm going to wait for iPhoto 5 to actually deal with all the Europe pictures (and yay, it also finally stores movies, too!), and I really really can't wait for Tiger.
I happened across a Nintendo DS in stock at Target the other day, so I figured I'd pick it up. I like it overall, but I have a few issues with it that I figured I'd enumerate just because I haven't had anything else to say for awhile:
- The stylus that comes with the DS is really light, so compared to the hefty Palm stylii I'm used to, it doesn't really feel like I'm holding anything. It's also a lot shorter than Palm stylii, so I'm having to grip it differently.
- It's kind of a lot bigger than I expected, almost to the point of not being easily portable. It's almost the size of two GBA SPs put next to each other. It's not much bigger than an original GBA, but the thickness is a bit of a portability stopper.
- Holding the unit and playing a game with the stylus (Mario 64 in my case) can get pretty tiring on both hands in different ways: My left wrist gets sore from supporting the whole unit + the pressure of me styliing, and my right hand gets sore from gripping.
- On the bright side, the dual screens are really nice and bright. A lot brighter and sharper looking than the GBA SPs, in my opinion.
- Unfortunately, my unit has a dead pixel in the lower right corner of the upper screen, so I'm going to have to call Nintendo about that.
One last issue is that I'm not really sure that the DS is actually going to meet my "portable" gaming needs. In particular, I see problems with the following scenarios:
- Lying in bed, usually on my side, with one eye open and peering at the screen.
- The toilet. Dropping that stylus isn't exactly unlikely.
- While playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the drive to work.
