Photos from Corbet’s Couloir
A few of my photos from the famous and scary(!) Corbet's - closed at this time, probably because there's a big rock sticking up in the middle of the drop-in area. Click on a photo to enlarge it.

Corbet’s Couloir
Having just arrived in Jackson Hole, we started talking about tomorrow's skiing and looking at the trail map. Soon we got into talking about Corbet's Couloir - a very challenging and famous run on the Rendezvous Mountain. None of us had skied it, and most maybe none of us will, but the legendary run made us curios. Being geeks, we fired up the laptops and started searching for information and photos.

Unfortunately, we didn't find that many good photos, but the ones we did find were impressive and a press release about this year's opening of Corbet’s Couloir described it like this:

Corbet's degree of steepness is nearly vertical at the top, thus creating the need to jump into the couloir. The slope then “flattens” to 50 degrees. The overall average steepness is 40 degrees. The width of Corbet's is 40-50 feet within the chute, widening toward the bottom. The vertical drop of Corbet's is 500 feet.

Flattens to 50 degrees??!

Searching youtube showed that there's even a short movie: "Someday, Somebody Will Ski That" by Peter Pilafian (2006). The trailer shows a few clips from the drop-in.


Tomorrow's plan is to go to the edge, look down and turn around.

My beloved iPod
...and what I don't like about it.

The most irritating "feature" is how difficult Apple makes it to recover purchased music after a hard drive crash. They could easily fix this by allowing users to download purchased media multiple times - that's how Google Video works. Another option would be to make it easy for users to copy music from the iPod to the new hard drive.

Some people might say that the solution is for users keep backups on separate hard drive (i.e. keeping a 3rd copy of the music), but that's more hazzle than most people want. Last time a hard drive crashed for me I had been out of the country for a few months and because of that I did not have a backup of my most recently purchased music. Since then I have not bought anything from the iTunes Store.

Another thing that irritates me is how the iPod displays music by Artist. Some artists' albums feature many other artists, and for these the iPod will display one line per unique combination of artists. I have for example row displaying "Jay-Z" and 19(!) rows that start with "Jay-Z Feat.". If I choose the plain "Jay-Z" option and then an album, the iPod plays the songs in the album that are "only" by Jay-Z, i.e. no featuring artist. When choosing "The Dynasty..." I get 4 songs, even though the album really contains 16. The only way I can play all songs is to go back to the top menu, display music by album and then choose this album.

This is bad user experience because many people think about their music in terms of artists, don't care much about who's featured on the different songs and don't know all album names by heart. Also, there's no easy way for me to play all my Jay-Z albums in a row.

Zero Gravity

Today's adventure with my visiting little sister was to go flying. I've recently gained interest in aviation and thought she should try it so I had her take an intro flight lesson. That means flying around with an instructor for an hour and learning a few things about the plane, a Cessna 172.

I brought my camera jumped in the back. The whole thing reminded me very much of my own intro lesson. The instructor very quickly went over checklists and explained the various instruments. I could see that my nodding sister couldn't make much sense out of this, as one would expect from someone who's never been in a cockpit before.

Once we got off the ground she got to take the flight controls and fly most of the time while the instructor handled the radio communication and made sure we stayed free of the sea-tac airspace and other planes. During the one hour of flying, we got a good view of Snoqualmie Falls and Seattle's surroundings.

The highlight of the flight was when the instructor took the flight controls and showed what zero gravity feels like. Below is a short video of it. You can see how the pen my sister is holding, and other things, start flying around. The beeping sound just before the dive is the stall warning horn going off.

Weekend in Whistler
My sister is visiting so we spent the weekend in Whistler with some friends. Here's a short clip from Blackcomb's Couloir Extreme.
Funny note: Couloir Extreme was originally called "Saudan Couloir" by locals, but extreme skier Sylvain Saudan complained about the unauthorized use of his name so the company simply changed it. (source: wikipedia)

Snowy Seattle...

...almost 3 hours to get home...

iPhone announced at Macworld 2007

- Recording of Steve Jobs keynote speach (quicktime mov).
- Minute-by-minute coverage.

BitTyrant
"A selfish BitTorrent client that improves performance"

Modified version of the java Azureus BitTorrent client. Downloads for Win, OS X and Linux.
http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu/

Spaghetti Accident?
When setting up this blog I created a Google Analytics account as a simple way to track traffic. Today I looked at it for the first time and as expected there's not much traffic. In fact, there's so little traffic that my misspelling 'fettucino alfredo' are among the top five search terms of all time. This spelling seems to appear rarely on the web - my blog currently turn up as result #6 on google - but people obviously search for it. Maybe misspelling some word is a good idea if you're looking for traffic? (...how do you spell it anyway? fettucini? fettucine?)

2006-02-05. Breaking news! Google's webmaster tool now reports that cokementhos is even more popular!