An embarassment of riches

They say there are no friends on a powder day.  And yet, recently, its been all friends, all powder.

Last Wednesday I got the second day of an epic storm in Vail.  Six fresh inches on top of 14 the day before. Blue Sky Basin was incredible.  Caught up with Shane, Mark, Mike, Maz and Pavel.  Fell asleep at The George during happy hour and woke up to go see John Brown’s Body, a great reggae band outside in Vail Village.  They now allow parking on the frontage road in West Vail by Safeway, so you can take a free bus and avoid the $24 parking fee.  Its only good Friday through Sunday but I got away with parking at the Safeway.

John Brown's Body and its SNOWING

I could have partied in Edwards but must be getting old,  I bailed about 8PM to drive back to Frisco to get a good nights sleep.  It snowed hard all day and I wanted to get first chair Thursday and have plenty of energy.  Vail reported a foot of fresh snow Thursday and Charlie, Rich, Colin and I were in the Vista Bahn line at 7:47 (lifts open at 8:30).  Let me restate this, there was a FOOT of fresh snow reported!

In line before slopes open, Vail, 32 inches in 3 days

We were in line for 3rd chair but got fifth after some aggressive line merging.  The first couple of runs including one down Prima were absolutely ridiculous, snow , snow, snow!  Eventually met up with the larger group and rode Blue Sky almost all day.

I have waited 11 years for this day.  The best powder day I have ever had in Colorado, it was amazing.  Lapping Skyline Express was the best.  Making a heel edge turn and being whited out will not soon be forgotten.

It turned out Denver was in blizzard conditions and a lot of offices closed.  Some of my friends called in Powder Days and didn’t actually have to spend a day!  Meanwhile people who stayed in Denver were rightly dissapointed.  There were no lines all day.  I had to rush back that night for a concert but I rode until 3:59, said goodbye to friends at Vendetta’s and was on the road.  Not before taking this picture in the Vail Village parking structure.  Can you say h a p p y?

Best powder day in 11 years

A lot of restaurants in Denver were closed, but we found a good Pho place on Federal which hit the spot, before Less Than Jake (with the Expendables) at the Ogden.

Less Than Jake at the Ogden

They played several of my all time favorite songs including Plastic Cup Politics and All My Best Friends are Metalheads.  They joked about betting that only 35 people would show up (there were hundreds), and they came out to and played the Star Wars theme. It was a fun show and the first time I have been front row at The Ogden.  The Expendables were OK, they played my two favorite songs, but they have these two enormous guys now, I have seen them twice before (once at Sherpa & Yeti’s with about 10 other people) and do not remember these big guys from before.  They were OK.

Sneak Peek

I had some major homework to get done and did 24 hours of school work in the next two days.  It was exhausting.  Here you can see me in my secret office, and my borrowed mac (more on that later), and my new laptop which I adore.  It is so tiny.  It has a 10 inch screen but is pretty workable, especially when connected to an external monitor.  I love being able to rotate the screen and how quiet/fast/light/small it is.  Also, a seven hour battery life is world changing, my work laptop had to be tethered to an electrical outlet.  You might wonder why I am wearing a hat, the answer: because it is freezing.

Sunday we drove to Steamboat.  I have never been.  It surprised me how little snow there was on the drive, but once we got to Steamboat (what a cute town) it started to snow.  Apparently it snowed pretty hard.

16 inches!

New Snow 16.  Wow, 16 inches of new snow.  A new personal Colorado record for most overnight snowfall.  Admittedly there was some crust underneath but you couldn’t feel it the first couple of runs and the snow was so light.  Its the end of the season so things are really cheap, we stayed at probably the nicest place in Steamboat for about 100 bucks and got a fancy breakfast and they carried our equipment slope side for us.  It was pretty decadent for me.

Knee deep powder

I snowboarded all morning and we hit all three peaks. Storm Peak was probably the most fun, the tree riding was great.  And did I mention the snow was deep?  After lunch back at the hotel I switched to my Tele gear and got this picture as they were snowblowing some lift lines, if I bend the snow is waist deep, and there were definite waist deep pockets all day on the slopes.  Really no lift lines.  What an incredible day.

Please Don't Pee Here

Two bathroom pictures in one posting, not too shabby.  Epic day at Steamboat, people were so friendly compared to Vail and the lifts are all modern.  What a ton of fun.  I will go back.

Lets switch gears.

I haven’t really used an Apple computer since college, so I have had a learning curve with my borrowed mac.

Last night I finished Programming in Objective C 2.0 which was pretty interesting.  The iPhone does not garbage collect so you have to do your own memory management.  Objective C is pretty easy if you have done Java or C++ before, its just syntactical differences, though I do find it harder (read: more obscure) than most object oriented languages I have learned. Some of the code looks like assembly language which is pretty gnarly.

I downloaded the iPhone SDK onto my borrowed mac and did some Hello World stuff in Terminal with success.  I poked around the developer documentation and already found some typos.  In the Foundation Functions Reference from Apple the Core Library NSLog C language function documentation states:

“Logs error an message to stderr”

I was surprised to see this.  Its no secret that documentation is the ugly stepchild of software development but for some reason I expected Apple to be above this kind of thing.  Oh, well.

Did you know that Apple computers can have a Motorola PowerPC or an Intel processor?  The Intel is newer.  Turns out you can’t install iPhone development tools on a PowerPC.  And my G5 has a PowerPC chip.  Crap!

This was pretty devastating.  It was late and I really wanted to try the iPhone simulator to have a win before bedtime.  I searched around and found a way to extract the grayed out iPhone items using Pacifist and the library file (iPhone Simulator Architectures.xcspec) to hack to allow compilation on a PPC.

I eventually got it to work.  Hooray.  ABout 10 minutes later I had written my first Objective C iPhone application, complete with Cocoa Framework GUI widgets and all.

Success!

Now I am reading iPhone SDK Programming.  Once I finish that I will watch the Developer Videos, about 10 hours of them, and then I will set up an account at Unfuddle, a free source code repository and then I will start my first substantive app.  I think I will try to write a simple MD5 Hash application.  I need a device to test things on and to pay my $99 to Apple to be able to move my programs from the emulator to an actual device.  Anyone have a cheap Touch available?

But I am working on something else in the meantime, while writing this post I have been downloading Eclipse and the Flex SDK.  I hope to create a Time Based Map animation to show off the work I did these past several years on behalf of the largest names in Real Estate.  If it works I can use it at my conference next week and in a future visual CV.

Downloads are complete so that’s it for now.