Not a good day for me at Blackcomb. Today my past got cozy with my present and they didn't really get along. I've never thought of myself as old or inept or untalented in any area. I try something, I usually succeed. I might not WIN but I keep up. Today, all I could think about was how I used to ski. Back when I was 15. Is that a fair comparison? No. But it didn't stop me from reminiscing how I once hit the hill with gusto and skillz. How I could ski all day, take any run, race and laugh all the way to the bottom of the hill. Trees? No problem. Moguls? You call these moguls. In reality, I did do okay for someone who's skied 4 times in 17 years. I should be proud of myself. But the hard, judgmental part of me said I should have picked it back up just like riding a bike. That my quads shouldn't be burning after 3 turns. My boots hurt, my skis are old. If I had better boots, better skis. But let's face it, I'm just old. I think that was the part that hurt the most. I've never considered myself old. Not until today. My knee is injured, I couldn't ski one run worth a shit, today sucked.

And that's why I spent two hours in the Glacier Creek Lodge. Listening to Queen, The Who and Canned Heat. Talk about old, Jesus. The 70's are still alive and kicking here in Canada, folks. I hear Mott The Hoople is up for a Juno this year. Hang tight.

Part and parcel with staying at Spirit Creek Cabin is drinking; as one of the newbies this year I'm doing my best to fit right in. Along with about five different kinds of beer, white and red wine, port and gin, there are also two different kinds of Scotch whiskey. The stand out for me is a Laphroaig Single Islay Malt.

There are tons of things that make Scotch whiskey cool.

• You can say stuff like "double cask matured" and "non-chill filtered" and you're not just blowing smoke.
• It's always "By appointment to HRH the Prince of Whales". Knowing that you are drinking liquor made by appointment of a royal anything is pretty cool regardless, but when you think about the historical connection between the royals and God (note capital G) you realize that you are really drinking liquor made by appointment of the almighty. Drinking by appointment of the creator can't be beat. It makes the hangover somehow purposeful.
• you learn a little history and geography. For instance, I did not know that Islay was a Scottish Isle. Nor did I know that double cask matured means that after they take the scotch out of the oak barrels, they put it in quarter casks. What are quarter casks? No idea. But nuggets like this are indispensable at high-brow parties.

Laphroaig has a very woody taste. On the label it's described as 'peatiness' that is a result of this second, specially commissioned quarter cask and that it's only barrier filtered to preserve this unique flavor. When I had my first sip I was convinced that this would be an acquired taste and now that I've had it three times I'm convinced I was right. But it's a good one. So I'm having some more.

John is sorting vinyl albums alphabetically, Tatiana and Susanna are in the kitchen preparing Thai food for our dinner, Winnie is knitting a scarf, Ann is preparing the cilantro for some veggie spring rolls and I have a beer and a glass of scotch near by. It can only mean one thing, we're at the Spirit Creek Cabin in Whistler.

Did I mention that Jethro Tull is pouring out of the 'Hi-Fi"...? Oh yes, we are definitely at Sprit Creek Cabin.

Hey! I'm writing from Whistler with all my body parts in proper working order! Yahoo for me! As you'll see, someone has already not been so lucky. Poor Chance. Oy, break a leg, buddy. With my nagging knee ailment, I was not too sure about hitting the slopes and tentatively took to the easy runs today. When I say 'easy', I mean Real Easy. Bless Martin's heart, he stuck with me on the My Pretty Pony run all day. What a guy. I caught him looking longingly up at the double black diamond bowl whilst being cut off by some troop of 3 year old ski school kids careening across the flats. He swore he wasn't bored; he didn't swear he wasn't feeling like a bitch though.

We arrived yesterday after a slight detour in downtown Vancouver. Totally intentional. Drove to the lodge to pick up our ID passes. Took another swell picture which, happily, runs a very close second to my world famous Black-Eyed Pirate Costco ID photo. I'd characterize this one more as Carl Malden With Bangs. One for the wallet! Headed up to the cabin. Got the car stuck in the driveway. Lost my wedding rings. Yes, that's right. Flew right off my stupid hand after helping Martin dig out the back wheels. Faught the urge to simultaneously throw up and punch myself in the face. Ugh. Where do you go after two silver slivers shoot off your hand into a white snow bank? And it's nighttime? And you have no idea the trajectory at which they left your finger? All you see is snow, snow, snow from the dim view of the reverse lights on the car? Well, I went to Guinness, Scotch, Champagne, Homemade Apple Cider Town. We gave it a solid effort. It was just so monumentally futile and sad and upsetting, I couldn't look anymore.

Skiing was super today despite being tense a few times. Hopefully, tomorrow will be as pain-free as possible. I'm afraid I may need a forklift to get out of bed in the morning. My muscles seizing up in the night. That first day of skiing after two years can be a real killer. At least for me. Not for Martin though. He laughed off my offer of pre-emptive Advil. "Uh, I won't be that sore tomorrow". Que? You mean, I am the only one gonna feel the burn from Upper Whiskey Dick? Oh yes. I forgot. Upper Whiskey Dick is for babies. And you are NOT a baby. I AM the baby. But do babies ski it 5 times with their teeth clenched pleading with Jesus to spare their life? Didn't think so.

Did I mention we have plenty of food here at the cabin? Mother of God. I've never seen so much food for 8 people. There's a Snack Cabinet. Cases of beer out on the porch. Leftovers from previous nights with new food at dinner each subsequent night. I was worried I wasn't bringing enough. Now I should be worried I didn't bring my Fat Ski Pants. Susanne has her goggles on chopping onions for soup tonight at this moment. Why didn't I think of that? I vow to do that from now on. I'll wear my helmet, too. The kitchen is a dangerous place. Some would say more dangerous than Upper Whiskey Dick.

For Christmas Cameron got an 4 GB iPod nano and a 4 GB Zune. This is probably the biggest benefit of being a child with divorced parents - you get lots of stuff.

The new 3rd generation nano has a larger screen and can play music videos, TV shows, even movies (if you can tolerate the display size). But most of this kind of content costs money and that's a bit prohibitive to a 13 year old. And to me. :) So how can you download free videos - YouTube in this case - and play them on your iPod? Here's how.

1. Browse to the YouTube video of your choice and copy the URL.
2. Surf on over to this TechCrunch page and paste in the URL and click the Get Video button. You'll probably want to rename the file when you save it as the default name is always "get_video".
3. Download and install SUPER. SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer), in addition to being free, is a media player and encoder. As such it can also convert most any file format to any other. The file you download from YouTube using TechCrunch is FLV (Flash video) and will need to convert it to a format compatible with your iPod.
4. Drag the file onto the SUPER application where it says "DRAG A VALID MULTIMEDIA FILE HERE" and then at the top where it says, "1. Select the Output Container" select "Apple -iPod".
5. Leave all the other settings alone and click the "Encode (Active Files)" button. This will convert your Flash (FLV) file to a MPEG-4 (MP4) file. By default the file will be placed at the root of your C drive.
6. Now simply drag the MP4 to your iPod.
7. In case you can't do this, you will need to enable "Manage music manually" and "Enable disk use". This will allow you to drag and drop any items from your music or video library onto your iPod.

Now get to watching.

It seems like Santa got everyone the same helmet camera for Christmas this year.

I got one, then last Friday I found out my friend Tony got one as well and yesterday on the ride Brian had one on his bike. Nice. I'm no camera expert  but after reading a few reviews and shopping around the Oregon Scientific ATC2K seemed like a good 'first' camera. The resolution is only 640x480 but it's shock and water resistant, comes with a reasonable mounting kit for your helmet and handlebars and Oregon Scientific was having a special on the camera plus a 2 GB SD card which is the largest it can hold. Sold.

ASIDE - the reason 2 GB is the largest this camera will accept is you have to format the card FAT 16... seems strange in this day and age.

Now having the camera is cool but I know exactly what is going to happen. There is going to be a deluge of crap posted on YouTube that is not in the least bit interesting to anyone other than the author. You know, stuff like, "Here I am walking the dog" or, "Here I am riding my bike around a really boring corner of a really unremarkable road" or, "Here is [insert significant other here] brushing their teeth without knowing that I'm filming them". Oh wait, there already is.

I guess it's just a learning curve we all have to go though. Just like when we got our first email address and were initially set loose on the Internet; everyone had to forward the same tired jokes and chain letters to everyone else. And it's not only helmet cameras, most any phone or digital camera will record video too.

But there is hope. Some, okay lots, of the stuff on YouTube is incredible. In fact it was my sister that originally got me thinking about how much fun making movies could be with her Lucca goes skating clip that she made a couple of years ago. I love this film. It obviously helps that I also love Weezer but she did a damn good job. The little touches like the shot of the heart rate monitor? Brilliant. The transition from running on pavement to skating on snow? So simple and so cool.

I guess there is hope for me yet. Or at least my videos.

Just watch your back - you never know who is going to be armed with one of these the next time you get drunk at a party, playfully flirt with your best friend's wife or decide to blow through that stop sign. No need for big brother when there is an army of little brothers all in possession of some device that will record video.

Shelley was feeling like poo and watching a movie in bed, Cameron was on the couch and deep into some Jean-Claude van Damme film and I was eating dinner next to a laptop. What better way to pass the time than figure out how to configure a Google custom search engine for our sites. Ta da...!

http://www.criminale.com/search.asp

For any conspiracy theorists out there that are convinced a cash-less society is the first sign of the coming of the apocalypse, I'm sure they would have something to say about Google as well. Give Google access to all your information, all your stats and all your metadata and in return you get a nifty search engine designed just for your site(s).

That said, it's pretty cool...

You can:

• Customize the look and feel of the search and results page (of course).
• Specify what sites you want this custom search engine to index so in our case where we have more than one site and more than one blog, all of them will get crawled.
• Let Google host the results. I chose to host them myself to preserve the criminale.com look and feel of the results by plopping them in my web page template that's just me.
• Link it to your Google AdSense account and (hopefully) make some dough from click-throughs in your search results.
• Add all kinds of refinements, new AdSense channels, key words, inclusions, exclusions and search customizations. I only understood about half of all this but it was fun and edifying to poke around and mess with shit.

How much stuff can you cram into a cyclometer? Cervellum thinks it's a lot.

Not only does this bicycle computer have all the usual stats that everyone (doesn't) need, it also has 'modules' that you can connect to give you heart rate, an optional LCD on the top of your STI lever, a power meter, GPS mapping capability and a REARWARD FACING CAMERA SO YOU CAN SEE WHAT'S BEHIND YOU.

No, really. There is a lens that attaches to your seatpost and the image it picks up can be displayed on the unit's screen; just like some massive RV with no rear window.

I suppose it might be fun to be off the front and not have to look behind you to check on the progress of the pack...

This is the best thing I've read all week.

I was born with the anxiety gene. Martin without.

A peek into the brains of those less fortunate. :)

http://www.finslippy.com/finslippy/2007/12/the-worst-that.html

to eat 4 pieces of fake bacon and a chocolate-covered cherry for breakfast, then I don't want to be right.