Friday - Both Trainings Canceled

They blew off both the mens and womens training runs early today. It's either pissing down rain or puking gloppy slush. Can't tell from the webcams.

So now the questions are....

(1) What will the weather be like tomorrow? Enough visibility to race?

(2) Will the course be usable tomorrow, even if the weather cooperates?

Whistler has a fantastic, well-trained, super-enthusiastic group of course workers called "The Weasel Workers" (closely related to "The Sled Dogs" at Lake Louise) and I'm sure they'll be out there, literally, all night, if necessary. If it's snowing they'll be shoveling the new snow off the course. If it's raining they'll be attempting to sop up the water with ammonium nitrate.

Or perhaps the weather is just such sheisse that Greg will order everyone off the course (lest they ruin the surface for all the subsequent events) and they'll just put themselves at Mother Nature's mercy for tomorrow.

Will be interesting. Wish them luck, because NBC desperately needs that mens DH race on Saturday, and they need either Bode or Vonn to win this weekend, preferably both. As for me, I'll be rooting for Manuel Osborne-Paradis, Eric Guay, Jan Hudec, and Michael Walchhofer.

Mid-Day Update from Pissler

Yup, exactly as I predicted. It's not that I'm The Amazing Kreskin, it's just that I've sat through my share of endless weather delays and cancellations at Pissler downhills, and I could see this one coming from a mile away. Actually, from 2500 miles away.

I was watching the FIS live ticker. Compressing 90 minutes into 30 seconds, this is basically what happened:

First forerunners were delayed due to fog.

Sent a few forerunners.

Another delay ("Start Stop" in FIS parlance) due to fog.

Sent one racer, Recchia, bib #1. Her time was 1:52, so she was cruising easy, focusing on just not crashing.

Another Start Stop, for about 20 minutes.

Sent a forerunner.

Sent bib 2.

Bib 2 (Stacey Cook) crashed. Probably because she couldn't see shit.

Another Start Stop.

Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

Game over. Training canceled 90 minutes after it started. Two racers out of the gate.

If the weather forecast is anywhere close to reality, they're fucked for the weekend.

Whistler has one thing going for it. That one thing is a guy named Greg Johnson, the FIS TD, who is one of the best TDs in the business. Greg, who is head of the Race Department at Beaver Creek, will be advising Günther Hujara, the FIS referee, and Greg really knows his stuff. Another thing Greg's got going for him is he's one of the few people in the world who actually likes and respects Hujara. Pretty much everyone else I know in ski racing thinks Günther is a hopeless douchebag.

Another random thought - I hope Stacy Cook isn't hurt. Racing at 100 KmH when you can't see the next gate is a sure ticket to getting pulled out of the nets, possibly one body part at a time.

Update: I saw the video. Cook hit the nets hard. She was conscious, but she took a big hit. The visibility wasn't nearly as bad as what I'd anticipated from my experience racing at Whistler, which surprised me. The start and the first few gates were marginal when Cook started, but it was perfectly clear in the section where she augered in.

The head of I.T. at FIS, Francesco Cattaneo, screwed up on the FIS web site today. His link on the FIS live-to-web page to the mens training was broken, so both the womens live link and the mens live link brought up the women. As a result, I do not know what happened with the men. But I think I can safely assume that the men did more or less the same thing (canceled), since they race on the same course at the same time.

Update: I was wrong. I just read that somehow, the men completed their training run. But I do not think it was a start-to-finish complete run, as the winner's time was only 1:34, so they still have problems. The men supposedly were going to run from the DH start to the slalom start. If so, they still need to either run another full training or a mini-training on the slalom-start-to-finish section of the course prior to Saturday's race. Or waive the requirement, which has never been done to my knowledge. It's possible. Years ago , at Lake Louise, the one training was run I1-to-finish. Then, early on race day, we ran a start-to-I1 training run (approximately 10 seconds) and the afternoon race was legal. Stay tuned. Who knows, perhaps the weather will cooperate tomorrow.

Nah. It's Pissler.

It's ironic, because at World Cup, when our DATA partners make even a minor mistake, Francesco is the first one to bitch and whine like a spoiled little girl whose miniature pony has been swiped. But there's no recourse when Francesco, who must have ordered one too many bottles of champagne at his local titty bar last night, screws the pooch.

Anybody who knows jacques schitt about ski racing could have told you the odds were overwhelming this was going to happen. So NBC is almost surely fucked for the opening weekend, as their marquee event, alpine downhill, is almost surely delayed into mid-week.

But there are a few positives:

1) With Greg running things, they'll get the DHs run at some point. There's a reason DH is scheduled for the opening days....it gives them two weeks worth of makeup days.

2) The cancellations will give Lindsey Vonn an extra 4 days for her injury to heal.

An Alpine Ski Racing Primer: Kombined vs Super-Combined

In a previous post, I mentioned an alpine discipline referred to as “Kombined”. That's not a typo. There is also another alpine discipline called “Super-Combined”.

There's a difference.

In simple terms, the difference is explained thusly: Kombined (also referred to as “Classic Combined”) is a downhill (DH) race and a full two-run slalom (SL) race, usually on consecutive days, added together. Three runs, two days. A Super-Combined can be one DH + one slalom run, or it can be one Super-G (SG) + one slalom run, on the same day, added together. Two runs, same day.

Kombined is often referred to as Kombined, rather than Combined or Classic Combined, because its origins lie deep in Austrian history; in the German language, Combined is spelled Kombined. Kombined is a ski racing anachronism which originated a century ago at Europe's winter “Super Bowl”, the Hahnenkamm-Rennen races at Kitzbühel (HKR). (NOTE: HKR is highly esteemed customer of mine; the timekeeping, speed measurement, and video wall software used there is 100% Broder's Skunkware Scoring & Timing Software.) The Hahnenkamm, which celebrated its 70th running last month, started in about 1910, and by about 1930 evolved into more or less its present form. By 1930, there was a speed race (more or less DH, held on The Streif) and a technical race (more or less SL, held on the adjacent Ganslern). Each had its own champion. But the really big deal was at the end of the weekend, times for the two were added together, and the combined winner was awarded The Hahnenkamm Trophy. Fans came from all over Tirol to celebrate the crowning of The Hahnenkamm Champion. Now they come from all over the globe, while tens of millions watch on TV.

The Hahnenkamm Trophy still exists. Bode Miller has won it, although he has neither won the Hahnenkamm DH nor the Hahnenkamm SL. He simply was the guy who placed highest in both in the same year. The Hahnenkamm Trophy celebrates the guy who is the fastest, most versatile racer, over a variety of conditions, on the weekend.

link

The Kitzbühel HKR is the only regular yearly venue on the World Cup to still hold a Classic Combined. Since the HKR is men only, the women do not have a seasonal Kombined. The World Alpine Ski Championships also still stages a Kombined, for both men and women.

So, basically, Kombined is ski racing's tip of the hat to Kitzbühel, to The Hahnenkamm, and to its Austrian roots.

Kombined is a software & scoring nightmare, and very difficult to stage. For example, racers who may not qualify to even compete in the 2nd run of slalom (flip 30) are allowed to race if they are eligible for the Kombined. They ski their 2nd SL run after the slalom race is over, but their times don't “count” toward the slalom results. In addition, most World Cup venues are either speed or technical, not both, and even if they do have both courses laid out on the mountain, the two courses frequently have finish stadiums in different physical locations. Lake Louise, for example, is a Club 5 DH (Club 5 is an exclusive designation given the World Cup's best races), but the venue doesn't even have a homologated slalom course.

So a few years ago, the astonishingly incompetent brainless idiots at FIS came up with the Super-Combined (SC). SC is one of the few good ideas to come out of FIS in the last few decades. It's far easier to stage than Kombined, because the “speed” run can be a Super-G if the mountain or the weather won't cooperate. These days, downhill courses are a vanishing breed, but Super-G courses are a dime a dozen. It only takes one day instead of two. There are no bookkeeping nightmares, as it's just another two-run race. It still rewards the most versatile racer, and it's easier for the casual fan to understand than Kombined. SC has become quite popular, and in fact this year's Olympics has dropped the Kombined and replaced it with a Super-Combined.

Ironically, with the US team in disarray, with very few World Cup results this year not involving Lindsey Vonn, being woefully mis-managed by the former ski-coach who is currently calling himself CEO, America's best chance for a mens medal is the SC. Both Bode Miller and Ted Ligety are amongst the most versatile all-around skiers on the World Cup. Although they each have only one World Cup victory apiece this year, it would be a surprise if one or the other doesn't wind up on the SC podium. Lindsey Vonn, if healthy enough to race full-blast, is also a favorite to podium in the womens SC.

"We're Never Coming Back Here" - Günther Hujara, FIS Alpine Referee, at Whistler in 1998

Snowmaking.
Kitzbühel, Austria, January 2007



In terms of actuarial tables, my lease on life is due to expire somewhere between 2040 and 2050. I believe by that time, three of the biggest American cultural and financial powerhouses of the 20th Century - TV networks NBC, ABC, and CBS - will be bankrupt, worthless relics of another age.

Like the American railroads and American car companies, those three networks are doomed to ride a tsunami of their own overconfidence, criminally poor management, and changing technology straight into bankruptcy court.

It is also likely, when NBC's corporate obituary is written, that Lindsey Vonn's appearance on The Today Show this morning will be worth a mention.

Please indulge me while I meander across several digressions to my point.

NBC paid approximately $800,000,000 for the rights to televise the 2010 Olympics. That's almost a billion dollars. That was just one in a long, sad series of colossal NBC gaffes. No other country pays even 10% of that amount. US networks perennially overpay for Olympics rights by several hundred percent, then they botch the coverage to the point where it's unwatchable by putting in 20 minutes of commercials every hour to pay for their folly. But NBC lost this game of musical chairs worse than any other network in history; they got stuck holding the 2010 bag at a moment in time when the bottom fell out of the planet's economy.

NBC has already admitted that they are going to lose at least $250,000,000 on the deal. That's a quarter of a billion dollars. In a historically tight economy. I would venture to say that if the the 2010 Olympics are spectacular beyond NBC's wildest dreams, they will lose "only" that amount. Realistically, they will lose almost double that.

NBC's chances of an extraordinarily great Olympics are partly dependent on the weather in Vancouver, and if you've read anything on the subject recently, you know the weather in Vancouver usually sucks. It is forecast to suck even worse than usual for at least the first 5 days of The Games. The weather at Whistler (site of alpine skiing), dodgy even at the best of times, is terrible and getting worse. There's a very good chance that the downhills scheduled for this weekend will not come off, for reasons I'll get into later. The weather at Cypress Mountain, site of the halfpipe and acro ski events, is so warm that VANOC is flying in snow by helicopter. If you've ever seen a helicopter ferrying snow, it's a pitiful sight. Take it from somebody who lived through the 2007 Hahnenkamm races in Austria, with 4 choppers working dawn to dusk in a futile attempt to save the race. A chopper can only handle maybe a ton of snow at a time, and a ton of snow is about half the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. In other words, not much.

One of the few potential lifelines NBC is clinging to is a possible record-setting performance by Lindsey Vonn, the statuesque World Champion downhiller with an All-American smile who has dominated alpine ski racing for the past three seasons. Up until today, NBC thought Vonn stood at least a decent chance of having a Michael Phelps Olympics, running the table of all 5 of her events. NBC has been promoting the hell out of this possibility, hoping against hope that they can parlay Vonn into enough viewers to keep their losses to “only” a quarter-billion. This morning, Vonn went on The Today Show and dropped a bombshell: last week she sustained a serious injury while training in Austria, and she might not even compete. Vonn has a shin injury, which for a skier is one of the worst injuries possible. It's like a tennis player who injures the palm on her racket hand. Skiers “feel” the snow through their shins, and their shins take a terrible beating when they race. They simply can't race with a bad shin.

If Vonn is out, or even injured to where her performances are compromised, then NBC goes from seriously fucked to totally, completely, historically, interplanetarily, intergalactically fucked.

Now for the weather. As I've mentioned repeatedly in previous postings, Whistler has the worst weather of any major ski resort in the world. The weather at Whistler is consistently atrocious. The problem is two-fold. First of all, Whistler is too close to the coast. It gets all the weather coming in off the Pacific Ocean. And it's too low. Whistler Village is only 2,000 feet above sea level. Whistler has got a simply awesome mountain (> 5000 ft vertical drop) with a superb downhill course, however, nobody ever gets a chance to race there, because it's always either pissing down rain or fogged in. Or both.

As I wrote previously in this space, my Winter Sports Group went there three years in a row to race World Cup (1996-7-8), and we never got a racer out of the gate.

World Cup and OWG ski events have a protocol for downhill (DH). The protocol states that for safety (and marketing) reasons, a downhill race is preceded by three “training runs”. These training runs take place on the DH course and are timed (some, such as the training runs for the Hahnenkamm in Kitzbühel, are even televised). Training is usually held over three consecutive days. In order for the downhill to take place, at least one of the training runs must take place, and a competitor must at least start at least one training run in order to be eligible to compete in the race. (NOTE: I used "at least" twice in that previous sentence because in order to be legal, a racer has to start, but does not have to finish.) Placings in training don't matter; the training runs simply give the racers an at-speed look at the course to reduce the chances they'll wind up in the nets (and therefore in the medical evacuation chopper) when it comes time to race.

In basketball, the expression "nothing but net" means something very good. In DH.....not so much.

So...the Mens DH is scheduled for Saturday, and the Ladies' Super-Kombined DH is scheduled for Sunday. (Note: the “kombined” DH and the DH are not the same thing, but they're both DHs. I'll explain that in another post later in the Olympics). Mens training today (Wednesday) was canceled due to fog. Big surprise. Both the men and women will attempt training Thursday and Friday. The men have reserved Saturday morning for a desperation training run if the schedule gets completely hosed by the weather. The women are also scheduled to train Saturday.

Already, all the remaining training runs and both races are in doubt. A big front is blowing in which may cancel training on Thursday and Friday with rain and fog. The front will then turn to wet gloppy snow, which will dump on the water-injected course all weekend, possibly rendering it too dangerous to race on (think wet, gloppy snow on top of an ice rink with a hockey game scheduled).

Guenther Hujara, the FIS referee, the guy quoted above vowing never to return to Whistler's shitty weather, has already rescheduled tomorrow's training to 10:30 from 11:45 in an effort to beat the incoming weather front.

And so it starts.

From FIS Alpine News:

Three training runs are planned to be carried out between Wednesday, February 10, and Friday, February 12. The men's downhill competition is scheduled for Saturday, February 13, a day after the official opening ceremony of the Games.
Unfortunately, the weather forecast for the next few days is not favorable for the region north of Vancouver as rain and snow are both projected to continue through Sunday.


From EarthTimes.org:

Unfortunately, the weather forecast for the next few days is not favorable for the region north of Vancouver as rain and snow are both projected to continue through Sunday.

Lindsey Vonn: WhoTF Is Inventing All of These "Controversies"?

Lindsey Vonn Captured on our PhotoFinish at FIS World Cup @ Lake Louise, Alberta


I can't understand, and am infuriated by, the controversy(s) being invented out of whole cloth in the media about Lindsey Vonn.

There's the controversy about her Sports Illustrated cover:

link

Then there's the controversy about her appearance in the Sports Illustrated Bathing Suit Issue:

link

And the controversy about her estranged relationship with her father:

link

And the controversy about her weight and size:

link

Sporting media, get a grip. Let's review a few facts, shall we?

1) She's the best female alpine ski racer in the world. By far. Nobody else is even close.

2) She is a threat to win any World Cup, World Championship, or Olympic race, in any discipline, in any conditions, anywhere, at any time. She's actually more than a threat; for many, she's a foregone conclusion. When she shows up at a speed event (Super-G or Downhill) these days, many in the media write their stories about her victory before the race even starts, and then re-write in the unlikely event that one of her rivals - such as Maria Riesch or Anja Paerson - wins. She swept, for example, all three World Cup speed races held on consecutive days at Lake Louise, Alberta earlier this season. Then she did the same thing at Haus im Enstal, Austria a few weeks ago. A clean sweep. Twice.

3) This is the third straight year she's achieved the rarified status described above in point #1.

4) She long ago achieved the status of becoming the winning-est American female ski racer ever. She is one World Cup victory from passing Bode Miller as the winning-est American ski racer ever, period.

5) Last week she clinched the Super-G crystal globe (World Cup Season Trophy), and the season doesn't end for two months.

6) She is a ferocious competitor. At the Torino Olympics, after a bad crash, she literally went from a hospital bed directly to the slopes to race an Olympic event. She didn't win, but she placed in the top ten. She won multiple World Cup races in 2009 and 2010 with her hand in a cast from various injuries.

7) She is known for superb sportsmanship. Her BFF is none other than Maria Riesch, a German racer who is her closest rival for the FIS World Cup Overall crystal globe. Riesch's family in Garmisch tends to Vonn's cows (yes, her cows), which she was awarded for winning a series of World Cup races in Val d'Isere. The two usually spend the holidays together, when the World Cup break is too short for Vonn to go back to The States.

8) She happens, incidentally, to be almost 6 feet tall and drop-dead gorgeous, with a 1,000-watt smile worthy of a supermodel. She also speaks fluent German.

9) Unless the above-referenced Sports Illustrated photos have been retouched, she apparently has buns of steel, six-pack abs, and looks terrific in a bikini.

Now we move away from facts and into opinion.

Lindsay Vonn is the best international ambassador for American sports I can think of. She's a better athlete than James Blake, she doesn't threaten to kill umpires like Serena Williams, she isn't a stoner like Michael Phelps. This is not a made-for-TV invention, like Anna Kournikova or Alexandra Stevenson. She's more along the lines of Chris Evert or Lisa Leslie, a phenomenal athlete who just happens to be a hottie.

I can't say I know her, but I've chatted briefly with her a few times at the World Cup races in Lake Louise. The racers, the coaches, the technicians, and the race support people all stay at the same hotel (Chateau Lake Louise) for those two weeks, so it's impossible not to occasionally bump into a Julia Mancuso or a Benni Raich or a Didier Cuche in the buffet line or just wandering around the hallways. She seemed friendly, laid-back, and genuine, as much as I could tell in a couple of 30-second conversations.

The thing about ski racing is that it's so horribly ephemeral and fleeting; she could hit the nets tomorrow and not win any of the 3 or 4 gold medals many expect her to win. Hell, she could hit the nets tomorrow and never walk again. Tragically, alpine ski racing is a sport where sometimes racers go down and they don't get up again. This isn't swimming or ice skating; storied careers end in the blink of an eye with alarming frequency. If you don't believe me, just ask Matthias Lanzinger or Silvano Beltrametti. So to the writers and flesh-police zealots stirring up all this sheisse, I say to you all: just STFU. Don't be so lazy, do some research, write about somebody who needs the ink.

FedEx Delivery Exception: A Play in Two Acts

Act 1

Bought two off-lease laptops on eBay to add to my event stock. Day of delivery comes. No delivery. E-mail seller, get tracking number. Plug tracking number into FedEx web site. Get this:

"Unable to Deliver Shipment. Return To Shipper. Recipient Unknown".

Grrrrrrrrr.

Get on the horn to FedEx with a good head of steam. Tell FedEx Chick "WTF? How can the recipient be unknown? I live in a dinky little town, two FedEx guys, I know them both by name, they know who I am."

FedEx Chick: "Wellllll - there are some notes in the record. Let me see.... it says 'overturned trailer' ".

Me: "They tried to deliver my pkg to a trailer? I don't live in a trailer. I live in a house. And trailer homes are illegal here."

FedEx Chick: "Still reading....OK, what happened is the pkg was out for delivery on a FedEx delivery truck, which then got into a big crash, and it rolled over. All the boxes onboard are being returned to their shippers."

Me: "Hmglymph. {working...working.....working} Are you sure?"

FedEx Chick: "That's what it says".

Me: "OK, thanks."

Act 2

Redial FedEx. Get another rep on the horn.

Me: "Hi, I'd like to give you a tracking number, and perhaps you can tell me what happened to this shipment. I just had a conversation with another FedEx rep about this, and I'm not sure I believe what she told me."

FedEx dude: "OK, sure, what's the tracking #?"

{looks it up}

FedEx dude: "Yup, I see what you mean. FedEx truck crashed, rolled over a few times, boxes damaged, all returned to shipper".

Me: "Hmglymph." {working...working.....working}

FedEx dude: "Yeah, I know, it's rare but it happens. I've been here ten years, saw it once before. FedEx truck had a fuel leak and burned to the ground."

Me: "Just for the sake of my own curiosity, why were all the boxes returned to their shippers? Why not deliver them and let the recipient make a claim if the contents are damaged?"

FedEx dude: "It's company policy. FedEx returns the parcels because in most cases the contents are purchased goods. It's easier for buyers to make a refund claims on their credit card if the goods are never delivered at all than if they're delivered damaged. Once they're delivered, then the buyer has to document the damage, file a claim, possibly return the goods at their own expense, and it can be a lengthy and costly process."

Me: "Wow. Never thought of that. That's possibly the first time in 49 years that somebody has explained something by saying 'it's company policy' and the company policy actually made sense."

FedEx dude: {laughs} "Yes, sir. Can I help you with anything else today?"

Me: "No, thanks for your help. Aloha".

FedEx dude: "Thanks for calling FedEx".

More on Jay Freeman, aka "Saurik"

This item from Wired is a few months old, but I just spotted it today. It concerns the aforementioned Jay Freeman, a guy I know vaguely and whom Dr Nephew PhD knows really well. Jay continues to (fairly successfully, I might add) rage against the Apple machine.

Rejected By Apple, iPhone Developers Go Underground

Other than this, I haven't had much to write about in the past week. I've been laid pretty low with the Euro Death Crud (bronchitis) since returning from Kitzbühel, so I've been spending most of my time gargling with Jaegermeister and sleeping. Haven't been able to surf because I'm still shivering and suffering from flu-like symptoms, so I get too cold in the water, but I have been out riding my bike in the heat to sweat out all that Austrian schinken and schwine.

It's good time to be laying low. The Olympic Corruption Fest train wreck has sucked all the air out of the sports production room for the next month, so I'm going to be home, doing some programming to get ready for a variety of upcoming events, and catching up on my rest.

Last year I segued directly out of the Hahnenkamm races into the Amgen Tour of California bicycle race, which just about put me 6 feet under. By the end of ATOC, I was so sick and so exhausted that I basically went to bed for a month. I coughed so much that I suffered a hernia. This year the ATOC has moved to May, and with a change in production companies, I may not get that gig again anyway. That date change may turn out to be a bummer eventually, but for now I'm loving it.

Another Crazy-Ass Hahnenkamm Downhill

It was another unbelievably crazy Hahenkamm-Rennen downhill. Perfect weather. Great racing. Humongous, raucus crowds. Nobody badly hurt, at least not any racers. Michael Walchhofer, notably, hit the nets backwards at aboutMach 2 at the Hausbergkante, but after reconstructing his equipment yard sale, he managed to ski into the finish area under his own power. Walchhofer is a great skier and a super nice guy (I know his family from The Alpenrose in Altenmarkt-Zauchansee), so it was a personal relief to see him OK.

Our software, hardware, and display technology worked perfectly. RADARs were fantastic. Our timing team was firing on all cylinders, a great team effort under very difficult circumstances, and we were all whipped after executing the DH and then switching everything over to the slalom stadium for Sunday's SL. The HKR is much like the US Open in that it's so huge, so complicated, and with so much chaos working against you that it takes a mind-boggling amount of preparation, talent, teamwork, and just plain good luck for it all to work perfectly.

I was really happy for the KSC and particularly for Michael Huber, aka Dr Hahnenkamm, a super-smart and personable fellow who is managing his first HKR as President of the KSC. Michael is the busiest guy in the valley these weeks, wearing two hats: Prez of the KSC and Secretary General of the race ROC. He not only manages to do a terrific job, but also greets everyone with a smile and a hearty "Servus" as he rushes by, or flashes by on skis. He and the Rolex guys make time to have dinner every year with our humble group of timing geeks, a personal touch and a symbol of moral support that I have found missing from so many huge events over the years, particularly from the event I have hated most and considered the biggest, most impersonal train wreck: the US Open, the scourge of my existence for 20 years.

I was too busy to snap any photos, but here are some photos of the day, courtesy of Rolex and Stephan Cooper.







Still a slalom remaining, tomorrow. But let's face it....the HKR Super-G may indisputably be the biggest SG of the World Cup season, the slalom might be (arguably) the biggest slalom of the season (those from Schladming would disagree), but the Kitzbühel Hahnenkamm-Rennen is all about downhill, and the KSC solidly knocked that one out of the park today. I was happy to be here and happy to have made our not-insignificant contribution.

Buckleys, Jaegermeister, and Too Sick To Think About Sex

Twelve years ago, I found myself marooned in Whistler at a World Cup downhill event, as sick as I've ever been. On scale of 0-10, where 0 is feeling great and 9.5 is being so sick you start perusing your Last Will & Testament in between time spent wishing you were dead, I was at a solid 9.4.

Too Sick To Think About Sex comes on at about 6. Reaching 6 on the sick scale is the point where, if a naked Charlize Theron crawled into bed demanding affection, I would get out of bed, walk down the hall, find another bedroom, and lock the door behind me.

In Pissler I was afflicted with what I now call the "Euro Death Crud", named thusly because I always seem to get it when I'm in Europe during the winter. It's deep chest congestion, sore throat, hacking cough, and may or may not be accompanied by dizziness and sinus pressure of approximately 1,000,000,000 psi.

During the Pissler event ("Whistler" is known as "Pissler" on the World Cup because it apparently never stops raining there), my bro CoopFromCowburg introduced me to a viscous, motor oil-like over-the-counter Canadian medication called Buckley's. Buckley's motto is: "It Tastes Awful. And It Works."

At first, I thought he was kidding. But the only time I could stop shivering was while laying immersed in a bathtub filled with scalding water, so I gave Buckley's a try.

It does, in fact taste awful. Buckley's tastes like road asphalt mixed with transmission fluid, with a dash of epoxy resin.

It does, in fact, work. My coughing immediately was reduced by 90%, and in 24 hours I was down below 5 on the sick scale.

http://buckleys.com/index.html

Flash forward to last night. I'm in Kitzbühel and have managed to catch a moderate case of the Euro Death Crud, but fortunately I'm only at about 6.5 on the sick scale. Unfortunately, Buckley's is only available in North America.

My roomie JimmyBobBillyRay came up with a solution: Jaegermeister. Jaegermeister, evidently, has many of the same characteristics as Buckleys, except it tastes ever-so-slightly better. JBob went to the liquor store and bought a 12-pack of little shot-sized airline bottles of Jaegermeister. Reluctantly, I tried gargling with it. My throat instantly felt better, so I suspect Jaegermeister has some lidocaine-like anaesthesthetic qualities. Keeping the bottles out on the windowsill so that the Jaeger would be nice and cold, I got up every few hours during the night and gargled Jaegermeister. I slept well and coughed perhaps 10 times the whole night, instead of 10 times per minute, as I had been doing up to the point when I started medicating myself.

After 12 hours I had consumed a mere 1.5 shots of Jaegermeister, and I was down from 6.5 on the sick scale to 5.0.

To my colleagues often trapped far from home, sick as dogs, keep this home remedy in mind. I know my friend Listen2UncleJay thinks rum makes the world go round, and perhaps it does, but for me in this case, Jaegermeister actually stopped the world from spinning 'round.

Kitzbühel Then...And Now

One of the coolest things about Kitzbühel and about the Hahnenkamm-Rennen is the town's, and the race's, amazing history. The Kitzbüheler Ski Club was formed in 1907, the Hahnenkamm race was first run in 1911, and it has existed in its present form and on its present course since about 1930. Kitzbühel is The Grand Dame of ski resorts; Vail, for example, is a fake scale model of Kitzbühel, right down to its Bridge Street Clock Tower, which is a scale model of Kitzbühel's church clock tower.

In 1969, the definitive ski racing movie Downhill Racer was released. Starring a young Robert Redford, Downhill Racer was the ski racing version of Le Mans, which starred Steve McQueen in a similar verite version of its namesake race, and Grand Prix, which starred James Garner and a whole bunch of real drivers that anybody into motor racing would recognize (Phil Hill, Bob Bondurant, Graham Hill). A lot of the action sequences in Downhill Racer, including the climactic race, were filmed in Kitzbühel.

Downhill Racer was recently released on DVD, and Amazon had this photo the Kitzbühel Hahnenkamm - Rennen on its page selling the DVD:

I showed this photo to Hermann S, who is 64 years old and is the head of teknik for the race. He was born in Kitzbühel, his family has lived in this valley for over 500 years, and he remembers HKR races and HKR racers going back to the early 50's. He identified two of the red-clad skiers in this photo as his relatives.

I walked outside to where KSC members and a couple of Austrian Army troops were erecting the finish corral and snapped a photo from approximately the same spot.


I had some fun with Hermann and Ted identifying what has changed and what has stayed the same since 1969. The latter overwhelmingly outnumbers the former.

In These Difficult Economic Times, Somebody's Got To Keep Crazy Alive

Red Bull brought their modular hospitality BUILDING from MotoGP and erected it next to the Hahnenkamm starthaus to serve as a "Green Room" for the athletes. The whole thing was freighted in by chopper, with Slim Pickins' character from Dr Strangelove apparently at the controls. A fascinating, terrifying air show which took place about 25 feet above my head.

Dr. Nephew (pending PhD in Computer Science) looked at these pictures, listened to my story, and wrote back "In These Difficult Economic Times, Somebody's Got To Keep Crazy Alive"

When an Apparently Good Idea.....Isn't

Those of you who have traveled through Heathrow in the past 10 years know that Heathrow just plain sucks, even on a good day. Even if you're traveling 1^st Class with all the perks, you get off the plane and go into a passport queue and then a security queue with a few thousand of your best friends. It takes forever before you can head to the American Admiral's Club for a hot shower, and that is the last thing your red, sore eyes want to deal with after flying, say, 10 hours from Dallas. Since I'm an American Airlines Executive Platinum, I have to tolerate it, because on AA you almost always have to go through Heathrow, and connect to British Air, to get anywhere in Europe. Trust me on this, a free upgrade to First Class on a 10+ hour flight is worth transiting through what may possibly be the civilized world's suckiest airport.

I thought I'd try to get the best of both worlds, bypassing Heathrow by taking AA OneWorld affiliate IBERIA through Madrid. Free upgrade included. Madrid's airport is reputed to be very good. Instead of a 777 from LAX or Dallas, I'd ride an Airbus A340 from Chicago or NY to Madrid.

This time, Smart Guy outsmarted himself.

I was due, no, I was overdue, for a travel disaster...and I got one.

Sunday Morning to Sunday Evening

Leaving Salt Lake City after visiting with my good friends Gary and Sue and skiing Snowbasin, I arrived at Chicago ORD to a bitterly cold afternoon. Spent a 4-hour layover in the AA Flaghip Lounge downing half a bottle of California Shiraz, then staggered onto the IBERIA A340 around dinnertime and plunked my ass into a First Class lie-flat seat. Then I sat. And sat. And sat. We went nowhere, as the pilots struggled with a mechanical problem. One of the technicians walking through the cabin mumbled something about a frozen fuel pump on engine #2. But basically, like a balky '58 Buick on a cold winter morning, the A340, a $150,000,000 piece of Euro feces, wouldn't start.

After about 90 minutes spent sitting at the gate, First Class was told to get off the plane. Cattle Class continued to sit. IBERIA gave us each a $20 meal voucher, and said to be back in two hours. I headed back to the Flagship Lounge and started working on the rest of that bottle of wine. Fuck dinner.Two hours turned into three. We eventually trudged back onto the plane and left Chicago about 6 hours late. Meanwhile, it was snowing like hell all through Europe.

I thought I'd seen the worst of post-menopausal, snarly, ill-tempered flight attendants flying The Menopause Route (DFW-Hawaii and LAX-Hawaii) on AA, but those American FAs on The Menopause Route are Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm compared to the senior FAs on that Iberia flight. They were all somewhere between crabby & nasty. Since I declined dinner, apparently they decided to ignore me the entire flight. They didn't even serve a round of drinks. To anybody in First Class. Their douchiehness was somewhat tempered after I started talking to them in Spanish rather than English, but with one exception, they were the worst FAs I've seen since I flew Aeroflot from Moscow to London a few years ago.

I wrangled about 4 bottles of agua con gaz out of the various waddling Mauds, hit the recline button on the lie-flat seat, and went to sleep. I slept like a rock from Pennsylvania to the Spanish frontier. I awoke to a small breakfast, and while eating, I scrolled through the IFE unit's menus. I found absolutely nothing worth watching. I finally started watching a really lame chick flick called "He's Really Not That Into You", or something close to that. A really dumb, really bad movie with a pretty good cast, wasted. And just when the first and only good part started (Jennifer Connelly stripping down and grudge-fucking her filandering husband on his office desk) the pilot cut the IFE, and we landed.

Monday, Early Afternoon. Same trip.

It was weird seeing Madrid covered with so much snow on the way in. Madrid had more snow than Salt Lake City, which I'd left behind the previous morning.

Madrid's airport terminal is completely open from end to end and side to side, about 400 meters X 40 meters, with towering ceilings about 25 meters high. You could easily fit 40 or 50 indoor tennis courts inside each floor, and even a very defensive lob wouldn't hit the ceiling. You could fire a laser pointer from one end to the other without hitting anything. Add marble floors and you've got yourself a skateboarder's dream.I wonder if a really good bowler could throw a 400-meter strike down the length of the entire terminal. He'd have a chance to try at Madrid Airport, at 3AM.

The place was a wreck. Snow had paralyzed central Europe, so thousands of people were stranded and dozens if not hundreds of flights had been canceled. There were people sleeping on the floor and perhaps 500 people in line at the IBERIA desk. I headed for the IBERIA VIP Lounge (a perk of being Executive Platinum) only to find at least 50 people in line THERE, and the lines weren't moving at all.

I waited in line for a half-hour to see an agent, and the line did not move one inch. Gazing off at the huge flight info board nearby, I noticed that my original connection from Madrid to Munich, which should have left 5 hours previously, was still at the gate. So (mistake) I walked out to the gate, waited an hour through an additional delay, and boarded. Or more precisely, attempted to board. I was flagged by the ticket validating machine. Although I had a confirmed First Class seat and a boarding pass, IBERIA's shitty software had removed me from the flight once my ORD-MAD flight went late past the connection's original departure time, and then gave my seat away.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

It was around 16:00, and I saw my chances of getting out of Madrid that day slipping away. It had already been well over 24 hours since I'd left Gary's house in Salt Lake City.

The IBERIA GA was actually very nice and apologetic about the software fuckup, so the fantasy that flashed before my eyes of clubbing him to death with my military-grade, hardened Dell ATG laptop, walking down the jetbridge and plunking myself down in the pilot's jump seat, didn't actualize. I just sighed, hung my head, and trudged back to the VIP Club. I usually know when I'm defeated, and I could see this was one of those times when I could flash my Executive Platinum / OneWorld Sapphire / 3 Million Lifetime Miles ID all I wanted, and it would get me nowhere.

The line at the VIP Club had dwindled to five lines of about three customers each. After I worked my way up to the front, I got another 55 apologies from the GA, who clacked on his computer for a while and handed me a boarding pass for a MAD-MUC flight at 20:00. Three more hours to kill. Again, he was so nice and gracious that I felt guilty for fantasizing about shoving his ticket printer through his teeth. He even mumbled something about getting my luggage on the flight, which I doubted would happen.

As I finished up with the GA, I glanced to my left and saw two of the tallest, slimmest, most gorgeous women I've ever seen in person standing next to me. I was initially prompted to look at them not because of their jaw-dropping gorgeousness, but because they were screaming at the top of their lungs from 3 feet away. I discovered that it is possible for a 20-year-old, drop-dead gorgeous, 6-foot supermodel to look worn, haggard, and ugly. Evidently they'd had a day and a travel experience not unlike mine, and unlike the resigned sigh I emit when I get fucked by an airline, they were Russian supermodels used to getting their way, and both proceeded to throw a rather impressive tantrum right there at the VIP desk. Like 5-year-olds whose GameBoy has been confiscated, they both burst into tears and started cursing their GA in a mixture of French, Russian, and English at about 130 decibels. They were accompanied by a large, slimy-looking guy, a younger version of disgraced Formula One empressario Flavio Briatore: scraggy beard, bad teeth, solid gold anchor chain, $50,000 wristwatch. As I turned away and headed for the bar, Flav Jr was adding his two cents to the cacophony. I'm sure that got them far. Let me know how that goes for you, Vladimir.

I headed for the free internet hookups in the back of the VIP Lounge. For some reason the IBERIA VIP lounge is not allowed to offer WiFi, but they do offer hard-wired router access, and I had a couple of Cat5 cables with me (don't leave home without 'em). Realizing that even if my flight left on time I'd miss the last train from MUC to Kitz, I got on the internet and reserved myself a room at one of the MUC airport hotels, then called the angel of mercy known as Herta at Villa Mellon in Kitzbühel (my ultimate destination), and told her not to wait up for me.

I had a chance to use and appreciate my fast-booting, handy dandy little Lenovo S12 IdeaPad, which is great for airports and airplanes and was more fully described in this space in an earlier post.

My flight to MUC left about an hour late, but I was grateful because outright cancellations still filled the departure display boards, and I finally got to watch Madrid Airport disappear into the distance, albeit > 12 hours later than originally planned.

I sit here on an Airbus A320 en route to Munich. It's 23:00.I should be at the hotel by about 1AM, and my luggage will almost surely not accompany me. Total trip time will have been about 36 hours, and I won't even be in Austria yet.

I asked the GA at the VIP Lounge if IBERIA would give me a hotel voucher, since the hotel at MUC is on my dime and was 100% their fault. Predictably, he said no, they were getting me to Munich the same day as my original ticket promised, and any plans beyond that were not their problem. He said I was welcome to write IBERIA's customer complaint people and plead my case, but not to hold my breath.

Since the Russian supermodels were in full afterburner right next to me, I just smiled weakly through my 36-hour shadow, thanked him for his help, and moseyed off toward the bar.

Tuesday Evening

Things started looking up when I arrived in Munich. When we landed in MUC, one look out the window told me just how lucky I was to get out of Madrid at all. There was snow on the runway and piles of plowed snow everywhere. On final approach, it was snowing so hard I could barely see the wingtips.

My baggage, of course, didn't make it to MUC, which meant (law of unintended consequences working in my favor) I didn't have to schlep it to the hotel nor on the train to Austria today. At the Holiday Inn Express MUC, the hottie at the front desk explained that over 60 of their rooms were filled with stranded fliers, and that's why she didn't have any emergency razors left.

MUC is in the same complex as the train station and a shopping mall, so I stopped this morning on the way to the train and picked up a razor, some floss, fresh undies, and a few other necessities. Riding the excellent, on-time, comfortable ÖBB train from MUC to Kitzbühel, I observed that Austria was white like I've never seen it. GREAT racing conditions. Even the sunny side of Kitzbühel (Kitzbühelerhorn) was totally white.

When I showed up at Villa Mellon looking (and feeling) like hell, the Angel of Mercy (Herta) had a room ready for me; then she brought me green tea and cookies, which was heavenly beyond words.

I just talked to Iberia on the phone, they tell me my luggage has been located and will be delivered to me in Austria on Wednesday.

I wonder how the Russian supermodels made out.

El Nino Sucks If You're a Skier

Snowfall at Utah resorts is 100 - 130 inches below normal for this time of year, but 100 inches below a 250 inch normal is still a lot of schnee. I skied Snowbasin yesterday with my host, Gary, and you couldn't go off the groomers. Looked like early November. All the little drainage gulches on Strawberry that Andrew and Ted and I have explored in snorkel powder during better years were full of brush, and even tall grass in some places.

I did manage, by a fluke, to get a really fun powder day at Powder Mtn earlier this week. Powder's Paradise Chair, which roughly bisects the mountain and has some of Powder's best steeps, had been closed since the last big powder dump due to mechanical issues. In the ensuing days it had remained cold, so the snow was still deep and pretty good, a little heavy but not crusty. I just happened to show up to hike James Peak on the morning they got Paradise working, and the mountain was pretty much deserted, so I got 8 or 10 nice pow runs in before the place got socked in by a windblown snowstorm. Those Scott P4 super-fatties I keep here in Utah cut through anything. It was pretty rocky and stumpy underneath the knee-deep pow, so I did gouge up the P4s a bit. I'll get a quick tune on them - maybe today.

Austria, on the other hand, is hosed as far as skiing is concerned. I Skyped with Roman The Roamin' Roman last night from the womens DH in Haus im Enstal, who told me the mountain has only 5cm of snow and the race track is 100% man-made snow. The snow in Kitzbühel is isn't great, but the race course is in perfect shape, and my friends at the KSC have gotten some good alpentours this month, so Kitz apparently has more snow than almost any other resort in Austria.

In related news, Snowbasin is building two temporary ramp-monkey stadiums and a monstrous half-pipe, as The Dew Tour is coming to town next week. IDS does the Dew Tour scoring systems, so I Skyped Mr. Don Key, who will indeed be attending. Unfortunately, I'm flying out to Europe tomorrow (Sunday) to start setting up The Hahnenkamm, and Don flys in Monday, so I will miss him by one day. Would have been interesting to see Mr. Key in an alpine environment. Will also be interesting to see what kind of crowds show up at Snowbasin for Dew. Snowbasin is in the middle of nowhere, although one can drive here in less than an hour from Salt Lake City a whole whack of other major resorts: Alta, Snowbird, Brighton, Solitude, Deer Valley, Park Schitty, The Canyons, Powder Mtn, and Wolf.

Super-Ha'ole White-Skinned Hockey Boy Can Now Surf

Teaching Davis Cooper to surf. He learned the basics and was up on a wave about 3 minutes.

Throwing Tatiana Out of Bed (For Eating Crackers)

If you've read my previous couple of posts, you know I'm spending some of my holiday down time fiddling with two new toys: an IBM Ideapad S12 Nano netbook, and a Nokia e71 smartphone.

The Ideapad continues to impress. For a netbook that practically fits into one's coat pocket, it's pretty cool. The S12 definitely has a lot of weaknesses (way too much screen glare, for starters, and important keys in weird places for another) but for the cost and form factor, I'll accept those compromises to have an S12 (or several) in my quiver. I will probably buy a few more to put in my event inventory.

One thing absent from the S12 that I really miss from my notebooks, however, is the ThinkLight. Like most guys pushing 50, I don't see as well as I once did, and like many programmers, I'm a really lousy typist. I didn't realize how much I relied on the Thinkpad "ThinkLight" (and Dell's equivalent) until I started using the S12, which doesn't have one. I'd love to know the cost and weight penalty Lenovo would have been forced to pay in order for them to put a ThinkLight on the S12. I would gladly have paid extra bucks for one.

The Nokia e71, which I nicknamed "Tatiana" because of it's sleek, elegant, muscular resemblance to the gorgeous blonde Russo-Australian athletics star Tatiana Grigorieva, has revealed a couple of major faults. Faults so severe that I've read dozens, if not hundreds, of posts on various support and chat boards wherein furious Nokia users were resolving to switch phones. To wit:

1) The Nokia has serious bugs in its Brewtooth stack. I have 3 different Brewtooth earsets (Jabra stereo, BlueAnt, and Plantronics stereo), and Tatiana wouldn't stay connected to any of them. They would train and connect, but then go into an infinite loop of connecting, disconnecting, connecting, disconnecting...all day long. By rebooting the phone, I could sometimes get the connection to stabilize for a few minutes, but then it would go on the fritz again.

I Googled around for a while, finding maybe a zillion people reporting the same problem. Few suggestions were offered, and widespread fury at Nokia was ubiquitous. No wonder Nokia is losing market share hand over fist. One suggestion which seemed to solve the problem for most was to buy a Nokia-brand Brewtooth earpiece, but I really like all of my current Brewies, so I wanted to avoid that. Many suggested updating the Nokia's firmware, as listed among the recent Symbian OS revision histories is "better Bluetooth connectivity". I checked Tatiana's OS version and it was 200.something.something; the latest version availabe on Nokia's web site was 400.something.something.

So I updated.

No improvement.

At all.

My favorite Brewie is my BlueAnt Q1, which I believe is Australian-made. Although it's not stereo, it does have a voice command set which is trick as hell, and in general it really works well. I checked the BlueAnt web site, and my firmware was several minor revisions behind. I updated the BlueAnt firmware, and VOILA...Mr. BlueAnt now works flawlessly with Tatiana.

I think BlueAnt is perhaps in that rare place at which technology companies sometimes arrive, where they have indeed invented a better mousetrap, and are still small enough to respond to the marketplace and to problems. Sort of like Palm in 1998, before their world went to hell.

In any event, Tatiana's first eating-crackers-in-bed moment has been solved.

2) Nokia's sync support of anything other than Lotus and Outlook really is pathetic. I actually tried to work around this temporarily by exporting my Thunderbird Contacts DB (approximately 1800 records) into a comma-delimited file, and attempting to suck it into the Nokia PC Suite.

No dice.

The Nokia PC Suite is extremely picky about CSV files. It won't even suck in its own CSV exports. Even worse, the auto-suck will not tell you anything about what it doesn't like about your CSV files as it fails. I fiddled and fiddled, and Googled and Googled, and found nothing other than a LOT of really pissed-off Nokia customers.

After futzing around with my data for an hour using WordPad and OpenOffice SCalc, I finally gave up. Fuck it, for now.

I keep a list of procedures I perform on new Win7 and XP installs to turn off all the eye-candy bullshit, secure the OS, and get rid of performance-sucking, unneeded Services. One thing on that list is to remove the hopelessly insecure and clunky Outlook Express. I recently got a couple of new Dell ATG D630s for my event stash, and I hadn't had time to fully strip them of their Windows bullshit, so I grabbed one with Outlook Express still on it and imported my Thunderbird Contacts DB into it. Then I installed the Nokia PC Suite, and synched to Tatiana. Bingo. All 1800-odd contacts imported. Then I deleted Outlook Express. I'll give up syncing for now, until I decide whether I'm going to stick with Tatiana.

One thing I did notice, however, it the Nokia seems to gag on punctuation in phone numbers. When you enter a phone number into the Nokia's Contacts software, it will not let you do this:

(504) 555-5555

nor this

504.555.5555

nor this

504-555-5555

nor anything else with punctuation. Phone numbers must be entered as one big unreadable blob, i.e.

5045555555

Even the crude and user-unfriendly Windows Mobile allows you to punctuate phone numbers, and knows to ignore them when dialing.

I think some of my imported phone numbers had so much punctuation that the Nokia simply dropped them completely.

In any event, Tatiana remains gorgeous, sleek, and seductive to me, but her Windows Nokia PC Suite blows pretty badly. We'll see if I love her enough to stay with her, which will require an investment of $50 in a desktop sync workaround.

Nokia E71

Next on our tech hit parade is the Nokia e71. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know my main phone is an AT&T Tilt w/Windows Mobile. I like the Tilt about 75 on a 100 scale. It's terrific for e-mail, calendar-ing, and pretty good for web stuff (as long as you use Skyfire rather than the crippled, pitiful IE Mobile). It's got a nice touchscreen and a half-decent slide-out kbd. (NOTE - I can't use an iPhone because (A) I'm hopeless with glass virtual keyboards (B) The phone part of the iPhone is scheisse, (C) the battery life sucks + the battery is not swappable, and (D) I'm not fabulous enough to use any Apple products).

Anyhow, one of the weaknesses of Windows Mobile is that WM phones are extremely cumbersome to use as phones. Try calling into a conference call (PIN required) or into your bank's telephony system with one hand, while walking, on a WM smartphone. Impossible, even if you've got hands like Chris Paul (of the New Orleans Hornets, arguably the best Point Guard in the NBA).

For Europe, where it seems I always need to talk to people on my phone while skiing down an injected race slope or while walking down the street (in both cases, while wearing gloves), I wanted to get a non-clamshell smartphone. I usually use a very cheap, very simple Nokia GSM shit-phone ($40 brand new) in Europe with my Austrian SIM, but I've become a lover of Bluetooth (pronounced "Brewtoot" in Japanese) earpieces, and the shit-phone doesn't have Brewtoot. With pre-paid SIM DATA plans getting more accessible, I figured what the hell, go for a smartphone.

Crackberry was out of the question, as the RIM OS blows chunks, and their browser is unusable.

After looking around for a while, it came down to either the Nokia e71 or the Nokia e63. The e63 is basically the cheaper, plastic version of the e71. I found an open-box new e71 on eBay for $200, so I went for it.

To my abject surprise, I love it. It is the most elegant phone hardware I've actually held in my hand. Light, slim, great kbd, great tactile feel from the metal case, nice click on the keys. I can type like a Tasmanian Devil on it. The Symbian OS is terrific. Browser is great. Tethering, e-mail is easy. And, unlike #$%^&*()@ Windows Mobile, you can do a lot of routine tasks with two or three keystrokes rather than the two or three DOZEN keystrokes required under WM.

Another thing I found really cool is that you can use the e71 to listen to FM radio (as well as internet radio). I know, it's dumb and I'm old...but I like FM radio.

It took me about 2 minutes to get it tethering to an XP laptop.

The e71's GPS simply ROCKS. My Tilt usually takes about 2 full minutes to find itself on the planet. The e71 found itself in about 15 seconds, and I wasn't even close to a window.

I find it incredibly annoying that my Tilt takes 3 minutes to completely boot. The Nokia cold boots in 30 seconds.

In a similar vein, the Tilt takes 3+ hours to fully charge, whereas the Nokia tops up in 15-20 minutes.

The Nokia camera is also way better than the Tilt's camera, although I rarely use a phone's camera. The Nokia camera has a flash, which the Tilt's camera does not. The rez seems much higher on the Nokia, although I will have to experiment further. Who knows, maybe using a camera phone will grow on me.

As with any phone (or unfortunately any girlfriend, as I've found), that initial rush of lust and fascination is soon tempered by annoying little shortcomings discovered in the course of a relationship (WTF - she leaves half-empty cat food cans in the fridge, stinking up all the other food to high heaven? Is sleeping with a Tatiana Grigorieva lookalike REALLY worth drinking tuna-flavored milk?).

By far the biggest annoyance I've found is the Nokia PC Suite only syncs with Outlook and with Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes? What pathetic luddite is still using Lotus Notes? Maybe it's a Euro thing. And Outlook is, well, Outlook. Enough said. I looked on the Nokia Support Forum, and found literally thousands of Nokia users bitterly railing against Nokia for lack of Thunderbird / Sunbird sync support. I agree, but there's more than one way to skin that particular cat. Several 3rd-party sync products, such as Sybase's XTNDConnect PC and Mobile Master, will solve that problem for $50.

Another thing I find weird is that the e71 cannot be charged via USB. Another "WTF" moment. I actually prefer charging through A/C power for various reasons (don't need to keep your laptop on all night for USB power, for example), but why not give users the option? Nokia does make a medusa-head USB cable with both a power plug and a micro-USB plug (part #CA-126), so that strangeness can be worked around.

I'm sure I'll find a few more annoying things about the e71, but in general I like the e71 so much that I may just retire the Tilt and use the Nokia as my main weapon in the US as well. If I do, I will bite the bullet and buy Mobile Master Pro, since I manage all my contacts and calendar with TBird / Sunbird.

Back to August: Nevados de Chillan, Redux

Wolf von Lindenau, one of the CASA guides I skied with in Chile this summer, finally got around to cleaning off the SD card in his camera and found these photos of me cutting up the Pirigallo Valley, sidecountry of Nevados de Chillan, from the first week in August. He was kind enough to send them along to me today. I'm easy to pick out because I was the only guy in the group wearing white.

Wow. That was some seriously good skiing. Can't wait to do it again.






Thanks, Wolf.