Gnubbs Blog

This past week, my buddy JT and I went for a bit of a road trip. Briefly:

Tuesday: Go to work as normal

Tuesday 12:00pm: Go to class

Tuesday 1:45pm : Get done with class, tell JT to pick me up

Tuesday 2:30pm : On the road, leaving boulder

Wednesday 2:30am : Stop at the last exit on I-15 in Nevada and play some video poker

Wednesday 3:30am : Pull off on an exit ramp and go to sleep

Wednesday 6:30am : Wake up, drive to LA

Wednesday 12pm : Get to Sarah’s house in Venice and hang out a bit. JT and I walk down to Venice Beach, grab some Vegan grub, and wonder around. At the Santa Monica pier, we play in the ocean a bit, and then walk back to Sarah’s.

Wednesday night: Go out to eat with Sarah at some nice Italian joint, drink a bunch of wine, are asleep on her couch by about 10pm.

Thrusday morning: Sleep in for a bit, then drive over to the Peterson Auto Museum. Lots of very cool cars. Will probably post pics later, but who knows.

Thursday evening: Roam around hollywood looking for someplace to eat. What a sleezy part of town. Eat some pizza and order big giant 32oz bottles of beer.

Thursday night: Go to the Knitting Factory to see Avail. The opening band (Huntington Drive?) is not very good. Watch the Xgames and basketball on the plasma screens in the club. Only in LA. The Draft is up next, and plays a good set. Avail is on last, and rocks out. Both bands are very good.

Friday morning: Get up and on the road by about 10:30am. Drive to the last exit in the US on I-5. Walk to Tiajuana. Get frisked on the street by Mexican police. Have lunch. Are solicited to buy drugs, cuban cigars, buy one get one free drinks, and taxi rides to whore houses. Strange place but the food was good.

Friday evening: Go to the Casbah in San Diego and run into Tim Barry and Beau from Avail. They make fun of JT for showing up at random shows of thiers all over the country. Go inside and order PBRs. The opening band (Hostile Combover) is actually pretty good. The club is tiny — way smaller than the Fireside in chicago or the Euc in cleveland. The Draft is awesome. Avail is awesome and the crowd goes truely nuts. Great show.

Saturday morning: Get up and on the road by like 10am. Wait 30 minutes for three toasted bagels at the most poorly run bagel shop I have ever seen. Go through a Border Control checkpoint on I-8. Laugh at hippies being frisked as a drug dog sniffs around their car. Get to Mesa, AZ around 5pm and meet up with JT’s friend Dan. Go to an awesome Vegan joint that makes Vegan Blizzards. Very good.
Saturday Evening: Head to the Clubhouse with Dan for the last show of our trip. Three opening bands, none of them good. Too tired at this point to drink, and the vegan food seems to be having a mexican wrestling match in my stomach with the food from Tiajuana. The Draft play a great set, probably their best I have seen. Avail plays another great set. The crowd in Phoenix is the best so far, but the club is not as cool as the Casbah. Show gets over at about Sunday 1:30am. We drive to Dan’s house in Flagstaff and get to bed at about 3:30am.

Sunday 6:00am : Alarms go off. Sleepy. Me and JT are up and on the road by 6:30am. In an effort to avoid traffic from the Xgames and other normal colorado ski trafic, we decide to take the back roads. We cover over 1000 miles, and not an inch is on an interstate. The road from Durango to Oury colorado is probably the prettiest drive I have ever seen. Coming down Red Mountain pass into Oury is pretty sketchy, but worth it.

Sunday 8:00pm : Home. Drink some beers, take a shower, and go to bed.

What a great fucking week!
Steve

In my last post, I explained how I decided I needed a splitboard and how I came to buy one. At this point you might be thinking…

What on Earth is a Splitboard?

Here is the idea. I want something that I can ride down the hill like a snowboard, but then climb up the hill like skis. (Yeah, skis can go up hill. More on that in a minute.) Most snowboarders choose to either boot pack — just stomping up hill. That gets old fast with a small amount of powder and quickly becomes impossible as the snow gets deeper. The other choice is snowshoes. I have been on snowshoes once, and decided they suck. They just don’t work that well, and are way slower than a skier with skins.

The solution is a splitboard. It locks together into a snowboard for going down hill, but then splits apart like skis for going uphill. Maybe some photos will help.

So, that is the core of it. When in ski mode, the heels of the bindings are free. Put climbing skins on the bottom and you are ready to cover some distance. (Climbing skins are goofy strips of fabric with glue on one side and hair on the other. The hair is directional — one direction is sticks the other direction it slides. This allows you to kit forward, and then allow the skin to glide.)

Here is a shot of the interface. In snowboard mode, the binding slides across the two pucks and is held in place by a pin. In touring mode, the binding goes on the brackets in the middle of the board and the same pin is used to hold the toe in place.

That is the idea behind split boards. They seem like a kludge when you look at them, but in reality the system works well. It is very secure in both modes, and the transition is pretty quick. They are very wide and stable when using them as skies (but also slow and heavy.) As a snowboard, this board is heavy but handles very, very well. It plows through just about everything, but still initiates turns very quickly.

I will provide a more in depth review once I have a few days riding in and out of bound.

The Problem:

Snowboarding at the resorts is fun. The problem is that the drive is too long, the resorts are too crowded, and the powder gets skied off way to fast. Plus, it is kinda like Disneyland there. You get a flavor for what it is like to snowboard, but are left thinking that there must be more.

The truth is that there is more — millions and millions of acres more. Hidden in the National Parks, Wilderness Areas, National Forests, and BLM land is basically an infinite amount of runs to ride. The problem is getting there. Skiers have a wide variety of options for getting up hills, but snowboarders have very few.

The Story:

On Saturday, me and my buddy Eric were planning on going up to Vail to get some love from the foot or so of powder they got on Thursday. I decided that I was tired of only hearing the wind in my ears, when I could be riding to sweet, sweet death metal. So I mentioned to Eric that I was going to be buying headphone/ear pads for my helmet. He asked me to pick up a pair for him as well.

After work, I first headed to Boulder Ski Deals and then REI. Neither of them had what I was looking for. As a last ditch effort, I thought I would try this little snowboard shop in town that I had never been to. So, I drag Stephanie to one last shop - All Board Sports.

When I show him my helmet and explain what I am trying to do, he points out a couple of things. First, that my helmet doesn’t have replaceable ear pads so I can’t put in headphones. (Hasn’t he ever heard of drilling out rivets and being a dirtbag snowboarder?) Next, he points to the scratches and missing bits of my helmet and tells me I should really replace it. Although that is a definately a good idea, I explain that I am hoping to buy a splitboard in the coming weeks and need to save my money.

I think at this point, his eyes light up just a bit. He starts to ask me about what I am looking at (a Voile Mountain Gun) and he tells me I don’t want to buy the Voile. I ask what he would recommend, and he pulls out a Prior 178 Swallow Tail.

About this time, one of his coworkers walks up with some beers, and he offers me one. “No, if I drink a beer I am going to buy a snowboard.” He smiles, cracks open a beer, and hands it to me. I ask what else he has in stock around a 165, and he brings out a Prior Backcountry 165 Split and a Prior Khyber 165 Split.

Stephanie at this point tells me that I should just buy it so that I shut up and she doesn’t have to listen to me talking about it anymore. After a bit of deliberation and talking about which board I prefer, I settle on the Prior Khyber 165. I lay down my credit card, and a bit over $1k later I have myself a new snowboard.

Continue on to the next post…

I just want to go on the record with the fact that I love the snow. We are currently in the midst of our 3rd winter storm in as many weeks. This one doesn’t appear to be as bad as the last two, but it is still hammering out. I don’t think it is snowing an inch an hour at the moment, but it has to be pretty close.

There is currently about 8 inches of snow outside my office. We are supposed to get another 4-8 inches during the day today. That means the drive home will be interesting, but I am totally okay with it. I live in colorado so I have an awd car with snow tires on it.

First off, I stole the title from my friend j$. You should also check out his post on the topic.

Some background — I am running multiple monitors on my system. That means that Xgl/Compviz are probably not a great idea. I may try it at some point, but at this point I am going for pretty and stable — not just pretty.

Installing MS True Type fonts
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
sudo fc-cache -f -v

Installing Mac Fonts
There are good instructions here.

General Mac Look and Feel
There are good instructions here.

Well, that is actually about it.