More than 1 metre in 24 hours. Say no more...I'm out boarding.

It wasn't really a great Niseko powder day, but seeing as this year has been pretty dismal anyways [but still better than the best 5 Australian seasons combined] it's worth noting. Last night it drop about a foot of snow. Spend most of today between Hanazono 2 & 3, dipping into the trees on the right of the main trail. Knee deep powder and we where the only ones doing it. Freshies everytime.

Now it just needs to dump another 4 or 5 foot and we'll have the base that is usually here in November.

It's late on the night of the 24th. I'm alone in my apartment and have been all day. Days like this are good for thinking about both your past and future.

I'm happy to be missing out on another bargin filled, special deal, never again to be seen, lowest price, 50% off Xmas.

If I try hard enough I could finish reading Musashi in a day or two.

I've been working heaps lately, and snowbaording a lot as well. This doesn't leave much time for posting here, so here's some short thoughts/links:

grafted.net is ok. The google adds at the bottom of each page seriously detract from the serious art image the site is seriously looking for.

If you're in to search technology, apparently this guy is worth keeping up with.

While browsing his blog I came across some more web-based rss aggregators.

Bloglines looks nice and simple. kinja, as of this date, seems to be under development. I like the honeycomb logo. FastBuzz is still in beta. I don't like the name, or the MSish looking site. Looks like it's been designed using Frontpage...by a secretary at MS.

I'm going to look into what's happening over at FreeDesktop.org when I get a spare moment. These screenshots look interesting enough.

There's more to post, but not more time just yet.

After almost a week of no snow, it started falling again today. With no promise of the cold weather keeping up, I decided to head out and get a few runs into me. It's not the kind of powder days I remember from last season, but was still better than all the Australian slopes combined. My legs are burning, but that's to be expected. Will probably need a few more days before the body gets use to moving on the board again. It's still snowing now, and if it keeps up, I'll be out there again tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Here's an aritcle for anyone who interested in the future of RSS.

What a nutter. But if you've ever been into lego, you got to appreciate some aspect of it.

Actually, a Quick Reference Guide to them.

And it wasn't too bad either. You could only go to the top of Kogen 6 chair. The valley below the 6 chair was open and the top half of that was knee deep powder. The front face of the mountain was open from the top of 6 to the top of the gondola, although I saw a few people ducking the ropes and doing the ride all the way down to the base of the gondola. There's still heaps of snow to be had before all the runs are going to open, but it's getting there. Looks a damn sight better than this time last week.

You heard it. It's friggin' tipping down in Niseko. The last few days it's been non-stop snowing [well...maybe a half hour break here or there]. Kutchan is starting to look like Kutchan should...snow covered with all the residents out on the street shovelling snow into the drains in the side of the road [the people of Kutchan are well know for being crazy snow shovelers].

The lifts at Hirafu are finally open and tomorrow morning I'm heading up to buy my season pass and have a few runs. Should be heaps of freshies out there 'cause there's still not that many people in town [there's been a lot of cancellations due to the lateness of the season].

btw...it's friggin' cold. -6 degrees celcius at present.

And this time I really, really hope it stays. Two days ago it dumped a wad of snow, then yesterday it was a little warmer, so it rained. Today is snowed, and snowed, and snowed. Big-ass flakes and all. All you people heading out to Niseko this season, you can relax 'cause it looks like the snow is finally here to stay [touch wood].

The Taero drives on the road and flys through the air. You need to take off and land at an airport, but I imagine if this vehicle takes off [pun intended] there'll be a lot more small local airports cropping up.

I've been getting into Blender laterly. It's really looks like it's going places since it's turned open source. The new interface is a welcome change. Anyways elYsiun is one of the most popular support sites for anyone interested in Blender. Lots of info, tutorials, etc.

Sharp Reader is another RSS Aggregator. This one is .Net based so I'm not really that interested in it [not only because it's .Net, but it's a .Net desktop app and therefore not web-based], but it's still worth noting down [for anyone who is interested]. Looks like they've done a good job on it.

It stands for Linux On The Desktop. There's been a lot of talk over the last few years about Linux being a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop, but it's only really been on the last few months that some of the big players [IBM & Sun to name a few] have really started to get serious about it. Making promises and the like. Now comes a company that is really talking business. Selling hardware with a No Windows policy, Element Computers has a range of Laptops and even a Tablet that all ship with Linux as the default OS. I told myself that my next notebook was going to be a Mac [because OSX is based on BSD and the UI rocks], but I'm going to keep my eyes on this company and see how customers rate there 'puters.

Marketeers of the world, start salivating. If JavaScrypt is not the best name for a JavaScript client side encyption library, I don't know what is. Oh...the library itself looks pretty good as well.

Damn I wish I still had my Palm m505, then I could emulate a Commodore 64 on it using this software. What fun.