The E90s arrive

Well, the local BMW dealer is calling to say they want to sell us a car. Great. I really miss our 1982 Saabs. They were so "Saab"! Too bad GM actually wants to make money. Hey, hold on! They aren't! So why not some quirkly-cool niche AWD hybrid turbo funk thing?

Cool Eatz in Menlo Park

Here in Menlo Park at Chez Cyndi before flying back to Boston in the morning. Someone told me that my flight is exactly three seats overbooked; I should be OK. Had dinner at Flea St Cafe with Cyndi, Phil, Brian, and Becky. Good stuff. Jesse and Francisco rock!

Post-NAB Post-FCCM Post-Tahoe

After two solid days of the ski, drink, eat, and sleep ritual, the weather is has finally given out. Phil left yesterday afternoon when he heard the magic word "icing". Not sure about Becky and Brian's departure, but we had dinner with them at Mamasake last night. I suspect that they want to avoid the rain and scattered t-storms in the area. Thinking that we will have a nice morning here at Plumpjack with Cyndi and Steve, then off to Palo Alto ville.

Here at Squaw and Alpine

Skied Squaw yesterday. Dinner last night in Tahoe City at Wolfedale with Cyndi, Steve, Phil, Brian and Becky. Off to Alpine this morning.

Alpine today was awesome. All the ususal spring greatness! Corn heaven.

Somehow I have to memorialize the collision bettween Rylan and Phil just downhill from "Expert Shortcut". I didn't see it, so I won't speculate on the situation.

FCCM 2005

So here we are again at FCCM in Napa. The brain-trust of the reconfigurable computing universe is here to show me the way. Awesome.


We finished out FCCM05 at Taylor's Refresher in St. Helena.

Panic in Boston

Widespread Panic last night was great. Drove down with Melanie. Met up with Ryan, Kaitlyn, Caroline and and all. Drinks before at the loud bar on the outbound side of the Paradise. While I was yacking away, M+K's sketchy-radar (sketch-dar?) went "oooh-oooh!" and there we were. The Agganis Arena is a nice venue. Decent acoustics. Nice seats. But no beer! What's up with that? What part about kids dancing doesn't go better with beer? My dancing anyhow.

Jesse and Barbara

What a pleasant April day for a wedding in San Jose. Everything from the ceremony to the reception to dinner with family was great!

Michi Mania

About thirty out-of-towners gathered at Michi last night for an orgy of sushi, beer, and sake. Jesse and Barbara seemed pretty cool for the evening before the "big day". I arrived early and that allowed me to have a long view of the tatami room.

Helping United Help Itself

So I have this fantastic idea that should really help save the airlines some money: I suggest that well above 18,000 feet they retract the little landing lights from the wings. This 737's tired flap track cowling was just shaking like the dickens! I feel "See and be Seen" is one thing, but really, at what price?

Then Phil turned me onto this little nugget for those with more dollars than sense!

Ice Out on Lake Massabessic

Well not really, but it is imminent. And with ice out comes the thoughts of spring: Water skiing in stupidly cold water in a dry suit that makes you feel almost as much the dork you really are. Or something. Alexei was asking me today, "So how's the water skiing?" I would have had a witty answer except I was a little crispy from last night's OAR show at UNH. I met "Luke and Laura" which is right up there with "Shawn and Dawn" for couples I know that are convieniently forward error corrected for my lazy memory. The whole Bonnaroo thing will require Hunter Thompson / Chris Lawson like precision and planning. I'll have to find a way to be up for it. Susan painted the powerplant on the Merrimack at the Amoskeg bridge today. I dig the industrial vibe. Like art and technology man, cool!

Telluride to Boston

Well the trip home may prove interesting. Telluride is socked in with light snow this morning. My plane is at 1 PM, so hopefully things will clear by then. This at least gives me a chance to hang out here at Cyndi's instead of the airport. I sure feel sore (the good kind) from six days of skiing 20K ~ 24K feet per day on this mountain!

An excellent breakfast at Sofio's with Cyndi. I guess I need to start packing soon.

Leaving Telluride:

Telluride Hospitality Retrospective

Aside from the skiing, the hospitality was generally great. Blurry memories include:

At Chair 8 we had Jenn, Melanie, and Risa putting up with our antics and never even implying that they might ask us to leave.


Honga's bartender Sarah is superwoman. So is Joni, who's newspaper blew off the bar at Chair 8.

Then there was "Linear Algebra Dude" up at Allreds who, presumably overhearing some talk at our table offered in passing, "yeah, I dig Null Spaces..."! We also liked Allred's queit blonde bartender.

Nothing exceptional about the 221 south oak waitstaff. The food was good, however.

Excelsior was a mess, but I'm told that it's hit or miss. Kristen made an excelllent martini, which can help forgive a lot.

Eagle's bar was entirely unremarkable. No olives for a martini: tragic!

La Marmotte was good.

Then there was the arrogant and ignorant Telluride ski instructor woman at "Skiers Union" that epitomized uber-bitch. Oh well, there is one in every crowd!

Telemark Gear Musings

For the past few years I've been skiing on Tua M3's (178 cm), with HammerHead Binders, and my trusty old pair of Scarpa T2's. The T2's are the original 2-buckle design, and the Hammerheads were from the original batch that Russel Rainey built. I've found this combination to really work well all around.

• Maybe on New England boilerplate and groomers I'd like some added support from my boots. Not to mention my original-model T2's may be getting a little tired after countless seasons. I've been wearing the size-8 liners in the size-8/9 shells.

• And maybe on powder days I'd like a ski with a little more float and a little more mass than the M3's. For their dimuntive size, the M3's do motor through crud like teeny-tiny Volkl P10's if you stay right on them. Like the P10's, if you are off-center, you're dead meat. The M3's 178cm length and very modest sidecut feels like a nice compromise.

• And I just love the HammerHead's. No changes here.

Telluride05 Day6

Dinner last night at 221 with Steve, Cyndi, Dave and Caroline. Steve and I rocked out on guitar and piano a twisted version of Zappa's "Magic Fingers". For about thirty seconds, then we fell into jam-till-it-hurts mode. Fun stuff.

Last Day

Although the ski area is open for another week, this is my last day here. That's kind of a bummer as the conditions have been so exceptionally great. "I don't want to be done yet!" I've surely gotten better; but I guess this is it. Oh well, better go out there and ski it well. Looks like two more snowy days are on tap.

So day 6 was powder heaven. Went up 8 to 9 and did bushwack - plunge -bushwack -plunge -bushwack - hermit before lunch. This was the first day that bushwack was rolled ballroom flat. An inch or two had fallen on the corduroy by morning, making it an exceptionally easy decent. The smallish bumps on plunge were definately more fun.

Lunch was in some hellhole called "Skiers Union" in the mountain village. Stubborn and rude are understatements to describe the tallish ski instructor who went out of her way to be a jerk. Allreds at least filters out some of the rifraf.

Pumped up becuase it was the last afternoon, we skied under 9 until we could ski no more. I did five runs on Plunge where I hugged skiers right hard and then jumped into the bottom of "Powerline" that runs down from spiral stairs. Fun stuff in the steep and deep.

Steve in the good stuff:



Dinner at the bar at Honga's. Sarah made sure that not one, but two bamboo-cylinders of cold white sake keep us happy and warm.

Telluride05 Day5

Had dinner at Eagle's Bar last night. Disappointed that they had "run out olives". What kind of martini is that? Oh well. Well it continued to snow all night and has cleared somewhat this morning. The forecast calls for only a 50% chance of snow today, but they put up an avalanche watch.

Just back from the mountain. Another Awesome Day! The morning was straight up 8 to 9. Then Plunge - Bushwack - Bushwack - Plunge - Bushwack. Five spectacular runs in 8 inches of fresh powder before lunch. Ran into a tranplanted `loafer "Heinz" who knows Talbot, Skip, Kayot, and the gang. Cool.

Lunch at Allreds with the usual suspects. After lunch, we all did a Lookout cruiser then everyone (except me) jumped into Kant-Mak-Em.


My afternoon was Lookout - Bushwacker - Bushwacker - Bushwacker. Lots of skiing! Nine runs off of chair nine for the day. Powder that forgives almost everything. I think of the six runs I took down the powder-coated Bushwacker, I had three of them entirely to myself. The "crowded ones" looked like this:


"Health Drinks" again (T&T/tall) at chair 8. Melanie, who served us, now knows us and what we drink.

Out for a hot tub and some apres ski soon.

Telluride05 Day4

Whew. I'm writing this entry Wednesday evening as the snow continues to fall. Toasty warm and dry after a shower, a T&T, with "2001" playing from last August's Tweezer Center 2-day pre-Conventry spectacular. Strange thinking how Phish played just four blocks from here fifteen years ago:

Sunday, April 8, 1990 Fly Me to the Moon Saloon, Telluride, CO Set I: Divided Sky, Funky Bitch, You Enjoy Myself, If I Only Had a Brain, The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony > Suzy Greenberg, Uncle Pen, Possum Set II: Golgi Apparatus, Walk Away, The Lizards, Slave to the Traffic Light, Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Fee, My Sweet One, Run Like an Antelope Encore: Carolina, Fire

Oddly there are more than a few songs in common with the 1990 Telluride and 2004 Mansfield setlists. Sweet!

So rewind to this morning. Wake up to find it snowing. Maybe three inches fell overnight. Had awesome huevos rancheros at Sofio's. The real deal. Rode up chair 8 to 9 and followed a familiar pattern all day: (Bushwacker - Plunge) pause for water (Bushwacker - Plunge - Hermit) pause for lunch (Bushwacker - Plunge) pause for dark. For the most part it snowed all day. The sun popped out and again as in the photo below.


But for the most part, the vibe today was like that of this lone pinhead, at the base of spiral stairs:


A mellow evening ahead as the snow continues to come down.

Telluride05 Day3

I need to be more careful suggesting tape-to-tape days like yesterday. Lots of fun, just an incomprehensible amount of skiing on challenging terrain for one day. The trouble for me is that you think (key word: think) that you have the agility you had five hours earlier. Anyhow, rested now and ready for what looks to be the only full-on sunny beach day of the week. More snow is in the forecast.

Coonskin and Milkrun in the morning sun:


Had a dodgy dinner last night at the Excelsior. There may have been a combination of factors, but with the burn rate so high, you get lulled into thinking there won't be any bumps. Soulive was at the theatre, and had started early, so we missed an opportunity there as well. Maybe last night was the unavoidable low-point from which to judge the interval. It wasn't that bad.

Super-Bright Sun and 24,000 Vertical Feet Skied

By our 9:30 start, the sun was high in the ski and super-bright. We worked our way over to chair 5 where Steve escaped injury after some tourist behaved badly. After more doodling around in the western slopes, we worked our way back to (my favorite) chair 9.

We had lunch on the mountain outside where we met the "bird boy of Giuseppe's". The bread on my Turkey Sub had been baked during the Carter administration, so we felt that some avian entertainment was in order.


Skied under 9 most of the afternoon. Just perfect tele-conditions. While I played "how slow can you go" on Bushwhacker and Plunge; Steve and Cyndi stalked Caroline during her lesson hoping some excess mojo could be easily captured.

After drinks at "Chair 8", a nice hot tub, and the usual pre-apres'-ski, we made our way to Honga's Lotus Petal for Sushi, Sake, and all that sort of thing. Sleep came easy! Another awesome day!

Telluride05 Day2

Dinner at Dave and Caroline's place last night. Great stuff you don't normally come across: Yak (yes Yak), really fine red wine (that happens to be Kosher), and really-really good drug-strength Kona bean coffee. I'll run out of superlatives if this keeps up. Also at dinner were the usual suspects Ann, Steve, and Cyndi. Throughout drinks, dinner, and dessert the local weather channel (available in HD by looking out the window) confirmed the best possible news: It was still snowing!

It looks like we be in the powder today. As it is still spitting snow this morning and the forecast calls for more, an interlude, and another tranche later in the week. Pictures to follow after our morning walk to the hippie health-food store for some tye-died hemp coffee and a muffin.

Tape to Tape! What a day! The photo below from chair 9 pretty much sums it up.

Met Dave and Caroline at the Gondola at 9 AM. Gabriel joined in shortly thereafter. I must have been on 9 five or six times! Lunch at Allreds with the lambchop lollipops (punk band from town) and then off to the happy land of chair six. Finished up back on 9, then happily down to the bar. Jenn tells us the trouble with red states and "burning man". I think Steve was paying more attention - I am tired!

Telluride05 Day1

Last night, had a fine dinner at La Marmotte with Blue, Louise, Steve, Ann, and Cyndi. I discovered that Macallan 12 at altitude can dehydrate you more than usual. No kidding.

I wake up early and peek-a-boo out my window to find snow! A few inches in town, more on the mountain. More comming. It looks like this:

This is very good, I suspect...

And right I was. A day of snow and powder with Steve, Cyndi, Dave, and Caroline. Lunch at Allreds thanks to Dave. Snow. A whole heap of snow. Enough to keep the feeding tube in this ol' mountain for a few more weeks. Snowing now still!

Where is Phil?

A quick walk around the town and Phil is nowhere to be found!



There is this excellent story of AC Power, Tesla, and Telluride.