FifteenOff TV, and other random stuff

Winter has been cold, dark, and generally miserable but days have been lengthening and snow has been melting around here. It's really hard to think about skiing during February in particular— your spirit has already been broken from December and January's 1-2 punch and you know you'll have to endure most of March as well. However, Marcus Brown has been keeping us entertained with Marcusbrown.tv on Monday nights. Definitely check this show out if you can.

I had a random thought the other day regarding -15 being a very stretchy line. What if somebody fashioned a -15 section (just that red section, not the rest of the rope- so that 7 feet) out of spectra line or steel cable? Then you'd get the 60' length without the stretch, to help prepare you for shorter lines. I have no problem sharing this idea because even if it turns out to be a GREAT idea (and that's a nominal chance), nobody will become a millionaire from it in this industry.

Hmm, what else... I know I mentioned before that I'll be blogging with greater frequency this year. Rather than keeping a ski log in the forum section, I'm going to keep it right here on the front page. It's kind of an interesting "full circle" phenomenon in that I initially created the site to be ONLY a blog. I purposely did not want it to be a forum. Then, site fans convinced me to implement a forum. It took some prodding, though, because at the time I figured we already had enough ski forums ( and keep in mind that BallofSpray.com and ProSkiCoach.com weren't even around in those days) and I wanted to bring something a little different to the table. Then, the user-generated aspect of the forum made the front page kinda fizzle out into an "article"-ish section, and the original vision of the site suffered somewhat. So, it's back to front-page blogging this summer.

We will be doing our annual run down to Louisiana this Spring Break. Hope to have some good on-site updates from that trip like we did last year, as seen in the Archives section. We will be skiing soon. Oh yes, we will be skiing soon.

I literally threw this episode of FifteenoffTV together in a half hour today using iMovie on my Mac. I shot the footage in November. I realize that 1) the footage is not top notch, 2) the skiing is pretty weak, and 3)the video editing is rough. That's what you get from me in the beginning of March while I'm waiting at home for these hardwood flooring guys to show up at my house. What the video does show is how much fun we have out on the boat. Lots of candid tidbits there. More to come. In this particular video you can see a tiny bit of slalom, a little footing, and a little trick. The trick skiing "tricks" you see took me approximately 5000 falls to learn this summer, so although they look trivial, I've come a long way (try trick, by the way. It's fabulous). I want to shoot a TON of video this year. The FlipHD camera, plus iMovie 09 (with a publish to YouTube feature, even) will make this SO easy compared to how things were even 3 years ago. This is an exciting time to be alive technology-wise. Hope you like the video.