I saw my first snowboard in 1983, on Regis's film "Apocalypse Snow". At the time the only snowboards I could find didn't seem to have edges, and I wasn't too impressed with that as I could afford only piste riding back then. The solution was obvious: I copied the guys in the film on Monoskis, and learnt how to ride moguls on one ski. I didn't start riding sideways until '89, so I can't remember what board designs were like in 1986. Certainly they didn't have inserts; they did have loud graphics though. So I'm not sure what the 1986 is all about, but the "Mullet" bit may be a reference to the Burton Fish, or it may not be.

Anyway, this is a review of the Lib Tech Snow Mullet 1986 for riding powder. By "powder" I mean specifically cat and heli back-country powder; not the fluff you'll find at resorts, which as afficianados will be aware isn't the same stuff.

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Or how I remembered how little things have really moved on since I first disliked Unix.

Everything's still there, gently rotting in cyberspace, gathering crust and grime, getting steadily nastier with time. Well the software is free so you've no one to complain at. The machines are perfectly logical, but history's landed unix with a lot of illogical baggage. Is it "user" or "usr"? Of course sometimes it's the one and sometimes the other... you just have to remember which to use when. It's a shame that the machine can't use the huge amount of memory it now has to remember a little thing like that, really.

Anyway, here's how I made an Acer Aspire One machine (the one with the HDD and Linux) work reasonably well, recorded so I can do it all again when I brick the sucker the next time. It's all easy stuff, but somewhat frustrating until you know the path.

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I'd ignored Silverlight for a while, as there are other things to play with and it didn't look too mature. With Silverlight 2.0 things are looking better. Couple that with the lack of free tools for Flash development, the superiority of C# to ActionScript, the fashionable nature of words ending in "q", and I thought it was worth a peek. The obvious place to start was an image gallery, although sadly Silverlight doesn't seem to support colour management. Perhaps all marketing people are colour blind or something.

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I've struggled with how to display panoramas on the web, previously using just the browser to display them. The standard flash plugin I'm using doesn't render them well: it works best with images of consistent size. "Lightbox" gets around that issue. The original Lighbox is Prototype/ Scriptaculous based. I like those, but MS are moving towards JQuery, and as this is running on ASP.NET, I used the JQuery Lighbox extension.

I lashed up a little extension to BlogEngine.NET which squirts out the magic incantations required for JQuery and the Lightbox extension to it, and then I hacked someone's thumbnailing extension for BlogEngine.NET ... so now I can drop images in here and they're automagically thumbnailed and displayed in a lightbox.

Like this:

These are all huge panoramas, so you'll need a fairly large screen to see them. I do have a bunch of nodal-point gear, but these were all taken hand-held and then stitched using PTGui and/or Photoshop. And as they're displayed without browser plugins, they're pretty much the only photographs on this site which you can see in the correct colours.

I found the BlogEngine.NET extension handler rather flakey. The principle's great, but it needs a little polishing. Unless you happen to have a wet afternoon to spare.