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K2 CINCH is the best of both worlds
I dropped by princeton ski last night to check out the K2 cinch bindings. They are fantastic. I’m going to buy them as soon as the thanksgiving sales hit. Jebus they are sweet.
They generally look like a regular strap binding. The clicks on the straps look kind of crappy, but they are standard attachments so you could replace them. I like to ratchet down really tight, but these seem to pop too easily. No matter.
The great thing is that you can easily adjust your binding tightness while riding, just as with any straps.
But the killer application is when you want to get quickly in and out. There’s a power cord at the back just like flow bindings. If you drop the lever, you can pull back the highback and at the same time raise the ankle strap. I put on a pair of store boots and tried whipping the feets in and out of the bindings. No problem, plenty of clearance. And when you need to lay the high back flat, you can, just like a regular strap binding.
I currently can’t see a downside to these at all. At $210 in a nyc shop they are definitely priced to move. Perhaps I am just dazzled by the messianic glow that seems to emanate from these sacred bindings, yea, for they are the ones fortold in our ancient snowboarder prophecies.
Now let’s start seeing some decent lacing systems. Go forth and design ye engineers, and produce them for me!
Finally a competitor to FLOW
Flow makes my favorite kinds of bindings for snowboards. They are comfortable and faster to get in and out of than any strap or step-in I’ve ever had. I’ve even been considering buying their $450 Team binding which is amazingly light and wonderful and if it were food I’d eat it. I’d love to link to the product description, but the flow website is of such a coruscatingly brilliant FLASH design that I can just point you to the front page and say good luck. Good luck.
Then this came along and it looks like I have to get my hot little hands on it. My man vlad tells me it has the same sort of fallback highback that flow has. I likes to see competition.
–you know, I’m looking at it, and damn if I can see how it falls back. Perhaps vlad is just retarded, which isn’t altogether impossible. I’ll still go take a look.
BangoWhatthehell
I am intrigued by this weird advisory on cryptome, keeper of, if not all, then at least exclusively, things you are not supposed to know. There’s no attribution, no explanation, and no other mention of this on the web.
The very short gist is:
Avoid the treacherous anonymous web browser, bangotango.com. It is harvesting unwary user addresses. It is operated by triumphpc.com as a law enforcement/intelligence sting.
It would be an interesting concept, if only because it has such problems with the idea of entrapment. The idea that the some agency could make the promise of proxied worry free browsing, even going so far as to include the text of the 4th amendment on the website, and then use evidence gathered there in court is boggling.
Hello world
Hello world
The Icon Creation Process
An icon starts off as a puppy, then all non-icon bits are stripped away by an iconizer which leaves only a clear concise visual expression of an idea, completely unlike what I have done with paint and the gimp.
Ooh heaven is a place on Mars
I think that Project Gutenberg is a great idea – unfortunately most of the titles are the likes of “Rides on Railways by Samuel Sidney”. I do keep up with what they are doing via their handy rss feed though. It is thusly that I happened upon The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars by L. P. Gratacap. I haven’t finished it, not by a long shot but the gist of it seems to be that when you die you go to Mars.
And before you are born, you come from Venus.
So another interesting part is that he and his father engaged in a series of experiments to contact his departed mother by Telegraph.
Oooh emergency
First incident so far – the plaza is blocked off. There are men in white suits in the fountain blocking it off. something’s afoot.
Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
I just happened to stumble upon FretDFire’s first blog entry which launched me off into a flurry of searches on Daniel C Dennet. He wrote a book called Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which seems to contain this insightful tidbit:
[I]f you want to *reason* about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I’m eager to [participate]. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenom of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith as a *way of getting to the truth*, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon you tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign agreement. But we’re seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into the issue that any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself.
This may be why he gets paid bucks to write books about these things and I try not to talk to people about religion anymore. I think that things just get more wonderful when you realize how truly amazing and complicated the real world is instead of closing all that off by saying “I have a magic spark that is hidden in me that powers my body and is where my thoughts come from and thats that.”
When I want escapist fantasy I’ll turn to some excellent fiction that is labelled as such and is well crafted. But more amazing than that is the stuff I’ve been reading lately about neuropsychology. My friend Jaime got me started by handing me a book that I absolutely can’t remember the name of and that I gave to a friend. The author was much inspired by Oliver Sacks. I then picked up Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and am just blown away again by how good these books are. By examining the tales of actual patiants we can get a better grasp on what exactly is the mind that’s doing all this thinking, typing this blog, reading this blog.
Is it a magic spark or is it something even more wonderful, the balance of the most complex and interesting machine ever created?
*** LATE BREAKING EDIT ***
See the man say it his damn self!
Bugmenot we hardly knew ye
Bugmenot.com was a great idea. An idea whose time had clearly come. And an idea whose time, it seems has clearly gone.
The idea was this. Instead of you registering for a new site every time you wanted to read a new york times article, you just go to bugmenot and they would hand you a handy dandy username and password that was, get this: already registered. This saves you the tedious time of thinking up fake email addresses or, worse, having to register a fake hotmail address just to get the confirmation email. It even came with a handy firefox plugin that would allow you to right click on the page and pop up a user name and password then and there.
Admittedly, if I gave a fuck who was reading my stuff, I might be a tad perturbed by the idea of people sharing password and identities and whatnot. On the other hand, I might be surprised to learn that you can’t always trust who’s at the other end of an ethernet cable. I might wise up and say “If I’m going to let everyone register for free to see this stuff, and a suspicious number of my users have email addresses like fuck@you.com or h@t.com, perhaps I should just skip that pesky registration in the first place!”
Bugmenot, an efficient warrior in the war against internet stupidity, struck down.