Christmas was good. Melissa surprised me with some nice long sleeve t-shirts from West 49. I also picked up my boots! Although no the exact model I wanted. The only difference between the Judge and the Phantom are the laces. The Phantom has traditional laces, which makes the boot a little less stiff (also because there is no chin reinforcement plate like the Judge has).

Saw The Aviator last night with Mark and Melissa. I enjoyed it a lot actually. Leonardo did a pretty good job - considering i'm not a huge fan of him.

Gord and Kara went snowboarding today. I opted to play in the poker tournament. I was out within 40 minutes. An all in mis read of the hand cost me all my chips.

The weather forecast in Tahoe looks great. Snowing every day we are going to be there (with a POP over 60% each day). Should be great. Mild too, not dropping below -5C!

I've starting working on my online snowboarding journal. Going to have to port the copy I have on paper to it sometime later.

I signed up for xbox live yesterday (2 month free trial). After going through all the hoops (nothing like typing out all your information using the Xbox controller) I was playing halo2 online with my brother. I went to xbox.com to see if I could get any info on how to cancel my subscription after the 2 months are done. Coudln't find it anywhere. So stupid.. I'm sure there is a way on the xbox itself to cancel the account.

Environment Canada is predicting 30cm of snow for Collingwood on the day we are going boarding! Timing cant get any better than that! Mark and I are packing the car tomorrow morning (taking the super early train, yuck). Then we are leaving work early (with Damon) and heading up to Blue.

I was at Melissas house last night. I met her brother and attempted to fix his computer. I was impressed at his mobility. She told me he was legally blind. Which I later realized was not 100% blind but (according to the CNIB website) "whose central acuity does not exceed 20/200 in the better eye with correcting lenses or whose visual acuity if better than 20/200 has a limit to the central field of vision of no greater than 20 degrees". So this means that What people can see at 200feet, he can only see at 20 feet (or worse). According to the website, this is the large "E" (at the top) on an eye chart.

I've been looking all over town for the snowboard boots I want to get. I was surprised to find out that the majority of the shops dont even carry the DC brand. Only one store, Boardzone, had them but not in my size. If anyone knows where I can get a pair, please.. let me know.

Great weekend, great indeed!

Andre's party was a blast and better than last years! Hats off to EBM crew. It's a shame that I forgot to bring my camera :/

Snow boarding was excellent too. First run out in the season and it was coooold (think -30C with the windchill). That didn't phase us though, got a good ~4 hours of riding in. The drive up was ass though. Mark had to battle zero visibility and snow covered roads.

I was happy that I didn't have any equipment failure as I didn't check anything before going out. Boots, board, and bindings all performed well. This week i'm going to get my new boots! (i'd love to be able to link you to the website with details, but DC uses a flash only interface, boo!). As well as getting board waxed/tuned.

So today I'm working from home for the morning as I can't seem to get my car started. My fault! Needs an oil change (still has good ole "summer" oil in there) and a tune up.

So what's that "bar code" looking thing at the top of the index page? It's a journal time line! Each line represents a journal entry. Right now it doesn't do much but sit there and look pretty. However in the near future you will be able to skip to any entry in the current month by clicking on a line! (UPDATE: hmm.. it actually plots the time of the day each entry was posted in the current month - not as cool :()

I will also be adding my snow boarding log book entries (that I started 3 seasons ago) to this website too.

So the new website is here. Some new features that i'm sure all of you would enjoy will include:

- Access to all posts back to March 2000. This will be expanded to 1999 (if I can find the original files some place)
- A search interface (go ahead, search for your name!)
- A RSS feed, so you can stay up to date using your favorite rss reader (I like thunderbird)
- Comments! feel free to post a comment to a post I make.

What's coming?
- I want to include the weather conditions of the time I posted the entry (think that will be cool)
- Various other needed pages like a "about me", "what i'm listening to now", "links", etc..
- Some interesting stats (updated in real time) like number of posts, average length, reading difficulty (yeah yeah.. i'm a nerd)

Going to go cut a christmas tree with Mark and his Sister today (nothing else to do). It's really nice out, about 3 degrees right now. Then it's off to Andres Christmas party (see pics of last years). Then it's off to Blue Mountain for the first ride of the season on Sunday! w00t.

December is here at last.. and no new website! Shame on me!

Work today sucked. I was disappointed that I didn't get the permanent position. However if I did would mean a significant cut in my take home pay (yay pension).

According to Melissa, we've seen each other 4 times in the past 9 days. Is that too many times for a possible new girlfriend? This was the argument we had last night.

I was compelled to write a nice long entry this time around.. but I realized I lost my phone after writing the first paragraph. So i'm going to focus on trying to find that.

Until next month! ;)