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Thomson – Bought at Garage Sale

Quite a nice garage sale find. Tidy profit for the new owner, too! (Full Story)

A Tool for Ski Enthusiasts

On big snow days, those of us who have to work to maintain a lifestyle of certain standards are forced to sit in our offices and listen to avalanche control set off explosives.

At Whistler-Blackcomb, alpine lifts like Peak, Glacier, and 7th Heaven will remain closed for one or more days for safety reasons until the avalanche risk is minimized. Live lift status is provided by light-boards on the hill, and those behind desks can monitor live lift status on the Whistler-Blackcomb website.

Knowing which lifts were closed on any given day is very important to ski and snowboard enthusiasts.Â If you don’t understand why, I can explain with a story:

Tuesday is a really warm day and the snow is quite wet. Overnight, the temperature drops, the wind blows 90km/h and it snows 30cm.

Wednesday morning there is 30cm of fresh snow, but Johnny has to work like a sucker, unlike Jill who has the day off. Ski patrol opens the Peak chair on Whistler but avalanche conditions keep 7th Heaven on Blackcomb closed all day.Â Wednesday night, another 20cm falls.

On Thursday, Johnny and Jill both go skiing.Â Johnny heads up Whistler to ski his favourite lines from the Peak chair, but Jill knows from watching the light boards all day on Wednesday that 7th Heaven didn’t open. She heads over to 7th Heaven where she knows there is 50cm of new snow waiting for her.

The moral of the story is that you can miss out on some great fresh tracks by not knowing the alpine lift status. To keep on top of things, you have the following options:

Ski / ride every single day.
Hit ‘refresh’ on the Whistler-Blackcomb lift status page every 15 minutes from 8am until 4pm.
Every night, call everyone you know and ask them what lifts were closed.

Enter a new friend – the friend who you can call anytime and will always know which lifts were closed, not just for today, but for the last 7 days. Don’t end up like Johnny – use the Alpine Lift Forecast.

At the moment, the Alpine Lift Forecast doesn’t actually predict anything, but it will show you 7-day lift status for all Whistler Blackcomb resorts, which is a good start.

Landscaping Timelapse

Here’s a timelapse video of the moving of 2 yards of compost enriched soil out of the driveway into our front garden. It’s fun to watch the pile shrink. We stop to talk to the neighbour (who is off-camera) around the 15 second mark and there’s 1 frame of Stephanie carrying Thomson (it’s just a flash). Unfortunately I didn’t capture the celebratory beer drinking at the end.

I’ve been playing with an old Canon Powershot A700 camera loaded with CHDK firmware and the Sunset 4 Timelapse script to make a series of timelapse videos. This is also the first video I’ve hosted on Amazon S3. Without such a service my old laptop/webserver would take about 3 days to stream this video to you. Isn’t cloud computing grand?

Login for Thomson

Thomson's Room

To view news and pictures of Thomson:

Login by following this link or by clicking ‘Login‘ under the Admin menu on the left-hand side.
Enter the user name and password that were e-mailed to you.
Click ‘Thomson‘Â from the left-hand Menu.

If you cannot find the Thomson link, make sure you are logged in. Once you have logged in, you will see a grey bar with the words, “Thomson’s Friends and Family” in the upper left hand corner.

This is a shared login, so please do not change or update the username or password.

Please call or e-mail if you have any problems.