Brent Kearney

If you’re looking for some advice on buying a digital camera, Mike Elgan’s article, The Myth of Maximum Megapixels, is for you.

Each amateur photographer has a pixel count “sweet spot” that best suits his photography style and abilities. For most people, that’s somewhere in the 4-to-6-megapixel range. Above that, however, increasing the number of pixels generally reduces the quality of pictures.

That’s right. I said it. More megapixels are bad. Here’s why…

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Yesterday morning there was a little over 20cm of fresh snow at Sunshine Village, on top of the 48cm from the previous four days. The sun came out, and the ski conditions were great.

Unfortunately, the Angel and Continental Divide chair lifts were still not open, so its still just low elevation skiing. It was a lot less crowded than opening day, so there were plenty of fresh tracks to be had all morning. Despite the deep snow, one must be vigilant for shallowly buried rocks and stumps. Check out this nasty ski-eater that I uncovered. On rocks, you’ll either get too much traction, or not enough, depending on the shape of the rock and how you hit it. So be wary this time of year.

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It’s hard to believe, but according to this MSN Japan article, many women are suffering from a strange affliction: perpetual orgasms. All day long, just standing there. One woman claims to have about 300 per day.

The condition, which lasts anywhere between a few days to a week, has been dubbed persistent sexual arousal syndrome (PSAS).

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Every year, it seems, no matter how dedicated I am about pre-season training, the first few days are always a killer on the legs. However, this year it was a bit different, and I don’t think it had anything to do with training.

This summer, aside from trail running, I started participating in two new sports: mountain biking and rock climbing. One thing that they both have in common, if you’re striving to do them well, is how important it is to be aware of and in control of your level of exertion, and the efficiency with which you move. If you’re biking up a steep hill, you will find it much easier if your upper body is relaxed as much as possible. Just flexing the muscles in your upper body causes your heart to work much harder, and that leaves less energy for your legs, which need it the most.
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It was a spectacular opening this season — both Sunshine and Lake Louise had great conditions. I have to say though, Lake Louise had way more snow, and there was easily twice as much terrain open. The Summit lift was open, and there were several excellent lines down from the top, with my favorite being Outer Limits. Outer Limits is to the far skier’s right at the Summit top, on the front side, right next to the area boundary fence. The snow was knee-deep and powdery, and from there you can ski all 991m of vertical.

Conditions at the Lake Louise ski resort on it’s opening day 2006.

The head ski patroller remarked that it was the best conditions for opening day that he’s ever seen. I’m not sure how long he’s been there, but I would guess more than a decade (some patrollers have been there 20+ years). It was a full-on powder day, on the first day of the season. I think its going to be a great winter!

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Some mornings you just need that extra jolt of stimulation that comes with a double-Americano from your local coffee shop. There are other mornings, however, when even that won’t do the trick. Cafés here in Banff have come up with the solution: the atomic bomb of coffee beverages, the Canadiano. One café, to be consistent with the local ski culture, calls it the “caffeine avalanache”.

A Canadiano is just like an Americano, except that instead of adding hot water to the espresso, drip-coffee is added. Most patrons order it in the large cup. Zing!

If you haven’t yet seen Who Killed the Electric Car?, watch it, as soon as possible. It is somewhat infuriating, but also exciting to think that there exists electric vehicles that can go 300 miles on one charge, and accelerate from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 3.6 seconds — today. You plug it in at night in your garage. Or at the office. Zero emissions.

The documentary is very well done; unless you’re an oil executive, you won’t be disappointed. Well maybe you will be disappointed, and maybe even angry — with the oil & gas industry, the auto industry, and the Bush administration, all of whom conspired to kill the electric vehicle market before it got started. Too much money was at stake. The electric car would remove billions in revenue from oil and gas, and billions more in parts and service of traditional vehicles.

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A Brooklyn judge has allowed a defendant in a recording industry case, Marie Lindor, to challenge the record company’s claim for $750 per song in damages. The songs are sold to retail stores at only $0.70, and thats for singles. The average is probably much lower than even that. The Inquirer has a good summary of the story.

This case will probably set a precedent that will put a wrench in the cogs of RIAA legal intimidation. They are very unlikely indeed to be able to justify seeking over 1000 times the cost that they are supposedly losing due to piracy. Its about time that someone stood up to those bullies.

Sunshine Village opens on Friday this week, and I’m stoked! The weather forecast is sunny with a high of 0 — so that means up at ‘the Shine it should be slightly below zero, with big blue skies. Ideal conditions. As you can see from the image on the right, which was captured from their slick new website, they are reporting 52cm of base. It is gently snowing right now here in Banff, and hopefully that will continue all day on Thursday. It should be an epic opening day!

Lake Louise is also set to open on the 10th, and I’ll be there all day on Saturday. It would be great if the back bowls are open, but I’m not counting on it, with only 45cm of base, as of today.

Writing a rant about my iPod has been on my TODO list for a little while. The rant was to be about the severely annoying problem of my ipod crashing, then spontaneously rebooting when I attempt to play a large mp3 file, and by large, I don’t mean that large: attempting to play most podcasts over 40 minutes in length caused the ipod to crash & reboot.

However, today I decided to try researching the problem a little bit first, because as you all know, Google knows everything. I of course was not the only person to experience this problem, and as it turns out, there is an easy fix for it. I found the solution at this ZDnet post, but it is for MS Windows users.

On my Mac, the solution was essentially the same, but I used the command line to quickly locate and remove the problem files. Here are the steps that I followed:

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Scientists in the U.K. have announced the successful cloning of a human liver. The breakthrough was pulled off using stem cells from human umbilical cord. A “baby liver” was grown; it is about the size of quarter. The techniques employed will be developed to clone a full-sized human liver suitable for organ transplant and repair.

Within five years, pieces of artificial tissue could be used to repair livers damaged by injury, disease, alcohol abuse and paracetamol overdose. And then, in just 15 years’ time, entire liver transplants could take place using organs grown in a lab.

Bottoms up!