Snow on the mountain

The ski season is not meant to start until next week, however that did not stop Snowbird, Brighton and Solitude from opening early. There was the tradition rush to be the official “first” resort open (Snowbird came in 3rd), and as the photo shows, they only just managed to open – there is snow up on the mountains, but not a huge amount. Alta (which is further up the mountain) is limited by their lease agreement as to how many weeks they can open, so they did not bother trying to open early – they are still going with an opening of next week (conditions permitting).

My car with two pairs of skiis

Jim and I car-pooled up the mountain, and as a result I ended up with two pairs of skiis on the roof racks. It almost looks like I know what I am doing with that setup.   I also bought snow tires for the car, and since it is all-wheel-drive, I should be able to get up the mountain every day that it is open. Of course I suppose I may have to work sometimes, but even with that I may go up midweek – the beginners run is open until around 8pm, so I may use that a few times for trying out snowboarding. Once I am better at snowboarding, I can think about doing a day of snowboarding, but for now, I think afternoons will suffice.

The beginners run

Speaking of the beginners run – that is where I spent my day today. As I said before, they were kinda rushing the opening in order to compete with the other resorts, which meant that there were no green runs open except for the beginners run. Actually that is not true – I was told that Big Emma was open (and presumably the other 5 runs that branch off it). However they did not open the lift that goes to the start of Big Emma – to get there you would have to catch a lift higher up the mountain, then ski blue slopes until you eventually get to the green stuff. While there were people telling me that this would be easy, Jim (who does black diamonds, and was up there), felt that it was good for me to have stayed on the safer areas. As it was I still managed to do a complete face-plant at one point.

Now I am all sore and tired, but I am looking forward to getting up there next weekend again.

As always, click on a photo to see a larger view.

Well it didn’t take long – woke this morning to snow. Dupree had been very excited last night when we had a fairly major windstorm. Then this morning there was all the snow on the ground for him to investigate:

And the view from my office window is absolutely fabulous. I sit next to a west-facing window, so the mountains in the distance are on the other side of the valley.

As always, you can click on a photo to see it in larger size.

View from the office

Dupree Investigating Snow

Hint of snow

It really feels like we are getting close to ski season now (even apart from it getting colder).

I can see the snow on the mountains from my apartment!

Snowbird snow

And when I look online it looks even better!

Snowbird is talking about opening up in only 4 weeks from now. Alta is going to force me to wait one more week – they are hoping to open the weekend of Thanksgiving. Fortunately I have a season pass for Snowbird, so it is going to be really soon that I will be back on the slopes!

Fall Colors

Not to mention the fall colors are gorgeous (taken from the start of the local dog park (everything you see in the valley is basically dog park):

As always, click on any photo to see a higher-resolution image.

I will upload photos soon, but I have been lucky enough to get to San Francisco for the Java One conference. Like many before me, I’ve fallen in love with the city, especially with the great food.

I’m used to breakfasts being an afterthought, but I’m pleased to say that they do great omelets and scrambles here. The only time I’ve had better has been when Paul used to cook up scrambled eggs and pancakes every weekend – his secret was using cast iron skillets.

Just ranting.

In another capacity, I maintain a non-personal email account. Since I am the person who created it, the only person who uses it, and only ever for the purpose that it was created, I know damn well that I never subscribed to Jordan Community (to pick on the latest people who sent an email to that address).

Therefore whenever I get an email that is obviously spam, I ensure that the sender’s email is put onto one of the blacklist services. This ensures that even fewer of their spam messages get out to the real world.

I am only one of many people doing this, and I am only reactive: there are people out in the world who deliberately set up web sites that are designed to look enticing to those idiots who harvest emails for the purposes of spam. Then when the email addresses are harvested and used, they get automatically added to blacklists.

So far so good – normal spammers work on the basis of sending out millions of emails in the hope that one percent will take the bait. And I am doing my little bit to reduce their chances of success.

But occasionally there are email spams that I see that appear to be genuine information. There was one the other day that was reporting on an issue that I care about, there were no embeded objects, and the email links were valid. So I can only assume that a spammer has sold the email address to a genuine business.

Given that, I have to wonder why on earth a business would purchase email addresses, knowing that it is going to cause them to be labeled as spammers, and that their genuine emails are going to reach fewer and fewer real targets.

Meh!

By the way: for the purposes of this rant, I am using the Wikipedia definition of spam, namely [indiscriminately sent] unsolicited bulk messages.