This past month we were able to take advantage of some nice weather here and get some climbing, hiking and skiing in.  Samuel’s skiing is improving every time we hit the slopes, and he now prefers the chairlift to the rope tow.  Monika’s been snowboarding with her sister again at Winter Park, and I was able to get up there once, too.  I went to A-Basin today, it was a bit windy but the snow was very nice.  I found a few areas that still had a foot or two of untracked powder, definately worth getting up at 6am.

We took the family up to Chautauqua Park in Boulder to get a good Christmas picture, and made them into cards at Wal-Mart.  There are always people there taking photos, I think the Flatirons there are the most photographed place on the Front Range.  The next photo below is a view of the Indian Peaks from Green Mountain, just behind the Flatirons.  The third is a view of Boulder from the summit of the First Flatiron, I climbed it with Jason and Jessica Deugan earlier this month.  Cold day, but nice to get out and get some climbing in.

So far this year, I’ve been able to ski at Copper Mountain, Monika has been able to snowboard at Winter Park, and today I took Samuel up to Eldora for his first time skiing. He did far better than I expected, I thought that we would only be there for a few hours and we ended up skiing for four. I tried to just make it fun for him and not expect him to learn anything, but he was able to move around on his skis pretty well by the end of the day. He even wanted to use the pony lift by himself! I let him decide when we were going to leave, and he kept wanting to do “one more time”. I would take him up the lift, then ski backwards in front of him and catch him when he was going too fast. He loved it. Here are some pictures from the day.

Something I’ve been using regularly for the past few years with good results is an RSS newsreader. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way for websites you like to visit to summarize changes in a way that a news reader can understand. What this means for me is instead of visiting Wired News, Engadget, and about 20 other websites I like to read, I can view all new changes on their site in my RSS newsreader. Each feed can be updated every hour so I can stay up to date on my news sources.

My site now has an RSS feed, you can subscribe by clicking on the RSS Feed link on the lower right hand corner of this page. You can find other RSS feeds by looking for the RSS feed symbol on many websites. I have feeds for quite a few things, including the ski report for Colorado, the latest Dilbert comic, newly released movies on DVD, and recent pictures uploaded by my friends on Flickr. Whenever someone I know on Flickr uploads a new photo, it will show up in my RSS newsreader within the hour.

On Windows, a good RSS newsreader is SharpReader or GreatNews, I use Akregator on my Linux desktop at home. There are quite a few RSS newsreaders that are web-based also, and a few good RSS plugins for the Firefox web browser. I like newsreaders that will show you how many articles are unread, and allow you to organize your RSS feeds into folders so you can categorize them by topic. With Akregator, I can click on the Comics folder I’ve created to see all the latest comic strips I subscribe to.

Empeg Web Lite is a small, clean web interface for the Empeg car MP3 player. It displays the currently playing track information, and allows the user to browse playlists and enqueue songs and playlists on the Empeg. You must have Mark Lord’s Hijack Empeg Kernel installed to use Empeg Web Lite. With only one file to install, it tastes great and is less filling! more…

After storing my images on my own website for several years, I’ve now found a better way to store and share my digital images. Flickr is a website that focuses on storing and sharing digital photos, it’s the first kind of it’s type that I would advocate. What’s even better is the integration with my blogging software, Wordpress. I can insert images very easily into my posts with a click of a button, redirecting the viewer to my Flickr photo site. Flickr allows me to do some pretty cool things, you can:

• Go to my main photo page at Flickr.
• See a map of where my photos were taken at Flickr.
• View a list of tags that I have associated with my pictures.
• List my photos by date.

If you have digital images to share or store (permanantly, too!), I’d encourage you to set up your own account on Flickr. If you do, you can add me as a contact, search for my name in the contact list and you’ll find me.