Some pics from todays trip to Kaprun. Tried to take some pictures of myself on my telemarks, but without any great success… Met some guys in the park though and they could indeed do some cool stuff! 16 years old… me feels so old…

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Lost in a show with an overwhelming quantity of products and super loud graphics, this huge clean image covering the side of the westbeach booth stopped me in my tracks for a good couple of minutes.
That and the fact that walking around the whole show 3 times I reckon I walked 40km at least and my feet were hurting.

The Snowboard and new school ski sections of the Munich Ispo (pretty much the only interesting parts) were for the most part full of very bright, really fun illustrative graphics. There was a parralel Eco design forum going on with some interesting speakers, as well as a good dose of bullsh!t. I have some quite strong opinions on the whole deal which I wont go into right now but there were a few really cool products on display too. One of the real standouts was The Waldmeister bike. The wood core of the frame is made of beech, a domestically grown, renewable material acting as a C02 sink by removing more than 3,500 litres of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The plywood layers of the frame — up to 100 of them — are carefully put together by hand in a process that takes much more time than automatic production but is also more energy efficient. The glue holding together the layers of plywood is water-based and ecologically harmless.

The bike was finished with amazing attention to detail and looked so trick. You can read more about it here.

Wicked video of Simon Dumont warming up for x12. Check out his Silver medal winning run in the pipe too. Serious height! He went way higher than Tanner Hall who won it, but only did 5 hits instead of 7…. Think he deserved the win really.

Some characters and robots that I saw during my trip to Japan, got to love that piano playing Wabot!

ASIMO      WABOT     ANDROID PROJECTS     GUNDAM

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The Giger Bar is a bar themed and modelled by the Swiss artist H. R. Giger who did all of the designs for the Alien films. There are two Giger Bars: the first, the Museum HR Giger Bar, is located in Château St. Germain, Gruyères, Switzerland, better known for it’s cheese and serene Swiss countryside setting; and the second is the H.R. Giger Bar, in Chur, Switzerland. There was a third Giger Bar, located at The Limelight in New York City, but when the Limelight was closed, the Giger Bar was shut down.

The interior of the bars are themed along the lines of his famous biomechanical style as shown in the Alien films.
The official website is here but you can see more photos on google images here.

In a World Short Of Oil, Provisions Must Be Made. The mainstream media is really starting to increase it’s coverage of peak oil at a seemingly exponential rate.  Now who’s crazy?
The article is here.

Does anyone know a good system for uploading a load of photos to wordpress and displaying them? I have played around with some plugins but nothing seems to work all that well. In-page photos with thumbnails work ok when you dont want to show more than 10 photos but anymore than that is kind of monotonous both to upload and to view one by one.
I have thrown the rest of the photos up on facebook here because the bulk upload and click to move to next image is fast and effective.

Can only agree with Piers when it comes to Saalbach, AAAAWWEESOME place!

Saalbach is a monster resort an hour and a half away from here. It was brilliant there, huge pistes, loads of sunshine and so big we only covered about 25% of it despite riding fullspeed all day. There is a pretty cool park there too and after some straight hits to get a feel for it again, I managed to throw down my first decent sized spins of the year. Saweet. Thanks to Craig Dent for these two photos.

This guy has a great eye for lighting and creates some brilliantly edgy scenarios to capture. Really impressive photography from Sacha Dean Biyan. Hot, hot, hot, hot.

Me old mate from Alpinestars Jason married the lovely Roberta, and for their wedding present I registered a website and hooked them up with a content management system so they could easily update it. He travels a lot and puts up some decent photos so I thought i would link up his site here.

Super smooth renders with a comic twist, from Divine Error

DivineError

China’s stock market down 17% in the past six days, India’s stock market loosing 9.8% in the first one minute of trading, the FTSE 100 index tumbling 5.5% wiping out £77bn, Japan’s Nikkei dropping 13%, Indexes in Paris and Frankfurt slumping by about 7%, the dow down 8.34% this year. My these are interesting times. Dont’ worry, be happy.

Obertauern is the first proper resort we have been to around here. It is only an hour away and is much bigger than the other places we have checked out. It would be amazing on a powder day, but as it was it was a bit icy until the sun came out. Good to be back in the saddle though.

It’s one of the great unanswered questions of science. What gives matter its mass? By generating conditions present moments after the big bang, scientists hope to locate the elusive ‘God Particle’. “This is going to take us to the next layer of understanding”, enthuses Prof Geoff Taylor. The Hadron Collider at CERN, due to be switched on next year, will shoot beams of energy around a 27 km loop, smashing them into each other at the speed of light. It’s all in the hope of detecting the Higgs Boson, or ‘God’ particle, thought to give matter its mass. CERN scientists will also create mini black holes and search for dark matter. As Taylor states: “We are on the verge of discovering how our universe evolved from the first few fractions of a second.”

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0Fg16j5hbvY

 Some highlights from the Toyota museum.

Toyota-7

Prince R380 + Toyota Celica -73

And a Lotus Esprit in mint condition driving around in the streets of Tokyo…

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