Mar/090
Shaun White Snowboarding for the Wii balance board
Shaun White on the cover of Rolling Stone
If you haven't yet bought yourself a Wii and got the balance board for Wii fit, then you should immediately do so, of course.
But if you have a balance board, you'll be wondering what the best game is to play on it. Obviously the Wii fit game itself is second to none; engaging, but a tiny bit serious to make it much fun.
The solution is Shaun White's Snowboarding. Firstly it's easy to learn the basic board controls. Using your feet to ollie and change your balance feels very natural and adding tweaks and tricks with the controller in your hand is an easy progression.
As is usual for the genre you have to get to a fair standard in order to unlock most of the more fun stuff, but this can all be done within the first few hours of game play. There is a co-operative mode for party play and dinner parties.
In short, there's hours of game play for the 50 quid cover price, and that game play is satisfyingly reliant on skillful balancing on the wii balance board. To really unlock the full potential of this game it probably helps to be 12 years old, but even us 33 year old geezers can bust a double back flip or two without putting our real backs out.
Mar/090
Boss Des Bosss 2009
Boss Des Bosses day has come round again. I'm starting to feel more of a part of these seasonal milestones now I've been here for a few years. This is only the 3rd time I've seen the event, but this year marks it's 20th anniversary. For 20 years teams of seasonaires from all over the Alps have come to Chamonix to compete in a head to head moguls competition.
Last year Zermatt won. They won because they practiced and were also really good. Chamonix were second. Because they didn't practice. But they were really good. So we'll see. Either way, it's sunny, there's a BBQ & we've got a bag full of beer and wine to get through.
Tonight's parties in Chamonix mark the beginning of the end of the season
Mar/092
New Economic Reality
At last I've heard a term on the media which describes the current financial crisis. I heard the term "New Economic Reality" on radio 4 and think that about sums it up perfectly.
Mar/090
Weeks flying by
Looking at the last date of my last post, I see I haven't written anything for over a week. It's an indication of how fast and hectic life is here during the winter. The weeks are flying by, with the end of the ski season now firmly in sight.
We've had a lot of visitors to stay this year. The spare room is the office, so when people stay I'm away from my computer and that's one reason for the lack of blog activity. I love having people to stay and a visit from an old friend from university last week, catching up after 5 years or so was brilliant.
The other reason for lack of blogging is of course, skiing. March has been a snowy month again this year. We had a dump of over a meter at the weekend and some of the best powder days of the season over the past few days. I've skied in some of the deepest snow I've ever skied. Face-shots a-plenty (when you're skiing snow so deep that the snow sprays up into your face).
At this time of year the sun is also much stronger, and the temperatures rise. The snow transforms quickly, first becoming heavy, then chalky, then slushy toward the end of the day or lower down. Spring snow is a lot of fun, and ridiculous suntans are common. I've got a stupidly dark tan which stops at my neck.
There's still the end of March and all of April to go. The lifts don't stop running till the start of May. Now is the time for ski-touring. Getting up high into the mountains in the lovely warm weather to find the best snow conditions is what we're aiming for now. The crevasses on the glaciers are now well covered with snow bridges, making them safer than at the start of the season. It's time to start skiing the Vallee Blanche.
Mar/091
Using the BBC iPlayer outside the UK
The BBC iPlayer is a brilliant piece of technology. Well thought out, well executed and after a long period of development and testing - it really works. The only problem is that due to the way that the BBC is funded, the iPlayer is strictly unavailable to users outside the UK. This has meant we've been unable to use the service here in France.
This restriction works as follows. When you make a request to the iPlayer service to watch a program, the iPlayer system looks at the IP address that the request came from. If that IP address isn't in the UK, it refuses to let you watch it. I've experimented in the past with using proxy servers and other methods to hide where my request is really coming from and trick theiPlayer into thinking I'm in the UK. Without much success. Until now. Due to the diligent research and plain techie genius of my sister's husband, I've found a solid way around the problem and through my mac mini connected to my big fat telly I can finally watch Sunday afternoon nature programs - my favourite thing:)
I'm not going to go into the exact details of how to do this, but I'll point my readers in the right direction. VPN - Virtual Private Networks. Many companies have a VPN to allow their employees to connect to the companies' network remotely, allowing them to access their files/emails etc. Essentially what happens is that a secure connection is created between the client computer and the network it is connected to. Requests to theinternet are now seen to be sent from the that network. If that network happens to be in the UK, then the iplayer is happy to allow the service to be delivered, regardless of where the stream it sends out actually ends up.
Suffice to say that services do currently exist whereby you can buy access to a VPN for a monthly fee.