Watch out! It looks like I’ve found new and exciting ways to fill up all my free time: sport and technology. Read on eager reader…

Last Thursday I found myself with no work and nothing to do. So I did what any red blooded American would do: I called my Belgian friend Julian (the coolest guy I know) who assembled two German friends and we drove off to the Spanish Pyranees for a day of international snowboarding at Masella!

That’s me and my brand new Rossignol Avalon board.
We met this past Christmas and
have been inseparable ever since.

There aren’t many places in the world where you can play beach volleyball and then drive just two hours and rip it up in a frosty snowpark. Barcelona is one of those places. It’s absolutely wonderful. And last Thursday was the perfect day to make the trip. Spring skiing is very different than winter skiing in that you can have a day where the sun is shining so bright that you find yourself peeling off layer after layer of clothing over the course of the day until you’re left with nothing but a T-shirt and ski pants. This was one of those days. Thanks to the gorgeous weather, I now have the beginning of a summer tan, a peeling nose, and a slight cold – but it was worth it. The only bad thing about spring skiing is that the snow at the bottom of the mountain was a little slushy. Yuck! But the other 90% of the mountain had choice conditions.

We had a great day bombing down the slopes and flying through the snowpark. I was even able to catch some of the day on film. I’m at the point now where I’m comfortable using my camera while I’m racing down the mountain. And I’m very protective of my camera. And this now leads me to the second part of this story…

As you probably know by now, I’m a bit of a technophile. I enjoy learning new things to do with my computer. You may have noticed this in the past few weeks with the impressive display of my Photoshop skills and Flash skills. But I’d never tried my hand at video editing. Until now.

Let me tell you something about Windows Movie Maker. It is a powerful and extremely easy to use program that will have almost anyone editing their digital videos in no time. Well, not “no time” exactly. It took me over four hours to throw together my first one minute video. Let me tell you something else about Windows Movie Maker. It is a flaming pile of shit. I say this after having lost ALL of the aforementioned work when the program spontaneously decided to freeze just as I was finishing the edit. I scoured the internet looking for a way to get my work back but all I found were dozens of other people saying the same thing about this Microsoft miracle. Grrrr.

I tried to install the newest version of Adobe Premiere Pro (the industry standard in video editing), but, for the first time in its life, my computer didn’t meet the minimum requirements. Luckily I “found” a copy of an old version of Premiere from 2003. I installed it and messed around for a while before realizing that the steeper learning curve would not allow me to finish my one minute video in the next few days. I wanted immediate gratification! So back to WMM I went. Freeze, crash, freeze, freeze, crash and I was finally done. I sent the finished product to YouTube for all the world to see. Here it is, my very first video: