April 19, 2005

Consumer Whore

I really want to fling more words at this thing, but these days I’m scrambling to finalize a few design projects before I duck out of this town. It’s not much. Honestly, these past couple weeks I’ve been spending more time at the shop hooking people up with gear than working on our website. Even so, over the last week my moonlighting gigs, coupled with my personal goings-on in the computer realm, have been enough to make my hands seize up. Sometimes they spasm, which is definitely new and probably not indicative of anything good.

That being said, let’s ramble about something more light-hearted. Let’s talk about all the neat stuff I’ve bought over the last few days! Today I picked up a new snowboard from Brave Dave at Storm Warning, a Ride Timeless 156. Stiffer and longer than my current stick (snicker), it promises to be an all-mountain carving machine. It’s incredibly light, too.

Today I also took my Naish Xeon trainer kite out for a whirl. Naish describes it as a “super fun park flyer,” even though no one has any idea what that means. Like, am I supposed to take this kite to the skate park and take it off any sweet jumps, and get like three feet of air that time? Whatever. For being an airfoil trainer, the Xeon is surprisingly resiliant. While practicing kite loops I slammed it hard into the shoreline muck a bunch of times, and dragged it across the beach while trying to relaunch it (self-launching the trainer is a cinch, but self-relaunching is a pain in the ass). Despite my greatest efforts, the only damage I inflicted on the kite was that it now smells like dead fish. Hello, Columbia.

I picked up a new kite harness the other day, a Pro-Limit Felix Pivec waist harness. It was last year’s model so I got a pretty good deal, and I outfitted it with a DAKINE kite knife. Strange thing is, the back pocket has been cancelled on the 2005 Pro-Limit harnesses, so I have no idea where they expect you to put your knife. Maybe they expect you to carry it in your teeth. I have no idea. Definite design oversight, if you ask me. Tensioned kite lines will cut through your arm like string through wet clay. You don’t want to mess with that, which is why any kiter with any sense carries a knife.

I got the fifth-line system retrofitted on both of my kite bars, so now I’m good to rock and roll. The conversion was painless, but was rather time consuming and involved tying a bowline. Our shop is offering free installation with the purchase of any retrofit kit and 2004 kite. I’m not sure if we know what we’re getting ourselves into.

…Okay, I had written more, but I just recently upgraded to Opera 8.0. I’m not used to the new interface and I lost half of this entry when I closed the wrong tab. Of course, I hadn’t saved it. This sort of thing has happened to me in the past, and it always makes me lose my will to live.

Whatever. I’m not even going to bother proofing this. Typos, you’re on your own. Don’t ever accuse us of acting too professional.