A journey of 1000 miles starts with a single SaaS Solution
Rookie Academy
Rookie Academy is where I trained to be a snowboard instructor, really great fun and great place! www.rookieacademy.com for more info!
RIP Tom…
May 21st
We received bad news last week. Tom Donnelly, the trainer that taught myself and Mike snowboard instructing died during the week, the day after his fathers funeral. He was the BASI examiner who I was training with most of the season in Wanaka.
I never forget when during heli-boarding in the Harris mountains in south island. The guide (a skier!) said that a ledge was fine to jump off, he ollied off it and found it to be a huge jump. It ended in his puffer jacked de-puffering, the cracking of his mobile and the destruction of an iPod… he always knew where the best hits were at TC, even down runs you’d been down 1000s times before and never even noticed!
He asked not to send flowers but to give money to his favourite charity (Angela Donnelly, 13 Harberton Park, Belfast, BT9 6TW).
You’ll be missed man!
Heli-boarding outtakes..
Apr 15th
I’ve uploaded the Heli-boarding out-takes from the 2006 Rookie Academy heliboarding trip…
Mount Ruapehu early bird lift passes available!
Apr 9th
They’ve gone on sale!!! yupiee! You can now buy early bird Mt Ruapehu lift passes at $399, for both sides of the mountain Whakapapa (which is new zealands largest developed ski field) and Turoa. Its interesting to see the price difference to europe 
nearly 4.5x more to get a 3 valleys season pass, but hey its a bigger skiable area
Off to snow planet tonight for some snowboarding. Its open 365 days a year. I asked them how many people came on christmas day and they said it was totally packed out! Bizzare!
Oh in tech news McAfee FAILED the 100% virus scan at VB. Virus Bulletin tests a load of virus scanners for “100% virus detection”. They failed to detect viruses running on Vista, ironically enough Microsofts’ OneCare also failed.
First Pics of Snow in NZ!!
May 5th
The 2006 season has started early in NZ! They were expecting snow early and they got it! Here are a couple of pictures of Snow Farm in the South Island of New Zealand. Ok one of them isn’t! Its of the Bra fence! If you go to wanaka and travel towards Queenstown from Wanaka to go to Cardrona or Snow Farm/Snow Park you’ll see this fense. I just went on the snow farm website to see if they have any pics and I found the true story about it: The Cardrona Bra Fence true story. Its quite long and kinda tradition to leave a bra on the fence
Season swap over…
Apr 25th
Well as one season ends the next one begins. Europe had a couple of late snow dumps which extended the season a bit but the US season has now more or less come to an end. Those who did the Rookie Academy course and were teaching in the US are now heading to NZ to do another season… well some of them . I’m hopefully going to head out to NZ for two weeks or so in August, so I can catch up and do a bit of snowboarding too
Here is quite an interesting article about search engine optimization. The guy who wote it has worked for a number of search engine companies, so you get some interesting insights to how the closely guarded algorithms work! http://www.webmonkey.com/06/16/index3a.html.
