Ski Bum Poet

Avalanche Skier POV Helmet Cam Burial & Rescue in Haines, Alaska

Jesse posted a link to this video on the AltaCam skiing forum recently, and I just had a chance to watch. It’s about 8 and a half minutes long. With the avalanche occurring in view at skier’s right around 1 minute 17 seconds in. The remaining 6+ minutes of footage is POV of being buried alive in a slide. Incredibly intense and scary to watch, but it’s important that you watch it…the whole thing. Here is a quote from the story included at Vimeo.

The guy in the video was the first one to drop from their group and while not a guide (he was going tail-gunner style), had a lot of Utah and AK backcountry experience. He had a Black Diamond Avalung on, but as you can tell from the video while he’s talking as he’s dropping in, it wasn’t in his mouth to start. He tried to shove it in the instant of starting to get sucked down, but it didn’t stay. It was just off to the corner of his mouth he said, and he definitely got snow / ice build up as you’ll see on the second sweep of the mouth by the guide after they get to him…

Glad to see this turned out ok in the end, but a good reminder to everyone who enjoys the mountains in the winter…

Check it out. Angelina from The Daily Reviewer commented on my Little Hummer post, to let me know that I was included in their top skiing blogs category! Thanks to whoever nominated and voted for me. It’s an honor to be included there, with that company.

Top Skiing Blog

BTW there’s gonna be powder in them hills by this time tomorrow. I’ll take some pics and post them…

Little Hummingbird taking shelter under our covered porch from the cold and rainy storm, circa September 2008.

I am a big fan of Patagonia deals. I have posted some in the past, and here’s another I wanted to share that’s valid through this coming Monday, Sept 21st…

Free Ground Shipping for orders over $100 till 9/21/09 – use Promo Code AFF9SHIP – Excludes surfboards, wetsuits, blankets, gift cards, gifts bags, Carry Y’All Bag and shipping are excluded. Offer valid in USA only. Click banner below to redeem. Be sure and use code.

Just CLICK HERE or the banner, then use the code underlined above, and you’ll get your order shipped for free if the total exceeds $100. Remember this weekend only!

We’ve been getting to know The Avett Brothers band (and family) over the last several months. So I thought I would post a couple of my favorite song clips from YouTube that I’ve found so far. This is the same song, “Down by The Riverside”, on both clips. This was originally recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1938!

The first is with Donna the Buffalo in March of 2007, and the second is a recording with Jim Avett, the brother’s Father.

The other morning there was a mule buck with 8 points eating a plant on the steps, right out side our bedroom window. I watched him from 4 feet away through the screen. There was another mule deer playing with Ellie’s swing at the same time, in the moonlight.

The buck eating the plant looked like this…

Eventually the big buck smelled my breath, or heard me breathing, and ran off. He scared the other deer to attention, and then she ran off as well.

Then I fell back asleep…

I decided to post a sneak peak to some soon-to-be breaking technology news for our company AvantLink.com. Scott Kalbach already published a piece on his blog, so this is technically the second sneak peak. At any rate…

David Clark, our CTO, has developed a killer integrated tool that will allow our merchant partners to police their protected keywords from rogue Affiliate paid search marketing. Some ski bums reading this might be scratching their heads and thinking WTF…so I apologize if that’s the case. But fact is that AvantLink might someday help me come out of ski bum retirement, and get back to blogging full time. So read up now (this is part of my prepared PRWeb piece that will roll out as part of the marketing push for the “Paid Search Review” tool):

TITLE/HEADLINE
Free Trademark Bid Monitoring Service from AvantLink

NEWS RELEASE SUMMARY
Web retailers using the AvantLink Affiliate network now have the ability to more closely monitor company name, domain name or trademark paid search bids using the Paid Search Review tool, available for free in the merchant account management interface.

NEWS RELEASE BODY
Park City, UT (PRWEB) September, 2009 — AvantLink announced today the addition of a powerful tool for retailers using their leading Affiliate marketing technology platform. The Paid Search Review tool allows merchants to monitor a self-configured keyword list of paid search marketing bids by their Affiliates, through a fully integrated network report. This tool was inspired by the open source code written by Mark Silliman available at iTrademarkBidding.com. However AvantLink CTO David Clark expanded upon that original idea to develop an enhanced keyword monitoring tool specific for the network, that is now available free of charge to merchants.

“One of the major business issues we find ourselves battling every day at AvantLink.com, is the problem generally referred to in the Affiliate marketing industry as Trademark Bidding,” says Scott Kalbach, founder and CEO of AvantLink. “This is the practice of Affiliates bidding on merchant names, domain names or trademarks via paid search ads to drive traffic.” He continues, “We have a policy that prohibits this activity, and we enforce it. However enforcement has become increasingly difficult now that we’re approaching 200 merchants in our network. This tool will assist us, and our merchant partners directly, in more robust brand protection and Affiliate terms of use compliance.”

About AvantLink.com:
AvantLink.com was founded in 2005 on the ideas of Affiliate marketing innovation, quality and service. They are a leading technology and tracking provider in the cost per sale Affiliate marketing space, offering enhanced retailer brand protection, datafeed scripts and other advanced Affiliate tools like tracking embedded RSS feeds, an Affiliate API, dynamic coupon/deal feeds, ad widgets, product content syndication options and much more.

…and how my wife saved us over $300 by Eavesdropping. Yesterday we went down to Babylon (Orem, in this case) to take advantage of the killer sales at RC Willey. Although I hate Babyon, I will say this: It’s worth the trip to this retailer on Labor Day if you want to save some serious cash. Our goal was to buy a new mattress, box spring and bed…and we got it done. After all we have been sleeping on a cheap mattress on a home-made wooden bed frame for our whole married life (six years on September 20th). This is also my first brand new bed I’ve owned,  ever.

We also took advantage of the sale to buy a new flat screen, HD TV…considering for our whole married life we’ve been watching what little TV we do on a dozen-year-old, radiation box that probably uses more power than our refrigerator. We owed it to ourselves.

At any rate, while I was gabbing away with a fast talking salesmen about the differences with the 32-inch TVs, Danette was sitting there quietly getting the scoop on a different model that was over $300 less than the one “my salesmen” was pushing, and hard. She just sat quietly, observing…effectively over hearing another salesmen telling his customer what a good deal the Toshiba was. So thanks to D, her observation skills saved us over $300 smackers!

Here is a follow up to my last post about the Donna show in Victor at the Knotty Pine. I would have followed up earlier but Danette beat me to it about our trip in general to the Teton Valley, so I’ve been lazy. Well here is a short, three minute clip of “Broken Record” from that night. As always we weren’t disappointed a bit. It doesn’t get any more real than DtB!!!