RedBeard’s Curious Life

So I went up a mountain with a couple of friends with the intention of sliding down its snow-covered surface in a vaguely controlled manner. As it was their first time skiing, and I am a fairly proficient skier, I decided to try snowboarding for the day so I could stick around the same slopes without getting too impatient. After a morning and afternoon on the very gentle (yeah, right) slope of the beginner area, I attempted a run down a fairly lengthy green run and essentially concluded, once I had reached the bottom, that the snowboard is not for me.

I must say, the overall experience was not on the level of pleasure I’ve previously experienced while skiing. Not even close, actually. I fell over more times than I bothered to count, often in awkward manners that left various areas of my body in significant pain. Included here would be: my hands, which were frozen and battered from unexpected and repeated decreases in my gravitational potential energy; my tailbone and pelvis, which suffered numerous impacts with compacted ice crystals; my shoulder and elbow, which attempted to absorb the impacts otherwise directed towards more tender areas; my feet, which were constantly on the verge of cramp while trying to assist balancing maneuvers.

The falling down apparently decreases in frequency and intensity with time, but I felt that there were other problems remaining – problems of a more systemic nature. From years of skiing, I’ve grown accustomed to such things as remaining standing while stationary and traversing flat or uphill terrain without dislocating my hip. With snowboarding, it appears that neither of these is really in the cards, no matter how much effort I devote to the activity. The constant buckling and unbuckling of snowboard bindings was rather infuriating, as it essentially forces you to spend additional time lounging around in the snow while skiers just glide on and off chairlifts without halt. I’ve also grown fond of facing downhill when skiing, and I’m not really sure if that’s at all consistent while riding a ‘board.

In the end, I borrowed the skis of an aforementioned friend and skied a couple of runs down the same green slope that had previously left me bruising. I glided effortlessly down the incline with nary a problem, even catching a little air near the bottom. Snowboarding may be an enjoyable activity, but I’m just not willing to risk life and limb learning it when I can already get down the mountain much more effectively with a different set of equipment.

I tend to upgrade my computer piece-by-piece as I find constrictions in my computing experience. However, there are instances in hardware progression when single components cannot be individually swapped out. The CPU and motherboard are usually linked in such manner, but it seems that the torch has now been passed from AGP to PCI-E, and DDR2 looms, anxious to lay claim to a torch of its own. Adding to this state of affairs is the generally high expense of increasing my megahertz or cores numbers, which leads me to conclude that the value in such increases is somewhat lacking.

I’m looking at roughly a grand to grab a dual-core CPU with a higher clock frequency than my single-core, a motherboard to support it, and a dual-DVI PCI-E videocard to fit into the slot on said motherboard. Dropping a grand on hardware that will result in roughly two or three times performance boost just doesn’t strike me as good value. Not to mention I’ll be clamoring for a DDR2 motherboard+CPU once those become available, with the added expense of replacement RAM.

So my conclusion for the time being is that I’ll sit this round out, perhaps grabbing a decent dual-DVI AGP card if I can find one for roughly a Benjamin.