Saturday Meg and I volunteered for the Heuga Center for Multiple Sclerosis. When we headed up there at 7:30 AM we weren't exactly sure what it was that we were getting ourselves into, but were pleasantly surprised to find out that we were part of the team who got to ski/board all over the mountain setting up stops in the snow along side the runs for a scavenger hunt.

The idea was that multiple teams were sponsored for the events which included the scavenger hunt, a slalom ski race an auction and a dinner all in the name of raising money for Multiple Sclerosis. I learn something new and interesting every day, and at lunch they announced that Billy Kidd had arrived. This name vaguely sounded familiar, and the character certainly had a presence as he entered the room. I quickly did a wikipedia search on my iPhone to find out the following information.



Billy Kidd, Jimmy Heuga and Pepi Stiegler were Olypic skiiers who took silver, bronze and gold in Innsbruck Austria in 1964. Kidd and Heuga were the first Americans to win metals in Alpine skiing. Jimmy Heuga found out he had Multiple Sclerosis in 1970 and then started The Heuga Center for Multiple Sclerosis in order to use his passion for snow sports and the support of his fellow competitors and skiers across the country to help fund the search for a cure. Another interesting tidbit is that a few years later, Pepi Stiegler found out he also had MS -- what are the chances that two of the three 1964 ski medalists wind up with MS? Statistics say around 1 in 700.



Meg and I got to meet Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga, and saw a pretty amazing turn out with outstanding support for the cause. The teams looked like they had a lot of fun cruising all over the mountain gathering clues and we had a good time setting them up. I guess you never know what your going to run into when you step out the door, especially in a ski town like Big Sky Montana. When I woke up Saturday morning MS was the farthest thing from my mind, but I have done a little research and it's pretty amazing what these guys have been doing with the last 30 years to help the cause.

Through an organization called Vertical Express they will be traveling to lots of ski areas doing fund raisers this winter, you can check it out at; http://www.verticalexpress.org/.

As you can see above, it wasn't hard to get them to sign some t-shirts and take some pictures.

If you are interested in finding out more information about The Heuga Center, you can visit http://www.heuga.org.

Other interesting links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_sclerosis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Kidd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Heuga
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/ ... 5589.shtml

I thought that my loyal readers may be interested to know my results using GIMP to actually replace my daily needs of Photoshop. In case you were wondering, I am aware that the text header I have right now is a bit boring -- and if I had good results here I would also have a new and interesting header.

As I said in my earlier post, GIMP is great for your resizing, and cropping needs, but when it comes to manipulating multiple transparent layers I would have to give it an unfortunate thumbs down. I gave GIMP the benefit of the doubt and each time it crashed I reopened it and started again from scratch trying to build my new BLOG header. Each time after I had about 3 layers and was trying to switch between the different available tools GIMP would completely crash, no warnings just core dump.

I don't know if this is a specific issue running on the G4, and I really hope it is but for now I think Photoshop is going to have to maintain the starter spot as my image manipulation tool.

Some of you may have noticed that I have switched up the theme a bit, I started to feel like the old look was getting a bit stale. It might be that everything else in my life is changing so the blog might as well too! If you think it's ugly, let me know -- the old look is three button clicks away.

Another interesting piece of info is that I have noticed people have had trouble telling other people about my blog via word of mouth due to the zero in the domain name. Today I registered ad4m.net (still has a wierd number in the domain) and http://adamchristian.com and they both forward here. So if it makes things easier just tell people you can find me at adamchristian.com.

Alright I have blogged like crazy and it's 2am, so to survive skiing tomorrow I better crash.

Gnite!

It has been a few years since I gave GIMP another chance, but today since my laptop was dead I needed to do some simple image work. I jumped on http://wilber-loves-apple.org/ and grabbed their GIMP dmg, extracted it and fortunately I had the X Server installed so GIMP popped right up.

I remember the interface being frustrating and unintuitive, and after you get over the fact that the menus are on each of the windows open in the application it's actually become very easy to use for image resizing, scaling, cropping, exporting in the various formats and all of the rotating and other day to day image work you need to do. I didn't get a chance to fool around with the filters and layering but I did get a feeling that for a large piece of the web image work, mockups for the web etc. GIMP may be ready for me to try again as a potential candidate to become one of my day to day tools.

Speed wise GIMP loaded significantly faster than photoshop did when it was on this machine before my 10.5 upgrade. The UI was much more responsive than I remember it being, and downloading that binary worked much better than installing from Mac Ports.

I will BLOG again at a later date after I try using it for a web project, but I think those of you who wrote GIMP off a few years ago when I did will be surprised at the progress they have made so give it another chance! And boy am I glad there is an Open Source alternative to Photoshop or all of my image dependent tasks would have been suspended until a much later date.

Go Open Source!

The last few days have been extremely active up here in Big Sky. The weather has been fantastic and with Megs folks in town we ventured out to find more Montana outdoor awesomeness. We spent a day skiing the Big Sky Resort, which is amazingly huge and has some of the best runs I have ever experienced. Since it was such a clear day we decided to take the tram to the top of Lone Peak and then ski down -- it was pretty intense.

We also had the pleasure of another run through Yellowstone, this time it was to the Canyon and instead of 60 miles on a snow mobile we went 110. The road that takes you to the canyon has a speed limit of 45 instead of the 35 we were going to Old Faithful, which took us through some canyon detours and a bit farther into the wildness of the park.

One of the most interesting stops we made was on the edge of a giant meadow with a river running through it. Most of the river was frozen but on the bank of the river was a river otter standing there intently staring at a coyote about 15 feet away curled up waiting for the opportune moment to grab the otter, his fish, or both. The otter appeared to be taunting the coyote to come on over to the edge of the river where the ice looked thin hoping he might slip in and end the whole game of cat and mouse. The wildlife photographer who was setup on the road taking photos of this whole exchange told us that there had been four coyotes in the game, but the other three had given up and moved on. One of which we probably ran into about two minutes down the road, which I got a really good photo of as we cruised by at a cool 10 MPH on the sled.

The farther we went into the park the colder it became, and the more wind we had to deal with. While trying to take some photos of the canyon the wind was blowing so hard right into my face that I had to just point and click hoping I got something.

Another cool setup this time around was a bend in the Madison River where on one side there was a herd of Elk digging down to the foliage, and the other side was a herd of Buffalo doing the same thing. The way the animals were arranged made it appear as if they had a deal where you stay on your side, and we will stay on ours.

Again Yellowstone and it's wildlife have blown my mind. Don't forget to check out the new Picasa Albums.

Lone Peak Album, Yellowstone Part II Album



Cheers!