Left-handed skiing

I hate today's weather. It's warm (+3), grey and wet. It's sloshy as snow is melting down and although we already had a good cover of snow and perfect winter weather since Christmas, there are already spots of brown appearing from under the quickly vanishing snow.

I used to say that during the winter, my mood can be reliably predicted from the weather report - I'm happy when it's snowing, and depressed when it's like this, when snow is melting. I've always been a fan of winter sports, or winter activities in general. There's so much fun to be had during winter: skiing, both downhill and cross-country, skating, ice-hockey (or whatever variants of it that you can play safely without needing all that protective gear) building snowcastles and skijumps etc.

I had somewhat lost touch with winter, having spent a number of "winters" in Cambridge, where winter is the time when you need an extra layer of lycra to go rowing, and people play football instead of cricket, which is a summer sport. They close schools and the whole country goes to panic mode when the annual "cold snap" arrives, with temperatures below 0 for two days. The traffic grinds to a screeching halt when the centimetre of snow falls. Not much wintry outdoor fun to be had there.

I've been more into downhill skiing before, but now with the marathon looming in under 3 months time, I tried to do a lot of cross-country skiing during the new year holiday we spent in Lapland. And it felt great, and so I bought a pair of skis as soon as I got home. I got them on Thursday, and went skiing every day after that.

I know I have my work cut out in terms of learning proper technique, although I have some experience, so that it can't be said I have two left feet. The salesperson seemed to think I had two left hands, however, because I noticed that the reason why the ski poles didn't seem to fit that well - I had two left-handed ones (the straps are slightly different). So I went to change them for a new pair, but now unfortunately the snow is escaping.

New year resolution and testing mobile blogging

Happy new year!

New year always brings with it new resolutions and new things. I made
a resolution, as well. I've decided to "write and run" every day, at
least a little bit. This probably means more blogging activity,
although most of the writing effort will be channelled to academic
writing and basically finishing the damn book.

The other new thing is related to this writing resolution. I'm writing
this note on the Nokia 9300i communicator I got from work as one of
the professors upgraded to iPhone. This is my first "smartphone" and
so I've got a lot of catching up to do in terms of finding out what
can be done with these things.
I've now managed to configure this to work in the WLAN at home and at
the office and got the Bluetooth link to work between this and my
laptop. I've found some cool applications, such as gmail, and am now
trying to post by email to my blog.

I'll be reporting how my new mobile life is working out, and whether
this will become a productivity tool. So far it has been a time-eater
and a toy for procrastination. :) But it has only been a day...