Over the past two weekends, I was invited up to Whistler to take in the Telus World Ski & Snowboard Festival. I had heard of the festival through friends that are avid snowboarders but had no idea that so many other things happen around the event.
The first weekend, as a guest of the fantastic Whistler/Blackcomb Media team, I got to stay in the amazing Dream House that lived up to it’s title. A fantastically appointed 5 bedroom ski in/out lodge right under the Blackcomb Gondola complete with hot tub on the deck which I spent a large amount of time in:
Shortly after arriving, we found out that the house was hosting a party with a huge list of who’s who in ski and snowboard media, gear makers and a number of world class athletes. Word quickly spread that I had my iPad with me and I gave a bunch of demos of it and had some great conversations with photographers and magazine people about the device and how it had the potential to transform their industries. I also learned a new trick that I have yet to master but I’ll keep practicing. It was a great way to get settled into my new home for the next couple of days.
One of the more interesting things (to me) that happens at the festival is a number of different photo & video contests that happen. There is a 72 hour film showdown where teams have 72 hours to make a video that is then screened and judged. There are also a couple other photo contests including the Pro Photo Showdown where some of the best ski & snow photographers compete. Unfortunately, these events happened mid week so I missed them but I’m thinking they are a great reason to come back next year and get more involved in them. Getting to meet a lot of the people competing in these competitions also made me envious of what they were doing as it seemed to be an absolutely fun way to compete, doing something they love.
The next day started off with a new experience for me: a visit to the spa!
I had already spent a fair bit of time in the house hot tub (hey, it was there and somebody had to use it) so the idea of going somewhere for more hydro therapy was very appealing. I’d never been to a spa of any kind before and apparently the Scandinave Spa was a pretty special place. It’s a huge outdoor facility with pools scattered amongst other buildings which housed different types of wet and dry saunas, including the amazing Eucalyptus steam room (the red building in the photo above) – it felt like you were inside a Halls lozenge…in a good way. Then it was suggested that you jump into the cold pool for full effect…it was actually quite exhilarating.
Being a first timer at a place like this, which is really an adult playground, I kind of felt like I was in a James Bond movie…expecting Sean Connery to come out of the steam room and then ninjas would jump out of the bushes and attack. I know that may not sound relaxing but it was still a pretty cool place to visit. We were all very mellow afterwards so clearly the spa experience is relaxing.
Next up was a visit to Sushi Village for dinner. Now I’m not a seafood eater so I was a little nervous about going for sushi but my hosts assured me they would help me navigate the choices. Worse case, I could order some chicken ‘KFC rolls’ if the fish didn’t work for me.
I figured I was already trying new things and might as well try new foods while I’m at it. I had tried sushi in the past was never compelled to try more than one or two pieces before being turned off. Thanks to everyone’s help, I eased into it and eventually found myself quite enjoying it all…It would appear that fresh & quality seafood really makes the difference. Or perhaps it was the Saki Margaritas. In any case, it was fun experience with great company.
The buildings in the village were a fantastic backdrop/screen for some awesome video projections during the opening kick off party later that night…including these retro videogame visuals:
It was pretty cool to hear the Donkey Kong theme blasting throughout the village while being projected on the side of a hotel.
Before we headed home the first weekend, we spent a fantastic afternoon sitting on a patio in the Village watching the Whistler Chef Challenge in front of Araxi:
It was a frenetic cookoff with lots of chefs competing Iron Chef style in timed challenges then judged on the spot to see who would advance to the next level:
Heading home that day was tough – the festival was just getting underway and we had to head home. But a few of us were coming back the following weekend so we had that to look forward to.
Fast forward to the following Friday, John, Rebecca & I met up again to participate in the Chevy Road Trip to WSSF along with some other media folks (Chevy is one of the sponsors of WSSF). We were loaned a brand new Chevrolet Equinox to drive up to Whistler and take in the rest of the festival (although this photo was taken at the Squamish Spit):
One thing we tried to do the previous weekend but didn’t make it before they closed was to visit the Grilled Fromage in Squamish. Rebecca had gushed about this place and I’m a big fan of grilled cheese sandwhiches so we convinced the rest of the Road Trippers to stop off and get our cheese on:
It’s a fun little diner that features over 60 different kinds of grilled cheese sandwhiches with a cheesy decor that includes a ton of cheesy things that I could spend all day browsing around the shop:
I opted for a smoked gouda, bacon & pickle sandwich which goes by the name of the ‘Polyester & Pickle’ which was amazing:
Once checked into our hotel in Whistler, we headed to the Fashion Exposed show to see the latest in ski and snowboard fashions all the while, a couple of great bands (The Zolas and We Are the City) performed in the middle of the runway.
We spent Saturday checking out the many WSSF events around the Village including getting to test drive a bunch of different vehicles including a Camaro and a few hybrid trucks which were on hand for anyone at the festival to take for a spin:
So much going on and I didn’t even set foot on the mountain where there was a whole other set of ski & snowboard events happening. As I said earlier, next year, I’ll have to plan to spend more time up there for the full festival. It was still an amazing couple of weekends in Whistler.
A huge thank you to Amber, Michelle, Tabetha & Stephanie for hosting me the first weekend and George, Janice, and Fred for hosting the second weekend.
Update: I figured I could probably do a separate post just about all the food photos I took at Whistler but because she mentioned it and did suggest an awesome place for breakfast, I give you VanCity Allie’s ‘Meat Pile’ from our breakfast at Elements in the Village:
As some of you know, I recently bought a Kia Soul after the lease on my Toyota Matrix ended:
and I thought I’d describe a few of the interesting bits of technology that Kia has included in this vehicle. I won’t get into the car side of things as there are plenty of reviews/comparisons of this car (with others in it’s emerging class) on the internet. I realize that this type of car seems to be a love it/hate it thing when it comes to it’s looks. Obviously I like it or I wouldn’t have bought it so no need to go there.
What may surprise you is the amount of tech that gets packed into this ‘urban crossover’ when you consider the relatively inexpensive cost of the car. The model I bought (called the 4U in Canada) has an upgraded stereo package which features an 8 speaker (including a center speaker above the dash controls and a trunk mounted subwoofer), 315 watt sound system. For a factory installed system, it’s pretty impressive.
1. Voice activated handsfree with Bluetooth
The model I bought comes with steering wheel controls for using your cell phone in the car. This type of functionality is becoming more common in cars today but is usually found on much higher priced models.
The first thing you need to do is pair your cellphone with the car. You can pair up to 5 different phones and the car actually talks you through the process of setting up your phone simply by initiating the pairing process via the setup menu option above.
The first thing it does once it’s paired is downloads your cell phone’s contact list to the car’s memory:
Every time you turn the car on (and your phone is in range with bluetooth turned on) it will take about 10 seconds to transfer the contacts and display the above message (along with the computer’s voice saying it). At first I thought this was annoying but then realized it needs to sync your contacts with the car and really only takes 10 seconds to do so at the beginning of your drive. What really surprised me was that it works perfectly with my iPhone (a 1st gen model). I didn’t have to do anything other than pair it with the car and all my iPhone contacts are available to me via voice activation.
If you press the listen button on the steering wheel, the car will switch off your music and be in listen mode. Here you would tell it who you want to call in this format: “Call Lastname Firstname Location” so to call my work number I’d have to say “Call Biehler John Work” which the car will reply with a confirmation statement which you can say “yes” to in order to make sure it heard you correctly.
You also have the ability to set voice contacts in the phonebook locally. For example, I setup my wife’s contact info in the car to simply shorten it from what I have on my phone. I wish there was a setting in the phone options to change the order of the names or at least honor the settings from the source phone (mine are set Firstname Lastname on the iPhone). But I guess it’s simply an easier way for the car to process the voice request.
Pressing the hangup button on the steering wheel will end the call and your previously playing music will return. Incoming calls behave the same way – your music will fade out and you’ll see “incoming call from XXXXXXX” on the dash display. Pressing the pickup button on the steering wheel will answer it. You can also dial any number not in your contacts by simply saying the number: “Call 5-5-5-1-2-3-4″ and the system will display your spoken numbers on the dash display and ask for confirmation before dialing. Apparently this ‘manual’ dialing feature isn’t that common on other vehicles.
2. USB/iPod support
Like most car manufacturers today, Kia has support for the iPod built in as well as a USB port that can accept a thumbdrive (or even a portable hard drive).
iPod support is via a separate accessory cable that plugs into the AUXIN and USB ports which gives you the ability to navigate your playlists on the iPod or iPhone. My cable is on order so I haven’t played with it yet but it’s supposed to charge your device as well. Why KIA doesn’t just throw this cable in the glove box is beyond me. It’s probably about $0.25 worth of materials. You can’t just use your iPod/iPhone cable in the USB port as it’s expecting a mass storage device – it won’t even charge your device strangely. The iPod cable is almost unecessary though since the USB port can accept a thumb drive. It’s arguably easier to just buy a cheap, huge thumbdrive and put all your MP3′s on it and leave it in the car fulltime.
When you plug a USB device into the port, it will scan your files very quickly and start playing the first track on the device. It’s folder aware so you can setup playlists that way fairly easily. You get the full song details, ID3 tags, etc although the default display is the filename (whatever.mp3) in the larger font (which scrolls to show you the full length name if larger than the screen size):
Being able to navigate through a pile of music (from a number of different sources since the stereo also comes with Sirius Satellite Radio, MP3 CD support as well as AM/FM), easily from my steering wheel is new to me and pretty cool.
3. LED speaker lighting
While this gimmicky item won’t appeal to everyone, it’s kind of interesting that they included it. Kia’s target market is probably about 10-15 years younger than I am but I still like the lighting and don’t find it distracting at night.
Basically there is a bunch of LED lights inside the front speakers that can be controlled via the dash as to how they behave:
The OFF setting makes the speaker like any other one – no lights. MOOD makes the lights pulsate slowly. MUSIC has them lighting up to the beat of your music and ON has them at whichever brightness level you’ve set via the +/- buttons.
Here’s a shaky cam video of it in action (MUSIC mode enabled):
The only thing really missing is GPS. It’s not even an option in North America and in Europe is an expensive addon that is simply a Garmin unit built into the space that I currently store my sunglasses at the top of the center console. I’ve always been extremely underwhelmed by factory GPS units since they are fairly limited, usually not nearly as functional as store bought units (I love my Tom Tom) and usually cost thousands of dollars as a part of a technology upgrade to the car.
So far, the only thing I’ve done to the car, other than moving the TomTom over is put an Apple sticker on the rear window. I’m not sure what else I’d want to do to the car to geekify it more so if you’ve got any suggestions, leave a comment.
UPDATE: meant to include a couple of photos of the console controls and steering wheel layout since I hard time finding them online before I got to test drive one:
Update (June 21, 2010): With the release of iOS 4.0 firmware for the iPhone, I’ve noticed two interesting new things with the handsfree bluetooth setup and my iPhone 3GS: I no longer get the ‘Transfer Complete’ voice prompt (but the bluetooth icon still lights up on the dash and my phonebook has transfered) and now when I get an incoming call, the ringtone (including my homemade mp3 tones) for the caller plays through the stereo instead of the default Kia ringtone. Both nice touches that must have something to do with a change in the bluetooth stack used in iOS 4.
Update (July 2010):I still love my Kia Soul but unfortunately, one of the selling points I had is now gone. When I bought the car in May 2009, my dealership, Bay City Kia, included ‘free oil/lube/filter changes for life’. It was in the contract I signed. Unfortunately, this past spring, Bay City Kia closed down and months later I got a letter from Kia Canada explaining this and suggesting a few other dealerships for me to use for service. Too bad neither are anywhere near me and aren’t even close to being convenient to get to. I emailed Kia Canada’s customer service (provided on the letter I received) inquiring if Kia would continue to honour the free oil changes offer that was part of my contract and after waiting a week for a response, I was sent a form email basically saying no. I can’t blame Bay City for this…after all, they are out of business but I was hoping Kia Canada would at least do something for me as this works out to be a significant amount of money over the balance of my car payments that I now have to cough up (roughly $600-700/year or about 2 car payments). So if you’re looking to get a deal on your Kia, make sure it’s not a dealer specific deal, but rather a Kia deal so you can hold them to it, regardless if the dealership goes under.
Now that the Christmas dust has settled, the turkey has been eaten and, at least in Canada, the Boxing Day/Week sales are winding down, what did you get? Any cool gadgets?
My wife and I don’t exchange gifts during the holidays, we simply spoil our nieces and nephew and then get what we wanted after Christmas at a bargain. It’s a pretty good arrangement that we’ve had for years. We get the holiday experience via family and we both get what we want at a more reasonable price…just time shifted a day or two.
That said, this year, I had scanned all the deals and decided the main thing I wanted this year was a new point and shoot camera. I’d had the same one for over 3 years and have been shopping around for an upgrade for those times when I don’t want to lug around my DSLR.
I settled on the Nikon Coolpix P6000 for a couple of reasons:
built in GPS – this is a relatively new feature to any camera and I think the P6000 is the only point and shoot with it.
it has many of the features of my DSLR camera in a much smaller form factor. I can dial in the various modes and settings and still set it to AUTO when I need to let someone else use it
Price. The Boxing Week sale price was $100 less than anywhere else.
I’m still exploring all it’s features and options. The manual alone is the same size as the one that came with my DSLR. It has a few features that I probably won’t use, like the ethernet port on the bottom which only allows you to connect to the internet to upload to Nikon’s My Picturetown photo site. If I could post to Flickr it would be a no brainer but at the moment, it’s not an option. Plus I’d rather it was a wifi connection and not a wired ethernet option. Still, the other features of the camera still seem to outweigh the downsides. I’ll do a more in depth review once I’ve had it awhile.
The other thing I got, the Korg Kaossilator, started after some ‘look what I got’ tweets started showing up on Twitter (like this one).
I seem to recall hearing about this little device and immediately started looking into it more after seeing CK’s tweet and subsequent blog post. I’ll embed the same video he embeded (from Korg’s site – also check out the intro movie on the Kaossilator site linked above) because it’s a great example of what this little gadget can do:
It’s basically a laptop touchpad and a synthesizer in a box a little bigger than an old school iPod. Instead of keys, you use the touchpad for input into the device and the samples, loops and patterns built in (including some awesome 8-bit videogame sounds too!) can be controlled with your fingers. This makes for a lot of fun simply zipping your finger around the touchpad and affecting the sound. This could so easily be an iPhone app if something similar isn’t one already. You can also loop segments and overlay them with others. I’ve dabbled in all kinds of music applications over the years. I’ve had no musical training of any kind and just like to mess around with this stuff making noise that drives my wife nuts but amuses the hell out of me. If I manage to record anything interesting, I’ll post it here.
So what did you get?
Update: So here’s a mediocre first attempt at making something that hopefully doesn’t melt your ears with the Kaossilator: Ka0s1 [MP3]. Kinda turned out like the credit sequence from a cheesy sci-fi movie but I like it. It was made simply by looping a drum beat and messing around with the S.60 sample on the touchpad with the arpeggiator turned on.
Today, Apple announced a number of new things at it’s “Let’s Rock” event and I have to say, I was a little surprised and disappointed.
First of all, new iPod Nanos were revealed. Not really that surprising as the spy photos and rumour leaks were pretty strong this time around. I SO don’t need the green one but nevertheless I still want it bad (but am not buying one).
The disappointing thing with these nanos is that they are a throwback to the previous models before they got short and fat. Why did you release the ‘stubby’ only to kill it off? Other than the accelerometer and the cute ‘shake to shuffle’ feature, there isn’t much new here other than a bigger screen. I was hoping for an improvement in the user interface or featureset. I think Microsoft’s Zune interface is still slicker and even has wifi syncing which would be killer on the iPhone. I’m not talking about Mobile Me contact/calendar syncing – I mean music, podcasts, videos, etc. being synced over wifi (or even 3G). I’d love to be able to listen to my subscribed podcasts and have the ability to grab the newest episode if I’m away from my computer.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the Zune’s navigation, with the custom backgrounds and nice smooth scrolling and animation:
is better than this:
Another disappointing thing was the release of some interesting new in-ear headphones with a mic and remote for the new Nanos and Touch which don’t appear to be iPhone compatible (according to Apple’s site). I would have liked to see a nicer option for iPhone users beyond the bundled buds. Still seems a tad overpriced at $79 and I can see them eventually offering something like this (if not these ones) for the iPhone.
I was surprised to see them release a hard drive based 120gb iPod Classic. I don’t think I know anybody that bought the previous 80gb version so I’m wondering who really wants a 120gb model aside from some DJ’s and a handful of other music geeks. The market has to be fairly small…and I bet most of those people would prefer a 120gb iPod Touch even if it’s as thick as a brick, the user interface, touchscreen et all would benefit so much more from a giant hard drive.
Not surprisingly, the new Touch’s weren’t that much different. The expected inclusion of GPS didn’t happen but it did gain a speaker for ‘casual listening’ – probably a good thing just for watching videos or playing games. The Nike+ integration was unexpected but would make more sense in the Nanos or iPhone to me. One can easily speculate it may become an option in a future iPhone.
iPhone owners will have to wait until Friday to see what kind of improvements make it into the 2.1 firmware release. I’m going to reserve judgement on the new Genius feature of iTunes until I have more time to play with it…especially on the iPhone.
I was recently offered the chance to test drive Microsoft’s latest version of their ‘wish I was an iPod’ MP3 player, the Zune and I jumped at the chance.
Despite what some people may think, I’m not *just* a fan of Apple products. I’m a fan of cool products in general and always like to at least try out the latest and greatest so that I know where I stand with my recommendations to friends/family/etc and so that I can accurately compare these products. I prefer to think of myself as a fan of a good experience rather than a particular company…but lately, Apple has been hitting most of the right notes for me so it’s easy to recommend them over many others depending on the product.
At first glance I thought the packaging was nice and simple but almost destroyed the Zune before I’d even opened it. A friend picked up the Zune box (middle in the photo above) and the little orange line on the bottom of the box is actually a drawer where you slide the inner contents out from. He picked up the box (it was standing upright) and the bottom fell out, Zune inside. Fortunately it didn’t fall far but was an inauspicious start to say the least.
As you can see in the photo, my Zune kit came with an AC adapter (basically a USB to wall outlet) along with ‘premium headphones’. The base Zune comes with basic headphones but the premium ones are truly decent. They feel and fit nice, do a great job of blocking external sound, and have a very long, rope-like cable which doesn’t feel cheap or plastic-y.
As you can see from the above photo, it’s pretty similar in size to the older version of the iPod Nano. Just a little thicker but the same width.
The first thing I noticed about the Zune was the large, clean font presentation. For such a relatively small device, it’s very bright and easy to read. The background in the above photo is my own photo (actually my wife’s from our trip to Hawaii) so it’s really nice to customize the background of something you will be using a lot – something Apple could learn from since none of their devices really support this kind of personalization. The iPod interface seems a little dated now in comparison, even on the new models…excluding of course the Touch and the iPhone.
The Zune just launched recently in Canada and has been available in the US for a number of years. Seems kind of strange to launch a product like this so long after they did in the US…and when compared to the iPod Nano (newer model), it may seem a little old to the uninformed consumer.
One thing that was initially a bit of a pain to deal with was the fact that they can only be setup with a Windows PC. I would have liked to use a virtualized version of Windows on one of my Macs but the Zune software complained of needing to do a Windows Update before installing…I wasn’t prepared to do that to any of my installs just yet so opted to use my wife’s old PC (she now uses an iMac) and install the software on there which was pretty straightforward and works fairly similar to iTunes as a media manager.
The menu system is actually quite nice and has a few nice little animated flourishes as you navigate around your content. I found the ‘touch pad’ navigational button to be quite sensitive and once I realized it behaves more like a laptop touch pad than a game controller d-pad, it was easy to get used to.
One feature I haven’t had a chance to play with is the wireless syncing and the ‘social’ aspect of the device which allows you to wirelessly share your content with other Zune owners. A number of local friends are also participating in this trial so hopefully we can get together soon and try out these features. The biggest problem is finding other Zunes ‘in the wild’…I’ve never seen one other than on store shelves.
Music and video played back like you’d expect if you’ve ever used an iPod…no surprises there.
Another lesson Apple could learn from Microsoft is the Zune came preloaded with some sample content. What a novel idea! Show people how the various content types could be used before dropping them into iTunes.
One feature that actually surprised me was the FM tuner. I’ve always thought it was a useless feature on an mp3 player. It made sense to me that you’d never use it since you have your own music on it. But considering this is an 8gb model, perhaps not all your music. Plus there are times when you may want to hear the news or traffic. Unfortunately where I live at least, the best news/traffic station is on AM. Still not sure it’s a main selling point, but definitely a nice feature. I also thought it was cool that the tuner was able to pull down the station name and even the track playing from the source radio station which even pushed out weather updates during commercials which was a nice touch.
All in all, I think the Zune is a solid mp3 player when compared to the iPod Nano – at least the model I played with. Possibly even a better device depending on your needs and your computer setup (PC or Mac). The big drawback for me with using it is the Windows only nature of the syncing software which is the same complaint Windows users made about the iPod when it was first released.
Part of the marketing campaign is to track the conversations about this mp3 player. They’ve asked me to include a link to the tool they are using to do this so that you, the reader, can add your voice to the conversation. This is an interesting approach and I’m curious to see how many people actually participate. It’s not an easy thing to track and requires people to do something they may not normally do. If you’re so inclined, here’s the link:
So here’s my quick list of thoughts about the Zune after playing with it for a few days:
Positives:
slick user interface
personalization options
wireless built in
FM tuner
the premium headphones are really nice
preloaded with sample audio/video content including tutorials and even the Zune commercial so you can use it out of the box (kind of – you need to run ‘setup’ first)
Negatives:
Windows only software install
form factor a little old when compared to Apple’s offerings
possibly a year or two too late to Canada
touchpad took a little getting used to due to sensitivity
poor design choice in package layout
I’ll add to this list once I’ve used it more and had a chance to further test some of the features.
for a couple of reasons:
