The Snow Giraffe Blogs

My new jhole

Come winter, everyone in Seattle hibernates. I wasn’t so tired, so each new year I put all my stuff in my car and work remotely from Narnia: always winter, never Christmas. And by always winter I mean pow with 5% water content; not those chunder muffins ski in the rain business. So after a couple years of Kirkwood at Tahoe and getting Utarded in park city/canyons and snowbird, my snow buddy Jonathan convinced me to check out the cowboy pow in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  The clever Seattlites realized that if you take out the “ackson” you’re left with a JHOLE. Right on. I can do that. And I did.

I hiked up peaked point to beg the great muther teton spear rock for more snow.

After my traditional put life in box / drive to Mt Bachelor in Bend, Oregon / pass out in a chair or jacuzzi NYE / party with your friends before you don’t see them for a few months, I busted it from the middle of nowhere Oregon to the middle of nowhere Idaho potato Wyoming to catch the gnar storm (I heart big dumps ya know). Arriving post midnight while Jonathan was at work, I walked around delirious from the 14 hour drive looking for our digs in Driggs and trying to understand the goog mapless street address of small town. At this point I am trying to decide if its worse to get shot or freeze to death in the negativo degrees. Instead I found the house, which has a pony on the door that I will convert to a unicorn, and did some sleeping so I could wake up and ride the gnar. The driest, finest, steepest Jhole gnar!

Okay, so to the point. Day 1 I find John at Grand Targhee and we ride the 3ft pow dump awesomeness. Jonathan takes off to go to bed and I decide that it would be a good idea to jump off the weird little wall that everyone was avoiding. While the board hit the pow and I actually landed the drop, my pants, my long undies, my regular undies and my skin was sacrificed to hidden Teton butt spearing rocks. Cold weather makes it tricky to realize hurt (that your giant gaping rip extends to your person), so 2 hours later in the restroom I got to re-lived my girly adolescence bleeding from strange jholes (do not click unless you really want to see a jhole). Hmm, I bet that’s what those dudes trying to tell me every time I bent over to put on bindings.

At least it was not a giant spearing face rock, and hey, now that I have a bigger meaner scar, my sea-lion bite from diving in the Galapagos will look tiny! So Teton spear rock gawds, I have accepted my jhole, so please send more snow. Or do these come in pairs?

Japan is one of those places you be in forever and never really understand wtf is going on. Sort of like a weird dream where half naked body builders are chasing after football players who have run off with the creatine. Now with Panda for Wii!

Can we please have one party without someone getting teabagged.

Don’t you think some FoxNews intern would could have warned them about sponsoring the “grassroots” teabagging parties.

I think USA is best at teabagging. When Teabagging is in the Olympics, we are so gonna win. I mean it probably has a better chance than women’s boxing for London 2012. Like boxing, teabagging should be divided by weight classes.

I am sorry I was too busy talking about databases to post this sooner.

Yo Seattle! I heard you like haikus so I put a butt in your haiku so you can poo haikus.

I like big butts and
I cannot lie. You other
brothers can’t deny. - Sir Mix-A-Lot from Baby got Back

Leaving snowboard everyday, I wonder, for what can I use Wasatch?

april snow showers make angry may flowers

I see this sign everyday leaving snowbird “Wasatch National Forest: Land of many uses“. I don’t really know what to use the Wasatch for, other than to jib it. I cant compute there or swim there. I could eat a pie maybe. Use it for firewood? Maybe, I could breathe there.

Also, what exactly is the Wasatch Cache. I guess you could cache the snow there, but usually I cache stuff to make it highly available for quick reuse. The Wasatch Cache is highly available but recycled snow blows. I would rather hide the snow in the Wasatch then cache it there. Speaking of which, Hidden Peak should be called too many tourists peak. It is not a good hiding place at all.

This pic is from summer. Don’t worry, its still snowing buckets. Thanks NorthWest. April snow shows make angry May flowers.

I am packing up my bags and going on tour. Good bye Utard.  I love you for best snow season of all of USA 2009, but alas you are melting.  Anyhoo, living in Salt Lake I learned a few new things. Fortunately I was not eaten by Mormons as some predicted, as the majority of the SL, UT are not LDS, especially those heathen snowboarding and drinking establishments I frequent. Nonetheless, here is a list of things I learned this winter.

Things Mormons Hate

(other than the obvious black people and gay people)

• FLDS. The LDS hates the fundamentalist polygamous multi-wife marrying twelve 12 year olds because it makes them look bad. Real bad. In fact, when a lot of non-utarded people think of Utard and Mormons, they actually think of the FLDS instead of the LDS. It is somewhat inaccurate, but then again with the Prop 8 outcome nobody out of state really cares to correct them.
• HBO’s Big Love - Big Love, a tale of a polygamous family in SL, UT was awesome this year. Fortunately for us, it showed lots of Mormon rituals like baptizing the dead and playing 15 min in heaven dressed in white as pilgrims. This enraged the LDS. Big Time.
• Hiring Heathens. You have to wear a special CTR ring to get a job in salt lake to show your temple worthiness. In USA its  illegal to hire based on religious preferences, but you either have the ring or you don’t. No questions asked. Remember the 80s when the entire FBI was LDS?

Things Mormons Like

• Ice cream (and jello). Think about. Take away sex, drugs, cigarrettes, alcholol, what do you have left. Exactly, ice cream. The jello aisle in the grocery is amazing. There is a cold stone creamery every block. Yum. everyone likes ice cream.
• Guns. Huge in Utard. While in most places you can get around the waiting period by buying a used weapon, most places it is not as easy as using the local version of craigslist, ksl. Look an AK47 for $600. Also, the Utard concealed weapons permit is reciprocal in all states except Cali.
• Bees. The mormons are way into honey bees and hives, etc. Deseret. Busy as a bee keeps idle hands in your pants? What wa?

Things Mormons Should Like

I really want a mormon pie. Maybe a strawberry rhubarb pie. Is there such thing. Can I get a pie in here?

Things Mormons Will Hate when they figure it out

Domestic Partnership (espeially between man and woman). Oh yes, gay marriage doesnt threaten the santity of marriage as much as Domestic Partnership (marriage lite). In much of the West (Cali, King County/Seattle WA) girls and boys can be domestic partners and get pretty much the same benefits as married folk. Awesome.

I am too scared to break young tech savy minds by exposing them to this well, lets say  interesting database post about cloud computing by posting highlights in my tech blog. So I’ll put them here. And for those non-nerds out there, just say highly available, cloud or scalable as often as you can and no one will ever know. For the geeks, somebody please please please help me understand this post. In case its included in MySQL DBA certification exam I’m taking next week.
Disclaimer:  You are about to be face punched with a highly available word salad as my friend who shall remain unnamed said. The incomplete sentences and typos are taken verbatim but are perhaps actually quotes from someone else called Jim. Round 1 ding ding…

I’m a database developing building a database system for clouds. Tell me what you need. Why I too am a database developing building! I need a unique composite key for my front door and a cloud for my sky. Oh and could I get a chandelier for the foyer?

If you scale, you don’t/can’t worry about server reliability Oh, you know I never do.

I’m a database guy who’s had it with disks. Didn’t much like the IBM 1301, and disks haven’t gotten much better since. Ugly, warty, slow, things that require complex subsystems to hide their miserable characteristics. The alternative is to use the memory in a cloud as a distributed L2 cache. Well I don’t know about you, but I am going to use a virtual, yet highly available shoe.

Oh, please please read on….. (more…)

a wound so deep and huge that the top sheet shattered on the other side

I apparently have sacrificed my snowboard to the Wasatch Cache National Forest of SL, UT. I also feel like I have been run over by a truck. Totally worth it.

Yesterday I watched Colbert interview Twitter founder Biz Stone. To my delight he said twat which I feel should be the official past tense of twit. Twittering Twats. Now that has a ring.

Colbert was also telling us that Meriam Webster changed the definition of marriage to include same sex partnerships. In Spanish there are lots of words like encebollar (obvi root word of cebolla:onion) which means to onionize or to add onions to a dish. I was always sad that we English speakers have no such thing. Until now. Steven suggested: engayify: to gay it up.

Everything about this screams utarded.

However, my new favorite addition to the Blythe idiolect (a dialect that only one person speaks and I apparently have) is Utard. Now Utard is simlar to the word redonk(ulous) in that it can be good and bad. Like the crappy Utah liquor laws forcing us utards (residents of utah) to buy memberships to all bars are definietley utarded. However this big muther storm dumping 150 inches in 2 weeks in april water content 7% omg is mos def also Utarded. Utarded fresh!