Love's Blue Demon Vs Wind, Portland, Miami, Powerslide Training Vibrating Thing, Trans-US, NROC News, Laser Scan Questions, Dog's Bark Into Words

Love's Blue Demon Vs Wind: Andrew Love's Blue Demon vs Wind tells a great story of two mythic characters who battle on ice. A must read.


'They raced and raced, and finally ended up in hand-to-hand combat. A total contest of willpower vs windpower, muscle vs nature'- photo and caption from Andrew Love
Portland: One of my friends sent me a message; he said 'pete, are you going to portland? or just to bort land, where you get bort ( a rare type of fish excrement) shoved up your nose by the locals every 4 to 6 hours'. I hope I don't get bort!

So this is my silly way of once again plugging the Big Rideau lake Speed Skating Marathon which is taking place on January 26th


Miami: Here's a plug for the Miami International Inline Marathon taking place on January 21st- check out the event's MySpace page.


Powerslide Training Vibrating Thing: I don't know how to describe the Zeptor Training - Powerslide Team video. There's a machine that you stand on, and it vibrates, and you do skating technique on it-


Since I now have the site focused on Powerslide, check out the Kalon Dobbin Interview- you may have to scroll down or search in the archives if you're using the link a few days or weeks from today. Here's a bit of what you'll get;

'PS: You got injured last year at Worlds. How is your leg coming along?

Yes I pulled my groin muscle at the World Championships in Colombia and I have been fighting to get my body right for the past 5 months. After getting my leg better I had started training again for 1 week and found that I need surgery for a hernia, 3 weeks after my surgery I was able to race my national championships and win a few national titles so I was very pleased. I am back into full time training now and very happy about it, you never know how much you will miss skating until you can’t do it so now I am training very hard for this coming year'.

Trans-US Skate: Check out the Danny, Trans-US Skate thread for pictures of Danny Daniels who is continuing with his quest to skate from one side of the USA to the other side of the USA.


NROC News: After yesterday's unveiling of the NRCO logo, we are finding out that Badger State Marathon Joins NROC.

Laser Scan Questions: If you're a skating information junkie, you'll defenitely want to check out the Q&A in Laser-scan technology- Alex Bont answers one of the questions saying 'This has been the hardest area to perfect. What we did was scan hundreds of plaster feet before and after Inze Bont sanded them to see how much plaster he sands off, and where he sands it. We then created a computer program that takes off the same amount of material that Inze would sand. The virtual Inze doesn't get tired or complain of a sore back like the real Inze hahaha. I had been working on this program for 8 years before we got the scanners, but the scanner price was previously too high'.

Dog's Bark Into Words: This is really really really cool; a new computer program can apparantly translate a dog's bark into words. See the video here. I think that if a dog could talk to me, it would say something like 'stop taking freaking pictures of me'.