I was snowboarding in California over the President’s Day weekend with friends from my old job at RLG, which for the most part was a great deal of fun.

Not so much fun, however, was the crash I had at Homewood, an event later dubbed the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre due to the large quantities of blood involved. I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but I guess it was technically my fault because I collided with a skier who was marginally ahead of me when he suddenly and unexpectedly turned across my path as we barrelled down a run called The Glades.

Unfortunately I stopped most of my not inconsiderable momentum with my face, which slammed into his back, causing us both to hit the snow pretty hard. My nose then proceeded to spray jets of blood several feet (Ricky, who was the first to arrive at the scene, compared it to the Black Knight in Monthy Python & the Holy Grail). My left hand got pretty banged up somehow too.

After establishing that my jaw was still vaguely attached to my skull, I asked the other guy if he was OK; he said he was alright, although the impact had winded him somewhat. Then he took off.

By this time the rest of my friends had arrived and were giving me tissues, helping collect the possessions that had got dispersed around the slope, looking for a ski patrol and taking pictures of the carnage etc.

After a while, I was able to get back on my board and we headed for the first aid station, and found a guy waiting for me a little way down the slope. He established that I had a “contusion” on the inside of my lower lip and some major facial swelling, so advised me to keep ice on my jaw and visit a medical centre to get some stitches at the earliest possible opportunity.

Anne was kind enough to take me to the Truckee Tahoe Medical Centre, where a Dr Krause did a great job of sewing my lower lip back together after stuffing all the meat back inside. Then he sent me home with some Vicodin and Tylenol, telling Anne that I had mild concussion and had to be watched for 6 hours to make sure I didn’t go bonkers (which could be a sign of more serious neurological trauma).

So, overall it wasn’t the best start to my 3-day snowboarding vacation, although I guess that one notable injury in 6 years of snowboarding isn’t too bad a record!

Balance is good, right?

Something bad: Last night I was having a quiet night at home, sitting on my sofa watching a DVD movie and drinking red wine (I didn’t quite finish the bottle, a fact I was inordinately proud of).

Towards the end of the movie (Charlies Angels 2: Full Lobotomy) I innocently stretched my legs out, which resulted in the most excruciating cramps in both calfs I’ve ever experienced. After rolling around on the floor in relentless agony for what seemed like an eternity, the pain finally started to subside.

Once I was able to walk again I went online to research the phenomemenon of muscle cramps, and was chagrined to find that the causes of this transient yet excruciatingly painful condition are basically unknown; muscular fatigue plays a role of course, but potentially so do hydration and electrolyte levels…

On the plus side, I discovered on behalf of my ex-girlfriend that you can buy brand new cars online at prices significantly cheaper than dealer prices at http://www.carsdirect.com/ , and Amazon.com are giving away thousands of free tunes here.

Had a couple of bits of excellent news this week…

The first one was that my ex-girlfriend Jessica both successfully accomplished her first day working as a substitute teacher since getting her California teaching credential at the end of last year, and also landed a sweet 3-month teaching job at a school in the South Bay that will kick-start her teaching career and open up lots of options for the future.

The second excellent bit of news is that my oldest friend Johnny D. (we’ve known each other for 30 years) proposed to his girlfriend Emily while snowboarding for the first time in Japan — nice one geezer!

The week was rounded off nicely when another old friend (of 22 years) Andrew came up from Washington DC to spend a boozy weekend with me in New York, including a fun 30th birthday party in my neighbourhood in Brooklyn for my colleague Barbara.

The only fly in the ointment was that I lost my shiny new Canon digital camera somewhere in Manhattan early on saturday morning whilst Andrew & I were out having fun in Manhattan. I only bought it last May, and it cost over $400. Doh! Anyone that knows me will also know that this is not the first time I’ve lost an expensive camera; in fact, I seem to do it with depressingly predictable regularity.

So another e-mail virus, mydoom, is speading like wildfire.

Like many of the more recent viruses, it “spoofs” the “From” field of infected messages by using addresses it finds on infected computers, so that innocent users of uninfected computers are getting unjustified complaints, sent automatically by e-mail gateways with virus protection, accusing them of sending infected messages.

The accepted wisdom is to make sure that you are running anti-virus software and that the virus definition files are fully up-to-date; but this requires payment of an annual license fee to an anti-virus software company. I’m lucky — my employer has a corporate subscription to a pretty good anti-virus product that makes it easy to keep my protection current — but not everyone is so fortunate.

I can’t help thinking that this could easily be a kind of 21st Century protection racket: “Buy our anti-virus software: Or else!” Of course, the anti-virus software companies vehemently deny that they have any involvement in the creation and distribution of computer viruses… But it would be so easy for them to periodically release new viruses covertly, and virtually impossible to trace it back to them.

Of course, history and experience show us that private corporations always behave honourably, and never indulge in illegal and unethical practices in order to boost their bottom lines…

This is pretty amazing — a psychic parrot that tells jokes!

I had to fly across the entire continental U.S. this last weekend in the name of U.S. national (in)security; the government agency formerly known as the INS, and recently reconstituted within the Department for Homeland Security as the BCIS (Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services), summoned me to get another set of fingerprints as part of my green card application, and because my adjustment of status is being processed in California (moving it to the East Coast would add several years to the already glacially slow process), I had to fly all the way from New York to San Francisco for the 20 minute appointment.

In fairness, this lunacy is also partly the FBI’s fault, because they insist that the fingerprints must be less than 12 months old when the case is reviewed (as we all know, fingerprints are notoriously changeable and volatile over the course of a few years). The fact that the INS/BCIS has been processing my application for over three years, and that it takes them between 3 and 6 months to clear one months’ worth of backlog, is still pretty damning though.

I also had a close shave with the Grim Reaper on this trip; as we came in to land at SFO, I heard the undercarriage being lowered and then raised again, and shortly afterwards realized I was looking at the dark mass of the Pacific Ocean on my right — which clearly wasn’t right, since it should be to the left for the approach into SFO. Sure enough, the pilot then announced on the intercom that they had been unable to lower the flaps completely, and that we’d be flying around for a while until they could “troubleshoot” the problem (although kudos to the pilot for being straight with the passengers, rather than either making up some bullshit or just leaving us guessing). I had a window seat just behind the wing, so I had a great view of the not-very-lowered flaps.

Flaps are used to change the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft by altering the profile of the wings, and lowering the flaps facilitates landings by lowering the stall speed of the plane — the plane can fly more slowly without dropping out of the sky like a giant lead duckling.

Anyway, after a couple of loops around the peninsula, we came in for another approach with the flaps still not fully lowered. I’m not sure how fast we were going when we landed; the last reading I got from the SkyMap was 140 mph, and it felt like a relatively normal landing (again, kudos to the pilot of UA 11 on 2003-01-22). But it was clearly a bona fide emergency, because there were fire trucks and other emergency vehicles with their lights flashing all the way along the runway.

So, I most certainly do NOT feel safer in post 9-11, post-Saddam America.

It turns out that I did get a touch of frostbite from snowboarding at the weekend after all — my chin is blistering and peeling a little now, despite the fact that I wore an overpriced neoprene face mask.

Still, perhaps it’s not surprising, considering it was -25 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Celsius colder than the South Pole has been lately!).

I just got back from my first snowboarding trip of the 2003/4 season, to Mount Sunapee in New Hampshire. It was a lot of fun, despite riding in what was probably the most intense cold I’ve ever experienced; -15 degrees Fahrenheit, which I believe converts to a bone-chilling -25 degrees Celsius. Several people in our group got frostbite!

Many thanks to Adam and the other members of the Ruedig family for their kind hopsitality, and to Amy Stein for bringing me along.

I arrived back in the USA today, 1st January 2004, having spent the last week and a bit in the U.K. with family & friends (High Wycombe, Chatham, London & Sheffield).

I was a little nervous about travelling on New Year’s Day, but in fact it was one of the most agreeable travel experiences I’ve had for a long time; not only did I manage to avoid a killer hangover by welcoming the New Year in a relatively restrained manner, but British Airways also upgraded me to Club World, so I got to ride on the upper deck of a 747 with a seat that turned into a completely flat bed — nice one!

I got a letter today informing me that my employment with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will be terminated as of 31 December 2003 — technically the first time I’ve ever been sacked!

The good news is that I also received a letter of employment from ARTstor, Inc. earlier this week, as we are on the verge of becoming a separate corporate entity in our own right as of 1 January 2004.

As my colleague Emerson pointed out, it was good to receive the offer of employment BEFORE the termination letter!