I live in Vancouver, this is effecting the spirit of a lot of people today. Tragic. I feel so bad for him and his family.

This video is almost snuff to me, but that's not my decision.

Earlier today or this week, one of the papers ran an article on how the track at Whistler is the fastest in the world, and one of the most dangerous. Athletes fear it, and it wasn't originally built to take the speeds that these guys are getting up to. There are going to be some serious questions about those metal pillars and why there isn't a higher wall at the end of that turn.

Hahaha. Now you've done it. Here comes a torrent of whiskery Whittaker...

http://www.videosift.com/video/Roger-Whittaker-Kenya-Safari

http://videosift.com/video/The-Mexican-Whistler-Amazing-whistling-skills

>> ^arvana:
There's no doubt it's an engineering marvel, but I can't really understand the point of it. Why wouldn't you just ski down one mountain and take the high-speed lift up the other one?


Two Words. American Tourists.

"Oh shit, I thought we we're going up that one..."

I saw him live around this time at the Egg here in Albany, NY. It was a great show. he's an amazing talent and a fantastic whistler. If you get the chance to see him live, do it, you won't see anything else like it ever.

Update, highway is open as of Saturday night.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080803.wrockslide0802/BNStory/National/home

Found a video of a bear that was wandering around the developers' hotel: http://www.videosift.com/video/Firefox-Developers-trapped-by-bears-at-Whistler

Amusing geek adventure.

Oh wow, thanks for the link, that's absolutely hilarious.

Some of my fav quotes:

Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer] 2008-07-30 16:59:30 PDT

This is the tentative solution we came up with at lunch:

1. Take a bus down from Whistler to rock slide.
2. Get out of bus.
3. Walk over rock slide (may require additional walkways).
4. Get into waiting bus.
5. Get to Vancouver.

Those who drove themselves will have to take the long way.

Comment #7 Hasham 2008-07-30 17:01:15 PDT

We shall ride bears to Vancouver. Rocks can't stop bears.

Comment #8 Eric (Sheppy) Shepherd 2008-07-30 17:02:04 PDT

As long as we ride atop the bears instead of in their hungry bellies.





Comment #25 Tyler 2008-07-30 18:23:26 PDT

I am arranging for the 74 bears. However, it will be rather short notice, and
people are the best bait, so I am thinking of using IE developers, but they are
in short supply, due to this weird upstart browser with a very weird name
Fire...something, oh yeah, firefox.
Also running into issues with PETA.

I heard the entire Mozilla team got trapped in Whistler because of this, so they did the only reasonable thing:

They filed a bug report.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448604

ahn...
My name is Renato. I´m 'pregnant' of my first daughter, which we´ll call Lucia.
I´m 33, age of dead christs.
I have two cats, Mao-Tse-Tung and Lacan , who brighten my days and nights.
They like to break things.

I live in Sao Paulo, Brazil and am a partner at a 3D animation company, TSI, doing work mostly for advertising and architecture.
I´m originally a journalist, but went to grad school in NY, on the (in)famous ITP - Intergalactic Telecommunications Program, or something similar. I miss NY.

I like to write when I am procrastinating more serious work, but videosift is getting in the way of that. I love to snowboard, despite the fact that after a motorcycle crash and some time at the hospital, the doctor forbid me. Still I went for ten days at Whistler and after two months I was back at being almost ok. Worth it. Now I sold the bike to pay for all those diapers to come.
(queue music: Gogol Bordello - Undestructable)

This short can be found on the "The Animation Show" Vol.1 DVD by, Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt.
It is done by Alex Boduvsky and named Bathtime In Clerkenwell (2002)
Here is some text that came in the DVD booklet about it, very rich.

ALEX BUDOSKY is calling from somewhere in the 917 area code, in New York City where he and his family call home, and his cell phone signal is breaking up. "Basically the entire family emigrated because of, you know, hard times in Russia in the nineties. we left in December of '94, garble garble garble garble garble garble. Yeah. So it was a good choice, I guess." Never having found out what their alternatives were, I have to say I agree with his assesment, the former immigrant who arrived with only artistic aspirations and no English vocabulary to speak of, is now the animator of choice for pop act The Real Tuesday Weld with a singular style and a rising career as a commercial artist.
Budovsky, who was born in St. Petersburg in 1975, came to America with his family and settled in New York, where they all still live. The then not-quite-20-year-old set his sights on higher education, but the fisrt priority was a practical linguistic one. "I didn't speak English when I arrived," he says, "so I went to Brooklyn College and took some English as a Second Language classes. Then I took some film classes, and graduated as a sound designer, with an emphasis on film".
He graduated in 2000 with an aptitude in all the film basics, including editing, screenwriting, and photography, and discovered a program called Macromedia Director, which is now software generally used in business presentations. He began animating as a lark, without any formal training. "I was working as an electrician in the New York City ship terminal and doing film in my spare for fun", he says, "so I just had fun entertaining myself".
At a friends house, he happened to hear Where Psyche Meets Cupid, a collection of droll cabaret/electronica by Stephen Coastes, a.k.a. The Real Tuesday Weld. He immediately decided to make a video for the haded hip-hop/hot jazz ballad "Terminally Ambivalent Over You".
"I knew nothing about copyright", Budovsky says, "and one of my friends told me, 'You can't just use this guy's music. You have to at least contact him and ask for permission'. So I wrote him and asked for permission, even though the film was laready made. He gave me permission. I waited several weeks, and sent him the film". The Flash-animated depiction of a love-distracted prisoner on a Gramaphone assembly-line unfolds mostly in black and white with a few color accents, and barring the contemporary soundtrack and the ultra-clean frame, it could pass for a particularly accomplished product of the Kruschev-era Zagreb Studio of former Yuogoslavia.
Coates loved what he saw, and sent Budovsky sketches for the songs from his upcoming CD "I, Lucifer". Alex heard "Bathtime in Clerkenwell", decided it was destined to be a hit, and immediatly set to work on a vdieo. The demented product is full of confused humans, belligerent cuckoos, and princers dangling over assembly lines - icons that seem to recur often in Budovsky's work. Don't bother asking where they come from, though, because Alex doesn't have a clue. "I never even think about what I do. It just comes out on its own", he laughs. "I can't really explain how all those characters appear."
To Budovsky's surprise, once Bathtime started making the festival circuit in 2002, it began to pick up an array of prizes, and the notoriety led to more shorts and commercials. He's worked on campaigns for Lucozade and Converse, his latest short is a music video based on Geoff Muldaur's version of "Brazil". Budovsky reworked the song with the help of The Real Tuesday Weld and friend Girt Chatrou (who is a two-time world champion whistler). He couldn't secure an internet license for "Brazi", but most of the rest of Budovsky's work is online at his own Figli-Migli Productions web site. (It means "low jinks.")
Budovsky doesn't have any feature film plans at the momment; his work method wouldn't support it. "All of my films - I don't do any pre-production whatsoever", he says. "I don't do scripts, I don't do storyboarding or animatics. I just build the film shot-by-shot, and halfway through the film I don't know what the end is going to be". For Alex, up to this point, short form has been the way to go because of the amount of contol he carries on the prokect. "In animation, you're a king, and you're a god, and you can accomplish so much alone", he laughs but adds, "I do like to collaborate though. It's exciting to see where people's input can take you."

/my wrists hurt, probably typos

Dibs on some Whistler lots... :-D