"Like An Addict" North East Kingdom #1 from thom parsons on Vimeo.

You Wanna Look Pretty Though, In My Video

(Is the title I would have used for this post if I hadn't already used it for some other semi-pointless past-post.)

Late, emergency edit: I have fallen into THIRD PLACE in the Breck Epic blogger grant poll. And while the thought of getting out of, whatever the hell it is, 40,000 feet of climbing in six days, is somewhat appealing, I still want to win this thing. So go over to the facebooks, you don't need to share any more information with big brother than you already have by signing up for the facebooks to begin with, and vote for Thom "Rocky Donizetti" Parsons. It's as easy as clicking the little button dealy next to my name. The poll ends tomorrow, do it...do it. And thanks.

Oops, I did it again. I done spent all my bloggin' time video editin'. I have to practice though, for possible future endeavors, and besides, I'm kind of addicted. I've got another one on the way right behind this one with all the crazy weather stuff that happened day two up in the kingdom. The song "10 A.M. Automatic" by The Black Keys was stuck in my head all day long on Friday. I was growling it under my breath as I rode. I was even growling it under my breath as I set up my tent that evening. "You're a dork," Whittinghammer sang, right in rhythm with my muted growling. The above video sums up the vibe of the day, all the flow and all the fastness. Having my internal soundtrack go external made me super-stoked, hopefully that comes across for you all.

The weather in the Kingdom definitely put the new Stylus-I'm not exactly sure how-tough 6000 to the test. It's alleged to be shock proof and waterproof, which is a good thing, because it was both dropped and doused with water more than once during the trip. I even washed some grit off the thing in a stream. But all was not 100% awesome. At the end of the day it got stuck in "P Mode" and refused to scroll through any of the menu functions from the camera settings. I could still take photos in one mode and I could still take video, but to take more than one video, I had to turn the camera off and then on again. Not convenient...and fascinating. Sanidas has had the same camera for over a year and he's had zero problems. I'm just a frickin' destroyer I guess.

Good news is, when I went into The Shop on Monday, I hit the camera with some compressed air and BAM! It was working again. Amazing. I might just be a little bit more careful with it in the future. The photos are not up to the level of my old Canon Elphs, but the video is decent. I did the Big Ring Rumpus post-race interviews on it:

Cycling Videos on CyclingDirt

It was a good thing it was waterproof for those.

And speaking of cyclingdirt, I'm heading up to the EFTA Pinnacle race on Sunday and I'll be "covering it" for cyclingdirt. Sadly for Rooter and K-Sweet, my helmet cam will be facing forward, not backward, so the only hope they'll have of making the web-pages of cyclingdirt will be if I lap them. Although I bet I can get them to give me a couple killer pre/post race interviews during the car ride home (if they don't boot me out of the car somewhere along 89 first). I suppose I'll have to figure out how to bleep out f-bombs before I air those things.

Falling asleep at the wheel here, be back tomorrow sometime.

Feckless

I don't smell good. I smell really, really bad actually. There's something about sitting in a car for a few hours that does that to a man. It does it to me too. Did I fail to mention that I was going to Vermont for three days? I think I did. Yup, I'm pretty sure I did. Well that's where I am, up in Waitsfield. The plan is to ride around here tomorrow with the legendary Vermonster, Jeff Whittingham, and then head up to East Burke to ride the Kingdom trails for Friday and Saturday with the likes of Andy Sanidas and some other peoples.


You may have noticed that these are not my, typical as of late, Helmet Hero, wide angle-weirdness photos. I finally got a new point and shoot digital camera, an Olympus Stylus Tough 6000 in (greenish) yellow. I figured if it's good enough for Gewilli, Linnea Koons, and Jill Up in Alaska, then it's good enough for me. I did get the model several levels below the one Jill uses to take all those sick shots of the Alaskan landscape, but I'm just taking sickening shots of the environs of Somerville, MA, I think the 6000 model is up to the task. And besides, the claim is that this thing is "Thom P. proof" — it is shock-resistant to five feet and water-resistant to something like ten feet...something like that. I'm not going to try it, so it doesn't really matter. No scuba-diving or intentional dashing of this camera on the hard ground is going to happen any time soon. Although I might throw it at K-Sweet's head if provoked.



Ya, I don't read fine print when it comes to these things. And that is why I didn't know that Olympus uses a different memory card than a Canon (or just about anything else). And of course the camera doesn't come with the card, something that was clearly stated on the Amazon page I bought it from. So I had to run out to 'The Shack" before hitting the road to buy a card for the wee-greenish-yellow bugger, and I got absolutely reamed for a paltry 2GB card. But hey, what you gonna do? Stop being a dumb ass all the time? Nah, that'd take way too much effort.

When Jeff Whittingham's through making people cry on the bike, he goes home and tries to make his daughters...not cry. I'm sure there was a clever way of putting that, but I'm just too damn bleary-eyed to think of it right now.

Once I got the memory card in and started playing with the thing, I noticed some marked differences between this camera and my old (broken) series of Canon Digital Elphs. For one thing, it is HUGE compared to the Elphs. Not something you might notice in a photo. I'm not complaining, the Elphs are simply incredibly small, this guy is plenty small enough. Next thing I noticed was that it starts up much slower than the Elph and the functions are less intuitive and harder to scroll through. Turning off the flash or going to macro-mode is a slightly more clunky process. Again, not complaining, this isn't a real "shoot out," the cameras I'm comparing are completely different, the version of the Elph I had costs twice as much as the Stylus Tough 6000. It's like comparing factory-farmed apples to organic-local oranges. Or something.

Burgers the size of our heads for dinner

Where the Stylus Tough kicks (I just wrote "licks" instead of "kicks." That would have been a great typo.) the Elph's ass is in durability. My Elphs have only ever lasted about a year, and my last one only made it about six months before dying in the midst of one of the most photo-friendly events of the year — SSWCs in Durango. The horror. I am hoping the Olympus' claims of near-indestructibility hold true.

Time to crash, Whittingham has a four to five hour hilly-ass-beatdown planned for me tomorrow. If you don't see a post on Friday morning send out the search and rescue.

Get it?