My mission for my Killington trip was to create a travel story using new tools for journalists. I was looking to use live streaming video, Flickr, Twitter, an HD camcorder and this blog to cover it all nonstop.
I set up everything to work through my mobile phone. Using this one device, I could take streaming video via Qik (which would appear in my Twitter feed), send photos to my Flickr photostream (which would be forwarded to my Twitter feed) and send Tweets. My Twitter feed was embedded in this blog so all of this content could be accessed by a potential outside observer just from this page. I also brought along my pocket HD camcorder to try to capture some high quality video to be edited later on.
Here's how all these things worked out for me.
This was my first aggressive foray into Twitter and frankly I just felt like I did not have enough to say. "Eating lunch now at the lodge." "Snow is falling in Killington, 'bout time :)" "Lift lines aren't too bad today." I'm not sure what I thought I would experience at the ski resort that would be worth relaying to the entire World Wide Web. I was not out of the loop on how the thing works. I used a hash tag (#killington) to identify my posts as Killington-related and even picked up some ski-and-snowboard-enthusiast followers that way. I guess it was useful in getting my Qik videos and Flickr photos published on my blog instantly, but I feel like I sort of dropped the ball on those two things too.
I found taking video while snowboarding incredibly difficult. How I did not foresee that is beyond me. To take sweet action shots, I needed something more powerful than my Samsung BlackJack II or my Kodak Zi8. They both did fine taking landscape shots but operating them both with gloves was nearly impossible. Once my gloves were off and I was operating either my phone's camera (for Qik video) or my camcorder, my body allowed me to film for only a couple of moments before it needed gloves to be returned to my fingers. Additionally, as you will see from my edited video in the previous post, I'm not much of a cinematographer so these obstacles I have mentioned only worsened my abilities to film interesting things.
Flickr to Twitter from my mobile phone would have been the easiest thing to pull off had I concentrated on it more exclusively. My phone doesn't have a great camera but for most of the landscape shots, it isn't too hard to make things out.
I guess my conclusion from this experiment would be it is wonderful that we have all these new communication tools, but understand when each can best be used. Had I spent the trip using my phone to take photos that went to my Flickr and then my Twitter, I would have a nice photo album already by the time I got home and my friends and family could view my pictures as I took them if they were interested. I didn't encounter anything interesting enough to really use Qik video appropriately but it would be a great tool for capturing video of something important so long as one knows how to use it properly.
Then there's Twitter. If all my friends at the mountain had been using it from their mobile devices and we constantly provided updates, I suppose it could be used in lieu of phone calls or text messaging. I think it is most useful in cases of a large group of people consciously communicating through it, such as at a large techie conference where hash tags can be used to group Tweets by attendees and through constant following and updating, users could find out about the best thing going on at any given moment.
I am glad I got to play around with all these different applications on my trip and maybe I will used them again sometime to record a trip I take (though it will be a trip to somewhere warm). Twitter, Qik, Flickr and Blogs can all be immensely valuable given the right circumstance and I did not convince myself that capturing every moment of my weekend snowboarding adventure was really the best context for any of them.
P.S. Looking back through my Tweets, it looks like another drawback of my plan may have been the lack of consistent cell service on the mountain. I know I took more Qik videos than just the one that appears there of the man with the beard that just will not quit. It seems some of my mobile updates (text, video, pictures) may have never left my phone or gotten lost in the cloud. Interesting.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Ice, Itchiness and Infernos: A Weekend in Killington, VT
It has been nearly a week since I left for Killington and I am still recovering back in Boston for a variety of reasons. My wrist hurts, my back hurts and most alarmingly, my armpits hurt - more on that later. In this post, I'll be sure to provide tips for anyone travelling to Killington this season or in the future, as well as some personal reflections on my own trip. In a following post, I'll discuss my experiment of documenting my trip using several multimedia elements.
Killington Resort is about a three hour drive from Boston. It is situated on Vermont's second tallest summit, Killington Peak. Skiers and snowboarders have 3,050 vertical feet to traverse when all the trails and lifts are open. It being early December following a warm fall, hardly everything was open last weekend.
One benefit of the early season is cheaper lodging. My friends and I crashed in a nice secluded cabin, about 20 minutes from the resort, off of a dirt road. We had plenty of sleeping space, a big snowy yard and a fiery wood burning stove. The house cost each of us about the cost of a lift ticket and a half, plus we had to bring our own food.
Later in the season, Killington can get expensive but anyone who knows they'll be going to Killington at some time during the winter should look for lift tickets at the reduced price offered online in the fall. I bought my tickets in September or October and they were only 50 dollars and are good for anytime during the season. Lift tickets can get up to 80 dollars or so later in the year.
The conditions were mixed at best. We did get a good snowfall on Saturday midday, so that put a thicker cover on the slopes for a few hours. By midday Sunday, however, we were riding primarily on ice and falling hurt, a lot. I took a good fall onto my wrist at one point, ensuring a week's worth of discomfort.
Killington can get crowded, even at this early time in the year. I would recommend getting there early or staying late to avoid the biggest swaths of skiers and snowboarders. The lift lines moved along quite nicely the whole time, even if the trails were getting Tokyo-dense at times.
Some overcrowding may be to blame for my back pain. That was caused by a rogue snowboarder who crashed into me as a I sat on the edge of the trail waiting for my friends. On a mountain, peak time for crowds is peak time for injury. My armpit pain is explained below.
One winter extravagance that vacationers often enjoy is sitting in the hot tub. Any good mountain home rental should have one: a little steaming pool, not too far from the house, surrounded by snow with beautiful views of the mountainous horizon. Our house had one and it was a delight, for a time. We got two nights of use out of the hot tub, just off the mud room, accessible by a short walk over a wooden walkway leading from the house.
After our second, and final, day on the mountain, we returned back to the house to pick up our belongings and turn off the water, lights, etc. The jets on the hot tub needed to be turned off also and the temperature should be set to 100 degrees. When I lifted the lid to make sure everything was in order, my senses were bombarded by a bubbling cesspool. Fortunately, the phrase "bubbling cesspool" can so rarely be employed to describe something we actually experience but no other words could could as succinctly depict what the hot tub had become.
It stank of a swamp or garbage or some other scent I would never bottle into a cologne to douse even my worse enemy in. The jets had been left on inadvertently, on a low calm setting. They churned the fluid around that was somewhere between Nickelodeon Slime Green and the artificially blued water of a mini golf course. Had Kermit the Frog been hiding at the bottom, no one would find him.
We laughed about the hot tub and feared we might have messed something up, causing this domestic chemical reaction. What if the owner keeps our security deposit to pay for hot tub repairs? The only thing we could do was head back to Boston and wait for the deposit to be returned, or hear from the owner.
No more than two days later, rashes and other skin ailments had broken out on all those who had been in the hot tub. Pseudomonas folliculitis it's called. Commonly known as hot tub rash. Somehow, bacteria borne in the hot tub colonized on us and caused unpleasant things to occur.
One side effect of hot tub rash is the painful swelling of the underarm lymph nodes. Wonderful.
In any case, you can view my attempt at creating a video document of the trip below:
Killington Resort is about a three hour drive from Boston. It is situated on Vermont's second tallest summit, Killington Peak. Skiers and snowboarders have 3,050 vertical feet to traverse when all the trails and lifts are open. It being early December following a warm fall, hardly everything was open last weekend.
One benefit of the early season is cheaper lodging. My friends and I crashed in a nice secluded cabin, about 20 minutes from the resort, off of a dirt road. We had plenty of sleeping space, a big snowy yard and a fiery wood burning stove. The house cost each of us about the cost of a lift ticket and a half, plus we had to bring our own food.
Later in the season, Killington can get expensive but anyone who knows they'll be going to Killington at some time during the winter should look for lift tickets at the reduced price offered online in the fall. I bought my tickets in September or October and they were only 50 dollars and are good for anytime during the season. Lift tickets can get up to 80 dollars or so later in the year.
The conditions were mixed at best. We did get a good snowfall on Saturday midday, so that put a thicker cover on the slopes for a few hours. By midday Sunday, however, we were riding primarily on ice and falling hurt, a lot. I took a good fall onto my wrist at one point, ensuring a week's worth of discomfort.
Killington can get crowded, even at this early time in the year. I would recommend getting there early or staying late to avoid the biggest swaths of skiers and snowboarders. The lift lines moved along quite nicely the whole time, even if the trails were getting Tokyo-dense at times.
Some overcrowding may be to blame for my back pain. That was caused by a rogue snowboarder who crashed into me as a I sat on the edge of the trail waiting for my friends. On a mountain, peak time for crowds is peak time for injury. My armpit pain is explained below.
One winter extravagance that vacationers often enjoy is sitting in the hot tub. Any good mountain home rental should have one: a little steaming pool, not too far from the house, surrounded by snow with beautiful views of the mountainous horizon. Our house had one and it was a delight, for a time. We got two nights of use out of the hot tub, just off the mud room, accessible by a short walk over a wooden walkway leading from the house.
After our second, and final, day on the mountain, we returned back to the house to pick up our belongings and turn off the water, lights, etc. The jets on the hot tub needed to be turned off also and the temperature should be set to 100 degrees. When I lifted the lid to make sure everything was in order, my senses were bombarded by a bubbling cesspool. Fortunately, the phrase "bubbling cesspool" can so rarely be employed to describe something we actually experience but no other words could could as succinctly depict what the hot tub had become.
It stank of a swamp or garbage or some other scent I would never bottle into a cologne to douse even my worse enemy in. The jets had been left on inadvertently, on a low calm setting. They churned the fluid around that was somewhere between Nickelodeon Slime Green and the artificially blued water of a mini golf course. Had Kermit the Frog been hiding at the bottom, no one would find him.
We laughed about the hot tub and feared we might have messed something up, causing this domestic chemical reaction. What if the owner keeps our security deposit to pay for hot tub repairs? The only thing we could do was head back to Boston and wait for the deposit to be returned, or hear from the owner.
No more than two days later, rashes and other skin ailments had broken out on all those who had been in the hot tub. Pseudomonas folliculitis it's called. Commonly known as hot tub rash. Somehow, bacteria borne in the hot tub colonized on us and caused unpleasant things to occur.
One side effect of hot tub rash is the painful swelling of the underarm lymph nodes. Wonderful.
In any case, you can view my attempt at creating a video document of the trip below:
Friday, December 4, 2009
From the Bean to the Green: The Drive to Killington
Just a few more hours until we ditch Boston and head up to the Green Mountains for a weekend of shredding (or skiing if you happen to need the assistance of poles to make your way down the slopes). I'll be driving up - and by that I mean sitting in the back seat - with my travel companions Mark, Nick and Steve after 3 p.m. today. I will be podcasting the entire ride (not true).
I will be providing some tweets along the way, so long as AT&T service stays strong as we move into some of the less populated regions of New England. Maybe I'll even take some Qik video and some Flickr photos, hooray! Anyway...here's a Google map of our route (because that is useful to so many people) to enhance my multimedia cred.
View Larger Map
I will be providing some tweets along the way, so long as AT&T service stays strong as we move into some of the less populated regions of New England. Maybe I'll even take some Qik video and some Flickr photos, hooray! Anyway...here's a Google map of our route (because that is useful to so many people) to enhance my multimedia cred.
View Larger Map
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Killington: Let it Snow
December 3, 2009 will henceforth be known as the day the earth finally said, "Seasonal axial tilt be damned, it shall be 69 degrees Fahrenheit in Boston, MA." Certainly it was nice to shed our coats for the day, but what of those people traveling north this weekend for some snow shoeing? Actually, I haven't a clue what snow shoers are up against because I haven't a clue how to shoe and therefore have the inability to empathize with them. However, I will be snowboarding for the first time this season at Killington Resort.
Al Gore's rightness has pushed Killington off a horse thus far this season. By that I of course mean the unseasonably warm temperatures this fall have partially paralyzed Killington's ability to operate consistently. This past Wednesday marked their reopening for the season so let the shredding begin (or skiing if you are inclined toward the neon waterproof unitard).
I'll be microblogging (as in providing Twitter updates regarding) my journey as well as providing some raw Qik video (that will appear in my feed). My tweets will be embedded on this blog as well as in their full blown glory here: @michaelkoleary. Look for some higher quality video and some more in-depth writing regarding the trip once I'm back.
P.S. I'll try to mark all Killington-related tweets with #killington.
Al Gore's rightness has pushed Killington off a horse thus far this season. By that I of course mean the unseasonably warm temperatures this fall have partially paralyzed Killington's ability to operate consistently. This past Wednesday marked their reopening for the season so let the shredding begin (or skiing if you are inclined toward the neon waterproof unitard).
I'll be microblogging (as in providing Twitter updates regarding) my journey as well as providing some raw Qik video (that will appear in my feed). My tweets will be embedded on this blog as well as in their full blown glory here: @michaelkoleary. Look for some higher quality video and some more in-depth writing regarding the trip once I'm back.
P.S. I'll try to mark all Killington-related tweets with #killington.
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