dasil003

I have been snowboarding 12 years, and I’ve spent half of that working on switch riding (not that technically unless your setup is completely symmetrical, you are actually riding fakie, not switch).

Early on it was just not much fun so I would ride switch very rarely. But recently I’ve made more of a commitment to it. Riding switch will refocus your learning to all the details of snowboarding that you may now take for granted in your default stance. For instance, after learning to ride switch on hard pack I thought I knew it all. Then I tried in the powder and took a hard nose dive because shifting my weight back to stay afloat wasn’t instinctive in the other direction.

This year I have made commitments to take 4-5 runs in a row switch the whole way, and its really brought to light quite a few things, like the fact that my right leg is stronger than my left, and my upper body twists more flexibly clockwise. Ultimately I think riding in only one direction (if you ride hard) will give you an uneven workout.

Even though I am not much of a freestyler (they don’t have a park here in Santa Fe), I believe mastering freestyle techniques of rotation and weight placement in all four directions is key to snowboarding enjoyment. Once you are truly comfortable riding switch with all its subtleties you be much safer on the mountain overall.

Even though I’ve just started learning Ruby on Rails, switchtower was not too hard to get going (fortunately I already had decent amount of subversion and general ruby experience). It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but that’s okay because it’s very customizable, and once you get it going you don’t have to mess with it. I wish there was a troubleshooting section in the manual, and a way to leave feedback, but I’m sure that will come with time.

PERSONAL PITFALLS: Make sure you have proper svn credentials cached on all your deployment servers. It doesn’t seem to work for me when it has to request username/password combos. Also, if you are on Mac OS X and use public key authentication, make sure that your ssh-agent is running. This problem may not affect you, but it had me recompiling ruby and generally banging my head on the wall for a couple hours.