Andrew McLean has a new blog online: straightchuter.com, filled with an abundance of McLean’s ski mountaineering tips and techniques.

As content goes, Straightchuter is lean and focused: you get tips and gear and more gear from McLean (author of The Chuting Gallery). Much of McLean’s skiing and mountaineering adventures take place at a level well beyond the mere enthusiast, but you’ll find invaluable information regardless of how hardcore your outdoor aspirations are. Check it out!

See Also:

SierraDescents Interview: Andrew McLean

Here’s something new on the Search front: cuil.com, a brand-new search engine developed by former Google Engineers.

According to CNN Money, former Google employee Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so effective, Google bought it in 2004 to upgrade its own system. Now Patterson and her husband have launched cuil (pronounced “cool”), which aims to compete with the search juggernaut.

Google has dominated internet search so completely for so long it’s hard to imagine anyone challenging their monopoly. But many of us would love to see Search distributed more evenly amongst a number of companies. For that reason alone, any effort to challenge Google is worth cheering—

Any genuine competition is likely to improve existing Search performance (and Google, good as it is, is far from perfect). Perhaps more importantly, having one company dominate Search (as Google does) breeds a volatile and easily-abused (and abusive) system in which a businesses’ Google rankings can literally mean success or failure.

Best of luck, Cuil!

ps: please rank SierraDescents.com highly!!

One of the blogs I enjoy reading on a regular basis is SierraJournal.com, run by Matthew DiPietro, a Bay Area tech and communications specialist.

Matt seems to have a knack for finding interesting and news-worthy backcountry tidbits to write about, and does a far better job staying on topic than I ever could.

He also runs occasional climbing and backcountry skiing trip reports, like skiing Matterhorn Peak’s East Couloir.

Matt’s site used to be called sierra-alpinist.com, but he wanted to branch out to cover environmental and alpine news as well as offering climbing TR’s, so he nabbed the SierraJournal domain and hit the ground running.

From the mission statement:

Sierra Journal was born of a passion for mountain climbing, backcountry skiing and wilderness travel in the Sierra Nevada. Sierra Journal’s mission is to provide great outdoor-related content in the form of trip reports, mountain adventure narratives, environmental news, local and national mountain-related news, gear reviews, and other outdoor tidbits.

SierraJournal is one of a very few active Sierra-themed blogs I know about. If you haven’t already visited, browse on over and check it out.

If you’ve searched the web for information on a trail or peak, chances are you’ve come across a listing from Trails.com, a subscription-only website offering trail information and topo maps.

For $49.00 per year, Trails.com claims to give you unlimited access to over 40,000 trail guides and topo maps for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Generally I prefer my websites free, so I always ignored Trails’ ubiquitous listings—though I often wondered what their content was like.

Recently, Trails.com absorbed my favorite online map service, Topozone.com. That plus Trails’ 14 day free trial offer prompted me to take a look at their service. The verdict? Trails.com offers a depth and breadth of coverage that is considerably more than I was expecting. Is it worth $49 a year? Read on (more…)

Here’s a nifty blog I found over at the New York Times: Dot Earth. In this environmentally-oriented blog, reporter Andrew C. Revkin “examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits.” As you might imagine, the topic of Global Warming figures heavily in the examination.

Today’s DotEarth blog entry discusses the new SimCity Societies video game. The better simulation video games are surprisingly realistic—often leading you to new and unexpected realizations of macro phenomena.

For a classic example, consider the original Civilization, one of the best early simulation games…

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