Wordle is an online toy for generating “word clouds” from text (or URL) that you provide.

The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

We love playing with Wordle – so much so we’ve created three below from our week as ski testers for ski press magazine.

What follows is a unique and creative way of getting the essence of our week in our own words… but remixed thanks to Wordle.

The first wordle cloud below was created using all the words we used in writing blog summary reports for 5 days starting last Sunday when we arrived in Ste-Anne. You can read all of them here if you haven’t already.

Click on each word cloud to see full size!

The next wordle cloud below was created using all the words Sasha used in writing her comments and impressions of the 30+ skis she tested over 4 days. All the comments were captured into our laptop (independent of ski or manufacturer) before handing in the booklet at the end of day 4.

The next wordle cloud below was created using all the words Phil used in writing his comments and impressions of the 30+ skis he tested over 4 days.  All the comments were captured into our laptop (independent of ski or manufacturer) before handing in the booklet at the end of day 4.

Wouldn’t it be cool to see a consolidated Wordle cloud from all testers published in Ski Press Magazine next fall as part of their profile of the testers?

We sure think so… and have emailed the suggestion to Sophie at Ski Press for consideration.

With car trouble adding stress to what was already going to be a stressful 8.5 hour drive in the rain to Mont Ste-Anne on Sunday, Sasha & I cashed in some travel points and took a much more civilized route to Quebec yesterday.

We were able to book flights on Porter airlines for $69 (plus fees & taxes) each way the night before and flew out of the Toronto airport.  Besides being my favorite Airline for total experience and civility, the added advantage of flying out of the Toronto Island Airport was that we left our house just after 11am for a 12pm flight.

We were checked into our condo at the foot of Mont Ste-Anne by 2:30pm.

We even had time for a quick 30 minute run before grabbing some groceries for the week. The rain that was hammering Ontario (and some of our friends on the Level 3 exams at Devil’s Glen) finally found it’s way to Quebec around 7pm – the time we would have arrived had we driven from Toronto.

Last night was orientation for the Ski Test for Ski Press magazine which included a 45 minute product demonstration from Icebreaker and take home samples of next year’s Leki poles and Alpina goggles.

Stay tuned this week as we blog each day on our experience!

This week Sasha & I were notified that we have been selected to join the high performance demo team at Mont Ste-Anne in Quebec City next month to test next year’s lineup of skis for Ski Press Magazine.

This will be our first time as ski testers and we can hardly wait to spend a few days ripping the top runs in the east on next year’s gear. Our feedback and ratings will be part of Ski Press’ annual buying guide for gear. We’ll post more details as we receive them… and will be blogging about our experience as we go through it at the end of March.

The timing works out perfectly for us as the annual super camp for active level 3 and 4 course conductors begins right after, making for a week of high performance fun!