When I was growing up in Wagin, almost all of the meat that we ate was home butchered by my Dad. He is the kind of guy who looks at most things and says “I can do that” and then just does it. I remember raising our own goats and slaughtering/butchering them. We had pigs at one point. The farm my Dad worked on provided us with endless sheep. I even helped out with some rabbits once in a while.
I didn’t really think about it until I successfully finished putting back together my sink, but yesterday was a very manly day:
Not bad, even if I do say so myself. I’m almost getting used to the beard thing as well.
I was walking (in the dark) to catch a train this evening, when I saw a man sitting in car, obviously tinkering away on a phone or something. For some reason it inspired me to write the following:
The cold blue glow
of a smartphone, or perhaps an iPad
illuminates his face from below
casting ghoulish shadows of distortion.Moments of otherwise peace
spent mindlessly striving.
Inbox Zero.
But only for a moment.Catching up on email.
Only to fall behind again.
Is there an end?
Is there a point?You have new mail.
My Mum and Peter were here to visit recently, and rather than hang out in San Francisco (they’ve been here a number of times, and done all the normal tourist things), we decided to go on a bit of a road trip. They were flying out of LAX, so we figured we’d take the Coastal Highway down from SF and see what we could find along the way. Oh, and since Peter was involved, we of course had to figure out a way to make a bunch of car-stuff be a part of the trip 
This weekend I got together with some friends and headed down to Big Basin State Park to go camping for the weekend. We headed down on Friday, taking our time by going down Hwy 1 (beautiful coastal drive) and stopping for lunch (Burrito Friday!) in Moss Beach, then going through Pescadero and visiting Harley Farms Goat Dairy (awesome!). From there we wound our way in to Big Basin and secured our 2 camping spots, which turned out to be fantastic. We got a pair of walk-in spots right next to each other, all the way in the back of the available sites (away from the parking lots/noisy people).
Apart from all the awesome food we ate (we really ate like kings!), we went on a most excellent hike on Saturday that wound up (for Rick and I) being around 11.5 miles. Here’s very very roughly what it looked like (I recorded a few waypoints using MotionX-GPS, then pieced this together on Google Maps):
Read the rest of this post…
Prompted in equal parts by the book Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life
The underlying premise is that a major disaster will overwhelm first responders leaving many citizens on their own for the first 72 hours or longer after the emergency. Our goal is to teach as many San Franciscans as possible that, with basic training, they can make a difference in the lives of their families and others when, not if, they are affected by a disaster large or small.
This is actually a pretty impressive program in my opinion, and is part of a bigger, national program called CERT. It contributes not only to individual, personal safety and education, but obviously helps build a more robust community that stands a better chance of surviving a disaster situation. The idea of distributing this sort of resilience also really appeals to me after reading books like John Robb’s Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
Earlier this year, my brother got me a pair of Vibram FiveFinger KSO‘s for my birthday. They’re pretty freaky. Here are some random notes on my adventures with these shoes.
Picture by yoavf
A few weeks ago I had a pretty rough time with something I was working on, so I thought I’d take the chance to share some lessons with you that I learned along the way. I’m taking these specifically from my experience as a developer of web-based systems, but I feel like at least some of them apply to a lot of other situations in life as well. YMMV.
I get really annoyed when I find myself having to do things over and over that a computer could easily do. I am also really bad at remembering to do small things that don’t seem that important.
The latest intersection of these 2 things is that I’ve been forgetting (or not bothering) to set my status as “Away” or “Back” on all the communications apps I have running when I leave the computer. This is something that a computer should be able to do itself, and something that I’m horribly bad at remembering to do.
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