Personal

Sometimes I post things that are kind of personal, so I make sure to put them in this category. If there is a password on any of these posts, then the password will be my date of birth, in YYYY-MM-DD format. If you know me reasonably well, then you should know that (or just ask me and I’ll tell you).

Waking up with Wakemate

The age of the quantified self is coming, whether you like it not. I’ve recently started experimenting with a few aspects of this idea, with sleep being one of the first that I was interested to look at, since I’ve had a quite a lot of trouble with getting good sleep over the years.

My theory has always been that after I had glandular fever about 12 years ago, sleep has never left me feeling rested or fully revived. That’s been very difficult to quantify or keep track of though, other than saying “I feel crappy in the morning.”

(more…)

Butchering a Lamb, with 4505 Meats

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.

(more…)

Manliest Day Ever

I didn’t really think about it until I successfully finished putting back together my sink, but yesterday was a very manly day:

  • Woke up in a tent, in the rain,
  • Ate meat (and eggs) for breakfast,
  • Drove home in a truck,
  • Ate meat (as a burger) for lunch,
  • Took apart and cleaned my camp stove,
  • Pulled apart and put back together my sink,
  • Ate meat for dinner,
  • Drank beer,
  • Oh — and I did all of the above, with a beard, which makes everything more manly.

Not bad, even if I do say so myself. I’m almost getting used to the beard thing as well.

Catching Up On Email, A Poem

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.

Roadtrip to LA

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 🙂

(more…)

Camping in Big Basin

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):
(more…)

Call Me N.E.R.T.

Prompted in equal parts by the book Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, the fact that I now live in an earthquake-prone area (and knew nothing about earthquakes) and by a personal interest in “Survivalism“, I recently attended a training course to become a qualified NERT Volunteer. NERT, or Neighborhood Emergency Response Team, is a program offered by the San Francisco Fire Department which was started after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. As stated on the official NERT website;

Neighborhood Emergency Response Team Identification Card

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. So what did I learn?

(more…)

Lessons Learned

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.

(more…)