It's hard to follow the road when you're not looking where you're going.
I got my first computer when I was twelve. It was a 686 tower hand-assembled by some man in Salem who made them in his house. I drove with my mom to the man's house to pick up the computer in our Jeep Cherokee. It was large, heavy, delicate. Its case was textured, a dingy yellowing plastic even when new. The side door to the computer popped off as he placed it in the car, and the man was apologetic for not fastening the case securely. When we got it home, my brother and I rushed to plug in the cables, connect the modem and boot it up. It was so fast. We sat there, staring at that computer thinking, "now what?" The possibilities seemed limitless. Sure, my parents owned a computer before this, but this was the first time I felt ownership of a machine.
"This is mine", I thought.
Looking back to see a straight line of focus from then to now surprises me. My twelve year old self certainly didn't predict I'd be doing what I'm doing, but my passion for computers and the web have been rather unyielding for fifteen years.
It's hard then, to relate to those that feel lost or confused about how they want to spend their life contributing to the world. Time and again, I meet, hear, or read about people with diverse passions like winemaking or sailing thinking about getting a business degree or becoming an HR person. I want to shake them and say, "take something you love and find a way to make it yours."
Why would anyone willingly spend the majority of their life doing something—or being somewhere—that doesn't fill them with passion, excite them every day, and continue them down the road they likely started as kid?
This is an extremely simple gem that adds a method (has_pretty_param) to your ActiveRecord models in Rails. This scratches a tiny itch I've had when overriding the to_param method on every model I make to get more search engine friendly routes.
Love, like all worthwhile things, is a wondrous, challenging endeavor. I'm blessed to have someone like Christy to challenge me to be a better human and for adding so much awesome to my life. Happy Valentine's Day.
GooseFeet Gear is a cottage manufacturer of handmade down backpacking gear. The company is run by Ben Smith, a 21 year old backpacker in school for industrial engineering at Georgia Tech.
I just completed a new site for Ben that now reflects the quality and simplicity of his creations. I'm so excited by what Ben is doing at GooseFeet that I took the majority of payment in trade. Now having used a wide variety of his gear, I can whole-heartedly recommend his work.
A bookmarklet I made for turning any website into a seizure party. Reading an arduous article about a country you can't even pronounce the name of? Annoyed that your bank balance isn't higher? Bring the party to the Uzbecky Becky Becky Stan Stan article or your overdrawn notice!
Ryan Jordan, founder of the online publication BackpackingLight and accomplished outdoorsman and backcountry guide:
While pondering the state of equipment innovation for wilderness travel, I've reached the same state of despair that I find myself in when questioning why economists have lots of answers and no solutions, why politicians (pretend to) have lots of solutions but no mechanisms for validation, and why consumers have an unquenchable thirst for more (innovation, newness, shine, and storage) or less (cost, weight, time required to acquire).
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Oh sure, there will always be a small influx of brand new customers into this little ultralight niche that will keep the cottage industry in business just enough so they can write off their backpacking trips and make payments on their logo-emblazoned trade show campers, but their quest for pursuing innovation doesn't seem to reflect the availability and cheap costs of new manufacturing technologies, state of the art fabrics, and real design. Instead, the cottage industry reinforces that paradigm of gear that is "made in my garage with substandard equipment from sketches on paper scraps using an uncalibrated ruler and dull scissors."
He sure pissed off a lot of people in the ultralight backpacking community he had a large hand in creating by posting this diatribe of the current state of innovation with cottage manufacturers of ultralight backpacking gear and the rampant consumerism of what he considers increasingly subpar products.
Mainstream backpacking companies have come around to the idea of lightweight backpacking over the last few years, and the industry is beginning to see the results of years of product design from the major players. It's easy to see cottage manufactured gear as subpar in the face of true industrial engineers and designers creating products with real R&D budgets now using the same innovative fabrics the cottage industry has been using for years. Ryan Jordan could have written an article as a rallying cry for the cottage industry to improve their process and products or die in the face of large organizations zeroing in on their market.
But, he decided to piss in the campfire instead of throwing a log on.
On October 29th, I started what became my second annual backpacking trip around the Three Sisters near Bend, OR. This year, I went with a friend (who I met through my hiking site Went Hiking) Chris. We decided on an agressive schedule—we planned to do the 52 miles in two days with and one night. That meant we had a minimum daily mileage of 26 miles.
I'm happy to say we survived without injury or ruin, and it was an exhilerating trip. Check out my full post about it on my Went Hiking blog.
So much of our culture thrives on curation—the editing and selection of the constant stream of newness fighting for our attention. Within that stream, we congratulate and elevate those that find a way to edit down that stream to a personal vision, a curated view from the perspective of someone with good taste. Steve Jobs is just a single example of such an editor.
This video is an excellent call to action for everyone to embrace a more "edited" life and to be more thoughtful of its direction in regard to the things around you vying for your attention.
My wife Christy is a talented artist and film lover who has been working on a film blog for the last year. There is now a long history of insightful commentary on movies you've likely never heard of but are worth watching. Check it out.
More and more, the average life is spent in front of computers, televisions, and smart phones. People travel everywhere by car and it seems we are slowly approaching the condition of humans in WALL-E:
This may seem a bit over the top, but the human condition is devolving in its capacity to be a wild animal, to provide for itself, to survive on its own. You're reading this blog and so perhaps, Dear Reader, you are already acutely aware of the simple pleasure of walking to see things not ordinarily visited and of being self-reliant, but most are not. Backpacking is just one way ordinary people can reconnect with nature and our natural selves.
To those that haven't yet been on a backpacking trip of at least two nights, please let me fill you in.
Walking without a destination through forests and on the top of ridges and mountains, carrying your only options of survival on your back is exhilarating. You can exhaust yourself so completely that you get better sleep on rocks than you do in your bed, and wake up with the sun, completely filthy, and never feel more alive. You'll run across wild animals, overflowing with the anxiety and fear you're supposed to have toward these creatures, only to find them timid, happy, and majestic. You'll arrive at destinations few have seen, and bask in the absolute silence of miles of untouched world.
Backpacking is, essentially, now a sport; however, it used to be how people traveled and lived and explored. It is our roots. Walking and sleeping are such simple, base activities, but there's so much beauty in the world left unseen by your eyes that it'd be a shame not to go visit.
February of last year, Oregon was hit with a freak warm front that brought over a week of 50º weather and sunshine to the area. I took that opportunity to round up a backpacking trip of me and my friends, branding it "MANPING" to make light of the fact we were casually backpacking in winter, none of us with real four-season camping experience. The trip was a great success, staying at low elevations in the Mount Hood National Forest to avoid snow, we had a really enjoyable night in the wilderness, replete with a roaring fire and whiskey.
MANPING 2011
Naturally, I wanted to try to recreate such a fun trip this year. I set up a Facebook event and invited friends to come out for the second annual MANPING trip. I was particularly excited because I'd just upgraded a few bits of gear, notably a new ultralight backpack, tarp, and insulation layer. This year however, the weather didn't work out in our favor.
As the date got closer, the forecasted weather deteriorated from sunny skies and 45º to a 70% chance of rain and a high of 40º. Friends dropped like flies in the face of the unfriendly weather conditions. The count was down to just two of us—my friend Kevin and I. We tried to make the most of it now that it was just a duo; knowing we both had Friday off, we extended our trip to two nights, planning a loop in the Columbia River Gorge.
Day One
It was a beautiful day in Portland; but, it was steadily raining by the time we got to the trailhead 40 minutes away. We had roughly 5.5 miles of ground to cover and 3700' of vertical, and it never stopped raining. We stopped twice, and then only briefly, to grab water or a snack, before continuing on through the rain to Dublin Lake, our first night's camp.
When we finally arrived, the lake was encircled in snow and frozen over. Two campsites were mostly bare, though the top layer of soil was frozen, leaving water to stand on top of the duff. Kevin and I were both soaked through; no amount of Gore-tex was capable of keeping someone dry for that amount of sustained weather. A large rock was required to smash through the inch-thick ice on the lake to obtain water. We found the best spot we could, pitched the tarp, and huddled underneath. It was 5 o'clock and still very much light out.
I, naturally being an idiot, didn't bring an extra shirt, just my down jacket as extra clothing. After putting it on over my soaked Patagonia R1 fleece, the whole jacket collapsed, rendering it worthless. So too did parts of my down sleeping bag, the moisture introduced from my soaking wet underwear and fleece creating high amounts of humidity in the bag. For a couple hours while cooking and eating dinner, I was rather nervous about the night, having only deflated down insulation under an open-air tarp for the night, surrounded by snow and camped on frozen earth, rather chilled already.
After those couple hours—and multiple times venting the inside of my sleeping bag to let out the steam room microclimate I was creating inside my bivy—the down started to dry out, I started warming up, and I could relax into the evening and joke around with Kevin about how we actually elected to be stuck in the cold rain under a tarp in February. We also decided to head back to the car the next day, as it'd be foolhardy to continue on so wet. Needless to say, it was a cold night as much moisture lingered in my insulation, robbing me of precious loft while the rain continued to fall hard against the tarp above us.
Day Two
We woke in the morning around 7, and by the time coffee was prepared and hard-boiled eggs consumed, the rain finally stopped. No longer oppressed by the sky, we sprang from our shelter to don our wet clothes, pack our bags, and head back to the Wahclella Falls trailhead. I couldn't find the willpower to put my pants back on, still dripping with rainwater, so I hiked out in my long johns and gaiters. Without the rain, it was a beautiful hike through dripping, foggy woods.
Conclusion
This year's MANPING was definitely more manly than last. It was also a good gear shakedown, to better understand what I'm capable of handling in likely the worst conditions I'll find myself in. I can't say I'm ever going to willingly go backpacking again through sustained rain in the winter (especially with so little rain gear and no spare clothes), but I'm now much more confident that I can still safely get by with minimal amounts of gear.
It just may not be comfortable.
For the gear whores among us, my base weight was roughly 12lbs and total pack weight of roughly 15
The Three Sisters Wilderness is one of the most beautiful and varied in Oregon. In July, I did a three-day loop around the North and Middle Sister, traveling cross-country over the pass between the Middle and South Sister. We covered the 40 miles in the three days, a casual pace that allowed us to swim in lakes, relax often, and enjoy some of the more unique aspects of the trail such as the Obsidian Limited Entry Area.
One of my favorite toys is a little camera mount called a StickPic. At less than a half ounce, it allows you to attach your camera to a trekking pole and take a photo of yourself from a much further distance. I used it to film myself throughout the three days, the results of which you can see below. Enjoy!
What a plague of retardation. Starbucks is one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world; they’re on every street corner, sometimes twice. Despite their immense popularity and growth and influence, they insist on using Italian names for sizes of every drink they sell, including milkshakes and tea, assuming that the average person will feel camaraderie with the brand or some such positive feeling or association. If not, then why continue the practice? Don’t want to rock the boat?
The inconsistency is what makes it worse—”latte” is now the defacto name for espresso with steamed milk, despite it being the word for just milk in Italian. When someone orders a “grande latte”, they are certainly not getting what they are ordering, and are in fact speaking a new language that only applies to ordering Starbucks drinks: I will coin this Starbuckslish.
Dear Starbucks employees,
It’s midnight. A young man walks in rather disheveled, red-eyed, still in business casual. He orders a “medium coffee.” Under no crazy random happenstance should you ever say, “you mean grande coffee?” That young man is me. I am still at the office working. I am running regular expressions over pasted in PDF jibberish to try and save myself some tagging busywork, to salvage sleep. I am hating life—don’t make me hate Starbucks more.
I'm coming to realize Facebook isn't the best forum for sharing much of the information it provides facilities for. Facebook's poor at sharing quality photos (quality truly is operative), bad for long-form writing[1], worse than Twitter or Tumblr for short or otherwise nonessential authoring, worse than LinkedIn for business networking, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is truly a jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none (perhaps except abusing user's trust in them through dubious privacy issues).
What people really need is a single directory through which others can discover their friends content around the web—a "homepage" for the non-technical, if you will. A single page with granular security that provides access to people's content around the web. Friendster mostly did that, but was purchased and shut down by Facebook.
Hm.
[1] I tried posting this on Facebook, but hit an arbitrary status-length limit, further illustrating my point.
Ever wanted to embed a very narrow Google map in one of your websites, only to find that the copyright notice bleeds out onto surrounding content?
There is a correct way to solve this problem without breaking the terms and conditions you agreed to when you got your API key. Don't hide the copyright notice or decrease the size as that breaks the terms; instead, include this in your stylesheet:
#map div span { white-space: normal ! important; }
The noise is the first thing, the shrill cries, screams, and mechanical creaking, the uncouth discussions, the loud talking, the small children, the greediness of toddlers still unaware of their own self-centered viewpoint, the assault of the attendees' subtle tastes. Everything at a fair screams for your attention; each ride or stand is an island of assault on your senses, promising an extreme experience or ridiculously insensible prize. I know many, many folks that have an empty spot in their living room just waiting to be filled with a six-foot tall stuffed gorilla bear.
I went to the Portland Rose Festival'sWaterfront Village Saturday. I went with my ladyfriend who is, unbeknownst to me until this day, a carnival ride junky. With requisite machismo running high, I agreed to go big, to ride the big rides, the scary, the janky. How bad could it be?
As it turns out, pretty bad.
After the third ride, I was sweating ice water, pot-sticker skinned, the skin of a man about to have a heart attack. It was impending-doom sweat. Something wasn't right with me and I was fighting back vomit. I was determined to sit out the last ride which appeared to be the worst of all, a contraption that spins you in a circle while you spin in a larger one, g-forces gluing you to your chair, destroying your insides for a small charge. "Funtastic", indeed.
"This will wreck me," I remember saying, still panting.
The ladyfriend went, bravely, into the line by herself to await her turn. She gets to the front of the line, and is stopped. Surely, she is too short to ride this as it looks like Satan himself created this machine. She's turned away, thank God, walks over, and says:
"I have to ride it with a partner—no singles! Please?"
People are so fucking stoked for the new iPhone. I arrived at the Pioneer Place Apple store a little before seven this morning, expecting to find a line, but found a crowd instead, sixty nerds deep. Thankfully, I was next to some rather interesting people to pass the time with, especially important because of the apocalyptic failure that was the in-store activation process. By the time I walked out of the store with my new iPhone at 10:30 (still inactive), there were about 300 people in line, first in switchbacks and then stretching down the walkway and around a fountain. Extrapolating my two hour, thirty minute wait (from the time they started selling at 8am until I finished), with sixty people in front of me, it led to a 2.5 minute wait per person. With 300 people, that wait would be a mind-blowing twelve and a half hours.
Website design and development is still a mystery to the majority of the internet-using public. Sure, they've meddled with Frontpage or maybe even Dreamweaver; they've made a page about Led Zeppelin in the 90's with “Under Construction” .gifs, and have used some sort of service to bling-out their space; they consider themselves internet power users. Why then, when someone hears I make websites, is the knee–jerk reaction to request services from me for free or for a nominal fee or trade? The only other parallel I can draw is a doctor: people do ask doctors to look at things for them, or ask their advice. That's fine, and in many cases, I'm sure they're glad to help. In many cases, I'm glad to be of assistance with my friends' or family's website needs. At the same time, can I or that doctor really say no? Can we deny a friend's request for help, guidance, or assistance? Not unless you want to seem like a megajerk.
I don't ask you to scratch my back or remodel my house, work on my range-of-motion post-injury, paint me free art for my wall, balance my checkbook, do my taxes, refinance my home, scratch my back, give me a pedicure, teach me to salsa, give me discounts on electronics, give me your couch, be my personal shopper, publish my book, give me your bike, let me sleep with your sister, or teach me calculus. Why should you?
Last week, a coworker and I were looking at entering Kittelson’s recent advertising landing pages for the Webby Awards. We began by looking at the previous years’ winners in the professional services category, of which we’d be entering under as an civil engineering consulting firm. The results? Well, here’s a screenshot:
The 2007 winner is an over-engineered, inaccessible flash abomination, chock full of animations and video clips, superfluous movement, and music. It’s fantastic for what it is—a movie showing high-end flash development that looks beautiful in a screenshot, but for a professional services firm? This is when I realized that there’s no point in entering the Webbys.
Web Design Isn’t Graphic Design—Does David Bowie Know That?
The Webby Awards are judged by an illustrious crowd of political columnists, singers, musicians, and personalities, including David Bowie and Beck. It should come as no surprise then that sites like the one above win; people outside of this industry view web design just like graphic design—taken at face value for aesthetic purposes.
This struck my coworker and me as very broken, and it appears that Jeffrey Zeldman in A List Apart’s most recent issue agrees:
It’s hard to understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the brilliant.
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The winning sites look fabulous as screen shots in glossy design annuals. When the winners become judges, they reward work like their own. Thus sites that behave like TV and look good between covers continue to be created, and a generation of clients and art directors thinks that stuff is the cream of web design.
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The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe my work deserves to win, but it’s rather disheartening knowing the biggest and most well-known award in the web industry is missing the mark almost entirely. Outside of some special categories—notably, Best Visual Design - Function and Best Practices (Both of which, by the way, went to Flickr)—the vast majority of all winning sites were flash-based.
