Stuff I Do Online Part 1
I’ve spent a few years in Alberta now, and I’ve got to say that I think it’s the bee’s knees when it comes to camping.
This past summer I spent some time compiling all of the camping, picnic, fishing, and recreation areas I’ve been into a public Google Map which is the point of this post. If you’re interested in the oudoors in places like Nordegg, Canmore, and Red Deer, then give this a gander: http://tinyurl.com/albertacamping.
Raised on Capitalism
I wanted to write a little about my lifestyle tonight and how I think it shares a lot in common with most of Western civilization.
I think this lifestyle is awful. It is mine and you may recognize parts of it as your own, but you may not dislike it as much as I do yet.
Being a capitalist means that everything has a dollar value attached to it. The instant you or I are introduced to something new we almost instantly associate it with a value. It’s possible that this could be the same for every single person on the planet, but with capitalists and people in Western civilization in general, that value is money and nothing else. Money is so souless, it can’t possibly encompass any sort of value other than materialism. Capitalism gives the mentality that you can own something because of your job. You can spend money and satisfy yourself because you have a job and you can float on that income, owning anything you want.
Capitalism imbues entitlement. All too much we forget to think of something as hard-earned and deserved, or something that money can’t buy. Nothing you can ever have has any spirit any more. You can own plastic and wood and leather, but unless you are very naive, you probably don’t feel like you earned it. If we worked for the things we own directly, that would be a very different story. Imagine if you worked for your house instead of money for your house.
No matter who you are, if you have cash in your pocket you feel entitled to get what you want. Money is the physical manifestation of narcissism. I wish we could all just forget about associating value to things in that sense. We need to feel attached to things we own.
In short, people who are raised on capitalism are materialistic. And it is ugly. Everyone like me who identifies with this feeling will one day realize it too.
- Mitch
Louis Gray is extraordinary, uncle, whiner
This was at first going to be a comment on the author’s original post, but I want to centralize my criticism so I’m posting it on the ol’ blog.
Louis Gray wrote us all to say that he feels Facebook failed him for not alerting him to an event in the lives of his immediate family. Which in itself is a ridiculous thing to admit to, but what I have a problem with is the “I’m a normal Facebook user” part. Louis has 1377 friends on Facebook as of writing, plenty of which he admits are web people who generate more online than average.
Here is my response to his post:
Louis,
You’re a big dolt if you think you’re a regular internet user for whom regular internet tools will always work. If you think this was a “big miss” by a trusted tool that applies equally to everyone who uses it, then you also must think that it is an atrocity when hard drive manufacturers neglect telling server operators that they should count on higher utilization of the hard drive compared to a layman, and therefore more frequent dead disks. The disclaimer is implicit and it is to be expected!
You should literally be doing the exact opposite this kind of thing. Instead of claiming to be a “normal internet Joe” who has things break on him for no apparent reason, you should be the guy telling us that something broke because he pushed it to its limits. You can’t be in the 99th percentile and expect normalcy.
- Mitch
Invention #1
Here’s the first awesome product idea I’ll post publicly because I want someone to take the time to make this before I do. That is, I’m lazy but I still think this is a kickass “invention.”
Someone needs to make The Camper’s Radio which would in essence be a tiny mp3 player built into a pair of all-weather speakers that you charge up and take camping. It would have it’s own internal chargeable battery, but also allow you to insert your own AA’s. The real hitch to this idea is that it would be preloaded with a selection of about 300 songs right out of the box. There would be 3 different preloaded “song packs” that you could switch between. One would be classic rock (bands like CCR, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young), one would be country music and bluegrass pack, and the last would be filled with entertaining stand-up comedy acts (18+).
These built-in mp3 players would come with an expansion slot for a Micro-SD card thus allowing you to add your own tracks.
I feel that I am onto something, and that’s not just what she said.
- Mitch
My New Car
I’m financing a brand new 2010 Mazda 3 and I like it a lot. I wanted white, I got black.
2010 Mazda 3
An unsent email to my boss re: business cards
Prelude:
We are an engineering company that prints dozens upon dozens of sheets of paper per week measuring 24 inches tall by 36 inches wide. I am a junior engineer who has not been allowed to get business cards for reasons I’ll explain in this unsent email below.
[Boss],
Earlier this year you told me that ordering business cards for everyone in the company is not effective due to considerations of cost and environmental impact. I’m writing to put the argument against ordering business cards due to environmental/sustainability concerns into perspective.
The square area of paper for 100 business cards is approximately 0.46m². The square area for one sheet of Arch D paper is about 0.55m². Considering we print engineered drawings on notably thinner paper (about 40 pound, 0.185mm thick) than the stiff business card paper (about 72 pound, 0.289mm thick), there is approximate 1.56 times more paper per square meter in a business card than normal bond paper. In equivalent area, then, 100 business cards is similar to 0.72m² of normal paper.
To sum up, one sheet of Arch D paper is equivalent to roughly 76 business cards. Granted there are other factors in the production of business cards such as cutting and boxing, consider also that there is a large, unused cardboard cylinder and plastic roll holders shipped with every single roll of paper we order.
Can you guess how many sheets of Arch D paper we threw out during the printing of just one job last week? We printed with the colour printer, too, which uses much heavier paper. My question to you is: why concern ourselves with the environmental impact of a box of business cards when there are seemingly much larger fish to fry, namely curbing the waste we generated when plotting drawings?
- Mitch
My new Samsung WB550 camera
Here are some quick sample photos I took: http://ff.im/5uGXA
And here’s the feature list: http://ff.im/5rfXz
I really LOVE this thing. It’s a bit bulky compared to my old camera, but the step up in features and quality are amazing.
I can’t believe this guy is an editor: Ben Parr
I don’t want to come off as an ass here, but that’s probably inevitable. I’ve been keeping some thoughts bottled up and it’s about time to get them off my chest…
Ben, please spend some time sharpening your writing skills instead of wasting it on things like Twitter song debates. There are inevitably always spelling, grammar, or logic problems in the first paragraph or two of your posts and it’s a huge turnoff for the rest of the post, or any of your writing for that matter. I really wish you were more embarrassed by your bad writing or took the position of “associate editor” more seriously. I thought things would improve over time and that’s why I’ve been putting off making my comments, but very little has changed.
I don’t think that everyone can perfect in what they do all the time, especially with writers who are trying to get something posted as soon as they can. When you try to pump out an article or an essay at the last minute you don’t give yourself or your editor a lot of time to proofread things and make sure it all makes sense. Everyone in college is always told to get someone else to read your work before submitting because they will always see something you didn’t.
Ben: tell us when you get a proper editor at Mashable; I’m done reading your garbage articles until then.
- Mitch
Roommate Etiquette – Just remember the respect
I don’t have all the experience in the world when it comes to living with roommates, but I’ve been living with them for the past 6 years (with a 1 year break in there) and I feel I know enough at this point to make certain generalizations about roommate etiquette which is what I’d like to discuss here. On the spectrum of comfort level during my times living with others, I’ve had the pleasure of living with my best friend, and I’ve had to live with a person I absolutely despise. I’ve never lived with a member of the opposite sex; all guys in the range of 19-27.
Before going to college I really just wanted to live with some people who I already knew and felt comfortable with. I want to live with people who have established trust with me beforehand, and I’m still that way today. So three of us high school friends bought a place together and went to university for engineering and that was my first experience with roommates. It lasted a solid 4 years with ups and downs but it mostly worked out good for everyone I think. (At least I haven’t received any death threats in the mail yet.)
I took home a lot of lessons from these times. There is certainly some advice I would like to extract from all the situations we went through and put in writing, but I think the basic bottom line is remember to be respectful and thoughtful to those you live with, even if it’s not your roommates. If you live in an apartment by yourself you still share several walls. And if you piss someone off, acknowledge it. Apologize if you feel you should; clear the air so that no bad feelings hang. Some good advice I got from David Thomas on FriendFeed is that if a conflict/problem won’t matter to you in 12 months time, don’t let it irritate you for more than 5 minutes.
- Mitch
