As you may have just read on Shannons page, we had a huge storm here in La Paz only moments ago. It must have rained for nearly, if not more than, an hour straight. Or perhaps it just felt that way as I fighting the flood from breaking into my house.
On our way to drop me off at home there were lots of people caught off guard by the storm and raging waters. Some people simply stayed put and waited for the storm to pass, others, like this guy on the bike just kept fighting the waters flowing down the street he was cycling up.
When I got home I figured the worst was over and that I could just sit back, relax and maybe have some lunch. Unfortunatly, the house was on the verge of flooding, and if it were to happen could potentially destroy everything in the house. Most of the water outside was flowing down the street, but we have a little courtyard/atrium/sunroom thing in our house and some of the water on the roof runs off in to it and gets drained. However, the down pour caused an enourmous ammount of water, at an alarming rate, to be deposited in this small space. The end result once it filled, it started flowing in to the house.
So I had to grab every towel, blanket, rug, and absorbent material to build my own personal levy. And, well, it only slowed the inevitable as the water reached a depth of nearly 1 foot.
Once the rain stopped I took some time from running around looking for towels and new sources of water getting in, like the AC vents and just about every window, to go outside and check out the river street. The problem with this much rain is that the drainage systems here cannot support that much water, nor is the ground absorbant enough to help. As you can see, the land just washes away with the water making the problem even worse.
Recent events in bullet form.
- The car has been fixed, a complete tune up and new brakes make a world of difference. I think its even ready for a trip back up to the beach.
- A few days after getting my car back one of the back tires blew out and I had to buy a brand new tire because the sidewall erupted.
- The trees outside are apparently infested with the
Asian Longhorned Beetle some kind of longhorned beetle. (pictured below if youre a knowledgable bug person let me know what it is)
- My birthday is in 10 days, and Im absolutely not interested, in fact Im dreading it.
Im really getting sick of stupid “life hacks”, in fact its the reason why Ive stopped reading lifehacker, and while Im aware that not all hacks are elegant, in my opinion true hacks should be.
A good example of an inelegant but, I suppose, effective hack is the The Hipster PDA.
The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and beaming, and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Lets make one together.
Building your first Hipster PDA
1. get a bunch of 3″x5″ file cards
2. clip them together with a binder clip
3. there is no step 3
What about tweaks and customization? They suggest different coloured index cards, lined and unlined cards, and a $20 space pen. You know, for when you need to write something down on your paper PDA underwater.
Now, an example of a elegant hack on the poor mans PDA is PocketMod a free disposable and customizable PDA solution that you print out on to a single peice of paper and when folded up becomes a great tool perfect for whatever use you create it for.
The PocketMod is a small book with guides on each page. These guides or templates, combined with a unique folding style, enable a normal piece of paper to become the ultimate note card. It is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It’s best that you just dive in and create one.
The elegance comes not only from how its designed, because technically you design it yourself, but in the flash interface you create your own design in. It comes complete with over 25 templates for each page including, grid layouts, spreadsheets, lined pages, calenders, organized lists, and more that you can place in any specific order and number you deem efficient for your needs on a daily basis.
Im definitely not the kind of person that reads self-help literature, but I did find The Multipule Self on dirtsimple.org an interesting, but perhaps long winded read, that may mean absolutely nothing to people unfamiliar with the relationship between computer software and hardware and its similarities to “you”.
That’s right. “You” are just a subroutine, and a recently-added one at that. You’re like a user-mode driver that gets access to certain kernel data, but you only see and control what the kernel lets you. You have no direct access to the kernel’s process space, but you can make calls into it, and you get notifications from it. The bulk of your nature as a human lies entirely outside your process space, outside your ability to directly perceive or control.
