My Review of Barrier Dry Sack

Originally submitted at Mountain Gear

Keep everything absolutely dry with the Outdoor Research's Barrier Dry Sacks. Even if your gear takes a spill into a glacial stream or mountain lake, it'll stay dry within the waterproof nylon fabric that's fully seam taped so that not a drop of water finds its way in.

• Keep yo...

Barrier Dry Sack

Santa's own sacks

By Mingus from Western Colorado on 12/22/2009

 

5out of 5

Pros: Lightweight, The Traveler, Easy to pack

Best Uses: Campgrounds, Backcountry Camping, Winter Conditions, Road Trips, River Trips, Day Trips

Describe Yourself: Outdoor Professional

What Is Your Gear Style: Minimalist

I am going through my old stuff sack collection from the past 30 years and giving them all away. I started using these lightweight dry sacks to store an extra base layer, gloves, and a jacket in my ski pack - it kept me from worrying about important things getting wet when repeatedly putting the skin bag back in my pack while doing laps in the backcountry. Then I got some larger ones to use as travel duffels for weekend truck packing - just fold them up and fasten the fastex and no worries about wet contents anymore. River people have long used this closure system and now with the light fabrics they are great for all outdoor applications.Get the bright colors so you can easily find them in the pack, truck or corner of the gear room.

(legalese)

My Review of Stratus Hooded Jacket - Men's

Originally submitted at Mountain Gear

Efficient synthetic fill gives this affordable insulator a broad climatic range. The Mammut Stratus Hooded Jacket has warm-for-the-weight proprietary insulation that holds in personal heat and a Micro Lite shell that repels wintry weather at camp or in town.

• The MICRO Lite Tex Performance sh...

Stratus Hooded Jacket - Men's

The Swiss Have it Figured Out

By Mingus from Western Colorado on 12/4/2009

 

4out of 5

Pros: Lightweight, Warm

Best Uses: Cold Weather, Casual Wear, Belaying winter climbs, Hiking and Camping

Describe Yourself: Avid Adventurer

Mammut clothing and packs are always cut with an economy of materials and parts. They are perfect for the alpinist in that they don't veer into snowboard sizing or all the bunk a lot of pack manufacturers think is useful. This jacket is slightly long in the sleeves (which I love) with the thumb rings to keep them down when you have your arms up doing things that make for drafts around wrists and the small of the back. It is cut low across the back of the hips and the torso is a trim cut, eliminating bulk that hinders movement. Finally the hood is just right with or without a helmet, neither too tall nor too compact and the orb of space for your face is perfect for maximum visibility and the right amount of overhang. I would have given it five stars if it could negotiate time off with my boss.

(legalese)

I Disproved Andy Warhol

Momentum has definately shifted in my favor for the moment. A friend of mine recently told me they adhered to Philippe Petit's idea that there is no such thing as talent, but that everything had to be earned through great effort. This is proving to be the case with Eric vs. Technology. Yesterday I couldn't land an image from the web where I needed it for assignment 15, today I discoved my blogsite name shows up on a Google seach for my web address. Freakshow!! Hyperventilate is going to scuff around the Google algorithms for 18 months if the NPR interview is correct. In addition to my appearance on the blue google search page I learned to scan old slides and upload to my blogspot so this ascent of J-Crack circa 1976 could prove I once had lots of hair. As for assignment 13 -- that is where this all started -- suffice it to say, I skimmed across soundsnap realizing I could find endless amusement in sounds with titles like "breathy animalistic wash 1" or "atmospheric swell - creepy and etherial 1." I avoided the human sounds since I was between making hold calls and checking the claims returned list in Gateway, but if I had a cat I'd play the bird sounds for them when they were napping.

Later when I looked at Jamendo I had this terrific discovery of a band called Tryad and their tune Struttin'. This was significant because I have been looking for music that I could put on my ipod when I am in a place like London at rush hour and just want to walk in a very crowded place with a soundtrack.

Perfect.

Now onto paging slips...

When I was eight year old I remember flying home to Albuquerque in a Cessna 150 with a family acquaintance. In the course of that 4 hour flight the guy piloting wanted to give me a flying lesson and it looked really easy to me so I said sure I'd like to take over the controls. Well, as you could predict the plane starting a belly-flopping sort of wobble that I just couldn't correct. I applied all my faculties to the problem, thinking harder and moving the controls differently, but nothing adjusted my sick slide over the Colorado/ New Mexico border. Yes -- there were only two wings and that upright tail thingy -- turn left to go left, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what's up with the foot business and how on earth (so to speak) is this guy going to put this thing back on the blasted runway. Whiskey Zulu Tango all you want, but my fate was suddenly in the hands of a guy that better not have a heart attack or I'm dead! After a few minutes "the guy" took back the controls knowing I was no child prodigy where flying was concerned and this assignment to get clipmarks to land this image on my blogspot was no different than trying to steer that Cessna 150. It was a sick slide of time and I missed lunch and went into the time I had allotted for Success Factors. But I couldn't give up and so I emailed the picture to myself, then copy and pasted it to my blog entry. Problem was I couldn't layout the text or even get the cursor where I wanted it so I just started typing and as you can see this is like a John Cage moment -- it all just ended up where it ended up.
As for the image, I forgot what I was going to say about it and just started thinking about the title of a previous post, "Six Different Ways to Build Anything." This was kinda like that. After lunch god-only-knows what Hyperventilate will look like and I'll finally go work on Success Factors.

What Are We Waiting For?

Assignment #7

Looking at Shelfari, Goodreads and Library Thing, I am struck by the human need to do something as private and internal as reading and then turn it into a social formula, where you have all this discourse about what you read. If Facebook is the model for how we are coming to interact as a species then these three seem to be paralleling that trajectory.

With that said, in terms of whether or not we adopt the Shelfari presentation and would that activate MCPLD's blog -- I think it is a good idea. The Boulder Libraries Good Reads had me initally questioning its relevance, especially with it advertising accupuncturists in the Boulder/Denver area and how can you not smile about "Boulder, CO?" Needles aside, these sites seem to integrate facebook, blogs, and reading recommendations in fun ways. I used to type up my old reading lists on a typewriter thinking that some day I was going to want to know all the books I had read in my lifetime. Here, you can do that in a way that is somehow more meaningful. My only request is that if you choose the Goodreads/Library website model, then please use a graphic designer for at least the home page so it looks inescapably compelling. Boulder's is weak. As a final thought, I would be far more interested in joining in if it were associated with my home area library. That way I can put faces to who's doing the reading -- it fosters community in my mind.

Swimming in the Information Stream

Assignment #10

If only all learning were this satisfying and productive. I simply followed Nancy and Cari's directions in utilizing EBSCO (which I have always been a little intimidated by) expecting it to be sort of dense -- aren't we drifting into the academic world, one full of confusing references, citations and ibid's? But because I'm confident in both of their teaching skills I knew I would figure it out. The only problem is, this search mechanism is pretty status quo. You aren't going to find the things I'm interested in...Right?

Incorrectomundo!!

First I search for an article in Masterfile Premier -- Ski Mountaineering in the Tien Shan -- and bingo, articles actually show up about skiing and traveling in the Tien Shan! How can this be? I practically feel like a bonafide research librarian. Okay, I'll look for something beside your usual Pablo Neurda search in Biography Resource Center to see if this really works. I search Yvon Chouinard the founder of the Patagonia clothing company, and you won't believe it, not only do I get the general Bio on Chouinard's life, I find out his father hated dentists and preferred pulling his own teeth. Well as you can imagine I am practically swooning at the informational search skills Nancy and Cari have handed to me.

I'm going to start keeping a little notebook of the bon mots I've learned. Thanks.

Stop the Debate

How many times have you heard someone say, "the movie wasn't nearly as good as the book?"
Hmmmm.......
My ongoing thought is, "of course it was not as good! They had to pack 250 plus pages of detail into an hour and fourty minutes. How could it ever be as engaging as the book?!" Give the poor movie makers a break!! With that in mind I am never let down by the movie.

"Books into Movies" was an engaging discovery. In two minutes I found "Invictus" a true story about Nelson Mandela and his joining forces with the captain of the South African Rugby team. Having lived in South Africa for six months I understand how enormous both components are to South African life. I remember driving across SA and seeing traveling gangs of rugby fans going to distant matches and getting the sense that rugby was a way of forgetting the woes that still afflict SA even with aparteid dismantled. Mandela's Robben Island prison cell is a pilgrimage site -- he is the figure that pulled off the impossible and everyone holds him out as some sort of miracle worker even though I constantly encountered people that were discouraged with the new order. It will be a bit like going back to SA and I'm stoked to find this film out in December.

The other film I found out about courtesy of Books to Movies was "Taking Woodstock" which in spite of any bad reviews I'll look for on DVD, because who wouldn't want to celebrate the vicarious experience of Woodstock? I'll put bookreporter.com into my quiver of websites I use and recommend to patrons and I'm going to read, "How Shall I tell the Dog." Check out the review for yourself.

Mutterings

Like all moments (or hours) in front of a digital screen, I start one place and end up somewhere I never expected to be. It appears to be reshaping my understanding of consciousness and concentration. Skimming through reams of information appears to me like a description of the Bardo state in the Tibetan Book of the Dead -- the mind flitting from one nano-second to the next....endlessly. I always come away feeling a bit spent and trying to gather my focus again. On the other hand the part of it I love is standing on this high divide and scanning the great distance for the pieces I didn't know existed, like discovering something kindred...or part of a soul I recognize.

It occured again when I searched Craig Lesley in Novelist and ended up with Gretel Ehrlich. You start out on some Indian Reservation in the Northwest, maybe the Yakima or Colville with troubling stories of life there, and you end up reading the Kirkus review, with the quote "greed-fed malfeasance" about melting ice and polar cold. I keep running across Ehrlich and her focus on the brittle, cold world and the piece of her that is haunted by snow -- its place in the world -- its place in the psyche. For some reason I understand that. Norman McLean may be haunted by waters, but I, like Gretel, am haunted by winter. I wasn't thinking about my relationship to all things frozen this morning, but here I am.

As you can see Novelist is about where searches end up. Did you find the right book? Did you find out that your molecules had been rearranged unexpectedly? And what does that do to my consciousness?

By the way, Novelist is going to be my savior when I get the dreaded question, "What's the third book in the series?"

A Walk with Weebly

After my experience with blogger.com I was all puffed up with confidence that going to Weebly and creating my masterpiece of a website was going to be another giant step for Ming-kind. Instead, I came away feeling a little chastened for assuming that the dad's that developed blogger were hangin' out with the dad's that got Weebly into Time Magazine for it friendliness. Blogger is really easy to set up, use, and visually it has made itself fast friends with my intuitive side. I struggled a bit with Weebly, but hope to reapproach the whole situation tomorrow with a fresh flow of Peet's. There is something of the old magazine editing table that I miss -- you know I want to get my hands on the red paper and glue or tape or paint so I can make something on the screen look like my old highschool notebook with all its endless doodles and pictures, but I can't figure out how to get there ....yet. So the website has an entertaining picture provided by Weebly which I presume can be changed at some point and I can't get "new page" off my title line. There also appears to be a graphic shallowness to the site, that I hope can be enhanced. If any of you out in webolution universe have any tips for me so I can rise out of mediocrity, I'm all ears. The URL is: http://hyperventilate.weebly.com/

I smell a Revolution

Miserly.
Yes, miserly is the only way I can describe the period of time I grew up in. If you had a good idea and you didn't guard it with great care then some huckster was going to come along and "rip you off, MAN." So considering the cost of patenting there were a lot of ideas that remained locked away. Right?
Now Lawrence Lessig from that progressive West Coast comes along and creates an arena where people can give stuff away for free....and still get credit?! What is this?? There must be communists involved. Didn't they start doing that in the Old Testament at the Tower of Babel -- you know, start learning each others language and start swapping ideas and accomplishing something...and then did god really come along and get mad?
Well you can see that the razor sharp idea of "saving the world from failed sharing" has cut open the sheath of my trained paranoia and greed. Frankly, I'm a little miffed this idea has taken so long to get here. I'm in my office silently screaming at the top of my lungs, "Where in the hazer-mater have you been the first fifty years of my life?!"
Okayokayokay, so all the wrongs in the world take time and good salt-of-the-earth energy to correct and this appears to be an example of just such an occurrence. This is going to require skillful counseling from Nancy or Cari to fully grasp the potential application of what appears to be a very highminded idea.
Gasp....gasp....onto assignment #9

Back to Ohio, or Tin Solders and Nixon's Comin'

The ethos of the Ohio Library Council's mission page was surprisingly candid about what it is like to work in a library and what you represent to the public. I was surprised at the honesty and I imagine I would appreciate knowing the person that wrote for their site. They also had a quote that I liked, regarding Gen Y and how open they are to using libraries and gleaning information in all the ways available. Houston on the other hand was sort of the same old public service hoo-haa that we always hear. It may be accurate, but I thought Ohio was more honest -- more progressive at its core.
The funny thing about the Ohio site was, when I went to the "Library Marketing" tab, I was sent to this dire screen that warned me this was a Reported Attack Site. Another click of my mouse and I was given information that twice in the past 90 days material had come from this site that was damaging. I'm not making this up -- check it out for yourself. I guess they have a freak-O mole that works in tech services or sets up their website...or is trying to sabotage the marketing department. Onto to assignment #7...

Six different Ways to Build Anything

Assignment #5

You know that Progressive Insurance add on TV -- the one that says, "So easy, even a caveman can do it?" This is how I felt about making consecutive requests once I was logged into my library account. Suddenly books would be arriving about the Himalaya and northern Italy with mere pressure from my index finger, but -- the additional point that I discovered is that even though this method shows a seamless efficiency, it may not be the one the caveman prefers to resort to when his back is up and a sabre tooth is fixin' to have him for lunch. The cave man will always "fight like he trains" and this caveman trained at the old ATS airport ticket counter and he wields the green back arrow like some state-of-the-art stone age tool.

But cavemen are nothing if they are not adaptable...so I'd better practice.

It is shocking and a little unsettling to come from a generation where you only had a public voice if you became "famous" for some reason. The world moves in a million capricious directions at once and you didn't know or realize it was happening....until now. Social networking will undoubtedly be a tool for improving the human condition and for polarizing it as well. The question that comes to mind is -- is it okay to have an accessible voice and do I need a public relations specialist to survey everything on the wire? Hmmmm, the jury is out, but I have heard from some old friends the past few months and that is nice.

As for the quiz, I only got 80 % which really tweaked me, but I'm blaming that on having visited "Slice of Life" bakery in Palisade this afternoon, and I think it was a massive sugar crash. It made me suddenly stupid and suspicious....or more stupid and suspicious.

Pandora vs. LastFM

I tried two artists from widely differing genres -- Aimee Mann in the female singer/songwriter category and jazz giant John Coletrane. Pandora was familiar so I started there hoping to find music I was unaware of, but was quickly disappointed that the music suggested was the usual mainstream diggy-di -- nothing new or wide ranging. LastFM on the other hand blew Pandora away for choice in the field. I immediately came across Beth Orton radio when I plugged in Aimee Mann and got a dozen female vocalists I'd never heard of. The visuals were a bonus for me, because I'm am drawn into the life of the artist when I see their face.
Next, I went to music I know and searched John Coltrane, he of course had a station and the first song that came up was one of my too-much-coffee-in-the-morning favorites, "Russian Lullaby." Everything that followed was of the tone I could spend hours cleaning the office to. So Zingo! LastFM is my new contact for music.

Brave New World

I'm constantly working on falling, as Ken Wilbur puts it, "into my own radical Estate, which is Spirit itself -- my own deepest identity and impulse."

With that in mind, this image came from a journey I created in May 2009. It sets the stage for this assignment and blogathon.