Here’s what I carry everyday:
If you look at it on flickr I’ve got everything labeled.
Monthly archives: March 2007
What’s in My Bag?
30Mar07What to Do in Bed
28Mar07My eyes stay open through the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promises.
- Psalm 119:148
As previously mentioned, I haven’t been sleeping well. I wake up in the wee hours of the morning, I lay tossing and can’t go back to sleep. Last night (or early this morning depending on how you look at it) at about 2:30, I awoke and began my usual, idle waiting to fall back to sleep but as I lay there, a Scripture popped into my head about meditating on God while in bed. I decided to give it a try.
This resulted in one of the best sleepless nights I’ve ever had. God blessed me richly as I lay considering Him and gave me new insights. I realized that I didn’t want to lose these so I flicked on my lamp and began pouring my brain into my notebook. I now have pages of material on how to explain Christianity to unbelievers. If someone were to ask me today, why I am a Christian I am better prepared to give an answer then I was yesterday.
It’s 6:30 a.m. now and I haven’t slept since 2:30 so pray that I make it through the day without keeling over from sleep deprivation.
Hipster PDA
27Mar07After finally making it to Sekaido in Shinjuku to acquire the last necessary components I have completed construction of a Hipster PDA (hPDA) as originally envisioned by Merlin Mann.
What is an Hipster PDA? In the words of it’s inventor:
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.
After considering my configuration options I chose to forego fancy options and assemble my device with simple graph ruled cards and a standard mini clip. The graph paper is condusive to my drawing habits and generally just looks cool. I tried a bigger clip but since I don’t need to carry a huge stack of cards and the mini clip has sufficent grip for my need I chose to go with the low bulk option.
Here’s the gory pictures of the completed project along with two styles of input styli and an error correction tool:
If you’re interested in building your own hPDA there are a number of resources to get you started: 43folders, D*I*Y Planner, flickr, wikipedia and many more. After a few weeks of careful study you can proceed to the actual construction phase.
Here is a complete set of instrcutions explaining from start to finish how to build a standards compliant hPDA:
- Find some 3×5 cards.
- Clip them together with a binder clip.
- No further action required. You’re done!
Have fun with it.
23Mar07
AOL has been compiling an immense database of wireless access points by driving down people’s streets and recording the locations of all wireless signals. Does this bother anyone?
21Mar07
Amazing! Queen is in this man’s hands.
15Mar07
A beautiful photograph of home.
12Mar07
The Opinion Journal includes an interesting article about faith on the front lines this week.
Making Time to Read
09Mar07A big theme on this blog lately has been my renewed reading habit. Adding this simple past time back into my life has made such a positive difference that I wanted to share a simple tip that I’ve been using to keep it alive. It’s so simple that I can’t believe I didn’t do this before.
Keep a book with you at all times. That’s it. If you’re like me you’ll find that you spend a lot of time waiting for things or people and if you have a book handy you can redeem the time. It doesn’t seem like this would actually allow you to get much reading done but it does. I started doing it just because I was bored in 15 minute breaks between classes and twenty minute train rides. Ever since I realized I was reading hundreds of pages a week in 5-20 minute increments, I’ve made a point of always keeping a book at hand.
Give it a try. What can it hurt?
Why I Never Want My Kids in Public School
07Mar07From the Spokesman’s Review via Club For Growth Blog:
Children in the [Hilltop Children's Center's] after-school program had constructed an elaborate collection of Lego buildings, calling it Legotown. But as Pelo and her colleagues observed how the children played with the structures and how Legotown was run, they became concerned.
“What started to happen was the group of kids who had constructed Legotown really kind of closed access to the Legos for a lot of kids,” Pelo said in a phone interview. “It became what we came to call – Lego-oligarchy.”
So when Legotown was dismantled by other kids using the center, Pelo and her colleagues decided that, instead of rebuilding, the toys should be removed from the center. It wasn’t permanent. The toys came back, but not before the kids created guidelines for playing with the toys that prevent them from teaming up against one another.
“For us, (Legos) became inherently problematic because of sort of the unexamined issues of power and authority,” Pelo said. “It felt to us that it was this opportunity to explore this bigger issue – how we’re going to all live in a community. It was about how can we make our community more fair about Legos.”
The approximately 25 kindergarten through fourth-grade students in the after-school program came up with guidelines for how Legos could be part of activities without invoking the social class structures Pelo and her colleagues observed.
Playing with Legos is now governed by three rules: All structures are owned by everyone; structures should adhere to size requirements so as to not create inequity; and the plastic Lego people can only be used by a group of people, not by individuals.
“Kids came to a pretty strikingly profound understanding of the ways in which private ownership falls short, or the ways in which private ownership is inherently unfair,” Pelo said.
Is that terrible or what?
I already use Lego to educate my younger siblings in capitalism. Whenever we play Lego, a market for pieces is established. This allows for free exchange of pieces through the mechanism of supply and demand. It’s pretty interesting to see how naturally the basic laws of economics can be illustrated in children’s play.
Sweet Dreams
06Mar07Lately, I’ve had Eurythmic’s Sweet Dreams stuck in my head. The throbbing base line, catchy lyrics and haunting tone conspire to keep the song running through my head for hours at a time.
Despite the song’s title, my dreams of late have not been sweet. As usual I haven’t been dreaming much at all. Unfortunately, this has been due to the fact that I’ve been fighting insomnia. While it might seem logical to surmise that my busy schedule, late nights and early mornings might provide the ingredients for deep sleep, they don’t. Lately, I can’t seem to sleep for more than four or five hours at a time (this post is being composed at 4 am after waking at 3). I don’t have time to dream often.
And the dreams I do have aren’t the kind I would recommend. A couple nights ago. I dreamed that I was going insane. Like most nightmares it had the feeling of terrible realism. I went about my life befuddled. Things didn’t make sense and when people told me things I struggled to respond. I couldn’t recall the words in my vocabulary and the answer to every problem seemed just out of reach. It was like the feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue but for everything. The constant confusion made me frustrated and irritated me. But the twist that I find the most frightening is that no-one told me. Everyone around me pretended that nothing was wrong but I knew that they knew. I could tell by their sympathetic glances and their patronizing manner. Rather than telling me what was wrong, they shepherded me along with exaggerated patience, speaking slowly, using simple sentences as if I were a baby or a small child. But I wasn’t a child. I could understand everything coming in, I just couldn’t process it or connect it to anything else. I hated their pity and despised their ineffectual attempts to help. I was truly helpless and there was nothing they could do. It was one of the most terrifying nightmares I’ve had in a long time.
