Last week I wrote about turning my 2002 Nissan Frontier into an adventure mobile – if you haven’t read that post yet, you can go back & do that. This week I will finish working on the raised sleeping platform/storage area. I was able to finish everything over the holiday weekend and even got a chance to test it out. I decided I’d rather work on it during the daylight hours instead of my usual Tuesday night slot. My neighbors probably appreciated that on account of the power tools. I hinted at a design last week and thought I had a good one. Like always I ran into complications and had to adjust as I went. The first requirement was that it be versatile. I didn’t want to build a permanent frame and get stuck with one design. The life of an adventurer is not often predictable. Currently, I use
I’ve started a new project – I am turning my 2002 Nissan Frontier into a full fledged adventure mobile. This is one of those projects that has a clear starting point but won’t likely have an end. Perfect for more than a few innovation sessions. Though my truck isn’t yet an official adventure mobile, it’s life has hardly lacked adventure. I got it when I was 16. I’ve driven it across the country a few times so it’s been everywhere from San Diego to New Hampshire and to more national parks than most Boy Scouts. It has hauled dirt bikes, surfboards, camping gear, furniture and everything in between. It’s had a good life as far as trucks are concerned, but we’re just getting started. The goal of having an adventure mobile is simple – it should make it easy for our family & gear to get to places where we can
Stoked! I cracked the four minute mark this week. Most of my improvement has come from better oxygen conservation. I have been focusing on relaxing to minimize the oxygen I use per minute – thus letting me last longer on one breath. To do this I’ve been working on lowering my resting heart rate and slowing everything down. I think relaxing my brain is the hardest part, so I’ve been counting in my head really slow. I think that helps pace my body a bit as well. I haven’t been able to push any further on the discomfort scale – once my vision starts to go blurry I stop. I think that is probably safer for training, but I’d like to try blacking out a few times so I’m familiar with it in case I ever get to that point under water. Finally, this week I heard of a
For tonight’s Innovation Session I’m going to make a Liar’s dice cheat sheet. This will hopefully be a simple and beautiful way to remember what the odds of a certain bet are at any point in the game – even if it’s been a long night. Liar’s dice is a simple game. Each player starts with five dice, everyone rolls and you take turns guessing the combined dice of everyone, even though you can only see your five. The bidding has to increase so eventually someone gets called a liar and everyone shows. Either the liar or the person that called them one loses and must discard a die. The game then repeats, now with one less die. See the full rules here. Most of the game revolves around bluffing, second guessing and such. But, at the end of the round, someone has to be right and that is always
A few weeks ago I wrote about my Innovation Sessions and listed three benefits/goals: train my innovation skills by introducing my mind to new and diverse problems, racking my brain for solutions and to exposing the resulting solutions to public criticism. explore ideas I have for products, visualizations or tools learn new skills and hone others that I do not use as regularly in my day job I forgot a fourth one which in many ways outweighs the other three: meeting cool people. Over the past month I have had lunch, coffee, beers or gone surfing with about a half dozen cool people that I met because of my Innovation Sessions. They shared a common interest, saw an idea of mine posted and were kind enough to reach out. Because of those meetings, some of the ideas might turn into realities. Even when they don’t, which will most often be the
In January I described a project idea for finding out which state is the most normal. Tonight I will pick up where I left off. Data Collection I am going to start by gathering data for each of the 50 states in a CSV – I also posted it as a google doc if you want to follow along. Eventually I suspect I will have to translate this into JSON before loading it into the visualization – but this is an easy way to get started. The first place I am going to try to get data is the US Census. Thankfully they have an API that I can use to get some population & demographic facts: http://www.census.gov/developers/ Unfortunately, the existance of an API is the only thing to get excited about. I got nowhere tonight. The US Census API is horrible to work with. I could be blind, but it took me an
Last December I started measuring a few things about myself every day. Now, four months in, I’d like to take a look at how it has gone and what that data has shown me so I can improve upon the system. Success of the System Over 102 days I completed the survey 80 times. Based on that I would deem the method a success. Any system that is able to remind me to do something and succeed in getting me to do it ~80% of the time is doing pretty well in my book. Pivoting my completion percent by the day of week gave me the following. The astute reader will notice that my completion rate was >1 on Wednesdays. I thought there might be a bug or double logging errors in my system. When I looked into it I realized that a few of those were actually my