review, books, survival, bushcraft

Participating in Nature

Participating in Nature is Thomas Elpel‘s “field guide to primitive living skills”. The book is presented as a story of the author’s wanderings throughout one day. It covers far more than primitive technology, expanding into Elpel’s environmental actions and ideas on modern, sustainable living. The primitive skills themselves are diverse – everything from bow drills to brain-tanning – and are presented in a much simpler, more digestible (yet still complete) manner than, say, David Wescott’s Primitive Technology: A Book of Earth Skills. The chapter on plants is a succinct version of Botany in a Day, and focuses only on a small number of plants local to Elpel’s Rocky Mountain bioregion, but I found the rest of the discussions applicable here to the Pacific Northwest, with only minor exceptions.

It is an excellent beginner’s book to primitive skills and the mind-set that goes along with them, as well as a valuable reference for the more advanced.

Discoveries

I went walking around the Arboretum today, continuing my exploration of the destruction caused by the earlier wind storms. Some of the felled trees picked up a impressive amount of earth with them. You’re able to stick your face right in the tangled mess of roots.

The past couple weeks I’ve spent a lot of time up there, mostly looking for Cedar. The place is strangely devoid of them. Today, I finally found one – two, actually – but they’re young, and nestled in a hill that offered protection from the winds, so neither was knocked over for my harvesting.

A little further down from the Cedar, I found someone’s wallet (ID, credit cards, cash, and a key). It was a bit of a hard walk, but I was able to get it down to the police station and still make my way to class in time – the class I wasn’t skipping. The police dispatcher said she’d give the wallet’s owner a call, which I was impressed with. I thought they’d just hold on to it until he called. If I lost anything up there, I would never expect anyone to find it, and probably wouldn’t call the cops.

2>4

Last Monday, the mailperson brought me a new t-shirt.

Put The Fun Between Your Legs

I also bought a patch to sew on it.

No Sense of Decency

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/

Why?

Can’t they just leave it dead?

If they want to make a movie sequel about hacking, why not do it with Tron?

review, books

Hobo

Eddy Joe Cotton’s Hobo is the fast paced adventure of a young runaway turned train rider. The rapid growth and maturity of the author tricks one into assuming a large lapse of time, when in fact the book spans only a few weeks of his life. I didn’t enjoy the whole book, nor did I find it to be one of the better books penned by a Hobo. I think his love for the state of Nevada played a role in this. He focuses on many of the things which disgust me about the state. That said, Cotton’s short journey on the road is peppered with many insights into the America of the early 90’s and plays host to many an interesting character.

FLVconvert

I have need to convert a bunch of AVI files to FLV. FFmpeg does the job, but I wanted to do whole directories at a time – plus different directories have different video dimensions and different fps. So, last night I hacked flvconvert.pl, a quick and dirty perl script to convert specified avi files to flv.

Usage: perl flvconvert.pl [OPTIONS] [FILES] Options: --size Specify video size. Defaults to 320x240 if none specified. --fps Specify frames per second. Defaults to 15 if none specified. --thumb Create a jpeg from the first frame Example: perl flvconvert.pl file1.avi file2.avi video/* perl flvconvert.pl --size 640x480 --fps 30 file.avi
review, books

Transient Ways

Jessica Han’s Transient Ways concerns itself with stories of travel, trains, and squats. Unlike Off the Map, this book’s writing is amateur, the stories have no cohesion, and the author presents herself as mildly egotistical. Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it. The tales are entertaining – enticing in their simplicity. Jessica shows promise as a writer, but is no Kerouac.

Jessica is also featured in the excellent hobo documentary Catching Out.

Itinerate

And seeing the snail, which everywhere doth roam, Carrying his own house still, still is at home, Follow (for he is easy pac'd) this snail, Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

– John Donne