Today's the Dave
You can not choose the cards you're dealt.
Posts
Unbeknownst to me, my girlfriend organised a secret weekend away for my 30th birthday.
Bright and early Saturday morning, she led me and her father (who was visiting for the weekend) down to Plaza Cataluña, from where I thought we'd catch a train to... I wasn't sure, but Girona? Madrid? Zaragosa? Nope, not the train station, but instead into Pepe Car to pick up our reservation, followed by a secretive drive for 3 hours into the mountains to Gotarta.
We arrived at a lovely Casa Rural in a tiny little village, with very welcomming hostess who took our dinner orders and sent us out for a walk in the hills.
Back at the house, after watching a field of sheep being driven home to the barn, it was 9.30pm, an open log fire is making us feel toasty, and still no sign of dinner actually being served, even though some fantastic smells were eminating from the kitchen. I mentiond my developing hunger in passing, but then you can never rush a rural dinner - it's ready when it's ready.
Suddenly, my friend Sam puts his head round the corner, and my mind does a summersault of emotions between the ordinary "Oh, hi Sam" and the slighly more concerned "But what the hell are you doing here?!"As the others also appear at the fireplace, it falls into place - suprise!
Suddenly the table is laid, dinner is served in seconds, and the full plan is revealed: We going white water rafting tomorrow!
And here we all are, kitted up in attractive wetsuits, lifejackets and helmets. It was a fantastic experience, and I think I want to do it again!
Many thanks to Eirin, Alf, Rob, Aleks, Ana, Sam, and Najat, you are all amazing!
So, no updates in a while. Had a little accident trying to turn round, slipped and fell pretty heavy onto my ribs. Kept going that day, but by morning still felt pretty painful so went to check I my ribs were broken!
Turns out they are not, just badly bruised, and still that way now, a while month later!
But, the tail end of spring is on it's way out, the sun will be high and trees will want to have ropes tied between them once more...
Saturday was a beautiful spring day in Barcelona and I spent it all in the park, slacklining. Strung it up a bit further apart this time, about 10m, which made it a little more challenging. Gets a little more wobbly in the middle. And practiced turning around and coming back again. Have though that a good goal to achieve this summer is to juggle 3 clubs on it. Tried with balls and it's difficult!
Achievements:
Walking from one end to the other, turning, and coming back again.
Many years ago, I was browsing in a little bookshop when a pale yellow book cover caught my eye.
Not quite believing that this was an autobiography from a man who had walked a wire between the Twin Towers, I bought the book, and proceeded to read it in a matter of hours. What I discovered was a story of amazing audacity and confidence in the face of all reasonable assessments to the contrary. Spend 18 months casing the towers, learning how to break in, how to transport tons of equipment to the top, string a wire between the two, and casually walk back and forth for an hour as the world looks up in disbelief.
Yesterday, I took a small step in this direction, and bought a Gibbon slackline. Today I took it out for a spin.
This is the first time I have ever walked on a slackline or tightrope. Putting one foot on made the line wobble like crazy - simply standing on it at all was a challenge! But after 3 hours of practice, I manage to cross a 5m span.
Result.
A shot at some goals I have in life.
I'll come back to these and add details over time.
Travel
- India
- Taj Mahal
- China
- Great wall of China
- Australia
- New Zealand
- USA
- Grand Canyon
- Yellow stone national park
- Rockies
- Cuba
- Dead sea
- Canada
- Brazil
- Rio
- Africa
- Europe
- Arctic Circle
- Northern Lights
- Paris
- Russia
- St.Petersberg
Activities
- Go white water rafting
- Shoot a gun
- Learn to surf
- Learn to hang glide
- Ride in a helicopter
- Have a mud bath
- Kill, cook, and eat an animal
- See the curvature of the earth
- Turn up at the airport and buy a last minute ticket to an undecided destination
- Sleep under the stars
- Go to a Rainbow gathering
- Learn to juggle on a tightrope
- Learn to unicycle
- Learn to juggle with 5 balls
- Learn to meditate
- Go on a silent retreat for a week
Financial
- Financially independent
- Passive income
- Investment portfolio
- Own a profitable business
- Debt free
- Own home
- Pension
Make
- Make a dining table out of wood
Posts
More experiments with Twitter visualisation, aided and abetted by tutorials over at OUseful.
If you fancy having a go yourself, a few quick steps…
- Download and install R (also, get over the fact that the site was put together by a statistician)
- Download, install and open RStudio
- Type install.packages(“ggplot2”) into the console and press enter
- Type whichever number is nearest to you and press enter - you just installed a package
Pretty much all the rest is covered over on OUseful (you just need to repeat step three for any other packages needed).
Love this from Tom. I want to do one of these heat maps with web traffic data.
Early in the second year we were given a project to develop an IT strategy for a small printing business. We delivered a comprehensive strategy with some pretty powerful recommendations for enterprise grade marketing management software. It was going well until one of the lecturer’s playing the…
So true.
“Who are The Suburbs?!?”
IS THIS BON IVER’S UNCLE??????
Am I Skrillex’s dad? [Edit: A reader kindly writes that due to the fact Sonny Moore was adopted this could be misconstrued as a jab at him—it wasn’t. We promise. We love Skrillex and respect him a lot. Just…’in other news’ took Uncle, and we didn’t want to go Grandpa…so, dad it was. We regret coming off as rude if anyone, Sonny especially, was offended.]
Typeverything.com
Understanding.
Yes, so just need to work out how to sell to these people…
“That will be difficult, but I can help you with it. This is how much it will cost.”
Desperately Seeking Dalston
“After numerous arguments with mini-cab drivers and estate agents about what is and isn’t Dalston, I decided to do some research,” Mr Mills writes. “I walked 4.5 km down the A10, stopping every 200m or so to ask 10 unsuspecting passers-by… ‘Excuse me, what area is this?’”
