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Chris Garrett's Personal Blog

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You are viewing Chris Garrett's personal blog. He also has a professional business blog called Chris Garrett on New Media and also Makerhacks, a site about 3D printing, Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Read more about chrisg.org here.

Public Transport

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In the UK we have what is laughingly referred to by “Two Jags” and the other fat cat politicians as an “integrated transport policy”. This basically means make it difficult and highly taxed to use cars while making it deeply unpleasant, expensive or nearly impossible to use public transport.

Unless you live in London, which is slightly more convenient as they at least have the tube.

the Blog at Calgary : Transportation Planning in Review discusses the plans for Calgary. I don’t live in Calgary but want to. I take a keen interest in all things Cowtopia. There is an election this weekend too. I want to be a new calgarian, not the redneck funny hat wearing type but the SUV driving suburban type.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of public transport. I used it daily when I had a proper job rather than working in my underwear. I didn’t like the reality of public transport one bit. It is expensive, smelly, frightening, inefficient, unsafe, threatening, unpredictable, unhealthy, dangerous, and lots of other nasty things. It wasn’t just the druggies, the drunks and the abusive passengers, or the urine spilling around the floor, the sticky seats stuck up with God knows what.  They never ever ever run on time.  Try using the train being delayed for the 40th time as an excuse to a boss who walks to work from his penthouse sweet two blocks away.

I even swapped my laptop bag for a rucksack type so as not to get mugged. I know several people who swapped their earphones for non-white ones for the same reason. On the rare occasion public transport (to get the one bus or train an hour that was available) I still had to use my car to get me to and from the station. Integrated? Don’t make me laugh.

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Putting Things Off

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Since I packed in my “job” and started my own business I have found I can’t put things off other than my own projects. My priorities have now changed so much. Where just a couple of months ago I would work a bit, slack off a bit, take a break every so often and check out aintitcool, chat to my friend Pete about Marillion or check out other geek stuff, etc, work a bit more .. now I seem to work non-stop.

Seth’s Blog: Everybody stalls

Everybody stalls There’s no question about whether you are procrastinating about something. The only question is: what?

Dilbert Stalls

Several months in and I still do not have my own company website. I think I need to learn how to convincingly stall other peoples stuff so I can get some of my own projects started! 😉

I just wrote about this over at performancing with some tips for how you can beat procrastination and “analysis paralysis”.

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Because Everyone Else Is

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I had heard about it before and thought it was one of those things that only 13 year old girls did, like a livejournal “learn about your friends” thing, but then I read about it on D’Arcys blog and thought what the heck let’s give it a try. And you know what?, it’s quite fun in a time wasting kind of way!

What is it? http://www.43things.com/

Lucid Dreaming

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When I was younger, even though I didn’t know it had a name or that it wasn’t “normal” I was naturally a lucid dreamer. Not every time I dreamt but enough to remember that I could change the course of my dreaming. In fact I used to go to bed thinking “what shall I dream about tonight”.

My favourite dreams were of me being a superhero. Perhaps because superheros don’t have to worry about having their school bag snatched and their pocket money stolen. Anyhoo… point being I would go to bed and dream about what I wanted to dream about. When I had nightmares I didn’t have control over the dream narrative and that above everything else was the most scary part for me. Not what was happening so much that I didn’t decide what was happening.

It wasn’t like I controlled every aspect, more it was like one of those old “choose your own adventure” story type affairs where if I didn’t like the way things were going I could decide “no, this is happening” or I could switch theme. One minute I am drowning in a vat of maple syrup (or something) next I can switch channel and I am superman flying over buildings and zapping people with my heat ray vision. That kind of thing. Like a kids imagination version of virtual reality. A lot of fun, you should try it.

As I got older this lucid dreaming state happened less and less but it’s still something that I experience from time to time.

Now I find out that it’s “bad” for you …

Caution on Hacking Your Dream – Lucid Dreaming – lifehack.org

# Addiction # Alienation # Dissociation # Controversial: Accidentally encountering “spiritual” entities # Controversial: Exhaustion # Controversial: Inability to stop # Controversial: Undesirable false awakenings

Not that I am too worried, the bad grammar in that article does not inspire me to put too much faith in the “warning”…

Short Film, entirely shot using digital still camera

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I just posted this over on my Digital SLR Photography Blog but thought it was so good I would repeat it here

Short Film, entirely shot using digital still camera | DSLRBlog

Using only a Canon EOS 20D they created all the visuals for this excellent little boy-meets-girl story. It’s a joy to watch, not that I know anything about cinematography! It has won awards and so far been viewed by over 120,000 people online. Not bad for a project that started because the creators couldn’t scrape the funds together for their real film project. I advise you to check out the blurb about the short after watching it, it’s too short to read any spoilers first. The background is here in an article about the film makers.

Watch the film here