Daniel's Place

Everybody has baggage. Does your baggage have style?

I bought my Metropolis messenger bag by Chrome several months back and I have to say that I absolutely love it. The bag has an insanely large carrying capacity, adjusts effortlessly to my changing environment (cycling, walking, driving, work), handles the elements with ease, and makes a bold statement about the wearer.

The commute to work is only 6 miles by bicycle, but Seattle has a way of throwing passive-aggressive weather, incompetent drivers, and hills that make the simplest of cycling excursions a life or death struggle. How best to transport a laptop, pair of shoes, and change of clothes? Get yourself a bag that hugs you close, increases your visibility, and keeps your stuff dry.

My only complaint is that it doesn’t magically reduce the weight of the things I carry within.

Love what you carry

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On December 18th, 2008, a relatively large snow storm hit the Seattle area blanketing the landscape and confusing an already squirrely set of drivers. The Washington State Department of Transportation website set a new record at 5.8 million pageviews in under 24 hours. It seems that Seattleites’ pressing F5 repeatedly to find an authoritative reason not to come into work brought the WSDOT web servers to their digital knees.

If there’s one thing the northwest craves more than coffee, it’s information. WSDOT seems to understand this. With lightning speed, the WSDOT reduced their website to text and links and pointed to a page on blogger complete with a flicrk account and up to the minute updates in twitter.

We saw similar behavior in the cyber front of the Russia/Georiga struggle. The Georgian government also opted for a Blogger account.

It seems that organizations are migrating critical communications to the cloud in the face of increased web server load. This is an interesting development.

The new WordPress looks cool and appears to work. This is great news for me! Looks like they still haven’t figured out how to change the status of an article from “published” to “unpublished” though it still is possible to take articles private.

The new interface looks pretty cool though.

Well folks, it’s about to get really dangerous and we need to prepare. I urge you to please review the Bellevue Reporter’s advice in their article “Advice for when the temperature drops, snow falls” and take every (un)necessary precaution.

Among the finer points covered in this article:

• If you have a life-threatening situation, call 911.
• If you have any questions about the food being spoiled: When in doubt, throw it out!
• Build Emergency Kits for your family to have at home, in the car and at school or work. Your kit should sustain you for 72 hours or longer. Place in your Emergency Kit:
• Food, water,
• first aid kit,
• a small tool kit,
• seasonal clothing,
• eye protection,
• flashlight with batteries,
• gloves, sanitary supplies,
• sleeping bags and extra blankets.
• Remember to add those special supplies if you have small children or you care for someone with special needs.
• Items for your pets also should be included.

Good luck out there, everybody and remember please don’t stop breathing and DON’T EAT YELLOW SNOW!

Strange how, in the season of giving and helping of one’s neighbor, that a newspaper in an urban environment would find itself seriously advising readers to prepare for a rural North Dakota nuclear winter.