Cold Monochrome Living

General Talk

02-20-2013 bwThe past three weeks have been a cold gray haze. That is, I have been living in a monochrome world. Everything has been a shade of black, white or gray. And it is has been cold. It started 3 weeks ago in Colorado.

Last week I was in Illinois. It started with an early morning flight from California. Early morning means driving to the airport in the dark. As I boarded the silver gray plane, that set the color-tone for the next three days.

Descending from 30,000 feet towards O’Hare International Airport, the sky below was a gray blanket. Transitioning from a sunlight blue sky above; we dropped into a gray world. A world I would live in for the next three days.

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A Gentleman’s Guide to Fitting Trousers

Backpacking Gear, General Talk,

01 selectionLet’s face it, most men don’t know how to buy or fit their trousers.

Properly fitted trousers will allow you to sit, stand, and walk without the material falling down, shifting, or becoming uncomfortable.
When purchasing ready-made off the rack trousers in a store, there are two measurements, the waist and the inseam.

It seems that many men don’t know where their waist is, or how to measure it.

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Great Expectations

Backpacking Gear, , , , ,
picture from Six Moon Designs website
picture from Six Moon Designs website

A lot of buzz lately about Brian Frankle joining Six Moon Designs as the Director of Pack Designs (link to the website).

For those who don’t know, Brian is the founder of Ultralight Adventure Equipment (ULA). As an accomplished long distance hiker, Brian started designing and building is own packs for his own use and this eventually morphed into ULA.

After 9 years, Brian tired of the day-to-day operation of running his own company and sold ULA to Chris and Sally McMaster in 2009.

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Kickstarter (or brother can you spare a dime)

What's Up With That?

What’s Up With That?

kickstarter logoRecently I have read several posts requesting money on Kickstarter. Not knwoing what Kickstarter was, I did a little research. Kickstarter is a “crowdfunding” website. That is, people/companies looking for capital to develop a product or service request donations to their project. I guess you would call it donations, because you cannot “invest” in the project and receive part of the profit. For your gift you usually receive some sort of minor gift or trinket. Sometimes, if the request is for a product, then you are basically pre-ordering that product. Of course, usually you don’t know if the product is any good because it hasn’t been produced yet. Kickstarter is not a store. Sounds like panhandling or begging to me. However it is not all bad. There are some good things going on over there and I will share some later in this post.

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