road warrior

perfect little gift: cool usb flash drive ‘keys’

We have a whole list of things that fall under the heading of “Practical but Ugly”, and wonder why it can be so hard to find good-looking, affordable versions of certain everyday items…dish racks, for example, or file cabinets. USB Flash drives are one of those handy items whose ugliness we’ve marveled at and put up with because we need them. Then we saw LaCie’s wonderful flash drives shaped like a key, and thought “want one!” Like many well-designed objects, they cost more than the norm – roughly $10 bucks more by our figuring. And since we’re hard-pressed to hack our own usb flash drive design, we just might treat ourselves to one…

For sure, we will buy them to give as unexpected little gifts to give..say to the host of a dinner party, or a friend we want to thank…about $18 for 4 gigabytes, $27 for 8…and up, in round, square or triangularheads. (The connectors come with a cover.)

via Core 77

08.29.10 | comments (1) | in apparel, family + friends, gifts, resources, road warrior, tools |

twitter in dire straits

Leigh Fazzina was lost in a 300-acre Connecticut wood, racing downhill on her mountain bike looking for the main road, when her front wheel hit a tree root. She flew over the handlebars and slammed into the ground, to find herself bloodied and unable to walk…and panicking. She tried screaming and calling for help on her cellphone but couldn’t connect. Then she tried Twitter, the social networking site, hoping that one of her 1000 followers might see her tweet:

“I’ve had a serious injury and NEED Help! Can someone please call Winding Trails in Farmington, CT tell them I’m stuck bike crash in woods.”

At least half a dozen people, many of them strangers, responded; the Farmington Fire Department got calls from California, Chicago and New York. A few minutes after sending her tweet, an EMS team found her.

Twitter, so often maligned for being a frivolous time-waster, proved to be an unexpectedly useful emergency tool; tweets, and text messages, will often go through in areas with spotty cell phone coverage, like state parks. Fazzina seems to have broken new ground in her improvised solution; there are no records of Twitter being used to call an ambulance before.

It reminds us though of other potent ways Twitter has been used by people in dire straits to connect, like the heart-rending tweets that came out of Iran during its recent revolution, when text messaging and phone service was cut off by the government…

PS: The amateur mini-triathlon cyclist thankfully had no serious injuries, just bad scrapes and bruises. She is grateful she didn’t have to spend the night in the woods.

via USA Today via BoingBoing

08.12.10 | comments | in community, copy this!, family + friends, outside, resources, road warrior, strategies, wheels |

emergency medicine

A few months ago, while I was clearing out a storage room in a lonely warehouse building, a friend called me on my cell phone in tears. She told me of the overwhelming fear and anxiety she was feeling about a trip she was to embark upon in a few hours, that held many potentially difficult situations.

Standing in a storage room amidst broken cardboard boxes and forgotten stuff, I listened and talked and listened, as my friend’s tears gradually subsided. “But, how will I make it through?” she asked. “What will I do if I start to panic on the long flight, or when I am in another time zone?”

I wondered what I could offer right then and there? What would be totally portable, that she could look at any time she needed to, to remind her of other ways of seeing things, the opposite of fear and sadness?

I found myself saying: “Get a pen. Now draw a heart in the palm of your hand. read more…

08.11.10 | comments (10) | in family + friends, gifts, identity, principles, resources, road warrior, signs, strategies, travel |

impromptu drowned cell phone rescue (+ life lesson)

Ubergizmo

We got an email from Manny Howard this morning about an improvised save for water-logged digital appliances (and a great general approach to take when the #$%!! is hitting the fan). We know Manny to be prone to minor disasters from his book My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm and love him for it, because he so forthrightly throws himself into things (as, it seems, do his kids):

“kids doused my iPhone with water the day before a 5-day work trip to southern France.

In a panic I called up my buddy Norman Vanamee (my best bud who I always turn to him for automotive clunker advice)…

…So the screen’s all mottled in some places, faded completely in others, the apps keep switching without my input. it shuts off and then comes back on occasionally. clearly digital cardiac arrest.

I asked Norm: So, do I go to apple store buy new phone in case this one dies while i’m on the road in France?

No way, he says, read more…

07.13.10 | comments | in community, family + friends, kids, people, resources, road warrior, solutions, strategies, travel |

italy for the gourmet traveler (+how to hack a guidebook)

In 1996, when I was about to take an extended trip to Italy, Fred Plotkin’s Italy for the Gourmet Traveler was my guide. Plotkin, who had been traveling in Italy since 1973, forged the guide from years of passionate traveling, living and eating there – over 700 pages crammed with personal notations and insider views on wonderful restaurants, trattorias, coffee bars, farms, cooking schools, festivals, and markets. He is at his best with small towns and off-the-beaten path places, like the Mushroom Market in Trentino…

“In season this is the place to buy freshly picked mushrooms. If you have any fears, you can look for the police officer who is the designated mycologist on duty. This piazza also has orderly stands selling cheese, meats, fruits, vegetables, beans, honeys, and flowers.”

In Plotkin’s guide, you will find essential bits of history and architecture and opera, as well as terrific, insightful writing. His chapter on Napoli begins:

“Fasten your seat belts! One can stand absolutely still in Napoli and feel like a spinning top.”

The guide has been so good and so reliable that it has gone through several printings; an updated edition was just published by Kyle Books. Like its predecessors, it suffers from only one problem: it is heavy, a 3-pound brick of solid information, particularly daunting in these times of overweight-luggage fees. Unwilling to travel Italy without Fred’s book, I improvised a solution (and figured out how to hack a guidebook): read more…

07.07.10 | comments (3) | in food, outside, people, resources, resources books + zines, road warrior, strategies, travel |

back on Thursday (maybe sooner) + duct tape

From on-the-the road in California and Seattle, in hotel rooms, and in flight, we’ve been reading your thoughtful ideas for taglines, posted in Comments or sent via email – lots of them! Even far from our home base, we feel connected by the community that has grown up around ‘the improvised life’ and awed at the generosity of its readers.

We were putting together a big post about it, with a list of ‘improvised life’ descriptors and taglines that happily boggle the mind, when we found ourselves exhausted, jet-lagged, running-on-empty. We need a rest, we thought…which is part of the deal, of writing, blogging, or making ANYTHING. You’ve got to give yourself permission to stop, and rest, in order to restore the flow. So we are, for a few days. We’ll be back on Thursday, having wandered around the Pike Place Market in Seattle, and drunk some excellent coffee, and recuperated from the red-eye home.

(Meanwhile, we’ve been taking notes on setting up a hotel room “camp” and strategies for surviving on the road. Stay tuned.)

We offer this photo of duct-tape Converse All-Stars as a symbol of what is possible in any given moment.

via BoingBoing

06.07.10 | comments (4) | in community, road warrior, rules for living, sightings |

guest blogger tim slavin on ‘american pickers’

We’re totally addicted to the History Channel’s “American Pickers” for many reasons but mostly because it taps into our primal need to hunt, hoard, share, trade, wander, and tell stories.

Antiques don’t magically appear in your local antique store or flea market. They are foraged and found and repaired by people like business partners Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, the shows unlikely stars. Mike is the thin buttoned-down Bud Abbott character while Frank is more Lou Costello with his day-old beard.

Together they wander the back roads of America in a white panel van in search of what most people see as “dumps”: broken down houses and garages you speed past on the way to the beach or the lake, that appear to be filled with junk. When Mike and Frank find one of these places, they’ll pull over and introduce themselves to the owner – older men, widows, daughters – who might be willing to let them forage through their stuff, hoping they’ll come across some treasures to buy, if not some compelling stories.

The result is great television full of improvisation. read more…

05.19.10 | comments (4) | in outside, paths + processes, reclaim, resources, resources blogs + sites, road warrior, sightings |

cool material: rubber paint (+ oscar diaz’ strap bag)

The very resourceful designer Oscar Diaz, who once made gorgeous utensils out of plastic bottles, devised a huge shopping tote called “Glueline” made out of a web of ordinary strapping material secured with rubber paint. We think the bag is beautiful though a bit flawed, since little things can fall through if they’re not held in plastic bags. But rubber paint is crazy inspired!!! We googled “rubber paint” right away to see if is something we could use at home. And we can. Here’s the thrilling description from Blurt It:

“Rubber paint is a durable, creamy, brushable layer of paint… It sticks on to the surface like a sticky, thick layer of gummy paint, but then when it dries; it has a nice level finish. It has an average hiding ability, but it can hide in one coat if it is thickly applied. It has a good bonding capacity. Rubber paint is versatile and sticks to such materials as wax paper and plastics. It leaves the existing flexibility of the wax paper or plastic bag intact.”

It’s basically the stuff Nina Saltman recommended when we asked her how Pascal Anson made his red-tipped silverware: Plasti Dip, used by carpenters to add a rubber coating to their tool handles. Just imagine… read more…

04.07.10 | comments (2) | in copy this!, identity, outside, reimagine, road warrior, wheels |

improvised street kitchens + utensils

In an email yesterday morning, a reader mentioned that her experiences living in developing countries led her to develop an approach similar to ‘the improvised life’s. We asked where she had lived and what that approach was and were knocked out by her answer:

“I lived in Vietnam for four years and Bolivia for three – amazing and fantastical places, where I learned many, many things, not least of which is how to view objects neutrally, so that you can see what they can really do beyond their stated purpose..Like the woman in a market in Hanoi who was peeling carrots and other ingredients, to sell as ready-made ingredients for folks to buy and make their own lotus blossom salad, and what did she use as a peeler? A chopstick, a razor blade and a cleverly-deployed rubber band: voila, vegetable peeler, third-world style….”

The jerry-rigged vegetable peeler reminded us of Kevin Kelly’s wonderful blog Street Use, about ingeniously improvised solutions, customizations and contraptions he and his friends have spotted in their travels around the world:

“In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, ‘The street finds its own uses for things.‘” read more…

02.24.10 | comments | in food, outside, reclaim, road warrior, sightings |

the benefits of wandering (+ multi-use notecards)

Constance Old sent this account of her unexpected walkabout through Philadelphia, when she followed one thing after another, after another, after another…to discover a neighborhood full of food and cool people doing their thing. It reminded us how hunger and curiosity can cause the road to open up in the most unexpected way. And how plain old wandering is an essential element in a creative life…(not to mention all the things you can use a well-designed notecard for)….

” I went down to Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to drop off work at Da Vinci Art Alliance at S. 6th and Catharine Streets. Although I grew up in Philadelphia, I have not spent much time there in the past twenty years. I had heard from my daughter’s twenty-something drum teacher from Brooklyn that Philadelphia is called the “sixth borough” at the moment because apparently there is a pretty happening music scene there.

Anyway, after I dropped off the work, I ambled along Catharine Street and immediately happened upon what looked like a gem of a restaurant: Little Fish. I went in and discovered that Little Fish holds about 16 people and serves the most delicious, you guessed it, fish. When I asked for a piece of paper to record the delicious food I had eaten, I was presented with the lovely note card (see photo), which is the same paper on which they write out the menu for the night. read more…

02.19.10 | comments (1) | in community, food, paths + processes, road warrior, sightings, travel |

duct tape repair of bear-ravaged plane

We don’t know where we would be without duct tape, the ultimate solution for many a seeming disaster. Just when we think we’ve imagined its possibilities, a friend emailed an article from the South Africa Times’ about a bush pilot in Alaska who neglected to clean his 1958 Piper Cub after a long fishing trip. The fishy aroma attracted a grizzly bear who chewed and clawed the wood-and-fabric plane apart (as well as its tires) trying to find the source of the delicious smell, then went on its way.

The resourceful pilot radioed for three cases of duct tape, rolls of cellophane and two new tires to be flown in so he could repair the plane and and fly home, which he did; witness the before-and-after pictures!

Duct tape is one of those everyday items we don’t think about much, but it has quite a story, read more…

01.31.10 | comments (3) | in materials, resources, road warrior, sightings, tools, travel |

(bowls of) water music from India

My friend Peggy Markel, who designs unique food and culture adventures, recently went on a scouting trip in Rajasthan India. She traveled from luxurious palaces to rustic countryside, taking in its monumental contrasts.

For Peggy, food is always about context, and this little film shows a fragment of the culture she was exploring, as revealing as its food, and as essential to understanding it.

Here is the story Peggy told me of how she stumbled on these street musicians and their improvised instrument made of bowls of water. read more…

01.14.10 | comments (3) | in art, housewares, road warrior, sightings, travel |

‘everything is so amazing, but nobody is happy’

This clip of the the comedian Louis C.K. riffing on Conan O’Brien’s show is a rare combination of REALLY funny and totally wise/smart/true. It is about looking around at what we have, recognizing miracles, counting blessings…

via the Technium, part Kevin Kelly’s vast and amazing site.

12.17.09 | comments (6) | in media, people, road warrior, rules for living, sightings, travel |

hand as notepad

Aeioux via Flickr (CC)*

I started thinking about using my hand as a notepad, as I did when I was a kid, and began noticing people with notes scrawled and scribbled on their hands. The manager of the local fish market had phone numbers running up the back of his hand in blue ball point. At the Bauhaus show at the Museum of Modern Art, a teacher ushered in a group of four young women and started talking about a weaving by Anni Albers; one whipped out a razor point pen and started taking notes on her hand. It’s a convenience that I overlooked for years until I needed to remember to take my laptop’s powercord to a meeting, and couldn’t find a post-it, so I wrote a note on my hand… read more…

11.23.09 | comments (4) | in copy this!, resources, road warrior, tools |

pop-up urban lunch (and other) counters

In my Inbox this morning, the ever-illuminating Manhattan User’s Guide alerted me to a new blog called Pop-Up Lunch. It explores ways New York’s nontraditional public spaces, like sidewalks, steps, and fire hydrants can be transformed into places to eat lunch. Writes blogger AP:

“This blog follows a series of Pop Up Lunches I have staged (some big, some small) and my development of mobile eating tools designed for the sidewalks of NYC. Ultimately, I hope that my efforts might inspire even a handful of my fellow urbanites to reconsider the potential for lunch – to be a joyful daily event – and for the sidewalks of NYC to serve as more than just pathways.”

Pop Up Lunch is totally after ‘the improvised life’s heart. You could easily apply its innovations – and certainly its thinking – to just about any city, and expand the uses for make-shift, jerry-rigged or impromptu surfaces: read more…

11.18.09 | comments (2) | in cheap + great, copy this!, outside, principles, road warrior, sightings |