Minimalist Moment: Lose Everything? Not I!

As I am sure you are aware, there have been several bouts of "rioting" here in London recently. I say this in the loosest sense, because it's not really been in protest of anything, it's actually just been mindless violence and looting.

And this is what worried me the most. Peoples homes were getting set on fire, for nothing. Like a lot of other Londoners, I live above shops in a big old building. Fire safety? Didn't exist when these were built! So in short, the plan was to get out. FAST. So, when word on the street was that the mobs were coming to my area, I got a little concerned. I thought it would be sensible to just have a quick scoot around the flat to go over an exit strategy in case I/we needed to get out of dodge in a hurry. Luck favours the prepared.

So I decided to sleep clothed, and pack a bag with everything I would need to get by:
  1. 2x underpants.
  2. 2x socks.
  3. Pair of jeans.
  4. 2x TShirts
  5. Passport
  6. Cash/Cards
I also packed my Macbook Pro and iPad since I had plenty of room.
Then it dawned on me. I looked around my room and thought:
"Everything else can go up in flames, and I really wouldn't care."
Another beautiful "minimalist moment".
- Posted from my iPad, please excuse any typos.

Comments

  1. JonR3 November 2011 at 08:34

    sorry rob, but a world in which someone has *two* state of the art portable computers to save from a fire, and considers this to be "minimal", is precisely the kind of world in which we can expect to see rioting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rob Cooper8 November 2011 at 00:25

    **@JonR** - Minimalism isn't about going without, it's about only having things that truly deliver value. I am a geek and love and use my tech all the time. Everything else is kind of meaningless to me, so I get rid of it!

    It's a common pattern to see minimalists who just have the basics (few items of clothing) and then have 1 or 2 items that are almost their "personality", be it a moleskin for doodles and writing, or a laptop for geeking.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GTD: Biphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 4

Physical State/Tiredness Same as yesterday really, awoke feeling really fresh and alert first thing in the morning. I again took a nap at work at 1230-1300. There has been a fair bit of interest about the napping at work so I thought I would take a minute to talk about it here (see below). Other than that, I did awake from my afternoon nap rather tired and groggy (took me 15-20 mins to get head together) but I actually think this is related to food since I ate a rather large pizza before sleeping.. :\ I have also found that even though it is great having the brain running longer, it can equally be hard to shut off. I have started going to bed with a book at 0200 so I can start to wind down to sleep mode for 0300. Staying up to 0300 is NOT a good idea, you really need to be going to sleep “ FOR 0300 ” not “ AT 0300 ”. Napping at Work Here’s what I do: At about 1200, I do a quick scoot around the team to see if there is anything they need from me, I then tie off any loose end...
Read more

Visual Studio: Unknown Build Error (HRESULT 0x80131515)

Image
If you are receiving this really informative error message in Visual Studio and looking for a solution, I hope the following can help you. I spent wasted a fair bit of time trying to figure this out. Funny thing is, it’s actually quite common in the post-XP(i.e. Vista and Windows 7) era (I’ve had it myself several times now).. The Cause After much digging, it turns out the issue is caused by the file blocking placed on downloaded assemblies. For example, I had the following after downloading the binaries for Autofac and adding it to my project: Error    1    Unknown build error, 'Could not load file or assembly 'file:///c:\{Project}\lib\Autofac.dll' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)'     {Project} To Fix The good news, is this is pretty easy to fix (as are most problems when you know the cause!). Open up the file properties dialog (right click in Explorer ...
Read more

TDD – Getting Started with Test-Driven Development

I have been expressing interest in getting up and running with TDD for quite some time, probably the best part of nearly two years in fact! (wow). I have always struggled to get going though. In my previous job I was pretty much flying solo, and even though I am in a 6-man team in my new job, we still are pretty isolated (not my choice!). Every time I have gone to the programming community and asked “how do I get started?” I pretty much got the same response wherever I went - “Just do it”. This was real frustrating because it can be so overwhelming, if you don’t know where to start, how can you start? So I started to dig deeper for as many TDD/Automated Testing sites as I could, even if it was pages and pages of stuff that I didn’t want to know, if I got one little snippet of something useful, I would be happy. I came across some great sites (links will follow). Some were very, very simple. Almost so simple that they don’t really cover the testing, they cov...
Read more