Want to get as much as possible out of the video coverage of the 2012 Dakar rally from ASO? Finding it hard to get to the good stuff over at http://www.dakar.com? Well, in that case I’ve got it all sorted for you. Below you’ll find a list of all the English videos posted by the official Dakar organization on YouTube – in a structured manner! At the least I’d recommend watching the Stage summary and the Magazine for every stage, however all the other material is really interesting as well! The Stage summary is usually around three minutes long, and the Magazine is about a minute and a half. What I find is a real pity is that none of the material is available in HD, the nature shots would’ve been awesome in a better resolution and bitrate. Oh well, can’t have it all without being there I guess. =) Here goes:
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Den här gången på svenska: Den vuxna varianten av att slicka på en stolpe under vintern är att vaxa pungen. Med skillnaden att här kan inte morsan baila ut dig. Share
Just saw the season finale of the new series Homeland and I’ve got to say that it’s a really good series! It’s managed to keep me more on edge during the whole first season than a lot of other series. Up until the last episode of this season they kept an intriguing story line with a few unanticipated twists left right to the end, aka – cliffhanger. I’ll be waiting for season two now! :) Share
 
Moving from uncertainty to certainty via doubtPosted on December 23rd, 2011 by Fredrik in Methodology, ProductivityRecently I came across a situation in Argentina where we needed to fill up our car with gas, but none of the gas stations around had any. Given that we were on a road trip through Patagonia our knowledge of the local surroundings was limited to a paper map and a TomTom device with a few points of interest. As you’ll read later on, this situation presented quite a lot of uncertainty, and my learnings on how to create certainty could be summarized like this:
It all began with our arrival at a Petrobras station in Sarmiento with a half full tank. Pretty soon it became clear that the gas station had run out of gas, but a local was quick to help out with the information that the gas station in Facundo (about 90 kilometers further in the direction that we were travelling in) had gas available and that the refill in Sarmiento wouldn’t arrive sooner than 1,5 hours. Knowing that one full tank of gas takes us approximately 440 kilometers we knew that we’d easily reach Facundo on what we had left. So, we drove the 90 kilometers to Facundo only to arrive in a town that never had a gas station (and probably never will). Yet another local in Facundo told us that we ought to travel even further along the road to Gobernador Costa, claiming that we would easily make it there with our, now quarter full tank. A quick check on the paper map revealed that the distance to Gobernador Costa was way longer than we’d manage on what gas we had left now. So we decided to drive back to Sarmiento. Slowly. Back in Sarmiento it became apparent that the refill of the gas station had not occurred, and now we only had about 3-4 liters of fuel left in the tank. That pretty much sets the scene. Stuck in Sarmiento:
There are different ways of approaching a situation like this, of which the least effective one is to act passive and resort to raising “what if…” questions. Those could be “What if there is no refill today?”, “What if we need to stay here over night?”, “What if there is no gas i Villa Hermoso?”. Basically, a lot of “What if”-s and no signs of devising a plan. Instead of being ruled by passiveness we decided that being proactive and get an action list in order with the ambition to be able to act on it immediately would be the best thing to do. What information do we have? What is our current goal? What information do we need to achieve our goal? How do we get that information? What is our alternative plan? Breaking it down: What information do we have? What we knew is more or less described in the previous bullet list, so nothing more to add here. What is our current goal? In this case it was rather simple to answer that question: to fill up the car with gas as soon as possible. But given other circumstances (or facts) it could already have been something like “get a room for the night”. What information do we need to achieve our goal? This section, and the next, is probably the most interesting ones in this blog post since they aim at attacking the primary problem at hand by breaking it down with a series of very concrete questions and actions. In this particular case:
How would you arrive at a list like this? You just need to take the “What if”s that are floating around and make proper questions of them. Sure, a few of the questions above are the result of previous questions, but all in all it’s not hard for a human being in need to come up with questions. The only real effort here is to prioritize the list so that you start working on the most important part first. How do we get that information? I’ll re-use the numbers of the questions above for clarity:
What is our alternative plan? Looking at the information gathering process above and checking the current time it soon became pretty obvious that we’d need to get a hotel room, and in the end that’s what we ended up doing. To ensure that we’d actually get a room and not have to sleep in the car we decided that we had to start finding a room pretty soon, otherwise everyone else would’ve gotten to the rooms before us. Having the alternative plan ready and knowing when to act on it is necessary in order to stay one step ahead. Your alternative plan might not be one you like, but get yourself warmed up to the idea and don’t ignore it. In total we stayed in Sarmiento for about two and a half days. Each and every day one of us in the group would check around the gas stations to see if there were any news regarding a refill. Other than that there’s nothing much to do other than accepting the facts of life and that every other option has been identified and worked on. Wrap up It all ended on a Monday morning when after having decided that we’d arrive early and be first in line at the Petrobras station for the delivery that most likely would arrive that day. The ironic ending to this story is that while sitting in the car at the Petrobras station we saw a truck from YPF pass on the main road. It looked like it was heavily loaded and luckily another member in the group who had already begun walking towards the YPF station for information could call us and confirm that the truck was pulling in. So we decided to abandon Petrobras and bet for success at the YPF station. And success we had! Share
Are you qualified to fix everything?Posted on December 13th, 2011 by Fredrik in Methodology, Miscellaneous, ProductivityA couple of days ago I got a flat tyre on my bicycle. In and of itself that’s not really a big problem, I consider myself handy enough to fix that myself. However, what was a problem was time; I really needed my bike the next day and for the rest of the week and I didn’t really have any time in my already busy schedule to fiddle around with a punctured inner tube. Also, I don’t have a clue as to which sizes of inner tubes there are and if there is a chance of me getting the wrong one. So I decided that I would only bother with taking the wheel off the bike and then let someone else fix the flat tire using any means necessary. This seemed very reasonable partly because there is a bicycle shop around the block from where I currently work. So at 10 am when the shop had opened I went over to see if they could help me. Little did I know that in three minutes flat and 170 Swedish krona later I was equipped with a new inner tube mounted on my wheel – ready to be put back on my bike! The moral of the story is basically this:
After having been checked out by a neurologist due to suspicion of multiple sclerosis (which no one really thought was plausible anyway) I’m now waiting for step two in the investigation of my hanging eye lid. If only they could stay on schedule, that would be awesome. I’m guessing that either way it’ll end up with some form of surgery. It’d be interesting to see myself in the mirror again with that stern look I was able to serve before the eye lid started out its life of lazy. ;) Share
And today was the day that I managed to check the last item off my list of short term challenges regarding wall climbing. The first one was to get all the way to the top of the tunnel and the second one was to get past the unnecessarily large overhang using technique instead of brute force. Overhang, you’ve got nothing on me now! Share
These are real bad times bro, we’ve got people playing stringed instruments! It’s the end of days!
-Four Lions Share
In the category “memorable quotes” I’ll be borrowing this one: Might seem hard to live by if you don’t know who the winner is, but it might be able to tell you you’re doing things wrong if you wake up one day and find yourself backing the loser. Or at least it might make you think about who’s the winner and who’s the loser. Share |
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