I took the opportunity to go camping at Mirror Lake with my brother & his girlfriend this past Friday. Mirror Lake is a beautiful place, but it helped me realize something about camping. I’m an Eagle Scout and I really love nature… but I don’t function properly without a decent sleep, a shower and a proper toilet. Luckily, this trip was pretty well stocked: my brother owns one of those Pop-up Tent Trailers, so I had a reasonable bed (a converted table/bed… actually better than some beds I had in Australia). There were even public toilets, but as anyone who has used public toilets at parks can tell you, it isn’t the best experience. Sort of a glorified Port-o-lou.
Something about camping just doesn’t sit well with me. As I said, I love nature, being in the mountains, etc, and I’ve camped hundreds of times. However, I guess I’m a city slicker at heart. I love a good bed. I don’t function very well in the morning without a shower (it’s not a thing of stinking or being dirty… my mind just doesn’t function well without being sprayed with water and lathered with soap… well, I don’t wash my mind, but you get the idea). And, I much prefer some privacy and some Charmin to a group of trees and some leaves.
And incidentally, Charmin has a horridly inaccessible website. The above address took me about 10 minutes to get, and only after I opened the “landing page” (their terminology via their javascript files) in Internet Explorer (nothing else seemed to work… ugh… do I need to teach them about the DOM?).
Bowers- I completely agree. I haven’t gone camping in ages. Other than fighting off the pollen and convincing my body that it isn’t really allergic through the use of an over the counter drug cocktail I really enjoy the outdoors. I just don’t like not being able to take a warm shower or a decent crap.
BTW, this is Elder Anderson from your first zone. How the hell was the rest of your mission? I decided to check out the link to your page from the profile on the alumni site-
The website looks great. I know nothing about web standards, except that failure to follow them means my phone is a lot less useful for checking out stuff online than it should be. Freakin tables
haha… awesome. I had been wondering who this random “Mike” character was. The rest of my mission was… uh… instructional. Let’s just say that I learned a lot about people, and that I’m glad I’m done. 😉
As for web standards, there is a great book on what they are and why designers should use them. It’s called Designing With Web Standards. I’m about halfway through it. Great book (and not boring like normal “tech” books).