Wherein I Keep My Stuff Dry in a Downpour

Last week I rode my bike from Toronto to Québec City and back for the 81st IETF meeting.  This is only the second long ride I've done (the first was to Ottawa in May), and the first where I didn't have complete control over which days I'd be on the road – and thus, no control over what weather I'd be riding in.  Seeing as it was a work trip, I'd have to carry my laptop, and so some means of keeping it dry would be necessary.

Since a laptop won't fit in my wee Ogio saddle bags, and neither they nor my laptop backpack are waterproof (and I didn't want to wear a backpack for 900km anyway) I needed something I could strap to my bike that would fit a long narrow piece of electronics, and keep it dry.

Rain gear, water, and street boots in the saddle bags, spare gloves,
camera, maps, etc. in the tank bag, everything else in the Seal Line

My usual stop for such things is my local MEC, as they rarely disappoint.  This visit was successful as always, and I walked out with a 75 litre Seal Line zip dry bag.  At first glance in the store, and while packing, it seemed to be the ideal bag for what I wanted.  It's flat and wide, carries easily, holds a week of clothes plus my laptop, laptop bag, and some assorted cables and other gear, and most importantly zips air tight.  In fact, after strapping it to my bike I found I had to unzip it to let it deflate a bit.. this made the difference between it poking me in the back all the time and compressing neatly out of my way up on the passenger seat.  But, it hadn't really been tested yet... and it would be tested.  Oh, how it would be tested.

On the ride home this past Friday, on the leg between Ottawa and Toronto, I ran into a pretty nasty rain storm.  Rain wasn't entirely unexpected.. I'd been watching some weather move East toward me from Toronto for a couple days.. but the amount of rain was a huge surprise.  I haven't even been outside in a rain storm like this in a long time, let alone out on the highway.   As I was passing North of Kingston on Highway 7, Kingston was busy closing down several streets due to flooding. It was some nasty rain.

But lo, and behold, upon my arrival home I found the inside of the dry bag to be.. well.. dry.  Bone dry.  Where the Ogio bags and me were both soaked, and even my supposedly rain-proof tank bag had some moisture in it, my laptop was saved.   Success!

Now if only I could solve the problem of drying out the inside of my helmet in the middle of a downpour.

Screencasting for OSX

I spent some time this afternoon evaluating several screen casting apps for my Mac. It cost me a bunch of time, and a little bit of money, so I thought I'd share my notes to potentially save someone some grief in the future.

For those who haven't seen the term before, "screen casting" is recording video of all or part of a computer display, usually with some sort of voice over, for the purpose of doing a demonstration to be viewed at a later date. It's often done to demonstrate the use, or features, of a piece of software, but lately it's also gaining popularity for sharing things like gaming experiences on video sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo.

There appear to be all sorts of applications for doing this today, where there were only one or two a couple of years ago, and they have a fairly wide range in features and quality. Some of the applications I looked at also do "screen grab" (capturing a still image of the display) but I pretty much ignored this in all of them since MacOS comes with a perfectly good utility for this (Grab.app). Full reviews below the cut.

Where Wild Things Return Us Our Childhoods

Last spring I directed a bunch of excitement this way about the first trailer for Where The Wild Things Are, based on the book of the same name by Maurice Sendak. I finally got to see the movie last night, just barely squeaking in before it left the main theatres in the city.

In addition to the excitement, I approached the whole thing with a little bit of fear, too. Wild Things is an iconic book from my childhood, and I had to wonder how it was going to be possible to fill a couple of hours from a 350 word story and still be true to the original. Oh, also while not managing to look distractingly silly with people in Wild Thing suits.

Happily, not only was the movie not a disappointment, it completely outstripped all my hopes. Jonze and Eggers managed to add depth and detail to Max's life without breaking the feel of the original story. They painted a picture of a wildly struggling young boy with all the fear and loneliness of a difficult life at home and the pure happiness and joy of his refuge in simplicity of childhood games and his own imagination.

Max Records was a brilliant pick for Max. He played the role honestly and perfectly, and incidentally, wins my award for best actor's name ever.

And the Wild Thing suits weren't distracting or silly in the least.