For those of you who follow this blog, I have not abandoned ship at all.
Actually, I have been working really hard on it.
I am spending a good bit of time not to get my Django tutorial done.
I hope to put it up today or tomorrow at the latest.
Things are going well for see-namibia.com and I always have to give it the most attention. But this is the blog I love to work on the most, and so be assured, there is more on it's way.
Over the next few weeks I have a number of things to do. I am going on a short tour, which I'll post a little about afterwards. I might also go to a few talks - which are mainly Namibian tourism related things. And I have lots of website stuff to work on. But, I'll still be here, and post a few random things of interest (well, to me) for you to read, so stick around if you want to hear more of my random mumbling.
Okay, just for fun, let me teach you how to teach yourself how to do handstands in one year.
Of course, nobody writes a blog post like that - who wants to do handstands anyway.
Or is it some metaphor?
Well, I'm one of those strange people who actually does exercise regularly, and one thing I always try to do
is to find a way to make it a little different - interesting.
This year (ish) I am teaching myself to do handstands.
Earlier on this blog I published a post about
my workout, and would have left it at that.
But a visiting friend had a look at my blog and asked about these handstands.
So, I'll tell you about it - in a tutorial form.
Up until last year I spent a lot of time walking, especially in hills and dunes.
I found that one thing that made a huge difference is having a good sense of balance, and I
want to give myself a chance to keep that.
So I added handstands to my workout.
Since I wrote the workout post, I have decided to cut out the handstands on Monday and Friday, when I don't work out at all
but to increase the number of handstands I do with each workout.
I aim for about 10 each day.
It takes me some time, as I am doing most of them for about one minute now.
Okay, the how to part.
Years ago I worked through a book on handstands and got really far with it, and decided, probably now almost twenty years later, to give it a shot again.
I couldn't find the book again, but remember the rough progression.
Here is how I am doing it.
First, I guess, I should make a disclaimer.
Handstands make you be upside-down.
The majority of your body's weight is above your neck.
You can fall on your head and break your neck, or something else like that if you follow the advice given below.
Don't do that, okay, and if you do, don't blame me.
Oh, and if you wear loose clothing, your shirt might fall down, exposing a bit of your body you may wish to keep hidden.
Okay, we are going to start off by a wall.
I don't think you need mattresses and stuff like that - do you.
If you are unsure of your strength, the best thing is to have a strong friend help you out.
I sometimes do it with my boys and I hold them the whole way.
Now, stand facing the wall, but a good two meters or so back from it.
Before we fling ourselves into a handstand, you need to know where you are going to put
your hands.
Try to get about the length of your forearm and hand away from the wall.
If you need to measure it out, place your arm on the ground, with the tips of your fingers against the wall.
You will need to aim roughly where your elbow is at.
If you are to close to the wall, you are going to bump your head… to far and you will fall over forward.
Okay, step forward with one leg, and place your hands on the ground, just slightly wider than shoulder width
apart.
Keep your fingers just slightly bent, and spread them out just a little.
Your eyes should look at the point where the wall and the floor meet.
Kick your legs up until they touch the wall - gently now.
Most likely on your first few attempts you will just kick up and come right down,
perhaps without reaching the wall.
That's fine.
Usually with my first handstand in a while, my nose feels funny and I sneeze.
Don't worry about that - your head isn't going to explode.
After a while you'll get over that feeling.
Okay, for a few months that is all you are going to do (remember - this is a one year program).
At first, concentrate on actually getting to the wall and being able to hold yourself there.
Work up to being able to do that for about 20 seconds or so.
Concentrate on getting your body into a really good position - look at pics of gymnasts and copy that.
Then start to concentrate on your hand strength.
Each time you go up to the wall, kick away from it a little, and try to balance yourself with the strength
of your fingers.
You are not going to be able to do much at first, and don't overdo it.
Do about 10 each day - four about five days of the week.
It takes very little time.
Once you can actually get away from the wall for more than a second or so, your focus should change to
trying to get your time up.
We are aiming for one minute away from the wall.
This is going to take you some time.
Once you have the one minute done, now you need to start getting away from the wall.
Now is the time to get a big mattress, out on your lawn or somewhere with space.
With care not to break bones, start trying to do handstands without a wall.
I am assuming you did the forward role back when you were in school - and know how to tuck in
your head when you go over forwards.
If you don't, learn that first.
Don't hurt your neck, please.
Once you have that done, work up to a minute like that - i.e., one minute handstand without using a wall to start.
Once you have that down, you are ready to start adding things.
The first thing is to get yourself to be able to hold a handstand in various ways.
Start with a book under one hand.
Increase the size of the book, eventually a few books, then a step, and so on, until you can balance yourself with your hands in different positions.
You can also start trying to do a handstand on parallel bars, if you have something like that available.
You can also try to get yourself up without swinging your legs.
By the time you get to here, you'll know what I mean.
And then, well… do this, I guess:
I know, I know… it looks just like me, but this is actually some other dude who successfully followed my tutorial.
I have been busy doing a few different things the last couple of days, and have deliberately tried to get away from my computer.
On Saturday is my eldest son's (Mark) seventh birthday party.
We are doing it at home, hiring one of those jumping castle things, and then we will braai with family in the afternoon.
I am also polishing up my Gimp skills to create an invite, but I don't want to say to much, certain people may read my blog
So, my plan for the day is to stay far away from my computer, clean the garden and stuff like that.
Maybe I'll put up some of the pics of the weekend (at least on Flickr).
I have added a photo section to See Namibia at see-namibia.com/pictures/.
Go have a look and give me some feedback.
I did already ask my Facebook Friends what they thought and will still make some tweaks to how it all looks and works, based on their feedback - but not till next week.
I also have lots of bits and peaces of stuff done for that site and for Sandcurves, so next week will be a busy one.
Enjoy the weekend, I'll be blogging again on Monday.
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about CSS.
On the one hand, trying to get your website to work in all the available browsers, and perhaps even worrying about cellphones and stuff like that, it gets tricky.
People have different screens, people set different fonts as their defaults and otherwise change the way they use the web.
I like to sometimes have a text editor open (emacs) while using a browser at the same time, and at times I really enjoy working in Emacs using w3m to browse - and if the website was done with a layout based in tables, that doesn't work.
I would have to be a crazy man to think that my css is much good, but it is not about the artistry for me, it is about getting certain things to work, about a logic problem.
And it is this side of CSS that is fun to me.
So here are some of the things I have learned about CSS over the last two years or so since I started building websites:
Draw a picture first - Draw the boxes and think about how to do that in CSS.
Separate Style Sheets - I tried to build See Namibia first with styles in the header. Then you change a bit for one page, do this here, that there, and soon you have no clue what you are doing, updating one thing means changing it throughout your site. Don't try to do it that way - It is mad. I suppose you could use an 'include' to bring it in, but that is just the same thing as having separate style sheets. Why bother. Just do it with external style-sheets and get on with it.
Get away from 'negative margins' and CSS hacks - There was a time that I thought you can't do a three column layout with CSS, without doing some stupid things. It isn't true. You can build a page with whatever layout you want, with just nested div tags.
Keep it simple - in a couple different ways. There was a time when I put in every 'margin:0' that I could. When you go back and try to edit it, you have to wade through all this CSS that does nothing to find the one thing that you need to fix. Actually, when your site looks great, go into your CSS file and delete one item at a time and see if anything changes on your site. Do that until you have absolute the least CSS code you can get away with. It is going to save you time in the future, and will make your website that fraction faster - with a smaller CSS file-size to load.
Organize - madly! Divide up the CSS file as you need to (perhaps say smaller projects, just divide up the classes, regular tags and ids. In bigger projects, divide by page section. Then alphabetize the tags within that section and alphabetize within the actual tag's styling.
It sounds like a lot of work, but it isn't - not if you take it over the time that you take to build a site.
It takes long the first couple days, but after that it actually starts to save you a massive amount of time.
Indent - except for the tag line, indent everything else. You can do one long line, which looks less 'smart' but is still really easy to browse, but makes finding the tag easier.
Build for Firefox - build for the browser that is closest to where the standards are moving. I am not an expert, but I would say build for Gecko browsers, then Webkit (Chrome, Safari) and if you really need, then do the separate CSS files for Internet Explorer. If you can just get away with one stylesheet and not have to build and fix, all the better. It may limit the look of your site, but with some creativity you can still make it look good. You can do things like rounding of corners for the browsers that support it, and just not worry about if for the older IE browser.
The most important thing for me is to have a CSS file that I can throw away and build an new one, or change any one thing I want, without having to really dig through things to much. When you add a new app to your website, you should be able to do some simple additions just to get things straight, and you should be able to use dynamic stylesheets to do things like website testing. Then CSS not only becomes a necessary part of building a website, but becomes really fun.
Warning: Dangerous levels of introspection and many warn out adjectives.
I have been working hard today to build a new section to see-namibia.com and hope to have it up and going soon (maybe still tonight), but I am kind of spent.
I have been working solid, sometimes from 6h30 in the morning till past midnight, stopping only for those things that I have to (a tweet or two, water the lawn, food, shower, and the daily outing to pick up the two boys from school, show Esmerelda that I still live). But Esmerelda works crazy hard too - supporting both of us while I try to get Frantic Naturalist to float).
When you are building a company, I think you think long and hard about what you are doing (and if you are going to be able to pay the bills). But you (or me, at least) get a little nostalgic and think about all the things that brought you to where you are.
I thought I would call this post "In the bushes with friends" but thought that would give you the wrong idea (smile).
I don't want to tell a history lesson, either - I'll bore you with that later.
Just thought I would do a quick summary of where the idea of Frantic Naturalist came from.
I had some guests in December when I did the two week stint at Sossusvlei (SDL), and when they got on the plane before returning home they asked out the window "Is there any way to contact you?"
I shouted back, "yeah, just Google 'frantic naturalist' and you'll find me.
Their quick response - "Frantic Naturalist, perfect name for you"
So, Frantic Naturalist has grown on me and fits who I am today (well, when I am not being a geek behind the computer).
I didn't earn that name quickly, it took some time.
I'm not sure if you want to be called Frantic Naturalist, but I love it (as a company name, not to be called that myself.)
But, to get to the point, I didn't really mean that name to be about me.
I have give the name for my company some thought (like 20 years of thought).
I always knew I was going to do something like this.
We chatted about it at school.
Anyway, I wanted to be clear that the company is not just about nature.
Huh?
Yes, I wanted the company to be about people.
About people who cannot wait to get out in the bush and discover it, understand it, photograph, explore… lovers of nature.
The name 'Frantic Naturalist' already comes with me for some time - I didn't like 'fanatical naturalist' or 'crazy naturalist'.
I wanted that sense of urgency - like "man, I can't wait to go out on our first game drive..walk...boat trip"
Of course, when it came time to register the domain, it was available, surprise, surprise. I still have the website, frantic-naturalist.com, though the site needs a total re-build.
Anyway, why this focus on people?
It is very simple, the best, best, best experiences of nature I have had, have been experiences I shared with others.
So these are the people to blame for my wacky company end:
Past guests (none of whom would likely have found this website, I would guess) - I have been such a lucky person to have taken the most awesome people in the world around the bushes of Namibia. I have had the most fantastic experience of working with guests that I not so much guide, but rather share this amazing, almost surreal, shared experience of nature. I am not lying, either. I have guided some people with slightly less enthusiasm, of course, but mostly it has been the other way. People get sucked in and we have a great experience. Of course I have the luxury of having done mainly very upmarket private guiding in the last few years, but really, it is not just those people. I struck it lucky and have learned so very much.
People I worked with. Everyone. Good or bad, I learned from everyone. There were some bad, really bad, and I have sat through many a disciplinary hearing as chairman and learned all that side of things too.
But there is very much the other side of it as well. I have worked with some of the coolest people. I have had nearly 20 guides work under me over the years - I want all of them back. I still know many of them today. My guiding team (that I left at the lodge and trained up) are still there, and still phone me just to chat.
Training teaches you so much. When you train, you have to be sure your own field knowledge is good. But it is more than that, you also have to teach new guides to not only tell people stuff, but to share the bush with people.… To create an experience every time you go out. That is why we did so well with Trip Advisor in those days - and they still continue to do well today.
There were also the guys who trained me in the early years. Very special people.
My buddies in my school years and nature conservation studying time. Thanks to Facebook and the Internet I have been able to get back in touch with many of them, and they still help me out today.
We didn't worry about passion or creating experience… we were to busy having a good one.
At school we ran around the Mau escarpment and in the Rift Valley. My sister told me that our class was known as "bushmen" for years after we had left. A lot of us enjoyed being out there.
At Saasveld it was much the same, except perhaps we knew more of what we were enthusiastic about.
And I started birding for real (or, I started keeping a list).
Our "Africa Club Nights" where discussion was restricted to a few specific topics, were such fun.
There have been some special friends since then, like the astronomers.
The last time I was running around the desert was with my buddy Frank, who took many of the pictures I use for my avatars and the great Namtoge video I have on the See Namibia blog.
Of course, family as well. My parents are more bush people than me.
So, it's with that cool background, with those cool people, that I am looking forward to building up my little Safari Business.
So, building my new website and starting with just bookings, that is just a stepping stone.
I want to try hard to deal direct as much as possible, without involving other agents, I want to deal with people.
Frantic Naturalist, bushes and friends - that is what I want it to be like.
