Owen Brisby

The reason the two numbers exist is that a tent has to be comparable on a shelf next to a competitor, and the competitor is quoting minimum weight too, so nobody can stop. It is not exactly dishonest, it is just a number for comparing tents rather than for planning your back. Compare like for like when shopping and weigh your own kit when packing.

I lost two full seasons to being stubborn about this. Bought grafted tomato plants, bought a fancy feed, built a little frame, all in a bed with about four and a half hours. Got a handful of fruit both years and blamed feeding, then blamed watering, then blamed the variety. Third year I put the same plants in a big pot on the front step, which is concrete and gets sun until six, and I could not keep up with them. What I actually spent that on was two years of the bed, not the price of the plants.

Geometrically: three planes. Unique solution means they meet at one point. Determinant zero means at least one plane is redundant or parallel to the others, so you either get a shared line or nothing. Drawing that once made the algebra stop feeling arbitrary for me.

How do you decide which one in five is worth an email? Everything I ship feels important on the day I ship it.

There is a second thing hiding in your numbers: 35km across four runs means every run is roughly the same length. Your long run is not long. Push one of them out to 12 or 14km, keep it slow, and leave the other three alone. That plus one hard session was worth about 90 seconds off my 5K in a spring, at 44 years old.

For weekend hikes you may not need GPS on the watch at all. Phone GPS with a proper offline map app is better for actual navigation and you're carrying the phone regardless. I bought a GPS watch for hiking and now use it for the altimeter and nothing else.

Seconding the wait on otos. I lost three by adding them to a month old tank and I still feel bad about it.

Heavy triples or fives on one lift, then eight to twelve on everything else. Do not add a day, add sets to the days you have.

Write the worst possible version. Genuinely bad, in a separate file called rubbish.docx, no citations, sentences like 'then we did the thing and it was weird'. Every decent chapter I have was once that file. The sick feeling attaches to producing something that will be judged, and nothing in rubbish.docx will ever be judged by anybody.

The other half of the problem is under you, not over you. A 900g bag on a cheap foam pad at freezing will still be cold, because the insulation beneath you is crushed flat by your own weight. R-value on the pad matters more than most people expect at 0C, and it's usually the cheaper of the two fixes. I'd take a mid-range bag and a good pad over a great bag and a thin one every time.

Worth knowing some providers block outbound port 25 by default for exactly this reason, so you might not even get the chance to make the mistake.

Mechanically this is less scary than it feels. Creating a new price does nothing to existing subscriptions - they keep billing the price object they were created with until you explicitly change them. So step one is just: make the new price, point checkout at it, done. The old cohort keeps paying $19 with no action from you.

Two traps. First, do not archive the old price if you might still want to use it, and do check what your payment links and any hosted pricing table are actually pointing at - it is very easy to 'raise prices' and keep selling the old price for a month because a link still references the old id. Second, when you eventually do migrate someone, set the proration behaviour deliberately. The default will prorate mid-cycle and generate credits and small invoices you did not plan for. Migrating at the renewal boundary avoids the whole mess.

Shape I would use: old rate holds for twelve months, announced now, then a move with at least 30 days notice.

Exactly. And in practice most first trips are heavy because of fear items, not because of the tent. Three spare tops, a second pot, a book, a huge power bank.

The separate account is the single best piece of advice in this thread. Once the rent lands in your ordinary current account it becomes income in your head and the capital expenses feel like disasters rather than budgeted costs.

Audiobook. Short bursts of reading were impossible for me for months but I could walk and listen for an hour. Same book, completely different accessibility, and walking was the one thing I was already doing.

It is a ceiling that came out of military and scouting guidance, not a target, and treating it as a target is how people end up carrying 13kg on a trip that needed 8. For a three day hut trip with short water carries you should be well under it. The rule only becomes relevant when you are carrying five days of food and three litres of water at once.

The thing that stopped me was assuming I had to sow them into compost to test. Bags on the fridge is trivial, doing that this week.

At $300 for two people and 2.5kg you're in mainstream freestanding double-wall territory and they are all roughly fine at this price. What I'd actually spend the decision on is vestibule size and whether the doors are on the sides or at the end. Two adults climbing over each other through a single end door for four nights is a friendship test, and it costs nothing to check.

Shipping first and posting after also removes the thing where I feel obliged to build something because I announced it. Had not connected those two.

The fair use line is the one people forget. If your costs are per run, an unlimited lifetime account is an open tab at your expense for as long as the product exists. Cap it at something generous and say the number out loud in the email.

Saving this. Composition is the one I would not have thought to review.

The exam fee catching people out is real, and so is the resit fee if you fail one module. Budget for one retake and be pleasantly surprised.

Neither, at 6 paying customers. 3 hours a week spent talking to the 90 free users will teach you more than 3 hours of writing to nobody, and it converts. Publishing is a lever you pull once you know exactly who you are talking to - right now you would be guessing at the audience and the message simultaneously.

The failure mode of his position is that heavy packs quietly shrink your options. You do not skip the extra ridge because you decided against it, you skip it because the idea of it makes you tired. I did the same route two years apart at 13kg and at 8kg, same fitness, and the second time I added a summit on a whim. Nothing on paper explains that, but it is the actual benefit.

Then that document is your first four issues and you should absolutely write. I withdraw the objection - the failure mode I was warning about is publishing instead of talking, not publishing what talking taught you.