Vietnamese Brick Cart

Snapped this gem in Hanoi. Note the rider's application of right foot on the bricks.

One Day I'll Grow Up... and get a Kamaz!


The top photo is me, and I think that's five time Dakar winner Vlaidmir Chagine in the Kamaz. If I was rich, or good at driving trucks I would so do that.

IKEA is the Pinnacle of Human Civilization.




















On Boxing day I didn't have trouble finding a car spot, bought two large chests of drawers, and assembled them without:

• Waiting in queues
• Having to deal with unreasonable, unruly or unkempt staff
• Getting stuck in traffic
• Any remaining nuts/bolts/awls/joggles/widgets
• Any remaining holes where nuts/bolts/awls/joggles/widgets are supposed to go
• Regret that what I bought sucked.

From my perspective the whole excercise was totally flawless on potentially the worst shopping day of the year. The employees, shareholders and suppliers of IKEA deserve every cent of whatever profit they made from me replacing the ugly cheap pine drawers I used to have with nice cheap MDF drawers. I also can't believe the win-win of customer self-assembly of furniture. I assume the logistics of transport and storage of flat-packed furniture are orders-of-magnitude more efficient than fully assembled stuff but this should be detrimental to the customer experience - instead I had a ball putting it together, sending the satisfaction meter off the scale.

I also was totally impressed by the design, partiularly the materials used, it was pretty much all MDF or Chipboard for the large bits which I assume would be the most efficient form of timber usage because you can pretty much use a whole tree rather than just the best bits of the trunk - but even the "solid timber" beams were a really neat laminate of a heap of small pieces dovetailed together - I'd imagine that again you can reduce the need for high value, long lengths of flawless timber by using these composites.

And the whole 70kg payload was packaged with less than 2 kg of packaging most of which was cardboard that is of sufficient surface area to host a war between crews of breakers and poppers.