Risk Management Rebooted
Here’s something to consider. I found the two videos below to be supremely interesting despite their titles. That’s because “Survival Planning” is a fooler for us Norte Amerikahnskis. The interviewee, Mac Mackenney, is not a survivalist in the hopeless gloom-and-doom apocalyptic zombie warfare sense that we gravitate toward. He is a genuine adventurer who makes it his business to manage risk in inordinately risky conditions. In that way, I found his approach, his simple way of recognizing risks, sorting through them, prioritizing them, and addressing them as helpful in an everyday sense for anyone who boondocks. Technically, anyone who hits the Interstate for a decent trip might benefit as well. There are three parts to this set from Andrew White, but I have included only the two most pertinent. Each is 25-30 minutes long, so if you have limited cellular data or an overactive bladder, this might be an issue. If you could hardly care less about simple ways of looking at risk and survival, but do enjoy rather impressive campfire stories, these are also for you.
I present these to you principally because first, they helped me recognize how what I choose to do and how I go about it affects my safety, and how simple changes can decrease exposure to risk. Second, because it is easy to go on assumptions and fail to recognize the inherent risks within our choices, it is easy (at least in the Great Southwest) to wind up in what are potentially very serious situations, without realizing it. I keep stumbling over accounts of everyday people caught by surprise and unprepared for what is around them. Sometimes they get aided or rescued, and sometimes they do not. The videos below are not a “how to” so much as a wake up call to recognize potential risks in your rig setup choices as well as how you camp, and prioritize them so that the most effective and influential solutions come first. None of this is miracle-level brilliance – it simply clears away the chaff and helps you recognize your most important needs first. If you can only see one, the meat of it is in Part 2.
Part 2:
Strolling Amok 
My computer had decided it won’t play any HTML5 videos. Do you know if these are available in any other format? Or can you give us quick synopsis?
Oye. A synopsis would not be practical for these.
YouTube varies the format of what it sends based on what it thinks your viewing program/device expects to see. In your case, it’s apparently sending HTML5 to your default player which also apparently can’t deal with it for some reason. In the spirit of making a Hail Mary, I’d recommend selecting the gear icon at the bottom right of the video to choose a different (probably smaller) resolution than it may have autoselected. If that fails, I’d try a smartphone or tablet, or another computer. I’ve had browser issues here and there over the years, and usually install an alternate browser that I can start up just to view problematic pages and videos. Often, when one browser chokes on something (usually because it’s out of date and can’t deal with coding changes), a different one will work just fine on that page. Personally, I’d follow the YouTube link to watch it directly on YouTube first. If it still refused to play, I’d download it (bottom left) and try to view it once it’s on my own computer’s hard drive. The downloaded format should show as part of the file name. If my default viewing app was faulty, I’d try another or convert the file to another format. Basically, if your computer choked on these, it should also be choking on all YouTube videos, too. You may need to check that your operating system and browser program are up to date. My old Model 1 iPad can’t play YouTube vids because it can be updated only so far, but not far enough. Standards changed and the hardware is unable to deal with the coding used these days on the Internet. If you’re using an older computer, anything goes for YouTube compatibility, since they keep altering things. At some distant point, the requirements for the latest operating system or program will fall outside of what your computer can do. I’m not saying that’s where you are, but either something is out of date or a program has somehow gotten corrupted. One last flail: when I was using Windows, when a program would mysteriously stop working for no reason, I defragged the hard drive and it would come back to life.
Cool. I’ll check these out.