04.08.02
Posted in General
at 8 pm
Here is my prediction:
One day a band will release a CD Jewel case. It will be available in stores. It will have a beautiful set of inserts. The Liner Notes will be well written, the lyrics layout will augment the vocalizations. The case itself will be textured in that ‘oo lemme touch it’ kind of way.
There will be no CD.
There will be a slip of paper that tells you exactly where you can download the music.
There will be a sticker, maybe even a set of stickers, that you can put on the face of your home-burned CD-R(s).
The package will still cost $14 – $18.
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04.05.02
Posted in General
at 5 pm
1) Flies or bees bothering you? Spray them with hairspray and they will take a quick dive.
2) Use air-freshener to clean mirrors. It does a good job and better still, leaves a lovely smell to the shine.
3) Use Empty toilet paper roll to store appliance cords. It keeps them neat and you can write on the roll what appliance it belongs to.
4) For icy door steps in freezing temperatures: get warm water and put Dawn dishwashing liquid in it. Pour it all over the steps. They won’t refreeze.
5) Crayon marks on walls? This worked wonderfully! A damp rag, dipped in baking soda. Comes of with little effort (elbow grease that is!).
6) Permanent marker on appliances/counter tops (like store receipt BLUE!)rubbing alcohol on paper towel.
7) Whenever I purchase a box of S.O.S Pads, I immediately take a pair of scissors and cut each pad into halves. I have noticed that the scissors get sharpened this way!
8) Opening brand new jars can be a feat in itself. Well, I have found a way to make it the easiest thing to do. Instead of banging a jar of jam, pickles, etc., with a knife until it loosens up, I simply reach into the drawer and pull out the handy nutcracker. It adjusts to the size of the jar and I simply give it a good twist and off pops the lid!
9) Blood stains on clothes? Not to worry! Just pour a little peroxide on a cloth and proceed to wipe off every drop of blood. Works every time!
10) Use vertical strokes when washing windows outside and horizontal for inside windows. This way you can tell which side has the streaks. Straight vinegar will get outside windows really clean. Don’t wash windows on a sunny day. They will dry too quickly and will probably streak.
11) Spray a bit of perfume on the light bulb in any room to create a lovely light scent in each room when the light is turned on. Place fabric softener sheets in dresser drawers and your clothes will smell freshly washed for weeks to come. You can also do this with towels and linen.
12) Candles will last a lot longer if placed in the freezer for at least 3 hours prior to burning.
13) To clean artificial flowers, pour some salt into a paper bag and add the flowers. Shake vigorously as the salt will absorb all the dust and dirt and leave your artificial flowers looking like new! Works like a charm!
14) To easily remove burnt on food from your skillet, simply add a drop or two of dish soap and enough water to cover bottom of pan, and bring to a boil on stovetop.
15) Spray your Tupperware with nonstick cooking spray before pouring in tomato based sauces and there won’t be any stains.
16) When a cake recipe calls for flouring the baking pan, use a bit of the dry cake mix instead and there won’t be any white mess on the outside of the cake.
17) Wrap celery in aluminum foil when putting in the refrigerator and it will keep for weeks.
18) When boiling corn on the cob, add a pinch of sugar to help bring out the corn’s natural sweetness.
19) Cure for headaches: Take a lime, cut it in half and rub it on your forehead. The throbbing will go away.
20) Don’t throw out all that leftover wine: Freeze into ice cubes for future use in casseroles and sauces.
21). To get rid of itch from mosquito bites, try applying soap on the area and you will experience instant relief.
22) Ants, ants, ants everywhere … Well, they are said to never cross a chalk line. So get your chalk out and draw a line on the floor or wherever ants tend to march. See for yourself.
23) When you get a splinter, reach for the scotch tape before resorting to tweezers or a needle. Simply put the scotch tape over the splinter, then pull it off. Scotch tape removes most splinters painlessly and easily.
24) Now look what you can do with AlkaSeltzer.
* Clean a toilet. Drop in two AlkaSeltzer tablets, wait twenty minutes, brush and flush. The citric acid and effervescent action clean vitreous China.
* Clean a vase. To remove a stain from the bottom of a glass vase or cruet, fill with water and drop in two AlkaSeltzer tablets.
* Polish jewelry. Drop two AlkaSeltzer tablets into a glass of water and immerse the jewelry for two minutes.
* Clean a thermos bottle. Fill the bottle with water, drop in four AlkaSeltzer tablets, and let soak for an hour (or longer, if necessary).
* Unclog a drain. Clear the sink drain by dropping three AlkaSeltzer tablets down the drain followed by a cup of Heinz White Vinegar. Wait a few minutes, then run the hot water.
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Posted in General
at 2 pm
Tuesday was a personal day off. I went with Amy to a dental appointment and then worked on the materials for my class. (Authoring Digital Media, at Portland State). The day off was nearly a necessisity because of the stress of developing this project. TownPartner is looking good, and I’m quite happy with where it’s headed, but it’s still got a lot of polishing to go through.
By Tuesday night however, I already felt a cold coming on. That sore throat and aching feeling was starting to hit. I made it through Wednesday and the first class, but by 9:15, I was dead on my feet and ready to head home. I went into work on Thursday as well, but only made it through a half day.
And this morning, I had *no* energy left at all. So I’ve stayed home. I brought my laptop home, but forgot the power cord, so I’ve only got 3 hours of time that I can use, unless I get out and run by work to pick up the cord, which I might do here soon.
This cold couldn’t have come at a worse time. Well, maybe it could, but this was pretty bad timing. However, I should be glad that I’ve only had two colds this year, so I’m doing pretty well. Let’s hope this one clears out soon. Afterall, my brother is expecting me to watch his kids at 7am tomorrow morning!
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04.01.02
Posted in General
at 7 am
The technology keeps coming as I’ve now installed VNC on my G3 for a server and a client on my Laptop from work. I can now use all of my favorite Mac tools and utils (including BBEdit). It’s quite a way to get the feel of having an Apple notebook without the actual having an Apple notebook. I like it.
I like it a lot. The only thing I’m missing is the Command and Option keys. Even the shift keys don’t work in conjunction with the arrow keys all that well. However for basic word processing and even straight text editing it’s quite effective. I’ll have to figure out some tweaks to get things operating smoothly. Like I’ve reset my Mac screen size to 800×600, but I’m not sure I like it. I may go back to 1024×768 simply because I can run that size at full screen mode.
Oops, almost forgot the linkage: VNC Stuff
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03.30.02
Posted in General
at 9 pm
This is how they save money in Tasmania from what Craig says:
“- Gladstone, Tasmania
I saw this and thought maybe the town was trying to micro-manage its resources and save money by combining municipal services of similar nature. (ewwww…)”
http://www.12xu.com/au/savingmoney.jpg
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Posted in General
at 2 pm
It’s been quiet around here because I’ve been swamped with stuff. Work has been nuts of late. That 16 hour day last Tuesday was just the start.
Wednesday was the meeting for PersonalTelco which actually was a lot of fun, now that I’ve got a wireless card to play with. While I was there I got others to set up to access a Wiki that I was running on my laptop. For the Win machines everyone had to go in and set up their TCP/IP config to use a specified IP Address, since I wasn’t running a DHCP server to assign addresses on the fly.
Once they each had an IP address, they needed to hit *my* IP address to get to the server, since we had no DNS services. It’s an interesting experience trying to set up a network from scratch, without the nice things DHCP and DNS and all those other services that you kindof get used to having and not giving a second thought to.
This week was also the last week for Jason, one of oour Java developers. He’s going to be taking his classes full time (Music classes) and so he’s going to be off the project. I’ve been working directly next to for the past few weeks and we’ve had a lot of fun discussing the usual geeking things like the symantecs of latin phrases and singing along with They Might Be Giants mp3s.
Some days were pretty long, but I did read some great stories on http://www.obscurestore.com. One that had been on a while back was about a woman near Washington DC who suffered from complete classic Amnesia. She knew nothing about herself prior to March 2, 2002.
She’s had three stories in the Washington Post, starting with the first one when we learn she’s reveal her identity.
I’ve been keeping track of the story through the Post’s Anemic search engine. I’ll include the first article and the most recent one in the Read more section. Good luck, Macy.
Read the rest of this entry »
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03.22.02
Posted in General
at 10 am
There have been some steps taken to put some rational thought into where and when to use Cascading Style Sheets for layout of elemetns on a page, and just what elements of a layout should use DIVs vs which should use tables.
I would like to have a larger discussion about this because it seems to me that While Divs have been great for lots of stuff in the over-all layout of a page, I really seem to see less of a return when I’m trying to work with: Menus, Image captions, layouts that have comparison text, and other issues that tables work so easily for, and so flexibly.
I really want to know how far to go with CSS layout.
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03.20.02
Posted in General
at 12 pm
When I’m working on my laptop…
while sitting at Pioneere Courthouse Square…
In the middle of downtown Portland…
soaking in the rays…
and the free wireless Internet access via my new Lucent WaveLan Wi-Fi (802.11b) PCMCIA PC card…
I must remember to bring my sunglasses that have polarized lenses…
…so I can see through the glare on my laptop screen.
NP: New Order, “Love Vigilantees”. (That song *always* give me the shivers…)
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03.19.02
Posted in General
at 12 pm
Rather than working on my class sylabus like I should be, I developed and wrote up an article about a Bookmarklet that works like so:
1) Visit a page with your fav browser.
2) Select this Bookmark from your favorites list or bookmarks menu.
3) Type in some text into the dialog that comes up.
4) See the web page that has the HTML necessary to link to the self-same web page.
5) Copy and paste the link into your favorite HTML editor or other text entry system. (Like… Greymatter!)
The article I wrote is here.
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03.18.02
Posted in General
at 8 pm
Florida now says man can keep his ATHEIST plate
Florida Department of Motor Vehicle bosses have reversed a supervisor’s decision to pull Steven Miles’s ATHEIST license plate. The DMV will now form a committee to review all tags “that fall into a gray area” before they are yanked. “I’m elated,” says Miles. “Now I don’t have to fight for what should be mine in the first place.” (Read it) (St. Petersburg Times)
(Via http://www.obscurestore.com/)
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