Bacon-cooking alarm clock by Matty Sallin.  Read the post at Make: Online where they have all sorts of cool stuff you probably never thought of.. but now that somebody has… you want to make one, too, doncha?

If you do make one, drop me a note, let me know how it works.

MMM Bacon!

Image from Make: Online

AND the worst part about grocery shopping, in my opinion, is carrying that stuff up the steps into the house.

Because by that time, you have already touched the stuff FOUR times:

• once from the shelf to the cart,
• once from the cart to the belt,
• once from the belt to the cart again and
• once from the cart to the car.

Yes, you still DO have to touch it to get it out of the bags and away.  But I figure, just ONE fewer time, especially THAT one time,  is at least a 20% saving in energy.

Delay is preferable to error.

Ian says it’s like being able to “press the ‘pause button.’” And that makes for a much “different life.”

His friend, Nancy Robinson, worried, in her comment to Ian, that delay might let her forget entirely.

But see, I read the quote differently. I thought it said “Delay is preferable to terror.”

That’s a whole different kettle of fish! Seemed a bit out of character for ole TJ. But hey, he lived in harrowing times.

So when I put these thoughts together, well, my mind goes a couple of ways.

If it’s terror

Sometimes the decisions I think I must make immediately really only seem that way because of some worry or anxiety I’ve got over the outcome.

A choice to delay an action removes, for me, a measure of anxiety and gives me space to consider options and possible out comes.

If it’s error

A choice to delay allows a situation to unfold a bit more and that may present different opportunities.

Now, sometimes, that delay could eliminate certain choices. But sometimes, too, fewer choices makes the decision easier.

How do I make the choice to delay?

I like to pay attention, as best I can, to the Morita notion “to do what must be done now.”

I can handle now.

• Is the error inevitable?
• Is it necessary to make the terrible decision now?
• Will babies die if I do or don’t do this thing? (That would sure put a different kind of pressure on the terror.)

Must the decision be made NOW?
If not now, then the decision to delay is exactly the right one to make.

Read more about Shoma Morita here

Actually, we’ve had pretty many since then. But I digress.

At the time of that particular party, we were in the middle of doing planning  a lot of projects around the house. We had the list of all those projects posted on the wall in the kitchen.

Here’s a party hint.

Some stuff you can’t clean up before people come over. But if you post a larger than life list, it WILL give people something to talk about. And they’ll focus on your list instead of the half painted walls.

At another party, when the hallway needed paint, I went to the wall paper store and got a bunch of samples. I taped them all over the hall way and asked people to vote on the one they liked best.  Another great conversation starter!

(The hall got painted.)

I sure wish I had a picture of that original list. But I tell you what, everyone who came to the party remembers that list and that the lynch pin task was fix the gutters!

Personally, I never understood why the gutters needed to be replaced before a bedroom was painted, but some how, in the mind of some-other-adult-with-whom-I-live, there was no point in doing anything until that task was completed.

The point is this: sometimes you need more than just a list.

Sometimes you have to figure out which parts of the project come first and then what happens next.

I love a good list. But stuff can get missed if it’s just linear. Or, as in my case, in a notebook on many pages.

However, I just read or at MakeUseOf.com about this cool new online project manager called Gantter.com You don’t have to sign in, or make an account.

The MakeUseOf guys say it’s a  lot like MS Project.  But it’s freakin’ free!  You work on the plan, you save it to your own machine, you upload it when you want to come back to it. You can print it out as a pdf and carry it around with you. OR blow it up really big, post it on the wall in your kitchen and have a party!

It’s surely over kill for figuring out a normal weekly schedule.  But if it’s a complicated week, or a project with many steps, I think it will really rock.

I thought it a bit of an odd fluke til I read over at MakeUseOf.com that THEY also noticed it’s something people search on a lot. So they reviewed an online alarm clock that allows you to pick the song you want to wake to.. and a lot of other stuff. And it’s on your computer so it will even work when you’re traveling—presuming you travel with your computer. (HA! Silly me, of COURSE you travel with your computer! Doesn’t everyone?)

And they this other link to a  great DIY project: World’s Loudest Alarm Clock

Hope you don’t live next door to me!

A friend sent me this info… today… on the day it was posted at Wordsmith.org.

perendinate

PRONUNCIATION:
(puh-REN-di-nayt)

Meaning:

verb tr. : To put off until the day after tomorrow.
verb intr.: To stay at a college for an extended time.

(Personally, I like that the day after tomorrow and being at college too long are somehow related!)

I’d like to think that this is not necessarily a bad thing… the putting off part, not the college part.  If I just don’t get around to something to day for some “whatever” reason, then I feel like a slug.

HOWEVER, if I decide that I can’t do it today, and tomorrow won’t work either, then I can perendinate on purpose. I can give myself a slight break from feeling guilty for putting the thing off and make a real plan to do it the day after.

The trick is to actually pat myself on the back for making the decision and then doing the thing.

We can hope, right?

Wanna lose weight? Couldn’t there just be one food you could eat that would fix it all? Buy a car? Some simple calculation to make the right decision?

A couple of years ago (actually way back in 1980) Dale Dauten wrote a book called Quitting, Knowing When to Leave…a job, a marriage, or any other unhappy spot you’re in.

I loved the simple process of evaluating the possibility of really being satisfied with a decision to quit something.

Basically he says, first you become aware that a decision must be made. Then you determine and weight the possibilities for the future, whether the decision is really in your own best interest and how certain you are about the necessity of the decision.

I loved the book!

And then this morning I read over at ScientificBlogging.com an article by Hank Campbell, Garth Sundem Makes Geeks Cool(er) Again.  The post at least starts out with a reference to Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life by Garth Sundam. Hank suggests it’s:

a way to quantify every important decision you may have wanted to make, from how many drinks at the company picnic you should have to how much sports you should watch today. The beauty of it was that by abdicating the decision you also abdicated responsibility – or so you thought. ‘Should I hit on that girl?’ calculations combined with errors in a ‘How many beers should I have?’ calculation probably took you to a bad place if you are married and no amount of pointing to his book was going to help.

The value of using equations to solve life’s dilemmas was verified time and again…

Check out the results of four geeks in a bar in the 5:44 minute video  here.

But in the end, it seems that making the right decision has less to do with the math and more to do with the evaluation that yields the confidence to move forward.

And really that confidence in the choice is most important.

Our old TV is starting to make noises like it might be time to replace it. So we’re just trying to determine SIZE TV will fit in the a nice-piece-of-furniture we bought a couple years ago to house the TV and all those other wires and components.

I know how big the box is. I know a TV should fit in there. We have one in there now.  But if the new TV is to be a different size–and this HD thing makes them ALL different sizes–then what is the largest size I can get?

WHY is this so freakin’ hard?

The reviews of the TV’s online tell me all kinds of crap that WOULD matter IF it fit in the box. But it is of NO value if it doesn’t fit in the box.

My husband explains to me that “All TVs are measured on the diagonal of the screen.”

Yea? Great but will that fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture?

Well, you have to do “big math.” You can’t just consider the aspect of 16:9 and figure 32 is to 19 as x is to 9    … blah blah blah. It requires square roots and squares.

I am a math major.  I COULD figure this out if I wanted to … but really, all I want is some TV manufacturer, or more likely another nice person, to make it clear that a 32″ screen comes on a TV that is this basically wide and this high. Therefore, I can judge whether or not it will, or will not,  fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture. (P.S. I know that no matter how wide they say the screen is, it will still not be as wide as the whole TV.  I lived in the 50s and 60s with console TVs that were as wide as trucks and that was a good thing!)

If Google will convert dollars to euros why can’t it as easily tell me how big the screen is in normal person numbers?  Then I can estimate if the case on the screen will fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture!

Oh, Wait! Google knows everything!

SO I searched (finally) on 16:9 calculator and Google returned up this great site where you can put in the diagonal TV size in inches, push a button and it gives you the screen size in width and height and compares it to a similar sized old style 4:3 ratio TV.

You can check it out for your house here: www.nicetaco.com/tv.aspx#calculator (Thank you, thank you nicetaco.com)

Now I have learned I’m gonna need a new TV AND  a new nice-piece-of-furniture.

Yippee?

This morning I stumbled upon this article “How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned Though Failure”  over at UnstructuredAdventures.com

It’s an interesting list of learning opportunities. But I was particularly attracted to this one:

2. Postpone hard decisions until you have to make hard trade-offs.
Instead: Make decisions earlier to create options and build flexibility.

Make decisions before you think you need to. You’re probably too late if you come to the point where you realize you have to make a choice between hard trade-offs. By waiting to make a decision you’ve created trade-offs instead of options. Postponing decisions in the attempt to optimize your results is probably a waste of your resources in other ways.

The longer you wait to make a decision… well, probably some of your options are gone. So your choices are automatically narrowed down. Sometimes that’s not a bad way to make a decision , especially if it’s not a big one. Show up at the movie theater at 7:30 and watch what ever starts next.  No real decision. Can you think of stuff you decide that way?

But what about when it does matter: either for business or fun?

Can’t decide on seeing Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band in Baltimore or David Bromberg in Reading?  Wait long enough and you’ll miss the first concert. The decision is made.  Wait a little longer and you don’t have to decide at all.  The decision is made for you.

Sure, that’s easy.  But do you get what you want out of it? Or is it just easy?  Was it fun? Or just easy?

And may I just say that I did NOT wait to buy my tickets to either show!

Rev. Peyton was a nonstop rush of music and stage presence. The albums are great but in person, they’re even better.  Breezy could be my new measure of stage presence. On his MySpace page one review says  Rev Peyton sounds like:

“Robert Johnson on crack… they get one hell of a sound out of an acoustic guitar, washboard, and snare drum. It’s easy to see why they are big.”  according to Steve Hammer, in Nuvo Newsweekly

However, I probably did not need to buy my tickets two weeks in advance. The concert was, after all, on a Tuesday night and featured a rather obsure group. But I did not miss it!~

Tressa Prisbrey saw a structure at Knott’s Berry Farm and decided to try the construction method out for herself.   My own family visited KBF when I was in the 6th grade. and I did not see this! Anyway, Tressa used bottles… hundreds of thousands of bottles and concrete.  According to Reveries:

She collected most of her materials from the local dump, although her hard-drinking husband drained enough beer bottles to create an entire structure made of his empties alone. Her intent was to shame him but apparently this didn’t work.

Check out the rest of her story here.

And then, just for fun, check out the rest of THAT site. I found MORE of those bottle houses here.