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
I have learned that if you that if you take your own bags to the grocery store, even if you only pack their bags into them when you get to your car, it takes A LOT fewer trips to get all that crap (er, food) into the house.
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:
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.
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Ian King posted on his FaceBook page this morning this quote by Thomas Jefferson:
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.
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.
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.
I like to pay attention, as best I can, to the Morita notion “to do what must be done now.”
I can handle now.
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.
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?
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It seems like the more complicated the decision the more people look for some easy answer.
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
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.
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People of my generation (including Ted Forth of the comic strip, “Sally Forth”) are pretty universally bummed that when the century turned, we did NOT have flying cars.
But today IEEE Spectrum reported from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the phone to make Dick Tracy proud!
LG has a prototype for a wristwatch phone! If Dick Tracy started using a phone on his wrist in the 30s and it took 70 years to become reality… well then, does that mean we’ll have flying cars in 2080?
Bet I won’t live to see it. But maybe–if i HAD grandchildren…. which I am NOT pining for–maybe I could promise THEM flying cars. Then they could be disappointed in me long after I’m gone.
What a way to start a day.
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… Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions-but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.
“A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”
I knew it! Don’t work so hard… Just freakin’ decide, already!
Further Pouget says:
If we had to wait until we’re 99 percent sure before we make a decision…then we would waste time accumulating data unnecessarily. If we only required a 51 percent certainty, then we might reach a decision before enough data has been collected.
Try it. See what it feels like.
As long as no babies will die, you can always change your mind.
Check out my other articles on deciding.
]]>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?
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?
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