Month: April 2011

Space Matters

I learned that a great yoga teacher, a great class format, and great energy from the class is not enough for me.  If the class space doesn’t work, it can cancel it all out.

I had all of the good stuff in a community class, but it was held in a science classroom and the posters and materials that covered every wall were constantly distracting to me (Gale says I have Visual ADD and that would explain it).  But the worst part was that, at the end of every class, we had to restore the tables and chairs to the classroom setup, which meant screeeeeching them across the floor.  Talk about canceling out the vibe!

In the last class that I will attend in that setting, the two chairs on top of the table fell off and hit me in the head, one at a time, during this process.

As my godson Steve said as he walked out of his first movie at age 2, after watching the opening number in the Lion King, “Done!”.

Walk a Mile in My (other) Shoes

I have learned, once again as I seem to learn each year, that the 2+ mile walk from Park St to my office deserves shoes made for distance.

Apparently, walking around all day is not the same as walking continuously.

So I need to work up to it and/or wear running shoes (look dorky) and carry my dressier shoes.

Anyway, it was worth it today for the view:

Wait a Second!

Every cell phone has it, and now I’ve found it on the iPhone: how to inject a “pause” into a dialing sequence to that you can dial a conference code AND the access code all at once.

On the iPhone, it’s the comma!  I read that each comma was 2 seconds, but I found that it’s much shorter and that I needed three of ’em to make it work.

I added entries for each frequently-used dialin, in my address book.  So I have an entry with a last name of  Dialin Jane and one that says Dialin Mary, etc.  The quick lookup works for any of those words.

The phone number entry looks like this:

886-555-1234,,,4444#

In this example, 4444 is the access code.

This will let me dial in quickly from my iPhone.

Don’t dial and drive!  Don’t text and drive!

Secure Enough

I learned that Goodwill, in partnership with Dell,  will take your old computer, send it back to their corporate office, disassemble it, and recycle the components, mostly for the metals.

I have at least two old computers here and I really don’t want to hook them up to the internet, get them working with a modern browser (if even possible) and download and run software to wipe out the hard drive before I give them away.  I don’t want to hook them up and turn them on at all!  They never had anything very interesting on them anyway, private-information-wise, so I want to turn them over as is.

This is good enough for me!

Your Milk’s Home Town

This is from the website of the desperately-trying-to-launch Manchester Food Co-op:

How do you know if your milk is bottled locally?

 Look for the code.
Each dairy product has a number code on the package. The first two numbers of the code tell you what state the milk is processed in and the rest of the code indicates the processing plant.

The codes for New England are: Connecticut 09; New Hampshire 33; Massachusetts 25; Rhode Island 44; Vermont 50; Maine 23. If a code starts with these numbers, you know the product was bottled right here in New England.

To learn where your milk is bottled, please visitwww.whereismymilkfrom.com

Pull Over! Right now!

Today, I learned, from the Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, the top 10 reasons to pull over immediately:

12. Losing Something ‘Essential’

11. Cabin Chaos

10. Medical Emergency

9. Lack of Visibility

8. Any Loud or Sudden Noise

7. Temperature Light or Oil Light

6. Sudden Change in Handling

5. Steam/Water Vapor

4. Smell

3. Smoke

2. Flames

1. Blue Lights

The details are here: Top 10 Signs You Should Pull Over

Do any of these surprise you?  One of them is news to me.

Hits Yes, Content No

I learned about  “content farms” from NPR.

“Content farms pay people almost no money to turn out very mediocre content that can serve up very cheap ads.”    This generates hits for advertisers, when search engines find matches with low value or little real information – just filler pulled together in minutes.

Recently, Google made changes to try to filter these sites out.

The here is the full (short) transcript: Google Tweaks Algorithm To Spot ‘Content Farms’

She said “It hurts me.”

I learned that, here in the U.S. of A., periods and commas generally go inside quotation marks when they run into each other.  I also learned that the misuse of this order of things causes physical pain to my sister, so I won’t be getting that wrong again any time soon!

Hey, what would I know?  I was a computer science major and although my friends (yeah, you know who you are) made great use of my gorgeous baby blue electric typewriter that my dad bought me for college, I calculated that I typed about six pages during that time.  I’m pretty sure that none of them contained quotation marks.

BTW this rule made no sense to me until I found out how it came to be!  This is from the Grammar Guide of the Capital Community College Foundation:

There are peculiar typographical reasons why the period and comma go inside the quotation mark in the United States. The following explanation comes from the“Frequently Asked Questions” file of alt.english.usage: “In the days when printing used raised bits of metal, “.” and “,” were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a ‘”‘ on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using ‘.”‘ and ‘,”‘ rather than ‘”.’ and ‘”,’, regardless of logic.” This seems to be an argument to return to something more logical, but there is little impetus to do so within the United States.

From the same site: “In the United Kingdom, Canada, and islands under the influence of British education, punctuation around quotation marks is more apt to follow logic.” <– for Lava

Marathon Monday T Travels

I learned that it is a brave and possibly foolish thing to try to ride the T inbound from Kenmore at the end of the work (for some) day on Marathon Monday.  This is also always a Red Sox day game day, as in the Fenway-area bars have lines at 8:30 AM.   Those are just some of the many happy and extra people getting on the train.

On this day, the packed-to-the-gills trains poked along, a few feet at a time, overheating all the while.  Or at least the people inside were overheating.  I was scaring Barbara by removing layers but we got to Boylston before it became scandalous.

Just be inspired by those who ran 26.2 hilly miles, and walk!