Carolyn taught me that you can make your connection to facebook more secure* by going to My Account > Account Security and then:
Control your browsing and login security
| Secure Browsing (https) |
| Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible |
* more secure than what? And how much more, with this squishy designation of “whenever possible”? I don’t know, but it can’t hurt!
These are all the things I learned today about our 12-year-old gas grill:
1. How to diagnose the problem of the high-flaring back burner and where and how to order a new burner assembly from Weber.com
2. How to question my own diagnosis and call Weber and get instant instructions, via email. On a Sunday.
3. How to disassemble and deep clean the grill, including inside the burners. And how to put it back together again in a way that it works.
4. How to cancel my order for a new burner assembly.
5. How rewarding it is to fix something we already own Perhaps we were channeling our fathers, who both absolutely loved to do just that, on this sunny Fathers Day.
Weber rocks. And so does Steve. And Maddy, who held all the directions and cheered us on.
OK, previously, I figured out how not to burn my house down while making tea. Now I’ve moved on to the potentially more dangerous espresso machine. This is a great design, but it lacks an automatic shut-off switch, so it just keeps building up pressure. Whoops.
I’ve learned to set a kitchen timer for ten minutes, when I start making my espresso. It’s such a quick process that you might think that if I can remember to set a time, I could remember to turn the darn machine off a few minutes later. But you would be so very dangerously wrong. Each time the timer has gone off, I’ve said “Oh! Right!” and been surprised all over again. And then I turn the espresso maker off.
From Cousin Kate:
“Note to self: spray toaster oven pan with non-stick spray before making frozen french fries. 😦 ”
The good news is that she learned this lesson all in one meal and the next batch of her fancy-pants sweet potato fries came out great!
I’ve learned that the florescent light over my desk is hot enough to melt the chocolate stashed in the compartment above it.
Darkness now reigns on my desktop.
I learned that microwaving soy milk makes just as delicious a latte as steaming it, without the mess or effort. I can save the fancy stuff for guests who actually want the foam.
We all worked so hard on the design of the new website, the user interface for a survey program for pediatric patients and their families. We worked with the media group to come up with a color palette that would be comfortable for the little kids yet cool enough for the teenagers. All this, only to have the project logo go all blurry around the edges, as though parts of it were flaking off.
Was it the monitor resolution? Nope. Was is the browser? No again.
Eventually the lead developer figured this out: There was NOTHING wrong with the application nor the logo and it would look just fine in production for our end users. The problem was that we kept sharing it with and looking at it through WebEx, which works great but does not provide a crisp image. When we tried it directly it was fine.
Lesson learned: What you see, via WebEX, is not necessarily what you get!
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!
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!
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.
Jane's Lessons Learned 