Up in Ontario

Mamamusings Top 24 Tips for a Lifetime

Via the always-excellent and destined to be frequently referenced LifeHacker website, mamamusings presents her favourite 24 useful household tips. I'm always a sucker for lists like this since it accomplishes two things - (1) the practical application of the tip and (2) making me feel smart, as if these tactics were some secret and I had been admitted late one night by a woman in a tilted hat and trench coat.

Some favourites I may employ one day:

• 3) To keep potatoes from budding, place an apple in the bag with the potatoes.
  
• 8) Spray your Tupperware with nonstick cooking spray before pouring in tomato-based sauces - no more stains.
  
• 18) If you have a problem opening jars: Try using latex dishwashing gloves. They give a non-slip grip that makes opening jars easy.

And some that just make me wonder how people discover things:

• 17) Don’t throw out all that leftover wine: Freeze into ice cubes for future use in casseroles and sauces. (Leftover wine?)
  
• 16) Cure for headaches: Take a lime, cut it in half and rub it on your forehead. The throbbing will go away. (And your forehead will be sticky.)

The rest of the Mamamusings blog makes for excellent reading as well, or at least it does if you're interested in the intersection of social behaviour and how computers / softwate / the internet enable and change those social behaviours. The author, Elizabeth Lane Lawley (yet another proud member of the reality-based community), eshews capitals and is slated to spend a year on sabbatical from her job at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology, I assume though I can find no explanation of the acronym on their website) to join the Microsoft Social Computing Group.

I also noticed today that LifeHacker recommends the Griffin iTalk, an iPod add on microphone that allows you to record directly into your iPod, which is exactly what the Duck and I have been doing, interviewing for a book project we're working on together. It's the second external microphone we've bought for our iPod and it works much better than the first one we bought, which tended to pick up too much ambient noise in the room including the sound of the iPod hard drive whirring. The iTalk also comes with a line-in insert so a better microphone is an option if we were interested in getting sound files closer to broadcast quality.

To complete my geek cred claim here, I bought our Griffin iTalk at the Apple Store in San Francisco when I was there attending the Web 2.0 conference back in October 5 to 7, 2004. The conference itself may be the most profoundly geek moment of my life, living for a few days in the epicentre of information technology and its leaders. More about that another time. Now I will only tell you that I had dinner one night of the conference with Ryszard Kott and Andrzej Turski, two researchers / developers / dreamers from Microsoft's Social Computing Group, the same group where the Mamamusings blogger, Elizabeth Lane Lawley, will be spending her sabbatical. Ryszard and Andrzej, both of whose names are much harder to spell than pronounce, provided excellent company that one night and their enthusiasm for social computing, in particular Wallop, bodes very well for the future relevance of Microsoft to geek culture.