How I Learn Woot’s Up

Mother’s Day coming? Oops. Flowers for mom. Roadside emergency? Gotta have some flares. Laptop speakers not up to par? USB-powered mini-speakers. It’s always something. Every day, one can’t-miss deal for something you didn’t even know you needed. Until you saw it on Woot.

You know you just own too much stuff when you find yourself trolling, just hoping you’ll find something else to buy. Warning: this darn site is addictive.

How I Know When I’ll Die

I’m about to have a birthday. Interestingly, it’s the birthday that marks the halfway point of my life. How do I know? A little calculator called Living to 100 told me so.

The calculator measures factors such as social interactions, medical condition, family history, diet and exercise…all the things your doctor says you need to take care of…and tells you how long you’re expected to live. Ouch.

Turns out that if I want to live to 105, I need to get my backside onto a treadmill. Who knew?

How I Get Some ‘Splainin’

Slate Explainer

Elections, war, religion, bailouts, the Middle East…Whenever the news, it’s more interesting when I understand something more about the background. Slate Explainer goes in-depth to explain the story behind today’s headlines, with such fascinating articles as “Is a $1 Salary Paid in Installments?“, “How To Prosecute a Shoe-Thrower “, and “How exactly will Obama get all his stuff into the White House?“

Readers can submit questions on other newsworthy topics…Just as you can submit comments on this blog entry by clicking the comments link below.

How I De-Junk My Mail

I may have been amongst the first three people to put myself onto the Do Not Call registry. Before the registry, I had nearly stopped answering my phone altogether. Just couldn’t bear the relentless solicitations for life insurance, time shares and credit cards. Since the registry, blissful silence from the commercial sector. These days the only people who call me are friends and clients.

So now I’ve added my name to the junk-mail version of the DNCR. OptOutPrescreen is operated by the four credit-reporting agencies. Signing up stops credit card issuers and insurance agents from checking your credit to mail out those obnoxious You’re Pre-Approved! offers, thereby discouraging — but not quite eliminating — the daily overstuffing of the mailbox. Reducing clutter is just my tiny contribution to the sustainabilification of the planet.

See how I just totally coined a new word?

How I Plan FHE

Family Home Evening

Hope your holidays were lovely and memorable.

It’s Monday, and we try to make all of our Mondays lovely and memorable by observing a tradition of our own: Family Home Evening.

Oh, yes, our family nights are often messy and disorganized, and all too often they devolve into a morass of movies and munchies, but we’re all in the same room, and that has to count for something, right?

Here’s the planner I use to try to impose at least a modicum of organization on our family nights: fhe.lds.org. The site suggests activities and lesson topics, artwork and an actual fill-in-the-blanks planner for organizing family home evenings.

Share some FHE tips of your own by clicking the Comments link, and I promise not to put you in charge of conducting the opening song.

How I Testify

We’re having a bit of a blizzard here, so Church got snowed out today. And a glorious Shabbat to you, too.

Perhaps I shall compensate for the lack of fellowship and community worship by studying my favorite translation of the scriptures: The Brick Testament, a Lego-ized pictorial representation of Biblical stories. Sometimes serious, sometimes satirical, it’s difficult to discern what motivates the maker of this site. But it’s all good fun.

In the spirit of the holidays, and demonstrating that a picture actually is worth a thousand words, I present the Brick Testament version of ”The Birth of Jesus”:

To be ecumenical, I should probably also give kudos to Assembling the Temple and Brick of Mormon, two other efforts to bring scriptural stories to life — or, at least, to Legos.

Play on.

How I Hassle Myself

I operate many mailing lists; sometimes a week or so can go by without my remembering to moderate the messages — and then all sorts of chaos ensues.

I’ve found the solution: Hassle Me, a helpful little resource that sends me abusive emails every few days reminding me to go moderate my lists.

Use it to remind yourself to go to the gym (”Get off your fat backside, you lazy twit”), eat fruit (”Lay off the burgers, you massive carnivore!”), or to think positive thoughts about yourself (”You’re really quite lovely, and not at all obese.”)

Sometimes, you just need to be nagged.

How I Swipe (Free) Artwork

It’s time for the biennial — okay, bi-decadal — update of our primary website, so I’ve been out hunting for artwork. Lo and behold: I stumbled into a third of a million images, all legit, and all free, at Stock.xchng, a free stock photo gallery.

Just goes to show: People are pretty darned cool. Oh, and generous. This is just a great time to be alive. Merry Christmas, fellow web builders!

How I Style Me Some MLA

Online Writing Lab

It’s finals week for the college kids, and they’re frantically dashing off papers and sitting exams. Mom’s helping the essay writers, natch’, by being harder on them than their own English professors would be. And I’m insisting that their papers reflect perfect MLA style.

My go-to place for online MLA style arguments: The MLA style guide page from the OWL at Purdue. It’s just one of dozens of OWL writing resources that every parent of a high school- or college-aged student should have available.

Honestly, how often do we get to prove we’re smarter than our teenagers?

How I 學習中文

I’m teaching a Chinese class to the kiddies in my daughter’s homeschooling co-op next quarter. But my fluency ain’t what it used to be. To bone up on my 中文 vocabulary I’ve been playing with the MDBG Chinese-English dictionary. It’s fascinating. Enter a word in English, if you wish, or in Pinyin, or even in characters, and get a list of every permutation of that word.

Click the icons to hear pronunciation, read etymological details, and even watch the character being drawn in a Flash demonstration.

Fēi cháng hǎo!

How I Find Peace

So Saturday I took care of a friend’s three third-graders, all of whom wanted to watch Daddy Day Care at a high volume. Now I’m a big Eddie Murphy fan, but c’mon. It’s not exactly his best work. And I wanted to work on my book.  By the time we were past the first Angelica Huston scene,  I still hadn’t written three words.

The solution: Great headphones and Simply Noise – a white noise generator that masked Eddie and a room full of shrieking kids.  Simply Noise plays a continuous loop of, well, static fuzz. To my ears, the white noise and pink noise are annoying, but the brown noise is perfectly soothing. Low-pitched, oceany, and full enough to drown out pretty much anything. I may have just found the cure for Adult ADHD.

How I Get Lettered

Arts & Letters Daily

Pseudo-intellectualism is way more fun than the real thing. When you’re a fraud, as I am, you can still gorge yourself on intellectual ding-dongs such as country music and Go Fug Yourself.

When my brain looks for healthy fare, it noshes at Arts & Letters Daily, a web portal that tracks interesting books, essays and articles that are all sort of au courant.

Then when I’ve had my fill of intellectual snobbery, I take a breather at The Smoking Gun, where I can be first on my block to find out which celebrity has been arrested today.

How I Fly Like a (Geeky) Eagle

Still doing way too much research, and way too little writing, on my new novel. Google Earth is proving invaluable (or distracting. I’m not sure which). Where before I might have driven (or flown) to the place I was researching, now I can pretty much Google Earth it and get at least a sense of what a particular street corner might look like, or whether an area of the town I’m describing is rural or suburban.

Oh, and whether my daughter was out playing in the neighborhood when she was supposed to be home with her older brother, practicing the piano.  She goes on record as the first child in history to get in trouble because of Google Earth Street View.

How I Read the Research

OCR Terminal

In the course of researching this year’s NaNoWriMo novel, I’ve been undertaking a fair bit of research. What I’ve discovered is that scanned-in text images are a bear to work with; I much prefer straight, simple text. I’ve been most grateful this month for the services of OCRTerminal, a groovy little tool that slurps up .jpg files or .pdf files, reads them, and converts them to text. It outputs page contents as pure text, if you like, or it can maintain formatting by outputting it as Word files, RTF files, or XML files. What a find!

How I Motivate Kids to Write

Our entire family clears its November calendar for NaNoWriMo. For the young ‘uns, it’s the Young Writers Program, where they pick their own novel length and play along with the big folk.

This year, the youngest is aiming for 15,000 words. Will she, or won’t she?

How I Get Motivated to Write

NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — inspires thousands of novels every December. Want to be the next JK Rowling? You’ve got one month. Clear your calendar!

How I Prophesy

I’ve got sort of a thing about the Old Testament. Love its ancient heritage, its rich language, its intense narrative, and most of all, its deep and abiding purpose. I know God better through pondering the prophecies and preaching of the Old Testament than I do through any other course of study. Every other book that the faithful take as scriptural must answer to the Old Testament for authority and foundation.

And so I offer this: Prophetic Midrash. An exegetical commentary on the prophets of the Old Testament.
Enjoy.

Summer Hiatus

Greenlance is on summer hiatus until 7 September 2008, when we’ll return with all new reviews and resources. Happy holidays!

How I Track the Patently Funny

Wacky Patent of the Month

I once knew a fellow who claimed to have invented an automobile engine that could operate without fuel.

“Yeah? What happened?” I’d ask.

“Well the government didn’t want me to be successful, so they…”

From there, the story would always get a bit fuzzy. Darned Patent and Trademark Office, always putting the kibosh on clever ideas.

I wish I’d known, then, about Wacky Patents, the site that proves once and for all that “the gummit” will let you you patent just about anything. Every month, for years now, Wacky Patents has featured such cunning ideas as this month’s “Anti Eating Mask,” a muzzle for fat people. Or the Animated Amusement Device featured in March of 2002, that had a swastika on an axle designed, apparently, to inflict pain on the nether parts of Nazis.

Did the government rob you of a great idea? Tell me all about it. I guarantee I won’t tell a soul. Just click the Comments link below, and share.

How I Evade Sue-er Rats

I have a confession: I have a law degree. It’s not something I share lightly, for I hold pretty much the same opinion you have of — if not most, then at least, some — lawyers.  There are bad people in every walk of life, but attorneys and tax collectors have the peculiar capacity to destroy lives. That’s too much power for any mere mortal to be entrusted with.

OverLawyered provides clear and convincing evidence of abuses of the legal system, with its daily chronicles of a jurisprudence system run amok. Unfortunately, the epidemic is spreading. OverLawyered now documents almost as many abuses outside the US as it finds within our fair borders. It’s an eye-opening read that ought to shock every citizen with a conscience.

Tell me your bad-lawyer story by clicking the Comments link below.

How I Feed a Raw Need

We Like It Raw

Nummy, nummy in my tummy…

I’ve been living the raw-food life — with an ocassional moment of cheating — since the first day of this blog.

Over the past two-and-a-half months, I’ve lost a considerable amount of weight, and have felt much, much healthier.

The investment was minimal: A $30 dehydrator off Craigslist, a blender, and a knife. But the food sometimes gets a bit repetitive. We Like It Raw solves that problems with amazing recipes and beautiful photography that inspires me, all over again, to stay healthy.

I intend to live a very, very long time. Eating raw vegan is the only way to get there with my health intact.

Tell me about other raw food and vegan resources you love by clicking that Comments link below.

How I Get Biblical

Blue Letter Bible

The great thing about the Blue Letter Bible isn’t the large number of English translations, or the commentaries, or the links to related hymns — though those are all excellent.  The wonder of BLB is the lexicon and concordance, which renders verses in Hebrew and Greek with transliterations and word-for-word translations to English.

See, for example, the lexicon entry for James 1:5 — “If any of you lack sophia, wisdom…”

Good stuff from the Good Book. If you know of other good religion resources, do tell! The Comments link invites you to share your sophia.

How I Gas Up

Looking to drive traffic to your web site? Here’s the secret, guaranteed.

Just make sure the topic of your web site is “Cheap Gasoline Locations.” Then get OPEC to double the price of oil. See how easy?

Well it works for Gas Buddy — the site that tracks the price of gasoline in your town, and in every town in your geographic area. Hey, we can fight back! Buddy up! Tell the neighbors what your nearest station is charging today, and they’ll return the favor.

Have other ideas for pressuring price gougers? Share by clicking that Comments link below.

How I Soothe the Savage Beast

All day today, I’ve been listening to Pandora — internet radio for the technologically inept.

Honestly, the whole Kazaa and ripping CDs and illegal downloads thing just baffles me. I don’t even wanna know.

But Pandora has music coming out my computer speakers for the first time in — well, ever. Today, it’s playing stations dedicated to my boys Earth, Wind and Fire, my Beach Boys and my Five for Fighting. Ahhhh. What a wonderful world. Hey! I think I hear Louis calling!

Click that Comments link below and bring me into the 21st century. I’m embarrassing my kids. What tunes should I really be listening to?

How I Get Inspired

Welcome back to Smart Thursdays. Today’s installment: The Best Thinking from the Best Thinkers.

TED is an annual summit on — well, any subject that fascinates. It originally featured speeches by fascinating people from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Now it’s much more. Click the TEDTalks link on the left column of the web page to watch broadcasts of the “talk of a lifetime” from interesting writers, academics, scientists and artists.

Warning: TEDTalks may cause brain pain. Listen slowly. It hurts to be brilliant.

How I Listen to Literature

We love, love, love our local bibliothèque, and in particular, we love our books on tape.

But sometimes, getting to the library is a chore, and sometimes we just need to listen to something other than radio pop. So we turn to our good friend LibriVox.

LibriVox is home to hundreds and hundreds of books — classic, mostly — in audio form. Listen to podcasts, subscribe in iTunes, or hear them using the media player on your computer.

It’s a good time to be alive. Found any other amazing uses of technology on the Web? Share by clicking that Comments link, below.

How I Get Happy

Louis Armstrong

Ever have a really awful, terrible, no-good day? I did. Yesterday. But only for about a minute, because whenever I’m down, nobody gets me happy again like my guy Satchmo.

My boyfriend Louis Armstrong and I have been an item since, oh, about 1963. Watching him smile, or hearing him sing Hello Dolly, or Mack the Knife, or What A Wonderful World is absolutely guaranteed to make anybody feel happy all over again. He’s jazz’s answer to Prozac.

Got a YouTube favorite of your own? Convince me to break it off with the Satch by clicking that Comments link below.

How I Charge My Life

Some financial planners advise against credit cards. I say, balony. Credit cards are awesome. At least, one credit card is awesome. That’s the one I found on Bankrate. It gives me a cut of every dollar I spend. I get 3 percent back for my biggest expenditures – including my cell phone, utilities and other bills. Hey, why should Visa get all the profit?

Bankrate surveys credit card offers from all the biggies and lets you apply directly from the site for the card that fits your needs. I have two. One for all my domestic spending  — and that 3 percent cash back — and the other for overseas travel, so I don’t get charged an exchange fee.

Credit cards are safer than cash, allow me to rent a car, track all my spending, and help me stick to a budget. Since I pay off the full balance every month, why wouldn’t I use them?

How I Teach My Baby to Type

It’s another birthday. L’il One turns 10 today, and in her honor, Greenlance presents one of the basic life skills a ten-year-old needs to master: Keyboarding.

The BBC’s Dance Mat features animated characters such as a Scottish goat and an Italian octopus that teach typing skills to the younger set — and to adults who still watch their fingers when they type. (Yes, Grandpa, we’re talking to you.)

Share your own resources for teaching information literacy by clicking that Comments link below.

How I am Amused

Audrey Hepburn as Madonna. Brad Pitt as a panda. Jive critters — including a flamenco horse and dogs doing the salsa. Worth 1000 is an online contest for graphic designers, multimedia artists and amateur Photoshop-ists.

It’s a fun and freaky respite from your Friday. I mean, seriously. How great is this?

Jive Critters at Worth 1000

How I Get Schooled

I’m too old for school. But I’m never too old to learn. See, I figure that so long as I keep my brain engaged, I’ll never become a doddering old fool.

That’s why, beginning today, Greenlance will sponsor Smart Thursdays, wherein we feature a great resource for adult education.

Today’s featured site: Stanford on iTunes University. This is the one that finally motivated me to install iTunes. It’s free audio and video broadcasts of Stanford University lectures covering a wide variety of subjects. It’s like auditing college classes without paying tuition. Such a deal.

Have other suggestions for Smart Thursdays? Share your ideas by clicking that Comments link, below.

How I Get 60mpg

Still driving an SUV? Not me. I just scored myself a ‘92 Geo Metro. Fifty mpg without even trying hard. But I can do better than that. I’ve learned extreme drivng — the cheapskate’s way to get super-high gas mileage.

Want to join me? Episode 49 (produced back in April, when gas was still sub-four-bucks a gallon) at Systm will teach you how to drive like a hyper-miler.

Have more ideas for improving the bottom line? Share! Click that Comment link, below.

How I Sing a Song

Mondays are for family night. Last evening we were joined by another family, and spent the time eating too much food and singing along with Guitar Man. Unfortunately, it turns out, we’re all a little elderly about remembering song lyrics and guitar chords.

No problem. Seems our computer has an excellent memory — because it knows how to find Chordie, a massive collection of guitar tabs, guitar chords and song lyrics, most of which are submitted by users.  Bad Moon Rising, Kokomo, Desperado, Country Roads, Puff, …are we showing our age?

Should we give it up and learn some Lil Wayne or Three 6 Mafia? Add Jonas Brothers and Rihanna to our play list? Click the Comments link below and suggest your own favorite family night resource.

How I Stay Married

It’s tough, this business of making two lives one. Even though my better half is a good guy — and he is — marriage is hard work.

Lovegevity makes marriage just a little bit easier, with expert advice on improving communication, being grateful, and resolving problems. Yes, it’s totally a chick site — though there is a section entitled Husband. But you just know it doesn’t see a lot of traffic.

Have any suggestions for relationship resources that actually would appeal to men? Do tell!

How I Observe the ‘-ites

Did you know that Wicca is on track to be the US’ third-largest religion by 2012? Or that of the ten largest religious groups in the United States, only Catholicism is older than Mormonism? That’s right. Southern Baptists were organized fifteen years after the LDS church, and two years before the Lutheran’s Missouri Synod. None of the other top ten were organized until 1897 or later.

How do I know? Adherents.com is a compilation of some 43,000 records documenting the membership of more than 4,200 religious faiths. It’s fascinating stuff, and will shatter some of your long-held assumptions about who believes what.

Tell me about your own favorite religion resource, won’t you? Just click that Comments link, below.

How I See Dead People

Been looking for your great-grandparents? Relax. They’re buried in a granite vault in Utah.

For the past several decades, the world’s largest repository of family records has been cataloguing and filming every available record of human existence: more than three billion pages of census records, births, christenings, marriages, deaths…if anyone recorded it, the genealogists at the Vault have probably copied it. 

And here’s the best part: You can take a look! FamilySearch.org makes genealogical records available to anyone who’s curious, or who wants to research their own genealogy. Just click the How Do I Get Started link and follow the six steps to creating your family tree. 

Have a good family history story to tell? Just tap that Comments link to start sharing your memories!

How I Get Compus Mentis

Is it weird that I enjoy reading court cases? Naaah. Gossip about crime and civil suits is infinitely more amusing than the alternative: Gossip about celebrity misbehavior and impregnations.

If you, too, prefer Judge Judy to TMZ, you’ll relish JRank’s Law Library — an encyclopedia of quick-reading articles about virtually every important legal decision in US history.

Got a better hobby? Time for assentio mentium!  Click that Comments link and share!

How I Get Clipped

Sometimes I fancy myself a bit of an artist. Then I look at what actual artists do, and blush.

One of my favorite unsung pop artists is an obscure school teacher and graphic artist named Phillip Martin. I’ve been stalking his web sites for months now, just gazing at his whimsical drawings. So that you, too, might marvel, I present: Free Clip Art by Phillip Martin. It collects in one place artwork related to all sorts of academic disciplines, holidays, the Bible, and occupations – as well as random ideas such as rainbows, floods, bathtime, seasick, and folding chairs (which I threw in just in case you thought I was working up a water theme, there.)

There are frillions and morillions of artwork collections out on the infonetwebs. Tell me about your favorite by clicking that Comments link.

How I Trend to Learn

Muskrat. Capuchin. Goleta. All words I had to look up this past week, because Google Trends assured me they were suddenly popular as search terms.

Turns out muskrats were the proximate cause of some of the flooding in the Midwest. A zoo in Mississippi has a new baby monkey. And Goleta is a town near Santa Barbara battling a massive forest fire. See how smart I got, just wondering why lots of people were suddenly searching for odd words?

Have a favorite place for reading the news? I’m all ears.

How I Got Me a System

Yeah, Superman may be the Man of Steel, but my hero is FlyLady, the Woman of Steel Wool.

When I was a child, housecleaning was not part of the curriculum. I would spend hours staring at the mess in my bedroom, wondering how other people did it. Eventually I’d just shove everything under my bed and into the closet, and call it good.

Is it any wonder, then, that I grew up to be an Adult Who Doesn’t Know How to Clean Anything? Or that some of my children grew up just as poorly educated?

But it’s never too late to learn; FlyLady has rescued me from the second half of a lifetime badly lived. Now my sinks are shiny and my toilets are scrubbed. It’s a start. We’re tackling clutter, one room at a time.

Are you Born Organized? If so, please share your best housekeeping tip by clicking that Comments link below. 

How I Repeat Myself

Have you ever just liked something, for no good, defensible reason? Yeah?

OK, well, for no good reason, I like KrazyDad Kaleidoscope. Plug in the URL of any image, and this silly little toy turns the photo into a kaleidoscope image. Flying pigs, your left toe, the photos of your kids you stored in Photobucket or Flickr. It’s just fun.

Have any image editing resources you’d like to share? Click that comments link below!

How I Examine My Belief

Do your beliefs match your religion? Beliefnet promises to tell you in this quiz that matches denominations with doctrine.

“Even if you don’t know what faith you are, Belief-O-Matic knows,” the site asserts. “Answer 20 questions about your concept of God, the afterlife, human nature, and more, and Belief-O-Matic will tell you what religion (if any) you practice…or ought to consider practicing.”

While I think Beliefnet takes a simplistic and overly orthodox view of my particular denomination, perhaps it’ll do a better job of yours.

What made your own Sabbath memorable this week? Share — anonomously, if you’d like — by clicking that Comments link below.

How I Say Happy Birthday

From today on, each time one of my many children has a birthday, Greenlance will celebrate by posting a resource that will be of particular interest to that kid. So happy birthday, middle son. This site’s for you:

“Makai” isn’t just an awkward pronunciation of “Michael”; it’s also the Hawaiian word for “toward the ocean.” Is there any question, then, what you’d name a magazine that discusses nothing but hanging out at beaches in Hawaii? It’s a Surfin’ Safari, baby. If you’re planning to live by the beach, live a beach lifestyle.

To my son who longs to live in Hawaii: We wish you “Hau`oli la Hanau,” Bu. And be glad that we didn’t name you “Hapai“!

How I Check My Brain

You enjoy crossword puzzles, your best friend likes Sudoku, and your cat plays the piano. Me? My intellectual stimulant of choice is taking tests.

Tests, Tests, Tests lets me break my brain against career tests, Bible tests, typing tests, personality tests, and even IQ tests. There are plenty of fun quizzes here, too. What’s your Hogwarts House? Are you a Neat Freak? How Jealous are You?

So here’s a little test: Can you tell me about a better online resources for adult brain teasers? If not, I get the high score.

How I DON’T Plot My Own Death

Here it is: The first review of a site I do not use. Ever. But it’s just so creepy, I feel a need to share.

Just in Case I Die — have you looked at that logo? — sends out an email message to the police, your spouse, or anyone else you designate, in the event of your death. Or in the event that you fail to log in and STOP the message from being delivered. Same thing, right?

“My ex-husband did it!” “The password is…” “I’ve had a crush on you since the seventh grade.” “All the money goes to support Fluffy.”

Eeewwwww.

I won’t even ask you to comment on this one. Unless you want to.

How I Fly Away

Cheap travel is hard to come by. Gas is so dear, I don’t even use drive-throughs anymore.

How do I make every penny count when booking travel? Not Expedia, not Travelocity, not Orbitz, and not Priceline.

Nope, in this house, it’s Kayak, not Red Bull, that gives us wings. Kayak is a no-nonsense tool that simultaneously searches more than 140 resources — including most of the biggies. I recently found a Philly/Seattle flight for 220 bucks on Kayak when the same flights were more than $400 on the competitor sites.

Have any favorite resources for planning travel? Do share! Click that Comments link and make my heart soar!

How I Get Creative

I’m no artist, but I know good art when I see it. And when I see it, I aspire to create gorgeous little dongxi* to adorn my own life.

Dick Blick Art Lessons is inspiring. It’s a collection of lessons for making beautiful things out of art supplies — supplies that Dick Blick really, really hopes you’ll purchase from them.

Let’s see what we have here:

Oh, that’s ingenious. It’s an African Embossed Leather Box. I think I’ll make one of those.

Oh! Oh! Here’s something else:

It’s Glass Fossils! I’ll make two of those!

It’s pretty much an endless supply of inspiration for artists and wannabes.

Tell me about your favorite art resource by clicking that Comments link below! Inspire me!

*Dōngsyi (東西). A word you should know. It means East-West. More significantly, it means “things,” tchotchkes.

How I Feel Superior to Dummies

When my self-esteem is suffering, I go visit the Darwin Awards to see what really dumb people are up to.

When other people set themselves on fire, blow themselves up, or shoot themselves out of cannons…well, how dumb could I be? It sort of puts “falling down the stairs and landing on my can” into perspective.

Darwin Awards keeps tabs on people whose stupidity is so phenomenal, it actually removes them from the gene pool. “Culling the herd,” is how DA describes it.

Do you have a favorite humor site? Give me a giggle. Click the Comments link to share.

How I Make My Red Pen Fly

This fellow Bill Walsh has been doing what I do, for nearly as long as I’ve been doing it. He wields a red marker. He uses it unmercifully. He’s my sorta people.

The Slot explains to the curious what a copy editor is. For a good time, I read Walsh’s Sharp Points columns and watch his blog about editing errors he finds in newspapers that ought to know better. Too often, I discover I’ve been making thoughtless editing mistakes of my own. It keeps me on my toes alert.

Are there online resources that help you stay up-to-date on your own career? Do tell!

How an Aphorism a Day Keeps the..

So I was sitting in my seat one Shabbat listening to the sermon, when the speaker began describing a sudden flash of inspiration he’d experienced. “This idea struck me like a lightbulb,” he said with great solemnity.

Ouch! (But high-props for having the chutzpah to hold forth! It’s more than I can normally manage myself.)

If you don’t relish the though of someone stifling a smirk when you speak, consider carefully this contribution from Calvin College: Mixed Metaphors…to delight and amaze you. My favorites: “It’s not rocket surgery.” “The monkey is in your court.” And best of all: “Marching to the beat of a dead horse.”

Have any amusing mangled maxims to communicate? Convey ‘em by clicking that Comments link. Let us laugh along!

How I Go Way Back

Time machines aren’t real…except on the Internet. This time machine fascinates me. WayBack Machine is a documentary record of the internet. Not just a story about it. The actual thing.

It’s a snapshot of more or less every web page. Ever. It’s mind-blowing. Just imagining the storage space required for this effort crosses my eyes.

WayBack Machine will be of particular interest to researchers who need to know whether or not a particular website is legitimate. And to me, who just likes to look at old stuff.

Bet you can’t name a cooler research resource. C’mon. Bet me.

How I Get My Kids Through College

This is a little test to see whether my college-student offspring are watching. Listen up, kids. Here’s how to get an A on your next research paper: Son of Citation Machine.

It’s a web tool to help you properly cite sources in research papers. Just enter the citation information into a form, click the style, and bingo. Cite anything from anthologies to web sites in MLA, APA, Turabian or Chicago style. (And note the URL: It’s a dot net, not a dot com.)

Now pass the test by clicking that Comments link below and telling me about another study tool you’ve used and loved. Or just call mom and say hi.

How I Learn How

Movies, shmovies. I’ve got videos. From experts. About everything.

Expert Village is a sort of combination YouTube and public television, where every video explains how to do something: make vegan chocolate mousse, predict the weather, organize a convention. Homeschool. Compost. Decorate. Shop. Sew. Sing. Blog.

Me-sa like-sa. When I’ve watched ‘em all, I should be smarter. Right?

Seen any good videos lately? Tell me where to look!

How I Memorize Factoids

No flash cards for me. Not when I’ve got StudyStack. Boring old flashcards were never this good.

Whether you’re prepping for an exam, memorizing scriptures, or studying a new language, if it needs to stick in your head, you need StudyStack. Use it the way you’d use regular flash cards, but take advantage of all the improvements: Use the study table to see all the data in a single place. Print data or export flash cards to your cell phone, PDA, or iPod. Play games with the flash card data. This is what computers were made to do. Use any of hundreds of existing card stacks, or create your own. Brain-bending.

What’s your favorite educational tool? (And “Bill Bennett” is not an acceptable answer.)

How I Forgave Apple

Apple Computer and I haven’t been on speaking terms since 1983, when it put Franklin Computer out of business with the lawsuit heard ’round the world. I really loved my Apple ][ clones, and did not take kindly to their mass murder.

But I’ve finally decided that Apple has done its penance. After all, it’s sort of single-handedly kept Microsoft from eating the planet. And it’s kept my kids so preoccupied with their iPods that they haven’t had time to get into trouble. So Apple, I hereby forgive you. And I’ve installed iTunes on my (non-MacBook) laptop as a gesture of my goodwill.

There. We’re friends again. I shall now go forth and partake of podcasting.

Do you have a favorite podcast resource? Help me love Apple again by clicking that Comments link, below.

How I Fish for Business

Call me biased, but this one’s a must-see resource for the business-minded. Why biased? Blue MauMau is my baby, sort of. I had a hand in the startup; its current success is entirely its own, however.

If you’ve ever considered starting a franchise, Blue MauMau is your go-to place, with straight-up — and often funny — news, blogs, advice and tips for making it big in the franchise world. It’s a great hangout spot for talking with owners of franchises, too.

What are your favorite resources for making sound business decisions? Share by clicking that Comments link, below.

How I Wiki My World

When I’m not blogging, or editing, or having a life, I’m building my little Wikispace. Gotta keep all that research someplace. Wikispaces is made for creating your very own version of Wikipedia. Use it to plan events or build a community. Your club or co-op can use it to coordinate classes and activities, advertise for new members, and improve communication. I use it as a freestyle database for storing information and research. Endless possibilities.

How do you facilitate group planning? Surely you’re not still using email. Are you?

How I Feed My Inner Geek

My hubby and I are well and truly the original geeks. We met on line. Not impressed? It was before there was an internet. Before digital photography. Before cell phones. We courted cross country over a juryrigged electronic BBS via dial-up modems. And he’s good lookin’, too. Take that, eHarmony!

So when my egghead husband names Gizmodo as his favorite hangout spot, take it with a grain of salt. Who cares if Gizmodo has the inside scoop on every new toy and gadget on the planet? It’s still porn for geeks, and loving it is weird.

How do you choose the items on your Christmas wish list?

How I Check My Credit

Free Credit Report dot com has a catchier jingle, but if you want a credit report that’s genuinely free, you want Annual Credit Report – the one mandated by the federal government in an effort to stop identity theft.

That law says that once a year, each of the big three credit reporting agencies must provide you with a free copy of your credit report. All you’re required to do is ask.

Spread out your requests throughout the year so you can monitor activity that takes place under your name. The schedule is: Equifax on your birthday; Experian on your spouse’s birthday; and Transunion on your anniversary. Got that?

Mark it on your calendar. Or you might end up selling fish to tourists in T shirts.

(Then click that Comments link below to share a tip for improving your credit score.)

How I Remember Things

My Palm Treo died, but it never quite fit the bill anyway. So I’ve been looking for a good, free online PDA. I need a reminder that will jump out and yell at me when I’m about to miss an apointment or a deadline.

Remember the Milk seems to fit the bill. It shouts at me via my choice of email, SMS, and instant messenger (AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! are all supported). It’ll even Skype me.

Tons of other features — too many to list here — make this a pretty happenin’ way to track what’s happenin’. And you can’t beat the price.

How do you keep track of your to-do list on line? Share your faves by clicking that Comments link just south of here. Moo-ve along!

How I Learn, in Plain English

Make it simple, simple, simple. That’s the way to teach complicated principles. And is there anything more simple than paper dolls on feltboard? Nope?

CommonCraft updates paper dolls with an electronic feltboard that teaches — in plain English — complex technology such as CFL lightbulbs, podcasting and RSS feeds.

But why talk? Just take a look:

Fun, eh?

Know of other good educational resources for learning about technology? Click the Comments link below and share your finds!

How I Dog My Kids

Some people collect stamps. I collect children. Seven of ‘em, spread hither and thither across the globe. How do I know where they are? I Skype ‘em, of course.

We videoconference non-stop, for free, via our microphone- and camera-equipped computers. Because we Skype, the kid two states away in the boondocks of Idaho, or the one living two oceans away in the middle of a Chinese earthquake, seems just as close as the child two bedrooms down the hall, or the kid at college two miles down the road.

Now one son is arguing that we should switch to Yahoo Instant Messenger, since that’s the system they use in his office. What’s your opinion? Convince me to make the switch by clicking that comments link.

 

How I Track Criminals

I’m a big Law & Order buff. Not just the TV show. Actual crime astonishes me. Back when we still had a city paper, I used to read the crime log religiously.

Now that we don’t, I watch what the local criminal masterminds are up to with SpotCrime, the Google-maps-linked tracker of local crime reports. Shootings, robberies, arrests, break-ins, assaults, vandalism — they’re all tracked right here. Almost as much fun as a police-band scanner.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet track my own neighborhood. But all the big cities are tracked, including the two just north and south of my town.

Know of any other good map-linked resources? Tell me about ‘em by clicking that Comments link, below.

How I Get Put Out

Wow. Sort of a combination Photobucket and YouTube, PutPile permits unlimited uploads of all your media files — photos, videos, audio, and flash. File sizes up to 200M are permitted, and multiples files can be uploaded at once. You get to choose whether to make your uploads public or private. It’s my new favorite storage depot.

Tell me about the best video you’ve uploaded — or viewed — this week. Click the Comments link to share.

How I Become a Star

There are now six viable competitors to Microsoft’s Office suite. And they’re all free — more or less. The most extensive office suite — Sun’s Star Office – is free to students and educators. It runs on Windows, Linux or Solaris platforms.

Star Office is a downloadable wordprocessor, database, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing suite. What, no Sudoku?

If you’re not a fan of Star Office, here are links to the other five suites. The first two are downloadable; the other three operate entirely online — an advantage if you move from one computer to another. They are:

• Lotus Symphony
• Open Office
• Google Docs
• ThinkFree
• Zoho

Where do you look for free software? Tell me about it at the Comments link below.

How I Connect

It’s easy to get free high-speed Internet access — if you have a laptop and a willingness to travel.

WiFi Free Spot is a directory of public hotspots for wireless internet access. It’s organized by state, and lists only those spots that provide Internet access at no charge.

How do you get online when you’re broke?

How I Get Carded

I can’t pretend to understand the business model, but that won’t stop me from taking free stuff when it’s offered. VistaPrint is that crazy company that offers free goodies I just gotta have. Business cards, rubber stamps, address labels, announcements, pens…all my favorite stationery-store stuff — free!

What’s your number-one online bargain source? Click the Comments link and tell me about it!

How I Check Facts

Lying politicians — it’s tautological. And FactCheck proves it. FactCheck is the lie-detector for politicians on both sides of the aisle. There’ll be no more bogus tales of sniper fire or tax cuts — not if the Annenberg people have any say.

If you have any political inclinations whatsoever, FactCheck’s RSS belongs at the top of your feed.

Who’s your favorite disinformation detector? Tell me by clicking that Comments link below.

How I Help Boys

Man of the House is a help for young men who don’t have a father in the home. Encourages responsibility, social development, morality, etiquette and other virtues.

If you don’t have a MOTH in your own home, count your blessings and share this site with someone who does. It’s a hard-knock life out there for boys without dads. Maybe this will help.

Know of other sites for teaching social responsibility? Click the comments link and share.

How I Pile On

You Google? Old school! I do better than Google. I Dogpile.

Dogpile quickly and simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, About, and several other top search engines. Dogpile also has a toolbar so I can search from wherever my browser happens to be pointed.

Am I missing something by not sticking to Google? Who do you take hunting?

How I Stalk Stars

How do I use the Internet Movie Database? I chase the bunny trails, tying to discover how many degrees of Kevin Bacon is, say, Madonna. (Two. Her former brother-in-law, Chris Penn, was Bacon’s Footloose co-star. The entertainment industry turns out to be surprisingly incestuous.)

Other people use it for movie reviews, biographies, flim trailers, and videos. Oh, and the movie star trivia.

What are your favorite sources for entertainment news?

How I Interrogate My Kids

My goals as a parent are fairly simple: I want my kids to think clearly, serve God, and improve the world. The first of those goals is the easiest to impose upon them. I just ask tough questions that cause them to cogitate at a high level.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a good model for formulating thought-provoking questions. You’ll find references to Bloom’s all all over the Internet, but this site at the University of Illinois makes the Taxonomy easy to understand and emulate.

How I Figure Stuff Out

My younger kids loved this one so much they made it their homepage. How Stuff Works explains how toilets flush, how telephones get sound, how your automobile turns gasoline to motion…and pretty much everything else you’ve ever wondered.

Spend some time considering the mechanics of animals, autos, business and money, communication, computers, electronics, entertainment, food & recipes, geography, health, history, home & garden, people, science, and travel. Fascinating.

How do you find answers to your questions? Tell me by clicking the Comments link below.

How I Get Worldly

If the CIA has experienced some bad PR over the years, perhaps the World Factbook will go some way toward fixing the agency’s rep.

World Factbook is the authoritative go-to place for in-depth information on every country on the planet, updated twice a month with new statistics, maps, and information that only the CIA has the resources to compile. The most interesting part of each country’s description is at the end, under the heading “Transnational Issues.” There you’ll get the skinny on the CIA’s opinion of what sorts of troubles are brewing in the nations of the world.

Where do you look for information before you travel? Share your favorites by clicking the Comments link.

How I Get Critical

So, so tired of wasting twenty, thirty bucks — and a couple of hours of my life — on bad, unfunny, poorly made movies. Any more, I don’t see a movie unless Rotten Tomatoes says it’s worth my time.

Rotton Tomatoes surveys not just one or two critics; it surveys every critic under the sun, including my absolute favorite, Eric Snider. And it assembles all those critics’ ratings into a single score that’s far more reliable than any one person’s opinion.

Tell me how you decide what movies are worth seeing. Click the Comments link below.

How I Got Foolish

There’s one born every minute…but those of us who invest Motley Foolishly aren’t among their ranks.

Click the Investing link to get started, then learn the basics of buying low and selling high. Pay yourself first, understand the power of compounding, start early, do something, and never turn down free money. Master the basics, and wealth will follow.

Share your favorite educational site by clicking that Comments link.

How I Sell My Soul

Actually met someone the other day who’d never heard of Craigslist. And here I thought it was as ubiquitous as Ebay and Amazon. Ah, well. In case you’re the OTHER person who’s never heard of it, Craigslist is this decade’s new Pennysaver, the new Classified Ads, the new Yellow Pages.

Come join the rest of us who are using Craigslist to buy and sell our tchotchkes, find employment, advertise garage sales, hire a guy to fix the roof, and moan anonymously over lost love. See what you’re missing?

What websites are you shocked that people don’t know about? Tell me about ‘em by clicking that Comments link below.

How I Get Fed

What? You don’t yet have an RSS Feeder? Now that’s gotta stop right now, young reader. It’s time to get headlines from all your favorite pages — including this one — fed directly to your desktop.

Spend five minutes of your life setting up a feeder, and save hours and hours and hours of scanning frequently-updated online newspapers and websites. Let your RSS Feeder do the scanning for you while you sit back and get productive.

The BBC offers this easy tutorial on RSS Feeds: How they work, how to choose one, how to install it, and how to operate it. (Me? I use an RSS Widget in my Vista sidebar. It satisfies my ADHD-driven distractability.)

Tell me which RSS feeds I ought to add by clicking that Comments link below.

How I Know What’s True

Every Saturday morning, for better than a decade, I’ve been laughing at the crazy, crazy things my fellow travellers do. You guys. Thank you for being on the planet with me.

And thanks, too, to Randy Cassingham’s This is True for keeping me up to date with the odd goings-on of the human race, and giving me a good giggle in the process.

The other reason I like Randy? He shares my views on Zero Tolerance. It’s some kinda crazy.

Nominate your favorite funny place on the web by clicking the Comment link one line down.

How I Smarten Up My Kid

Parenting’s not all fun and games — except when it IS fun and games.

What could be more fun than playing animated math games against a cartoon with a plummy British accent? The BBC Schools site is a rich source of free, high-quality curriculum materials for every academic subject and every age from pre-school to college.

How do you use the Internet to keep your kids on track academically?

How I Get Reasonable

Politically, I consider myself a screaming moderate. Conservatives annoy me. Liberals annoy me. Polemics of every ilk annoy me. Without getting all Rodney King, can’t we all just acknowledge one another?

The online magazine Reason is left-leaning, but its tone is relatively moderate and careful. When writers are able to make sound arguments without name-calling and caricature, I listen. Coming soon to Greenlance, the right-leaning equivalent of Reason.

Tell me where you get your intelligent, thoughtful, non-polemical political fix by clicking that Comment button one line down.

How I Find Meaning

MSN operates my favorite thesaurus, but when it comes to etymology, I can’t stop loving Dictionary.com.

It doesn’t search just its own excellent resources; it also searches Encyclopædia Britannica, the American Heritage Dictionary, the Online Etymology Dictionary, Princeton University’s WordNet, the Dictionary of Idioms, a multilingual dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary, Investopedia, an investment dictionary, a dictionary of law, a dictionary of computing, the U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer, Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, and an acronym finder.

That should pretty much put a stop to your next family Scrabble war, right?

Tell me about your favorite research resources!

How I 翻译 the 漢語

I spent spent thirteen-odd years in China. I’m ashamed to admit, though, that four-year-old children read and write Chinese better than I do.

Still, I have an advantage: I know how to fake it. Babel Fish lets me double-check my college French and my bad Chinese before humiliating myself in public. For good measure, it also translates Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

¡Woo hoo!

What tools do you use to communicate with non-English speakers?

How…In what Manner…I…

Brilliant. Clever. Extraordinary. And lots of other synonyms. There’s no shortage of thesauri and dictionari lurking about the ‘Net, just begging to be consulted. I look to Encarta because the thesaurus seems to hit just the right word more often than any other. And the dictionary is pretty great — cool, wonderful, awesome, ummm… — too.

What’s your favorite word look-up resource?

How I Track Granny

Genealogical research: the art and science of stalking the dead. Just one more of my numerous little obsessions. It has its rewards. When I found that my dad and his good friend of thirty-some years share the same great-grandpa…pay dirt!

There are lots of excellent genealogical resources on line, and I’ll review them in future postings, but my current favorite site for posting genealogical research is Rootsweb. Input the name of your great-grandma, and find out what the government knows, as well as what nearly half a million researchers have already discovered about her.

Tell me how you stalk your own great-grandparents by clicking that Comments link below.

How I Feel the Guilt

You’re an obsessive recycler. You garden. You resist air conditioning. You even compost. But you still don’t feel like you’re doing enough to save the earth. The reason? Mother Earth News, the guilt-inducing Italian mother-in-law of media. These are the people who live in solar-paneled sod houses, dress in dead leaves, and won’t step on bugs. They fertilize with their own bodily wastes and think driving automobiles should be a jailable offense.

I love them. And hate them.

How do you live sustainably? Click the Comments link one line down and tell me about it.

How I Get Answers

This may surprise you, but I don’t actually know everything. I just pretend I do on television. When I need real answers, I ask real experts. Happily, experts are on call, just hoping I’ll ask. Where do I find ‘em? At AllExperts, of course.

Volunteers who have some expertise in their particular field answer questions by email, usually within a day, but rarely longer than three days. Find your topic, choose your expert, and rate the response. What a world!

Tell me where you go for answers, won’t you? (And if you answer: “God,” I’ll accuse you of stealing my best line.)

How I Get My Word On

For depth of commentary, and access to Hebrew, Greek and Strongs, nothing beats Studylight for in-depth scripture study. Search by word, topic or specific scripture refence. Studylight lets you choose the translation (presently 47 options, including the Vulgate and two Spanish editions) and the commentary.

The Hebrew and Greek concordances I find particularly useful in trying to discern on my own the Author’s original intent.

Today’s fascination: The use of “Word” in Genesis 15:1 (”the word of the LORD came unto Abram in a vision”).

Where do you go for scriptural commentary and to compare alternative translations?

How I Protect My Baby

Did I mention I have eight kids? That’s right. Five sons, two daughters, and my baby: an HP Pavilion laptop. I’ve killed said goodbye to about a dozen notebook PCs over the past two decades, but it wasn’t always hardware failures that sent them packing. At least twice, it was because a virus snuck through while I was on deadline. Anti-virus subscriptions lapse, time’s short, and pow! I’m buying a new computer.

But no more. Now I have great antivirus software that never expires. It’s free, it’s fabulous, it’s TrendMicro Housecall. Oh, and you last three people who connect to the ‘Net via dial-up? Sorry. You’re out of luck. But for the rest of us, Housecall is a lifesaver. Thank you, Trendmicro. I love you!

Tell me your best anti-virus tricks by clicking that comment button one line down.

How I Beat Spammers

It’s just this easy. I don’t give my email address to people I don’t trust. When strangers — or websites — want my email address, I’m hahaha@mailinator.com. Go ahead. Spam me, baby.

With Mailinator, I make up any name I want at the Mailinator domain, and it’s mine. It’s yours, too, if you want it. No registration, no login. Just retrieve your mail. Or better yet, ignore it. It’ll disappear after a few hours. But who cares? Did you really want to read the spam?

Oh, Mailinator has a few alternative domain names, too, in case the potential spammer who wants your address is onto this workaround.

What do you do to fight spam?

How I Strut My Stuff

My hard drive is plenty full, and I’m not the crypt keeper. I don’t want to store all those random pieces of graphic art that really belong in blogs, email attachments and web sites. Storing photos is why the good Lord invented Photobucket — the free photo sharing and storage utility. Photobucket stores vast quantities of your graphic art, and you get to decide whether to keep it private or make it public. But the Slideshows may be Photobucket’s best feature.

Do you know of a comparable storage depot? Tell me about it by clicking the Comments link below.

How I Space Out

Somehow I managed to skate through twelve years of public school (and nearly as many years of college) with only a minimal exposure to science. Now I’m trying to compensate. And LiveScience.com is my drug of choice.

I especially enjoy reading the science blogs and reports on scientific studies. Every day the site hosts fascinating articles such as yesterday’s “Fairness Is a Hard-Wired Emotion” and “Myanmar Flooding Seen From Space“. Sure beats TMZ for cocktail-party trivia.

How do you stay up to date on the subjects you loved in college?

How I Saved My PC

Once upon a time my computer crashed. T’was filthy, dirty spyware took it down, it was.

I got it running again — barely — and installed Spybot — a fabulous piece of freeware that somehow managed to make everything all better. I haven’t had a problem since.

Tell me about your favorite free software utilities — but please, only after you’ve installed your own copy of Spybot. Here it comes to save the day!

How I Fight Glurge

You have one too: The neighbor who’s always emailing you dopey urban legends about hypodermics in gas tanks and Microsoft’s magical ability to track email forwards and reward them with donations to charities. I stopped arguing; now I just respond with a link from Snopes. Snopes is in the business of telling the truth about stupid stories. It’s usually right.

Tell me about other sources for combatting annoying email forwards. I’ll reward you with a 25-cent credit to your Visa card. Really, I will. And if you don’t tell 12 people about this post, you’ll have terrible luck for the next 30 minutes.

How I Got Smart

My favorite avoidance activity: Editing Wikipedia. Each time I edit, I get the sense I’ve made the world a little bit better. And every time I start playing Wikipedia, I get just a little bit smarter.

Wikipedia is inherently unreliable, of course. (cf, Michael Scott’s thoughts on Wikipedia.) And I’d never quote it in public. But it’s nearly always my go-to place for getting general background information on an unfamiliar topic.

Which online resources do you use for research?

How I Got Thin

My Calorie Counter is the resource I use to obsessively track my weight, water intake, food consumption and exercise. Somehow, it gives me strength, knowing I’ll have to account to a machine for that box of fudge I’m agonizing over. And if I don’t exercise every day, the evidence will show up in graphic form.

Have you found a good tool for tracking calories and weight? Tell me about it!

How I Got Rich

It’s Fidelity’s Full View feature. Enter every asset and every debt, and Full View tracks your changes in net worth. I began investing with Fidelity because that’s where my husband’s company invests his 401K. I continued because it has great research tools. Full View was an unexpected bonus.

The downside: Fidelity recently “upgraded” its investment research tool with prettier graphics and less functionality. Tell me about a good online tool for tracking a budget, and I’ll consider moving.

How I Got Famous

Social networking is so “Will you sign my yearbook? Please? Please?” But suddenly, all my middle-aged friends are networked. And just as suddenly, so am I.

Without even trying, I know who’s pregnant, who’s sad, and who’s having a birthday this week. So Facebook me, baby. Be my friend! Please? Please?

Tell me why you hate Facebook, and love Myspace. Or why you hate the whole notion of online networking, and wish we’d all just have a neighborhood barbeque.