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. [...]
Archive for May, 2008
How I Stalk Stars
Posted in Entertainment, Media, tagged editors, freelance writers on 31 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
How I Interrogate My Kids
Posted in Education, Teaching tips, tagged editors, freelance writers on 30 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Figure Stuff Out
Posted in Education, Research, tagged editors, freelance writers on 29 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 & [...]
How I Get Worldly
Posted in Education, Entertainment, Research, Travel, tagged editors, freelance writers on 28 May 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
How I Get Critical
Posted in Entertainment, Media, News and Opinion, tagged editors, freelance writers on 27 May 2008 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
How I Got Foolish
Posted in Investing, News and Opinion, Wealth, tagged editors, freelance writers on 26 May 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
How I Get Fed
Posted in News and Opinion, Technology, Utilities, tagged editors, freelance writers on 24 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Know What’s True
Posted in Education, Entertainment, Humor, News and Opinion, tagged editors, freelance writers on 23 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Smarten Up My Kid
Posted in Education, tagged editors, freelance writers on 22 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Get Reasonable
Posted in News and Opinion, tagged editors, freelance writers on 21 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Find Meaning
Posted in Education, Research, tagged editors, freelance writers on 20 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I 翻译 the 漢語
Posted in Community, Research, tagged editors, freelance writers on 19 May 2008 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
How…In what Manner…I…
Posted in Education, Research, tagged editors, freelance writers on 18 May 2008 | 1 Comment »
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… — [...]
How I Track Granny
Posted in Data storage, Genealogy, Home and Family, Research, tagged editors, freelance writers on 17 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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, [...]
How I Feel the Guilt
Posted in Education, Health, News and Opinion, tagged editors, freelance writers on 16 May 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
How I Get My Word On
Posted in Education, Research, Theology, tagged editors, freelance writers on 14 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Protect My Baby
Posted in Technology, Utilities, tagged editors, freelance writers on 13 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Beat Spammers
Posted in Community, Technology, Utilities, tagged editors, freelance writers on 12 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Strut My Stuff
Posted in Community, Data storage, File sharing, Technology, tagged editors, freelance writers on 11 May 2008 | 3 Comments »
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 [...]
How I Space Out
Posted in Education, News and Opinion, Research, tagged editors, freelance writers on 10 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Saved My PC
Posted in Technology, Utilities, tagged editors, freelance writers on 9 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Fight Glurge
Posted in Research, tagged editors, freelance writers on 8 May 2008 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
How I Got Smart
Posted in Education, Research, tagged editors, freelance writers on 7 May 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
How I Got Thin
Posted in Diet, Exercise, Health, tagged editors, freelance writers on 6 May 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
How I Got Rich
Posted in Budgeting, Investing, Wealth, tagged editors, freelance writers on 5 May 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
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