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It’s an uh-oh morning

I should have known I was in for it when the baby greeted me this morning with "uh-oh." 

"What’s uh-oh?"

"Uh-oh."

When your diaper comes off under your pajamas, that’s uh-oh.  So I put him in the tub.  Turns out there was more uh-oh coming.  I know there was a Dirty Job show about how to clean baby and poop out of the bathtub but I must not have paid enough attention.  Next time.  Next time they can feature us.

On to the dishes.  It turns out that shrimp ceviche and cheese sauce do not wash well in the dish washer.  In the process of unloading the dishes to manually wash them, the dishwasher rack fell off and a margarita glass fell and … uh-oh.

It’s an uh-oh morning but since it’s not even eight o’clock, I figure we can just start over!

Have a good uh-oh morning!

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Save more gas switching from 15 to 18mpg than from 50 to 100mpg

I saw this on Eric de Place’s blog and although not immediately intuitive, he’s right:

You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car.

Driving 20,000 miles

15 mpg 18 mpg 50 mpg 100 mpg
1333 gallons  1111 gallons  400 gallons  200 gallons 

So going from 15mpg to 18mpg, you’d save 220 gallons, but doubling your mileage from 50mpg to 100mpg would only save you 200 gallons a year, assuming you drove 20,000/year. So it really is important to pay attention to the car you pick’s gas mileage, even if it’s only a few miles more per gallon than another one.

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Flickr’s new uploader rocks!

If you follow my pictures on Flickr, you know that I’m a bit sporadic about uploading them.  I just uploaded a bunch today with Flickr’s new Uploadr 3.0 and it worked great!  Much, much better than the old one. 

  • Faster.  Faster.
  • You can edit titles before you upload.
  • You can edit the tags and privacy settings for pictures individually.
  • Once you hit upload, you can immediately start working on another set of photos.
  • It didn’t drop me once!
  • You can work offline.
  • It’s open source.  (This doesn’t immediately buy me anything but it’s cool and it means if anything really bugs me, I could fix it.)

The one thing that bugged me is that when I selected pictures to upload, it never remembered what directory I got them from.  Every time I selected pictures I had to navigate to my pictures’ directory again.

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A quick tip to speed up your computer

A tech support guy gave me a quick and easy tip to make your computer faster:

Remove all the icons on your desktop.

Each time you start your computer – or any application – Windows reads all the icons on your desktop.  If you have a lot of icons, that takes a long time.  All of those icons are probably shortcuts to applications you can also find on your Start menu.

Merry Christmas!

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How much allowance did you get?

There’s an interesting blog post over on freemoneyfinance that is asking two serious financial questions:

  • How much did you get for an allowance as a kid?
  • How much did the tooth fairy leave you?

I answered:

I got $1/week allowance starting around first grade and $1/tooth from the tooth fairy. 

My seven year old stepson gets $1/week at both houses and $1/tooth
from the tooth fairy. I think the tooth fairy is being a bit cheap
since she gave me a $1/tooth over 25 years ago!

What about you?

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Gasp! A salad for lunch!

I had a salad for lunch.  I would dare to bet that none of you have ever seen me eat a salad at a restaurant … because this is the first time I think I’ve ever ordered a salad at a restaurant.  It wasn’t too bad … especially with the Red Ale to go with it!

This is a direct result of Frank and I deciding to eat less carbs … all because of Good Calories, Bad Calories. (And the best things I could find on the menu were steak, fajitas and salads.  I got the cajun salmon salad because we’ve had lots of steak recently and we’re having Mexican for dinner.)

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Writers don’t have to be politically correct

John Scalzi, the author of Old Man’s War, pointed me at Nick Mamata‘s story of talking about his book Under My Roof to a bunch of freshman.  It’s quite funny.  The listeners seemed to think that his book would corrupt people:

Explicitly, I was asked several times if I didn’t think that a kid
might read the book and build a bomb or become a racist or
anti-American.

By people that seemed to be having some politically correct issues of their own:

Indeed, one woman went off on a long tangent about making English the
official language of the United States — this was of course prefaced
with "I’m totally not racist, but" (you know, racist throat-clearing)
and then her friend said that yeah, she’d read a study that predicted
that in a few years New York would be 75% Spanish and that "we’ll be
the minority." And I said "We who?" and she said "We, you know, us,
normal people." (I shared an eye-roll with the Nigerian and Pakistani
students in front of me at that point.)

I recommend reading his whole story – it was funny.  And thought provoking.  Hopefully authors can continue to write the stories they do without having to be politically correct.  The day they have to change their words to be politically correct will be a sad day indeed.

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What to do when your shirt doesn’t meet your pants …

hip-t

Have you noticed lately, that shirts don’t often meet pants?  So there’s a gap in between?  Well, now there’s a solution, hip-T.  It’s a really short tube top that you wear under your shirt, over your jeans.

I guess the hip-t might be a handy thing to have (I switched the shirt I was going to wear today because the shirt didn’t meet the pants) – but I’d rather they just went back to making shirts longer or pants higher …

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To my regular readers …

About the ads and anything else you might find annoying on this website … As you’ve probably noticed, I use this website to play around with things.   If you love or hate anything in particular, let me know!  If anything interferes in your reading, definitely let me know!