Geeky Cleaning Avoidance

Today is Saturday. Every Saturday, Alex works at CPHM Ambulance from 6am to 6pm. That leaves me with 12 hours (ok, well, more like 9 or 10 hours because I usually do get back to sleep after he leaves in the morning) to get chores done. That’s a lot of time – I should really have no excuse for not getting chores done in that time. I mean, even if I have plans and want to go out during the day, I still have the entire morning (most Saturday plans don’t start till the afternoon). So, I’ve been up and about for 4 hours today and haven’t gotten a thing done. Well, actually, I did start wash. So I’ve got that going for me…

Here’s what I’ve been doing for the last hour or so: researching cleaning guidelines and developing daily and weekly checklists for myself to keep on top of the cleaning that must be done. Yep, I’m that much of a procrastinator and that much of a geek. I found a Daily Quick Cleaning Checklist on RealSimple.com. I was like, “This is great! I can totally use this! But… I can’t use it interactively from my iPhone. Boo!” So I decided to create a Google Docs Form that I can access from my iPhone and check off tasks as I do them. But then I decided that really wasn’t enough. I needed something to guide me on the big stuff – the cleaning that needs to be done weekly, monthly, and so on. I found the perfect blend of Geek and Housekeeping… The Periodic Table of Cleaning. This is also from Real Simple, but it’s no longer on their website. I downloaded and modified it so that it’s on one page and printed it out and stuck it on my fridge. And I was like, “This is great! I can totally use this! But… I can’t use it interactively from my iPone. Boo!” So, you guessed it, I created a Google Docs Form that I can access from my iPhone and check off tasks as I do them. Nerdvana.

My Daily Quick Cleaning Checklist
My Weekly Deep Cleaning Checklist

I really want to create Monthly, Quarterly, Bi-Annual, and Annual checklists as well – and I’m sure I will – but I really, really need to stop all this planning and actually start cleaning. Boo cleaning…

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So is this why I’ve been Obsessed with Tetris Party on the Wii lately?

clipped from lifehacker.com Tetris Wipes Out Bad Memories, Say Scientists According to researchers at Oxford University, playing the popular, classic puzzle game Tetris after a traumatic experience could significantly reduce emotional scars. Apparently Tetris—which requires serious brain power on your part—blocks your brain from storing those bad memories. The catch: It needs to be played immediately following the traumatic event, so break out your old Game Boys and stick ‘em in your emergency kit. Photo by Micah Taylor. [via] kflott 9:20 AM You have to arrange the bad memories so they fit together, each time you complete a row, that row of bad memories disappear. Unfortunately, the longer you do this, the faster the bad memories fall, making it harder and harder to keep up.

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Another Project Born of Boredom…

Because apparently it never occurs to me to finish my chores when I get bored.  D’oh.

I put a new design on my site today.  Decided to take a simple DIY Wordpress Theme (created by the girl who did the bluebird blog template I was using before) and customize it a bit.  The Firebug Firefox add-on made playing around with the basic edits I did really simple, but I still ended up killing a few hours going back and forth on a few different designs.  I love the colors and the header image and the overall simplicity of the look.  I also love that it sort of reminds me of Christmas (the orbs in the header sort of look like ornaments to me) but then it also reminds me of nesting and spring, so this design might stick around for a while.  Weeee…

Alex thinks I’m crazy for spending hours doing crap like that.  I guess it looks like work to him.  Doesn’t feel like it to me.  It’s oddly fun.

Oh, and while I’m talking about fun little projects, I just have to share the Photoshop job I did for the “overview webinar” at work that incorporates our new logo:

I found a stock image of a magnifying glass and cut out the glass part of it into a new image.  I took our logo and spherized it and inserted it as a layer into the original magnifying glass.  Then, I brought back in the glass of the magnifying glass as a new layer that I made less opaque.  I think it looks awesome for a 10 minute Photoshop (much better than most of the graphics on our site ).  Well, actually, I wish that I’d spherized the logo more.  Ah well.  I wish I could find more excuses to do fun little projects like that at work instead of stupid boring managerial stuff. 

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clipped from www.amazon.com Get the Universal Wish List Button It’s the essential tool for adding items from any website to your Amazon Wish Lists. Ready for the fun part? Go to any online store, and when you see something you want, click the “Add to Wish List” button in your Bookmark Toolbar. Unless you need to quickly log in, that’s all it takes to add it to your Amazon Wish List.

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Simply Stunning

I was bored tonight while I was waiting for my iPhone to restore after I upgraded it to the 2.1 firmware and then jailbroke it (using the Pwnage tool), so I started poking around Hulu. I knew that there were clips from SNL on there, but I thought that they were all newer clips and didn’t realize that they had some older ones up there. I stumbled upon an old Celebrity Jeopardy clip and laughed until I cried. I remember listening to these with Eric and Ryan and Beck. Eric used to talk just like Will Ferrell’s impression of Alec Trebeck all the time – it’s really catchy. That was around the time that Beck and I went on our Ghetto Fabulous Trip to Europe… we ran around Edinburgh doing Sean Connery from Celebrity Jeopardy Impressions (“Then the day is mine!”) for days before we realized that it was probably really obnoxious to the Scotts… But we continued to do it anyway.

Good times…

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I mean, it’s just about the cutest thing ever. We have the Wii Fit and it really is fun to exer-play. I think that it might actually keep me motivated to lose weight since it weighs you when you play and you can take a fitness test and see a little graph chart with your weight and BMI. The little voice it uses is adorable too. When you step on the balance board, it goes, “ooh” in this tiny voice that makes you think it’s saying that because you’re a tubby and much heavier than it expected. Somehow, I don’t find that insulting. I’m overweight according to the fit test (and according to me and according to anyone who looks at me) and I actually think it’s sooooooo cute when it calculates my BMI and then says very matter-of-factly in this tiny mechanical voice “that’s overweight”. Anyway, just having a bit of Wii love. Wiiiiiiiiiiiii!

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Make this iPhone App for me, Please.

So here’s what I want:

I want an app that will work with Google Earth. I want to be able to capture location data while I’m out on a walk and have a path created for Google Earth. I want the total mileage to be calculated from the path created in Google Earth and it’d be cool if it could calculate the average mph that I moved based on the times associated with the location points. Also, it’d be cool if it could then calculate approximately how many calories you’ve burned. Oh – and it’d be cool if you could compare your times if you’re doing the same path over and over again. And it might be cool if you could add notes to your location data… Or create a note or photo and have it attach location data to that… I could see people using it to create walking tours of their city as well as what I’d do, which is track my workout data with it.

Of course, this will all work much better once the iPhone has actual GPS functionality instead of sort of a hacked version of it through cell tower and WiFi triangulation. Which may be as soon as June when I will probably really want a new iPhone… I need to get a job that would require me to always have the latest and greatest… Oh! Or my anniversary date with my company is in the beginning of June and since I recently got a promotion/raise, I probably won’t get a raise in June so perhaps I can convince my boss that I at least deserve a bonus (which I do) and that bonus should be at least as much as a new iPhone.

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After Midnight Again

I will never, ever manage to get back on a schedule where I can go to sleep at a normal hour and then get up for the gym in the morning. It’s after midnight again and we are still awake – Alex playing on his PS3 and I’m doing random crap on my computer.

I decided around 10:30pm that I’d finally print out a bunch of our wedding pictures and figure out where to hang them. Once I figured out where I wanted my groups of frames to be hung, I set to work in iPhoto flagging the pictures that I wanted to print – but found myself running back and forth to my frame groupings to try and figure out which picture I wanted where and in what size I’d have to print it. Then I remembered Skitch. I snapped pictures of the frame groupings I had laid out on the floor with my iPhone, imported them onto my iMac and opened them up with Skitch. In Skitch, I could very quickly and easily add text elements which could be changed, dragged around, and updated as I was working. Here’s an example:

OK, well, the example is kind of hard to see because I was working with a big image and reduced it for posting online and so my fonts look tiny. Anyway… Skitch totally made my little on the fly project easy and fun. Oh, and the interface can be pink (for girls) and the icon is this crazy little pink heart so I love it.

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A little obsessed…

Yet again, I find myself up waaaaay later than I wanted to be because I got caught up in something that I was doing online.

Tonight it was Twitter. I’ve never bothered with Twitter before because, well, I’m not very social. But I found Twinkle for my iPhone, which is a Twitter client that adds the ability to find tweets from folks near your actual location and the ability to add pictures to tweets right from the iPhone camera. Pretty cool stuff. So that led me to (finally) creating a Twitter account, which made me think that I’d like my Tweets to be on my blog (my obsession with being able to see exactly what I was doing/saying/thinking/feeling on a specific moment in time makes me need all of my content to be in one spot) which made me start researching WordPress plugins for Twitter which led me to one that I really liked – but doesn’t seem to work exactly right yet.

So now I’m all hyper and still way into what I was working on but it’s already almost 2:30am and we were planning to go to the city tomorrow to see Captain Picard in Macbeth but in order to get to the matinée show we’d need to leave here by 8am to get to Poughkeepsie in time to catch a Metro-North train that will get us to Grand Central early enough to get to a 2pm show. Since I’m still typing away and Alex is still awake behind me playing on his PS3, it’s not likely that we’ll be awake and ready to leave the house in 5.5 hrs. We shall see…

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Oh! I am so P-Cited!

I got my invite to the beta of Evernote! I don’t know why I think it’s such a big deal… It’s just a software beta. But it seems like it’s going to be really useful and cool. Weee!

(David coined the term ‘p-cited’ in our family and it stuck with me. Much like ‘Wham’. )

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