Free pen holders – getcha some
Inspired by addictive blog Apartment Therapy – and an OCD-need to keep my pens in separate homes – I set out recently to make my own pen holders:
- One for pencils
- One each for blue, black and red pens
- One for highlighters
- One for Sharpies
…you get the sorry idea.
What do you think?
From humble cans of coconut milk to centre stage and totally useful.
Get your own:
- Choose some wrapping paper or something delightful
- Measure the can’s circumference & height, cut your paper to size
- Stick a length of double-sided tape to one edge of the paper & wrap around
- Seal the other end of paper to the can with some more tape
2 minutes flat!
(If I had a little more Martha in me [Blue Peter skills for Brits] I might change them up for the seasons. I’ll leave that up to you!)
Won’t somebody think of the children?
You might find me a psychotic grammar she-demon, but I think I’m rather a benevolent soul.
As such, I’d give these chaps the benefit of the doubt. I would. And I tried.
But there are three babies in this picture – 3 babies all equally on-the-go.
Which means… I’ll have to cry instead.
Feeling bendy? Try this office yoga
The lovely Esther at Yogatic offers daytime relief to cube monkeys and work-at-home-types alike – though I might give it a miss at the Starbucks mobile office. Close your eyes and count forward to Friday….
Affect vs. effect – with visual aids
As Grammar Girl fights the good fight, I’d thought I’d join in with some handy visual aids.
‘affect’ vs. ‘effect’, what’s the difference?
Never again have to cross your fingers as you hit send/print/launch – not really knowing whether you’ve used ‘affect’ or ‘effect’ correctly.
General rule?
- affect is the verb
- effect is the noun
But! English being English (that is, requiring of the most tedious classes in all of high school) – there are sneaky exceptions.
Check out KU’s handy printable sheet here – and commit to memory my noble contribution.
Love your laptop? 4 ways to keep it safe
Keep your laptop safe from thieves
Here’s my own happened-to-a-friend-of-a-friend urban myth:
A man’s using his laptop on a train – sitting in the seats that face others across a table. As the train pulls into the station, the man turns to his briefcase to put his iPod away. Before he can realise what’s happening, the respectable-looking man seated across has snatched his laptop & sprinted off the train.
Far-fetched? Not if we believe TechWire’s story. (And I’d never underestimate the appeal of a perfect, shiny Macbook Pro).
When working in public
As a San Francisco cop asks in this article,
“Where else do you have a thousand-dollar item sitting on a table in a coffee shop?”
Ding ding ding!
Keep your laptop tethered with a steel cable lock*. I have a few. I keep one in my favourite suitcase, another in my let’s-go-to-Starbucks backpack and one in an oversized handbag. Whatever I leave the house with – I’ve always got a laptop lock with me.
When staying in a hotel
If it fits, lock your laptop in the safe whenever you leave your room. Otherwise, lock it to a piece of furniture with a cable lock. This can be tricky with hotel furniture – but the laptop attached to a heavy chair will look far less appealing than the one left on the desk next door.
At the airport X-ray machine
Another horrible hypothetical:
Thieves working as a pair stand in front of their victim in line. After Thief 1 goes through the metal detector, Thief 2 sets the machine off and holds up the line as he gets searched. Meanwhile, Victim’s laptop has already gone through the X-ray and Thief 1 helps himself. He presumably beats a hasty exit out of the terminal – the ‘Catch Me If You Can’ details are fuzzy.
Better safe than sorry? Hang on to your laptop until the last second – putting it on the conveyor only when the path is clear to walk straight through.
1 more laptop safety tip
Staysafeonline cleverly advises to pretend your laptop is a wad of cash (a very thick wad, in most cases). Treat it likewise.
*Laptops have a security slot into which a combination lock with steel cable fits. Loop it around something heavy (e.g. a table leg), insert into the slot & lock. It’s a theft deterrent only – they can be ripped from the laptop casing but ruin the thief’s chance of selling it.
Expensive office storage? I think not.
Boxes and buckets. Does life get better? Nope.
My absolute favourite section of Ikea – I type erratically as heart palpitates – is the ‘office organisation’ area. The boxes & buckets section.
In most Ikea stores – I’ve studied this – you enter Mecca after escaping the food court disaster. Run from fat kids shoving 50¢ hot dogs down their throats and fly down a staircase, then around a corner. There, angels, sing.
It’s heaven. Neat white shapes and perfect clear boxes. Stuff to store other stuff in.
Boxes and buckets that stack!
And make your life better!
My local Ikea is an easy drive or train ride away, so my boxes-and-buckets collection approaches an I. Marcos level of excess. I’ve got the lot. (Hey, I work at home, it’s an easily justified addiction – my office is corralled and cannot spread).
Yet, while I love the concept of storing-stuff-in-other-stuff – my cheap-o student relics looked both cheap & ugly. Definitely low-end Ikea. Didn’t really mesh with my creative-r-than-thou aesthetic.
The cheap hack for cheap Ikea
As luck would have it, on a recent rainy-day trawl through a local antique shop, I found a box of old books & notebooks in a back room. Amongst it was a pre-WWII book report, done in fountain pen, from a fellow UBC student. Very cool – and very musty – history.
“Is Germany Prosperous?” the 40-page essasy asked, dissecting a book published in 1922.
Antique buffs, look away now.
$5 later, the relic was on its way home with me – detouring first to a craft shop where I picked up some mod podge glue.
A few hours of delightful cutting & pasting, Billie Holiday in the background for effect, and I had brand new office storage. Ta da!!!
I can’t tell you of the author’s ruling as to German prosperity – his handwriting was hard to read – but I love the result. Not only inheriting a strange piece of my university’s history, but a great makeover for under $10.
What do you think?
Google’s Click or Treat gets an A+
There’s no laurel-resting at Camp Google. After last month’s UFO mystery caught our attention, they’ve gone for the details yet again with today’s Click or Treat.
Love it.
Does your website have a quirky underbelly to amuse and reward visitors that pay attention?
Mine does. I blatantly reference 2 of the best movies ever made on pages of my main site. I’ll give you a prize if you find them. (And I’ll even tell you the movies – Jurassic Park & Bring It On – but don’t you dare disagree on their cinematic perfection).
Boo hiss, Universal
I went to see Couples [sic] Retreat this weekend. A research project.
I’d hoped to see 4 couples (gorgeous girls curiously married to guys way out of their league) fleeing backwards for 2 hours. Nonstop withdrawal from Place A to Place B. It mattered to me dearly. I needed them to run for their lives in hasty, panicked, flat-out retreat.
$12.95 wasted, nobody did any such thing.
Instead, the characters went on a retreat. Took a couples’ retreat.
And while the packed theatre suffered their long-winded antics and mediocre slapstick – we mutually hated this film for one reason above all others.
Where was the goddamned apostrophe?
Retreat. Noun. Requiring of an apostrophe when someone takes one. When they take possession of it. (REMEMBER THIRD GRADE?)
How did yet another movie poster depart on a print run of hundreds of thousands of copies without anyone noticing?
Agreed – this movie caters to the “Morons, Illiterates and Meatheads” demographic — but smart people get bored on a rainy Vancouver night, too!
Lynne Truss, come back from Africa now, the Western world needs you!
You did what? Oh, you dummy.
It was a perfect afternoon for sunshine, chirping birds, fantastic iced coffee – an ideal ambiance.
It, too, was the day I’d work 3 hours on a document without saving it.
Yep, 3 hours. Without saving it.
Without. Saving it. (Stop laughing).
As anyone who’s ever lost that pages-long email just before sending it will understand – what I’d written was good. A dead ace.
With a groovy combination of Joss Stone & The Kinks, we’d covered – as a team – 14 pages of fantastique. Not one word of which I’d saved.
“You had me, you lost me,” the file smirked, disappearing into the ether.
I was left alone, bereft. Just me & my Sunny Afternoon.
Didn’t think it was possible to work that long without some sort of auto-save kicking in, did you?
Yea, well, tremble with fear if you’re a Mac user with iWork’s Pages. It can’t, won’t, doesn’t auto-save. Turns out Word’s auto-save isn’t much to shout about, either.
Dial up these presets & preferences – a little “anti-stupid” campaign. It happens to the best of us, I can now assure you.
Word auto-recover
- Lots of technical looking stuff for Windows users, c/o their Microsoft Big Daddy. Note that their offering is an auto recover – not an auto save.
iWork Pages add-ons
- Download WorkSaver
- Buy ForeverSave (US$9.99)
- And enjoy the ultimate irony that the wee TextEdit app (Apple’s notepad equivalent) has a fantastic auto-save.
We know the ideal solution – save the bloody thing! So, whilst on the subject, peruse further….
Safety first!
- Web Worker Daily on playing (and winning) at DIY tech support
- More Web Worker Daily on backing up your social media (god forbid you lose a tweet)
- Barkings warns that your iPhone recovery plan might need another look
- Michael Gray’s version of doomsday prep – how to back up pretty much everything
Applaud me for typing this with one hand. The other has been – and forever will be – permanently attached to “Ctrl + S”.
Signing off good & humbled,
Lauren
My good opinion once lost is lost forever. You?
I get concerned whenever Dan Brown pops up again – back for more money? – and then get angry. Never in this century have lucrative writing and digestible English been prised so far apart. (Last century? I pick John Gray.) Yuck.
Agree? Good.
Disagree? See how you can stomach the Telegraph’s pick of “Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences”.
My favourite –
Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué.
Dan, put the pen down, take your millions – and shuffle off!
Sorry – I’ll ask in a way you’ll understand:
Shuffle off…radiating a fiery clarity that forecast[s] [your] reputation for unblinking [suckiness] in all matters.
Boooo.