TripIt

from Lifehacker.com:

TripIt takes all the work out of storing your travel plans in one place. Instead of making you enter all the details like places and times by hand, just forward reservation confirmation emails to TripIt so it can do all that heavy lifting for you. Register for a free account at TripIt and start forwarding travel plan confirmation email messages from "virtually any" online travel site to plans@tripit.com, and the web service will parse out dates, times and locations and generate your itinerary with lots of additional information, like a calendar, photos, weather, maps, online check-in links and even collaboration with fellow travelers. Check out a sample TripIt itinerary that came together by fwd'ing a few emails from online bookings. Now, this is a travel organizer I might actually use (versus just saving all my trip-related messages in my email software.)

TripIt

UC Berkeley lectures on YouTube

from Ars Technica:

Ever felt like learning about physics from a professor at UC Berkeley? You may have been able to listen to those lectures before, but now you can watch them through the university's new public channel on YouTube.

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Proppian Fairy Tale Generator

from Yahoo!Picks

Trickery! Villainy! Violation! Pursuit! In the 1930s, a Russian scholar named Vladimir Propp studied the "basic plot components" of his country's folk tales and came up with a list of the mythic stories' "series of actions"—or "functions." Though the Eastern European thinker surely didn't imagine the rise of the Internet, an imaginative class at Brown University has brought Web and academic together with the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator. This ingenious online game presents the basic structures of the fables Propp dissected. You, the reader, select which functions you like. Click as many as you want: Mediation? Branding? Reconnaissance? Hit "generate" and a fairy tale based on your choices will appear before your very eyes. Note: Disney these ain't. Even the "preset" versions of Cinderella, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel read like nothing you've heard (or seen) before. The legends woven by this raconteur of a generator are imaginative, richly detailed, and undomesticated. The Grimms would approve. So, we like to think, would Vladimir Propp.

Give Thanks with an Appreciative Note

from lifehacker.com:

Good manners start with good intentions. Etiquette experts postulate that writing thank you notes increases the frequency and quality of gifts you receive. But what if you're stuck and don't know what to write? The Thank You Note Samples site covers nearly every imaginable topic to give thanks for, from acknowledging the receipt of charity donations to expressing appreciation for hospitality arrangements to thanking your potential employer for an interview. Multiple letter formats are available to add variety (especially if you're spending the night writing the same monotonous notes due to a recent wedding). Additionally, the suggestions go a step beyond just the written word. Why not give thanks, for example, with a gift basket? If you want to express your gratitude and feel like you are not inspired, the Thank You Note Samples site will definitely get you back on your toes and you'll be filled with ideas for expressing appreciation.

Thank You Note Samples

music

dome

nice neighborhoods

When we were shopping for houses in our new town, we were pretty concerned that there weren't very walkable neighborhoods with houses we liked. The neighborhood we came from was close to all kinds of things. It was great.

So, anyway, it would have been nice to have this tool available when shopping around: http://www.walkscore.com/

I just found that our old neighborhood had a walkability rating of 75%! Our current neighborhood has a walkability rating of 3%. :-(

decorating - color schemes

I just found this site: http://www.colr.org/

It seems like a more automated way to do some of the color scheming that I've been doing manually. I'd take a digital picture of something I wanted to coordinate, then pick out colors and make rectangle samples of them. In the above site, if you keep clicking to create color scheme from the picture, you eventually get a representation of the colors that you imagined.

Here's an online discussion of the site: lifehacker.com

I am not a tourist

I went to a conference this week in a town which is a popular tourist destination. Mostly, I think, because it has great weather and landscape and some intriguing history.

At the end of the conference, I had some time on my hands. I was not very interested in touristing, but, after talking with my husband on the phone, relented and went out and about a little.

One thing that is popular for a tourist is to go shopping. I would have to suspect that this is popular for people who like to go shopping in the first place. That is not me.

Another thing people like to do is "sight seeing". Looking around for the sake of looking around. I get bored with that as well.

So, for my afternoon out, I did go to a couple of cute places. But I only started enjoying myself when I tried to do "home things" there. I found a library to go to. I read some magazines and got ideas for decorating the family room (we just moved into a house and want to paint it now, instead of right before we're trying to sell it; lesson learned from the relocation).

My laptop battery had died, so I looked at some email, sitting alongside gobs of teenagers. The library had a pretty "tree garden" park around it, so I took a hand-drawn map they'd done of the garden and walked around looking at the trees and learning what their names were.

At a corner there was a sign for where all the different types of churches surrounding the park were. I sought mine out, drove to it, looked at and saw that it was good, and parked there while I went over to another cute shopping area.

In the shopping area one of the first storefronts was an intriguing bookstore. I lost myself in the books, deciding to purchase one called Lost History. My knowledge of Sunnis vs Shiites has increased exponentially. I took the book to the restaurant next door and read it while having a happy hour.

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So, as described, this was not touristing. Probably some of the nicest "not touristing" I've done in a long time. ;-)

flying sandhill crane

I posted about the prevalence of sandhill cranes in my neighborhood recently. Today I was driving down our street, on my way to work, and I saw some of them flying. No big deal, but then I got a great view of what they look like underneath when they fly. It was very funny, because their legs just kinda flap around the sides of their tail. So, they look clumsy when they're walking and they look clumsy when they're flying. They're great!