Or, more likely, fifteen good stories, according to Lifehacker.
.
I’d recommend anyone looking for a new job should consider having these stories and rehearsing them so that when asked you have good answers and don’t fumble as you tell them. Plus it always looks good to be prepared.
If you are looking for a new job, go to Lifehacker/LinkedIn for more guidance.
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And this one from Food52 could be yours. Once you get in the habit of making minestrone, you can really adopt any set of vegetables and beans you have to make the soup you want. Don’t like cabbage? Don’t use it. Out of chickpeas (garbanzo beans)? Use something else. It may not strickly be minestrone if you do, but who cares: it will still be delicious. Needless to say, this is a great way to use up bits and pieces of vegetables in your crisper.
It’s the weekend. You could use something to read. Instead of going to the latest books — which are no doubt very good — why not consider picking up a classic and reading it. If you are furrowing your brow at the thought, please take a moment and read Calvino’s argument for why you should in this NY Review of Books piece.
One thing that Calvino doesn’t mention is that the classics can be fun. Not all of them, of course, but many of them can be as delightful and engrossing as any book you might find.
Whatever your reasoning to select one, here’s hoping you start reading one this weekend. Enjoy!
(The image contains text from Calvino’s book, “If on a winter’s night a traveler” and it contains the best description of the process of reading. I don’t know if it’s a classic yet, but it will be and is also a great read.)
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If not, this weekend is a good time to turn that around.
(From the great blog swiss-miss.com. See her blog for much more inspiration.
As this article shows, you can make a big change in your place with a small amount of paint. Minimally Designed Apartment With Punches of Color (Design Milk).
Case in point, this door and the fixture above it:
Depending on the object you paint, you could get a big change with a small can of paint. Low cost, low effort, big difference. Well worth it.
See the link to Design Milk (above) for more great examples.
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It says something about the pervasiveness of image producing software like Photoshop in that most people looking at this…
…would clue into what is happening to the face in this image. More and more of us use software like Photoshop, Paint and other tools to create and manipulate images. Seeing it used in this way makes us aware of just how much imagery surrounds us and bombards us, as well as how much computer imagery we deal with every day.
For more on this story, head over to Collossal and see more examples and background on this.
(Street Eraser: Giant Stickers Appear to Erase the Streets of London with Photoshop)
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So head on over to this link at the Open Culture site: Free Fun: Play Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Frogger & Other Golden Age Video Games In Your Web Browser and soon you’ll be playing video games like it is the 1980s. Make sure you explain to the younger ones that you needed to pay a quarter for every game.
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Blogging is dead (so it is said). But I am still blogging, and happily so. Here’s why, here’s what I think has changed, and here’s what I do now.
I have been blogging a long time (since 2005). Over that time I have had blogs on Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr, and on IBM’s hosted sites. I still blog on WordPress and IBM. (Posterous is gone, Tumblr feels less like blogging and more like social media sharing (great stuff, but not for me), and Blogger never could top WordPress for me.)
Blogging had it’s big moment in the early Web 2.0 days, and a number of bloggers went on to great success. Then more and different types of social media appeared, making blogging seemed dated and bloated. Even I dropped off blogging and started doing more with Twitter, Instagram, and more.
I have returned to blogging because it still has something that other social media lacks. It allows me to capture longer ideas, unlike other social media. It lets me go back and see what I was thinking about and doing years ago. Most social media is about the Now and about the Group, but blogging is more than that. Blogging extends in time, and starts (but doesn’t end) with me.
I was also incented by a number of small things. One, my blog traffic was declining, and I thought I would like to see if I could reverse it. I like the idea of people reading my blog, and I thought blogging again could improve the decline. Two, WordPress started paying me monthly for my blog traffic. It is a pittance: less than $6 a month. I have a goal to get it up higher than that. Three, I’d like to reach the goal of having a million views of my blog. I started the blog modestly, and I have been happy to see how it has grown. I’d like to hit that number.
Those are small incentives, though. A bigger incentive/goal is that writing my blog is Writing. Blogging is a good word, but what I really want to do is write and write better and eventually write well. Maintaining the blog helps with that goal.
(If your blog is mainly writing, consider saying you are Writing (not Blogging) when you are adding to your blog. A blog is a web log, but if you are trying to do something more than just log things — and you likely are — why not elevate what you are doing by labelling it with a better label?)
How I blog now:
Unlike many smart bloggers I follow, I tend not to write long form posts. When I do, I write them in Microsoft Word, mainly because if my machine hangs up or reboots or does any number of stupid things, I will not lose what I have written thanks to Word’s superb autosave feature. Once it is good enough (by my meagre standards), I will copy and paste it into WordPress.
If you’ve heard Ira Glass’s talk about the creative process , then you will want to see this video (here, at swissmiss). If you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to see it. Especially if you are struggling to create something that matters. Highly recommended.
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It’s Monday: you need some help with feeling awesome. I recommend this not too hard to handle on a Monday post at Pick the Brain. Like all tips, some will help you more than others. I especially like the samurai sword of confidence (feel free to replace a sword with something less violent if that helps you).
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Buddhify is an app I read about on the Swissmiss blog that “teaches you to meditate and relax on the go.” I haven’t tried it yet, but I did check it out and it looks promising. For more,
see swissmiss.
Over at Food52, there’s a nice rundown of dishes you should consider making without following recipes. You may want to refer to some memory aid, but if you like these dishes, chances are you can make them pretty much without the need of a cookbook (or a web site).
They have recipes from Vegetarian or Vegan Chili to Quinoa Salad to Marinara Sauce to Risotto and more.
Well worth a look.
is another variation of a storable bed. Unlike my previous post, this bed doesn’t go into the ceiling, but flips around to become a desk Here’s the before:
and here is the after:
For someone with a small space, it’s a cool alternative to the sofabed.
For more on this, go here.
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