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Indoor Solutions

If you’ll only be gone for a few days, simply move your houseplants out of direct sunlight. This will slow growth and reduce moisture loss. Make sure you water thoroughly right before you depart.

If you will be turning the air conditioning down or even off while you’re away, move houseplants to a part of the house where the air temperature will be relatively cool and constant.

Many houseplants will thrive in a temporary bathtub greenhouse—especially low-light, tropical foliage plants. Leave the light on in the bathroom, and you should return to a tub full of healthy plants. Here’s how to do it:

• Start by lining the tub with a large plastic sheet.
• Place several layers of newspapers on top of the plastic, lining the bottom of the tub.
• Place plants on the newspapers and turn the shower on long enough to wet the newspaper.
• Pull the shower curtain closed to help retain moisture. Read the rest of this entry »

The Toughbook CF-Y5 is Panasonic’s newest launch into the business rugged-notebook market where businesses may not mind investing a little bit more for something that will last and worth spending.

Design
The primary things we notice in this notebook is its weight. Including the power supply unit the laptop weighs just about 1.95kg, which is superb for a 14.1 inch LCD based laptop with a build in DVD writer. The CF-Y5 is also splash-resistant and Panasonic just stamps authority with this kind of feature laded onto the system. The laptop can also be dropped from an elevation of 30cm, although this isn’t spectacular by any sense where in most cases notebook falls are likely to be from a desk more than double the height specified. Read the rest of this entry »

First, an apology to my regular blog visitors for the lack of posts over the last month. Busy, busy, busy at work and home. No time to blog. The last couple of days I have been experimenting a bit with micro blogging via Twitter as a result of a conversation with my firm’s IT director and blogger.

Quick post to this interesting NYT article, Practicing Patients, about PatientsLikeMe. The article covers some ground on some of the questions that periodically swirl in my brain regarding HIPAA, privacy rights, who is (should be) the steward of medical information, pro/cons of patients (consumers) self treatment, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Ray Davies of Kinks fame opened the North American leg of his current tour at the historic Warfield Theater in San Francisco last night. I’ve seen Ray solo at least three times now, and the Kinks countless times since 1976 (Schoolboys in Disgrace tour), and last night’s show ranked among the best Ray concert experiences ever, and certainly the best for many, many years.

This was not the mellow but charming Ray Davies Storyteller show we’ve enjoyed and gotten used to over his last several American visits (or, at least, the ones I’ve caught). This was a real Rock ‘n’ Roll show that rivaled seeing the Kinks in the late 1970s (Low Budget/Give he People What They Want era), just before their last surge of early 80’s popularity took them out of the mid-sized theaters and put them into arena territory. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve mentioned before, now that I’ve “closed” RAILhead Design, I’m going through the process of *finally* moving all my various stuff to the domain name I’ve had for I don’t know how long: maurymccown.com. Right now, I’m waiting for my web host to open-up server migration again (which should happen mid-April), then I’ll begin the move in earnest.

Until then, I’m tinkering with my new site’s “coming soon” page, and in so doing, I’ve come to enjoy fiddling with some cool CSS capabilities. In particular, I’m loving the text-shadow and web font capabilities — though only a couple of browsers (Safari 3.1 and Opera) fully support both. Read the rest of this entry »

Roll over lumbering desktop computers, the limber laptop is here, and it’s here to stay! For a while now notebooks have outstripped their ageing desktop PC siblings, easily winning the gold medal in the computer sales olympics. We will illustrate how the PVP effect has contributed greatly to the increase in popularity of notebook computers. Read the rest of this entry »

If you plan on documenting your next trip online to share with family, friends, and strangers alike, a recent article — How to Make Me Read Your Blog. Or Not. — by Pam Mandel of Nerds Eye View might be of interest.

“Even though I have absolutely no editorial cred other than my reading habits, I’m going to scribble a brief rundown of what catches my eye and what makes me click away.”

Turns out that, editorial cred or not, Pam gives good advice for keeping a compelling travelogue: Read the rest of this entry »

If you know someone that’s a smoker, then you do have a good cause to be concerned. Still noted as the number one cause of lung cancer fatalities in the U.S., smoking is also tied to various other frightful types of diseases and cancers. You might then be questioning is this the time to help someone quit smoking, once and for all.

Many individuals are still oblivious to the terrible health effects that are at a result of this habit. One significant point to help someone quit smoking is to have them feeling motivated to give up. What might work with this individual? Are they in the least bit health aware? Have they got small children or grandchildren that they wish to see grow up? Read the rest of this entry »