Monday, May 19, 2008

The Sloan Career Cornerstone Center

Book from the NSF.....

Girls In Engineering - PDF book which makes recommendations on how science and engineering should be taught so as to increase the number of women and minorities in the scientific and engineering workforce.

The Sloan Career Cornerstone Center

The Many Uses of Vodka

Interesting tips--- HSM

The Many Uses of Vodka 

The Many Uses of Vodka

By: Dahlia Rideout (Little_personView Profile)

Aside from being a fantastic drink, vodka has many uses which you may not have known about. Since vodka is one of the world's most popular drinks, many of us have a bottle handy in the home. And since its typically filtered and pure, it makes a handy liquid to have around.
Here are a few uses:

  1. To remove a bandage painlessly, saturate the bandage with vodka. The solvent dissolves adhesive
  2. To clean the caulking around bathtubs and showers, fill a trigger-spray bottle with vodka, spray the caulking, let set five minutes and wash clean. The alcohol in the vodka kills mold and mildew.
  3. Clean jewelry. Soak the jewelry in vodka for five minutes, then rinse, and dry.
  4. Clean lipstick from clothing. Rub the stain with vodka, then throw into your regular wash.
  5. Remove the glue left behind by a bumper sticker. Rub the glue with a soft, clean cloth soaked with vodka
  6. Prolong the life of razors by filling a cup with vodka and letting your safety razor blade soak in the alcohol after shaving. The vodka disinfects the blade and prevents rusting.
  7. Spray vodka on vomit stains, scrub with a brush, then blot dry.
  8. Using a cotton ball, apply vodka to your face as an astringent to cleanse the skin and tighten pores.
  9. Add a jigger of vodka to a 12-ounce bottle of shampoo. The alcohol cleanses the scalp, removes toxins from hair, and stimulates the growth of healthy hair.
  10. Fill a sixteen-ounce trigger-spray bottle and spray bees or wasps to kill them.
  11. Pour one-half cup vodka and one-half cup water in a Ziplock freezer bag and freeze for a slushy, refreshable ice pack for aches, pain or black eyes.
  12. Fill a clean, used mayonnaise jar with freshly packed lavender flowers, fill the jar with vodka, seal the lid tightly and set in the sun for three days. Strain liquid through a coffee filter, then apply the tincture to aches and pains.
  13. To relieve a fever, use a washcloth to rub vodka on your chest and back as a liniment.
  14. To cure foot odor, wash your feet with vodka.
  15. vodka will disinfect and alleviate a jellyfish sting.
  16. Pour vodka over an area affected with poison ivy to remove the urushiol oil from your skin.
  17. Swish a shot of vodka over an aching tooth. Allow your gums to absorb some of the alcohol to numb the pain.
  18. Soothe a sore throat. Add a tablespoon of vodka to glass of warm water and gargle. The alcohol helps numb the sore throat.
  19. Eliminate swimer's ear. If you don't have rubbing alcohol, fill an eardropper with vodka, and squeeze it into the affected ear, then let it drain out

Article source: Miss Charming.com. Photo courtesy of Kaishin on Flickr (via Creative Commons).

The Many Uses of Vodka

Monday, May 5, 2008

TeacherTube - How to create a great PowerPoint without breaking the law.

todo-- hsm

TeacherTube - How to create a great PowerPoint without breaking the law.

Ploofle » Software list

For review -- hsm

Software list

Published by Charlene | Filed under geeky stuff

Just for grins, I’ve gone through my computer to see what stuff I use is open-source or free…and here’s what I got. You can just google the names as I’m too lazy to link. But I’ll write a bit about the things I like.

Work
OpenOffice - Does word, powerpoint, excel-like things. Also has a better system for page layout and visio-like drawings in my opinion.
Zotero (with OpenOffice/Word extensions for in-document citing) - A firefox addon that lets you download RDF/DOI data (think autofilling of citation fields) from most places, including PubMed, and store the pdf/article in the database, AND you can tag and it’ll do fulltext searches within both citation info and the pdfs on the fly.  The extensions let you cite from it and formats automatically into a lot of typical citation styles with either endnotes or footnotes.
InfraRecorder - Burns CDs, DVD, or makes ISOs painlessly.
Handbrake - Converts video (VOB files) painlessly into various divx formats, including for ipods
VirtualDub - Make simple video edits/effects for AVI files
Audacity - Record or edit sound.
Firefox - You know what this is
Free Download Manager - Very useful here in Mongolia.  Supports download resuming without as far as I know putting crap on your computer.
WAMP - An all-in-one package that runs a local Apache web server with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL.  Can also be set up to run multiple versions of PHP and MySQL or set up as a “live” webserver.  Includes SQLite I believe, but I don’t use it.
OpenEpi - Offline (but browser-based) interface to a lot of common biostatistical/epi/public health calculations, such as sample size or chi stuffs.  Also explains decently what these calculations are for.
WeftQDA - Haven’t used it for real, but it’s a qualitative data analysis tool similar to ATLAS.ti
FreeMind - Used for mind-mapping - multi-branched tree-like structures that are great for group work and discussions or medium-sized planning sessions where you want to focus on gathering all ideas then refining/organizing them
Sumatra PDF - Simple PDF reader that will run off a USB drive - also saves/bookmarks the last page you had open of individual files if you do the ebook thing.
CutePDF - “Prints” files to PDF format
CompareIt - Just that.  Compares line-by-line two files for changes.  Useful if you poorly manage documents or code, as I do.
Fun
VideoLan - Great media player - plays virtually anything and will try to fix corrupted files
Trillian - Multi-platform chat client
QuickPlay with ZSNES, Kega Fusion, Nestopia - Old video games! And Quickplay serves as a management frontend for the various systems and stuff.
StepMania - DDR clone for computers.  Many many many songs are available online, and with a laptop with tv-out and a usb-based pad, you have DDR for real.

Utilities
WinDirStat - Cool utility for looking at your hard drive’s space usage graphically to identify where you have random large amounts of crap.  Also has cool pacman hourglass-equivalent icon while analyzing your drive.
USBVirusScan - Needs some setup, but in the end will execute a program (e.g., a virus scanner) upon insertion of any removable disk.
PuTTY - Blame sourceforge.  Used for SSH and telnet-kinds of things.  Mostly command-line
Spybot - Malware/web-based exploit protection software.  May be becoming obsolete with more virus scanners including this kind of module…
TortoiseCVS, TortoiseSVN - Again, sourceforge.  Used on Windows machines for CVS/SVN code management
WinRAR - Shareware.  Much nicer interface than Winzip
FileZilla - FTP tool
Firebug - Firefox extension for checking code in browsers and examining CSS.
UW proxy tool - Used with Firefox to toggle on or off UW netid authentication when looking for articles and what-not.

Even if that wasn’t interesting to you, now I have it saved somewhere so I can download stuff if I need it later and don’t remember what I have…

Ploofle » Software list