Lifehacker has a great post up on managing your caffeine intake for optimum performance.  I first heard about studies showing that caffeine increased or decreased performance differently depending on the complexity of the task during a psychology course.  I quit drinking coffee before exams and other more complex activities.  I didn’t realize the negative impact caffeine could have until my first test without.  I was calm, cool and much less anxious.  On the flip side, at work while doing more repetitive tasks, I down the coffee and buzz on through.

Caffeine: Get Optimally Wired with Caffeine

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The other day I found myself in a familiar situation. I was engaged in a conversation with fellow coworkers and we needed to look up some information on the internet. I was the quickest on the draw and got the typical astonished inquiry, “How do you do that?” My usual quip, “I speak Google’s language,” is more than bravado–it’s a fairly accurate description of what I do.

Do You Really Need to Search?

Before we get into search technique, let me venture to state the obvious: Don’t search for things you don’t need to. A search will never be faster than retrieving a resource directly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone search for a domain name instead of typing it in the address bar. Don’t adapt unproductive cognitive patterns!

Less obvious is that it may actually be faster to retrieve information listed on a site with a good navigation system or a simple url mechanism directly rather than by searching. If you want the latest Microsoft Office service pack, it might be easier just to go to their office page and click on downloads. Knowledge bases often have a quick url for retrieving information. If I see a reference to Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 111868 and I want to look it up, I type http://support.microsoft.com/kb/111868 in my browser. To pull up RFC 1441, I browse out to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1441.txt. Becoming aware of little shortcuts like this to resources you use often can be key. As you come across sites that are easy to navigate or notice simple url pointers to resources, make a mental note for future searches.

Choosing the Words

Word choice is probably the most difficult concept of searching the internet for beginners. I doubt most of my readers are beginners, but the idea is worth review. Choose a few nouns or adjectives that together form a unique criteria descriptive of what you’re looking for. The main goal here is to be unique. Prefer terms that separate what you want from anything else. This isn’t always easy.

Say, for example, you are thinking of buying a computer from Apple and you want to read some c

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Hello everyone. I had email updates shut down while the blog was undergoing some changes so that you wouldn’t be bothered by experiments. Here is a quick run down of how the new site works:

I have both a public and a private section on the web site now, similar to the way it was set up before. The private area is to protect information on the kids and the public area is mostly babble you may or (more likely) may not be interested in. I’ve eliminated the group password that used to grant access to the private areas in favor of letting you create your own accounts. I was getting asked frequently to clarify the password. This way you’ll be able to reset your own password if need be.

In the sidebar on the right and also at the top of this page you will see a link to subscribe. You have the option to subscribe either with a feed reader (don’t worry about it if you don’t know what that is) or by email. You can also choose to get all updates or just family related updates. As there are now several different ways you can receive updates, this update will be the last one sent out to the old email list. If you just want a quick way to resubscribe by email to the family updates, you can do that by clicking here.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to yell at me for making it ridiculously impossible to access pictures of the kids and obsessively changing things all the time please email me. Linked below are a few family updates you may have missed during the sabbatical.

• Pics of the Kiddos in the Snow
• A Simple Way to Pray
• Jade’s Haiku
• Buried
• School Update

Tags: masker.net
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Tags: Bethany,Chip,Daniel,Jade,Liberty,photos
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Many of you know I was recently ill with pneumonia for several weeks, unable to do much other than lay on my back. During this forced sabbatical from work and school, I spent some time rereading a pamphlet by Luther on prayer.

In “A Simple Way to Pray,” Luther shows us how to gain daily from rich blessings of the Church that have become so common and ordinary that they can be taken for granted, namely the Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, and Apostles’ Creed. The idea is that these can be prayed daily with gain:

I divide each commandment into four parts, thereby fashioning a garland of four strands. That is, I think of each commandment as, first, instruction, which is really what it is intended to be, and consider what the Lord God demands of me so earnestly. Second, I turn it into a thanksgiving; third, a confession; and fourth, a prayer.

In this way, not only are these three passages changed from the short forms we have memorized from early childhood and hastily recited countless times, but prayer is changed properly from a one way request to a two way conversation: we speak to God in prayer and allow Him to speak to us by studying His Word while doing so. This is all accomplished in Luther’s method, which can be rephrased as a series of four questions:

1. What does this teach? What is commanded?
2. How does this passage or this command prompt thanksgiving. How is it a blessing?
3. How have I fallen short of what God expects of me here? What confessions do I have regarding this command?
4. What can I ask of God in light of this passage?

I was happy to have the opportunity to review this little pamphlet prepared by Luther a few centuries ago and wanted to share it. If you are interested, you can order a copy from Northwestern Publishing House for less than $2. You can also preview the text as it appears in larger works at Google Books. The NPH edition is a later revision of the text that includes a section written later on praying the Creed. It also has an introduction explaining the bizarre circumstances that led Luther to write the pamphlet.

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Autumn discovered one of those crumpled up pieces of paper on the table yesterday that are all-too-common in a house with four children. Usually these are glanced at to ensure they aren’t some misplaced homework assignment and tossed, but this one was different. On it were written a series of haiku in the mode of the eight-year-old mind:

Make a flower bloom;
The sun does it tomorrow,
Rain does it today.

Is it a springer?
For I have a singu[l]ar,
And I have a light.

Never be meanest;
For the people important
Are to be kindest.

Oh, God alas,
Who made the brontosaurus;
And in fact is Lord.

See a flower bloom;
In the streaming sunshine,
Where the rainbow ends.

Oh, brontosaurus;
With the big feetosaurus,
And ancient broad past.

These are rendered as written. I’ve only corrected the spelling of ’singular’ in the second haiku after asking him what he was talking about. Even so, the second still seems the weakest in the series. When I asked him about them this morning he said he was listening to the fourth grade lecture instead of doing his work. Jade is in third grade and shares his classroom with the second and fourth grades. Homework has been a problem. What do you do?

In this case I made a mental note of the intangible benefit of multi-grade classrooms implicated, congratulated him on his poetic debut, and reminded him that it is important finish what his teacher has assigned him before delving into extracurricular adventures.

Tags: Jade,St. Luke's LES
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I made it home today. We got some snow all right. Thought I’d share some pics of the damage. In Detroit there was barely any snow. By the time I reached Fenton, US-23 was down to one lane and moving around 40 mph. We had at least a good foot of snow at home, maybe 14 – 15 inches in some spots. The big rumor today is that Birch Run got 22 inches, but I don’t know if I believe that.

We haven’t had this much snow in quite a while.

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My first thought was to post “Live from Logan” tonight, but I’m actually writing from the Science Center as I have left my MacBook in the capable hands of the Apple geniuses–more on that later.

I escaped the snow back north for a rainy day down in Cambridge. The word is it will turn to snow overnight and produce an inch tomorrow. Hopefully that doesn’t delay my getting off the ground as I’m told I’ll already be late to work for the road conditions in Michigan.

The new semester is off to a fast start. I’m taking Internet Architectures and Protocols, a course on British Hellenism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Strategy, Conflict, and Cooperation, a course on economic game theory. I’m excited about most of them so far.

I would write more, but it’s already time for me to run and catch the T before I miss my ride to the airport. I’m up for another night in luxury on the bench in front of the security gate. Good-bye for now.

Tags: education,HES experience,MacBook Pro
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I finished integrating Gallery, so now once you create an account you’ll be able to view the photos by clicking the link at the top of this page.

I also tagged all the historic posts so that you can find posts by clicking tags on the right. Once you log in the randomish photos on the right will start to show something other than my mug and landscapes.

It’s coming along. . .

Tags: masker.net
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I thought this tip on tracking shipments over at lifehacker was worth comment.

TrackMyShipments is a free service that combines a gateway to delivery company tracking sites with a slick ajax interface. Once you create an account, you can add shipments to be tracked simply by forwarding emails containing tracking information to track@trackmyshipments.com.

If you’re a fan of Gmail filters, you can take this one step further. A quick search through my email for “tracking number” (quotes included) returned only emails from various companies containing shipping information, so I created a filter that automatically forwards any incoming email with “tracking number” in the body to track@trackmyshipments.com. Privacy freaks be warned: anything you email me that contains the phrase “tracking number” will be forwarded on to a third party, so put it on your list of trigger phrases with “kill the President” and “somebody set us up the bomb.”

Tags: Gmail,web 2.0
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