Upgrade Your Life is a techie how-to book absolutely stuffed with more solutions to organizing our modern lifestyle than one person actually has room to fit into our modern lifestyle.

The fun of the book for me was to register, consider and sift all of author Gina Trapani’s little hacks to find the ones that could potentially revolutionize my life. There was a lot of sifting, but it definitely worked.

Before going further, I should justify why I feel this book fits the criteria of the Women’s Unbound Reading Challenge.

(This blog post is SO late. I finished the challenge and wrote this months ago, but it sat lonely in my drafts file, only rediscovered yesterday. Hurray for broken stuff that helps me find unpublished posts! lol)

Participants are encouraged to read nonfiction and fiction books related to the rather broad idea of ‘women’s studies.’  The definition according to Merriam-Webster: the multidisciplinary study of the social status and societal contributions of women and the relationship between power and gender.

This book transcends them all. It’s not about women’s issues, but placing this book in a woman’s hands is giving her the tools to solve many problems.

Women are underrepresented in the enormous field of technology and computer science that is changing the fundamental shape of society. I don’t think women can afford a hands-off “that’s the guys” territory approach to computers and how we use them in daily life. Now, don’t let me lead you the wrong way. This book will not teach how to hack into your local school and change your grades. But it will teach confidence. How? Because it will help you feel like you have a more active hand in your life. It will help you realize that you have good ideas and provide you ways to bring those ideas to fruition. And a little independence will go a long way.

Upgrade Your Life is written by a woman, about a topic and a field that is heavily male-oriented for the moment and provides the tools for any woman in any field to feel empowered to make her own choices and not just pay for the brake work because the mechanic says so, so to speak. I believe it’s an excellent candidate for this reading challenge.

So, back to the book…

I heard about it because I listen to Gina every week on a podcast called TWIG, This Week in Google. Never miss an episode, it’s one of the little highlights of my week. Along with tech guru Leo LaPorte and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, the three discuss all that is going on in the world of Google. The good, the bad and the ugly. They chew over tech news, what’s happening or about to happen,, cell phones, cell phones and more cell phones and eventually get to this extraordinarily interesting conversation about where we are as a society and where we’re headed. Not unlike a really cool sociology professor I had once.

Gina is the “Tip of the Week” contributor and I mention that not because it’s the biggest part she plays in the trio, but rather because of how indicative it is of who she is. Having founded Lifehacker “tips and downloads for getting things done” years ago – if you’ve never been there, click the link now, it’s a must read – she offers little keystrokes, shortcuts and an ocean of creative problem solving to make using Google products even easier.

Long time readers of my blog know by now that I’ve been a Google convert, using their web services for years now. The move from using Outlook to Gmail for email alone totally flipped my life on a head. I railed at what I did not understand, but once the epiphany came, I can’t get enough. Total fan-girl here.

My interest in technology spins off of my partial obsession with organization and how I can use it for my own better ends. When you’re the kind of girl who takes whole weekends as a teenager to move furniture and reorganize, you’re also the kind of girl that gets a kick out of the fact that Google is just so darn good at integrating their many amazing services and making your life handy dandy. See, it’s not just me anymore to keep track of. Now it’s my job and a husband’s home business and kids and swimming lessons and all of the social activity that comes from our growing family.

And I don’t just want to scrape by. If I had a motto in life or something that people remembered me for, it would be that I lived and loved well and with grace. Believe me, I don’t always meet that bar, but anything that can help me be less anxious, more settled and confident and bring enjoyment into my life… well, those things are always welcome. And so many of Gina’s little and not so little hacks have done that for me.

Not to mention that I find her an eternally positive person. Her enthusiasm for what she does and sincerity in offering it to us absolutely oozes out of everything. A successful woman known for her smile rather than her rants. That’s a woman living gracefully, living well.

As a sample, I’ll offer one of my favourite hacks, number 90:

I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox as my web browser for years and never knew that this was possible. (Though since the writing of this post, I’ve switched to using Google Chrome as my browser, but that’s another post and this is still a GREAT Tip.) Check it out…

You can create bookmark “groups.” Say you check the same four webpages every morning or as soon as you get home from work. Instead of painstakingly opening each one, you can with one click open them all at once. Brilliant!

Here’s how – open all the tabs you want to group together, go to Bookmarks, click Bookmark All Tabs. A window will pop up that allows you to name them as a set, do so and you are done! I used this hack to make three groups of pages that I use in conjunction quite alot. They’ve been so handy-dandy.

1. Social Butterfly: my Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook
2. Photo Sharing: my Flickr, Picasa, Picnik, befunky
3. Recipe Search: Epi, BBC, Foodnetwork, Food Blog Search, All recipes, Big Oven

Other hacks taught me the importance of tagging my flickr photos, the magic button key command that is Alt+Enter, how very much I needed an To-Do organizer though I did not in the end using her main example (Simplenote rules!), how to freshen up our filing cupboard so I can find stuff, what a wonderful thing keeping my inbox clean is, how to search my gmail for anything under the sun, and how to get slightly lower priority email like goodreads and freecycle mail to skip my inbox and go to its own folder saving me a mountain of time.

Turns out that there was quite a bit that I was already doing well. Confidence booster to be sure! I save my bookmarks in Delicious and can access them anywhere, I use Gmail, as a family we share our Google calendars so no one is left in the dark, I’ve sorted and named and dated each individual one of our digital photos for years, and I’ve consolidated all my email accounts into gmail for so long that I forget that I’ve ever used anything else.

Wanna-be hacker that’s me!

p.s. Gina was named among Fast Company magazine Top Women in Tech for 2010. Go see what she and other women are doing online, in tech and games.

Share this post!

We love brownies.

Who am I kidding?! I love brownies!

And I’ve been using the same recipe that my brother dug up out of a now unknown and probably lost family cookbook. It’s quick and easy, uses cocoa that I always have on hand, but the result frankly hasn’t been interesting lately. So the search for a new brownie recipe began.

Delightful Google results led me to a contest once known as “browniebabe of the month” hosted by the food blog Once Upon a Cakestand. The results were all from 2007, but the way it worked was that she asked for submissions and garnered three months worth of brownie recipes, dubbing one winner as The Brownie Babe each month.

I’ve linked my hand-picked favourites - after a read through - below for your viewing and tasting pleasure.

There is a brownie for me in there somewhere.

Hopefully, for you too!

Supernatural Brownies

Lemon Mousse Brownies

Outrageous brownies with Salted Butter Caramels

Mocha & White Chocolate Chip Brownies

Outrageous Brownies

Chocolate Crunch Brownies

Peanut Butter Topped Chocolate Brownies

“Turtle” Brownies

Peanut Butter and Fudge Brownie

Brrrrrr-ownies

Peanut Butter Brownies

Nuggets o’ Gold Brownies

Peanut-Layered Brownies

p.s. Do tell all the moist warm gooey details once you try one!

Share this post!

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

There is no definitive origin for this quote. And while that really bothers me, it nevertheless came to mind last night as I read Kim Todd’s biography of Marian Sibyllia Merian entitled Chrysalis.

Merian lived from 1647-1717, merely a hundred years after the printing press was invented and was the daughter of an influential engraver and book publisher in Frankfurt. She grew into an artist like pretty much everyone in her family, but what earned her fame and money was using that gift as a naturalist, traveling to South America to study and capture in print its plant life and insects, especially moths and butterflies. I’m currently completed fascinated with the story of her life, but my thoughts were detoured with this passage:

“The press’s ability to spread information so rapidly made it invaluable but also gave it the taint of subversion. The business depended on the dreaming up of fresh ideas, always a risky endeavor when the only reading material above suspicion was the Bible. Some had doubts about whether anyone by ministers should read even that. A refuge for scientists, religious minorities, and visionaries, a publisher’s workshop drew free thinkers of every stripe. Whether the writers wanted to publicize discoveries about the mechanism of the human heart or incite a religious revolution, they needed the type, the paper, and the press, to have any influence. The astronomer Johannes Kepler, when he wasn’t contemplating the orbits of planets or the movement of the tides, lingered at the printers where his books were in progress, looking over tables and evaluating illustrations. It was a coffee house before anyone in Europe drank coffee, where the heady brew was ink.”

This first use – or impression – of the printing press set the course for books, authors and those who would love them for years to come. Even with the modern resurgence of reading and the Harry Potter and Twilight phenomenon, this quote seems to still hold true. Is it any wonder that modern bookstores have partnered with coffee shops?

Thinking about what I’d like to incite,

Adrienne

p.s. In reading about Maria Sibylla Merian online, I enjoyed this New York Times article a great deal – though the last line seems an unfair and personal opinion, rather unlike the factual nature of the remainder.

Also found a Google timeline on Merian — never seen such a thing before, didn’t know Google did this, but it’s neat. Check it out. Oh my goodness, does this mean that one day they are going to do a timeline on you or me? On this day, so and so tweeted about this. Imagine that!

Share this post!

blue fingernails for blue flowers.
my aesthetic trade-off.

ruined the former to plant the later,
but oh what a glorious day!

creeping phlox and delphinium
buddleia, perovskia, not to mention hydrangea
i expect full repayment next year.

Share this post!

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

~ excerpt from Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats

Share this post!