What I Learnt Today

For the household manager, having to decide every day what to cook for the family, and then doing the shopping to make sure you’ve got the ingredients, and then actually cooking, is a drag (or so I’m told by those who would know).

So my colleague Paul’s present to his wife Lesley seems like a pretty good one.

Paul undertook to cook dinner – every night – for 2 months! 

(Mind you, I suspect that Lesley has cooked dinner – every night – for the previous 30 years)

What’s more, each night would be a different creation – working systematically through the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet Book One and Book Two page by page. This is a pretty big ask for someone whose previous speciality was Tomato on Toast.

Apparently the experiment, now some weeks in, has been going very well. A Masterchef is born!

The CSIRO Total Well Being Diet is a high protein, low carbohydrate diet. 

This is based on research showing that a high protein diet was more effective than a high carbohydrate diet for weight loss, and for improvement in blood lipids, and appeared to have lower drop-out rates.

The CSIRO suggest it is especially suitable for women.

(it worries me a little bit that a diet suggesting we should eat more red meat was sponsored by Meat and Livestock Australia.

Unfortunately, studies done by the CSIRO suggest that although you can lose weight on any diet, long term adherence is poor.

Here is some examples of the high protein and high carbohydrate diets.

Some sample shopping lists are here. Luckilly for Paul, no beetroot or cucumber.

PS Paul has been kicked out of the husband’s club for raising the bar too high.

 

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The best book available for Kindle or iBooks is Jerome K Jerome’s ‘Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)‘. 

And it is free!

Project Gutenberg is an open source project that aims to make out-of-copyright texts available freely to all. 33,000 books have been digitised by volunteers. It is a magnificent source of reading- just about every book you have ever heard of published more than 50 years ago is available free of charge for reading via plain text, html, kindle or ePub (iBook) format.

Three Men in A Boat was published in 1889 – but the humour remains entirely fresh. It tells the story of a boating trip on the Thames undertaken by three friends – J, George and Harris, and J’s dog Montmercy.

Here is a snippet from Chapter Three,

So, on the following evening, we again assembled, to discuss and arrange our plans.  Harris said:

“Now, the first thing to settle is what to take with us.  Now, you get a bit of paper and write down, J., and you get the grocery catalogue, George, and somebody give me a bit of pencil, and then I’ll make out a list.”

That’s Harris all over—so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people.

He always reminds me of my poor Uncle Podger.  You never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger undertook to do a job.  A picture would have come home from the frame-maker’s, and be standing in the dining-room, waiting to be put up; and Aunt Podger would ask what was to be done with it, and Uncle Podger would say:

“Oh, you leave that to me.  Don’t you, any of you, worry yourselves about that.  I’ll do all that.”

And then he would take off his coat, and begin.  He would send the girl out for sixpen’orth of nails, and then one of the boys after her to tell her what size to get; and, from that, he would gradually work down, and start the whole house.

 “Now you go and get me my hammer, Will,” he would shout; “and you bring me the rule, Tom; and I shall want the step-ladder, and I had better have a kitchen-chair, too; and, Jim! you run round to Mr. Goggles, and tell him, ‘Pa’s kind regards, and hopes his leg’s better; and will he lend him his spirit-level?’  And don’t you go, Maria, because I shall want somebody to hold me the light; and when the girl comes back, she must go out again for a bit of picture-cord; and Tom!—where’s Tom?—Tom, you come here; I shall want you to hand me up the picture.”

And then he would lift up the picture, and drop it, and it would come out of the frame, and he would try to save the glass, and cut himself; and then he would spring round the room, looking for his handkerchief.  He could not find his handkerchief, because it was in the pocket of the coat he had taken off, and he did not know where he had put the coat, and all the house had to leave off looking for his tools, and start looking for his coat; while he would dance round and hinder them.

(more…)

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How can you get your masterwork published?

Step One  – Write It

When that minor detail has been dealt with……..

Step Two – Publish It with Blurb Books

While you are waiting for the editor of Penguin Books to give you a call, you can arrange to have your book professionally printed. 

The barrier to this used to be the large print run that was required to make it worthwhile. You don’t always want a palette load of books (first up, anyway).

There are a number of services that will publish photo books, including the ‘keepsake’ function built in to iPhoto on the Mac. A quick google search shows a number of options. 

These cost in the order of $50, which is OK for a one-off special occasion. But what about short stories, plays, novels, letters, memoirs,family history, your political expose or a HSC English major work?

The solution we used was Blurb: Make Your Own Book. Make it Great  (thanks to Cathy M for the tip).

After registering with Blurb, you download the ‘BookSmart’ software (or ‘Bookify’ is you are after a photobook). This application is used to design your book – choose a photo for the cover, import your text from a Word document, choose a template, change your fonts, create a title page, etc. The application is a little clunky, but more than adequate for the task. When you are happy, it is a simple process to upload your creation to the blurb site. So far, all free.

Step Three – Buy It

Once your book is uploaded, you can buy copies. Books are printed on demand – you only need to order one, if that’s all you want.

Alex’s paperback 44 page book was available for $US 3.99 a copy. As a hardcover, $US 18.95. That seems like good value. Naturally, the more pages, the higher the charge.

Caution – as with many things ordered from the US, postage is the killer. It can more than double the price of an order! Ordering a number at a time can make that a bit better.

The quality of the printing in the books we received was excellent

Step Four – Sell It

Blurb also has its own bookstore – which means you can make your book available for other people to buy – just like Amazon. You can set the profit you’d like to receive for each book sold through the Blurb bookstore. They take care of the printing and postage. Your book may become a bestseller. Alex’s book with a preview of selected pages is now viewable in the blurb bookstore.

Watch out JK Rowlings!

 

 

 

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Hum a Few Bars and I’ll Fake It.

Is there a tune in your head that you just can’t name? A song on the radio you’d like to download to your iPhone? How about the music from a TV commercial that you’d like to identify.

The iPhone app Shazam has been around since the app store first opened. Turn it on, hold it up to a music source, and it will ‘fingerprint’ the tune, consult its online database, and let you know the song, singer and lyrics and also link to the iTunes store and YouTube videos for that song. Amazing.

The newer app SoundHound takes that a bit further. It does the Shazam thing for recorded music, but is also very good at identifying songs that you just hum or sing. Even when I hum and sing. It correctly identified Hey Jude and Piano Man immediately – that is probably because so many other bad singers have tried to match the same song. It struggled when I sang ‘Jeans On’, but today that song happenned to come over the loudspeaker at Officeworks and SoundHound was able to confirm that David Dundas was the artist.

SoundHound uses the enormous user-created database of songs at midomi.com. 

You can test out the service without the app by visiting that site.

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