life pro tips

not mine unless stated. tips and facts and humor and life lessons. who knew the internet had so much to offer? posts will be tagged by type and subject. hopefully this will become a repository of some sort; it's the online database of these facts. they will also be sorted in a text document. //=reply break.

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if you get a traffic ticket..

Go to traffic court if you can. He may or may not show up, but if he does, the judge will most likely side with the officer.

If you do fight it, try to request a different date and day for court. I've heard that they try and schedule their cases all on the same dates/days so they don't have to keep missing work.

This is pretty much always the case. I've had a lot of speeding tickets over the years. I've always gone to the Simi courthouse in hopes that the officer wouldn't show up. They have always been there unfortunately. But usually about half the people in the courtroom have their officer no show and get dismissed. Also if your cop does show up, then you plead guilty no-contest, you will get a nice reduction in the fine. Usually around $100+ off the ticket. And you get to leave early.

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cold side of the pillow

your body temperature naturally goes up at a certain point in your sleep. if it gets too hot, you can buy a programmable thermostat for your central A/C in the summer and set it to go down two degrees at approximately 2.5 hours before your waking time. makes a huge difference.

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caffeine

has a half life of 5 hours.

it takes 5 half lives to completely eliminate a substance. so if you want a good night’s sleep try to drink caffeine only in the morning

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debunk: cold drinks

the wet paper towel trick to get your drinks cold in 15 minutes is a myth. here’s why.

the fridge would have to cool the wet towel first.

and since water has a high specific heat cap, it would actually be worse for your drink unless you use a cold towel.

15 minutes in the freezer (no towel) is fine, even better.

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dip duck roll & hover

fruit flies are annoying. put out a bowl of apple cider vinegar (attracts them) mixed with a bit of soap (kills the surface tension of the water). it works.

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email twins

@gmail.com and @googlemail.com both resolve to the same account. this is perfect for signing up for websites twice to get two accounts.

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more on this; 

also works: [email protected]

+words after your username will be treated as a different email address and be sent to you

Usually I sign up for things like this:

[email protected]

So you could do:

[email protected]

this will trip up some validators that do not expect a "+" in the email field. But that is relatively rare.

the tag after the plus will automagically filter into folders on gmail. So [email protected] will end up tagged as fishing and sorted accordingly if you have a tag that matches it already setup.

then you can set up a rule in GMail to delete any email that comes in from "username+spam". keep a clean inbox. another tip is that periods are ignored, at least for gmail.

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email twins

@gmail.com and @googlemail.com both resolve to the same account. this is perfect for signing up for websites twice to get two accounts.

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i never wear this

to parse out what you never wear so you can sell it or give it to charity, turn all your hangers in your closet one way. once you wear a piece of clothing and wash it, hang it up the other way. at the end of the year, donate or sell all the hangers that never changed directions.

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finding a lost dog

if you lose your dog, the best way to find him is to leave an article of clothing that you’ve been wearing all day, along with some familiar toys or water bowls in the place where you last saw him. 

with luck, when you go back the next day, your dog will be sitting there waiting for you.

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style sheets

for anyone trying to learn how to use  Word (or Gdocs, for that matter), learn to use stylesheets. 

stylesheets allow you to change the formatting of all of your headings, or paragraphs, or footers, etc, at once.

to do this, apply the correct stylesheet (title 1 for section titles, title 2 for subsection titles). the default should look good, but adjust freely to your liking. bam. all titles in your document change, and you can auto-generate a table of contents.

need some custom formatting all over the document? create a custom style sheet.

you’ll never have to take the time to change every title manually again.

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science

a group of scientists watch as one of their colleagues is about to jump off a building, when one of them yells, “don’t do it, you have so much potential!”

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blanch

for asparagus, the water should be at a rolling boil with a ton of salt in it. thirty seconds in the water, then straight into an ice bath, also with plenty of salt. wait for the water to come back up to a boil, and repeat.

also, once the blanched asparagus is cold, get it out of the water and dry it off.

from here, we cut the asparagus for whatever application, and then keep it cold until it’s either sauteed, grilled, fried, or baked. this way the color will be perfect and the asparagus will not be overcooked (given that it is cooked quickly at a high temperature).

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more detail:

1). boil a pot of water.

2). salt the water.

3). once it is at a rolling boil, put a couple of handfuls of one kind of begetable in the water for about 1-3 minutes, depending on the veggie. be careful not to crowd or add to many because you want the water to stay at a consistent boil the whole time (cook in batches if you have a lot).

4). check if cooked every minute.

5). immediately shock your cooked veggies into a bowl of ice water, with lots of ice. this stops the cooking so the veggies stay green and bright.

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fromage

the best way to store cheese:

wrap in cheese paper or wax paper (not plastic wrap) so that the cheese can breathe.

keep in the warmest part of the fridge - the vegetable or cheese drawer.

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violet jessop

jessop was a ship nurse who served on each of the three “sister ships”: Titanic, Brittanic, and Olympic. While she was onboard, the Olympic collided with a war ship, the Titanic hit an iceberg, and the Brittanic hit an underwater mine. violet survived all three.

//

all i can imagine is her on the second and third ship as they begin to sink and she looks off into some imaginary camera like she’s on The Office.

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blanch

for asparagus, the water should be at a rolling boil with a ton of salt in it. thirty seconds in the water, then straight into an ice bath, also with plenty of salt. wait for the water to come back up to a boil, and repeat.

also, once the blanched asparagus is cold, get it out of the water and dry it off.

from here, we cut the asparagus for whatever application, and then keep it cold until it’s either sauteed, grilled, fried, or baked. this way the color will be perfect and the asparagus will not be overcooked (given that it is cooked quickly at a high temperature).

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music; guitar links

songsterr plays the song while showing the guitar tabs, so you don’t have to figure out how it’s supposed to properly sound by itself.

chordify: past a youtube URL of a song and it tells you the chords. great for learning songs on an instrument.

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space is huge.