Archive for December, 2006

NYT: refurb computers

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

One last (planned) post on my current computer situation. The New York Times ran a story today about major computer manufacturers offering reduced-cost refurbished computers — from returns shortly after an initital purchase, mainly — and a new electronic environmental rating systems for changes in manufacturing. Plus a note on computer recycling.

This is a good […]

Something in the water outside Charleston

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

I was reading the Faith of the Free blog, noting its author, Ron Stevens came in “through the Universalist door” and is organizing a church in Summerville, S.C., outside Charleston. (I also noted he was for a time a member at All Souls, Tulsa, where I interned in 1994-95 and was known by some as […]

Resurrexit computer

Friday, December 29th, 2006

I swear this is the truth. Tonight, I was about to pull the hard drive, disc drives and the network card for later use, leaving the chassis for recycling. (Don’t throw these away; computers are full of toxic metals.) The RAM was already out — I thought I had fried it with static or something […]

Unintended hiatus

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

Well, the day after Christmas, my well-loved Ubuntu machine — originally bought as a MS Windows machine — died. Try as I might, I couldn’t even get the BIOS to boot. Perhaps a stray bit of static when I tried to add some memory? Fortunately, I backed up everything but the few days before Christmas, […]

Two last minute Christmas ideas

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

Sometimes, the best ideas come at the last minute.

Does your Christmas Eve services attract worshipers who’ve already tied one on? Perhaps you can give out candy before the service. See at the BBC, “Lollipops to stop noisy revellers” and “Pub lollipops making right noises.” Hat tip to Richard Layman at Rebuilding Place in the Urban […]

Google Books “gift” to researchers, Universalists

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

I have hundreds, and probably well over a thousand dollars’ worth, of eighteen to twentieth century Universalist imprints slowly gathered over the years. I got each new title as I could — first through specialist book dealers then eBay plus gifts — because they are so hard to come by, and one chance of buying […]

Getting the Christmas service together

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

A Unitarian Universalist colleague — I’ll say no more to identify this person — wrote

I listened to the [automatically-generated] Christmas evening service. It’s nice, but the voice is too much for me. But I need advice–I want a good Christmas Eve service, old or new–that will be a kind of high church experience, intimate […]

Overcoming Christmas overload, 3: the traditional “Jewish Christmas” observances

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

After years of hearing about “what Jews do for December 25″ from friends, Hubby and I took the plunge last year. Sure, Philocrites has written about the December 24 party scene for Jewish singles, but we’ll leave that to a younger crowd, and enjoy being so, well, domesticated.

Last year, after a breakfast of stollen and […]

Turn off your computers when you are not at work

Thursday, December 21st, 2006

For a lot of people, tomorrow will be the last day at work for a week, so it is environmentally important not to use any more electricity when you’re not working than necessary. If you work with a computer — and it isn’t a server or something that has to be up all the time […]

Google package search

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Did it get there? You could go through the UPS or FedEx sites to track your package, or just search for the tracking number through Google, which has a package searching feature. If you have the Firefox browser, there will be Google search bar in the upper right hand corner, and since I do (and […]


Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States