William Safire and Margeret Atwood’s tips are my favorites.

…handbags carriers (and to a lesser extent other carriers of daily-use bags) are confronted with the handbag paradox that states: it is nearly always easier to add additional items to the bag than to sort through items to be removed, with the net result being that people walk around with significantly more stuff than they need.

We decided to get two of the ~30″ square LACK coffee tables. The couch is also our dining area, so really, the more table space, the better. These tables have a shelf about halfway down the legs, but we have two active cats. Anything we left on that shelf would be identified as not bolted down, and therefore a cat toy.

So we needed drawers on rails that would hold from the top, instead of the side or bottom.

Based on another hack I’d seen around, I knew the TROFAST drawers had a lip that made them pretty much perfect for this use. My husband picked up the STRECKET rails from the kitchen department, and after testing that the rail and lip were a match, we took them home with us.

One of the tables also has the SIGNUM cable management rack attached for wrangling laptop cords since we work on the couch a lot. At some point, we might spraypaint those bright green drawers. :)

Finished Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. Passed it on to a co-worker in exchange for Freakonomics.

Maria Popova’s Beautiful Mind
The creator of Brain Pickings on how to think outside the corporate box.

The 11 Best Psychology and Philosophy Books of 2011

You Are Not So Smart

Contents Magazine Issue No. 1

The Overjustification Effect

Got halfway through Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout today.

Adaptive Design, Fixed Widths and Tablets

Move Your Story Right Along: The Elements of Style Rap

The output element

Taxonomies don’t matter anymore

The Internet Gets Physical

Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?

Book Pickings

You knew the old Mozilla, meet the new Mozilla

RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP-Addresses

Got all my boundary service code ready to go: made changes to finder.js, settingsoverride.py, and definitions.py. Added shapefiles. Didn’t have to look up git commands! John Keefe got an EC2 instance running for me, using Chicago Tribune’s GeoDjango image. I should be able to get the app up pretty quickly from here!

Baked another couple hundred cookies. Wrapped said cookies up for mailing to family and friends. Spent an hour at the post office. Hey y’all, you’ve got cookies!

I learned:

Installing GeoDjango is STILL a bitch.

I need to start a notebook on all my project stuff as I do it; I keep forgetting passwords and filenames and commands. (Been meaning to do this for a long time, have never managed to implement it.) Have notebook, will fill.

EC2 isn’t as easy to work with as it should be. Why is this prep stuff so hard?

I read:

The Defense Bill Passed. So What Does It Do?

In Which We Teach You How To Be A Woman In Any Boys’ Club

Building Social Software for the Anti-Social

Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works

Made like 200 cookies. My hands smell AMAZING.

Got two awesome books from my in-laws: Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens and Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Attended two different birthday parties. Happy Birthday December people!

I learned:

Preheating the oven is not optional.

I read:

Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works

Nerds and Male Privilege

Sent my first chain email since…no, wait, EVER. In my defense, it’s a recipe exchange. And BCC was used.

I learned:

I knew this already, but it should be repeated: Spider Robinson is AWESOME.

I read:

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, 1949-2011 Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, With Wit

My daughter, a cult guitarist, and how journalists can become semicompetent programmers, pretty much in that order

The nightmarish SOPA hearings

December #Jcarn Roundup

Problems and Opportunities in Government Data