Peter's Useful Crap

Guest post by Leah Tse

Recently, I phoned my hair salon and tried to book an appointment with my stylist. The receptionist’s response was every girl’s worst nightmare – I’m sorry she no longer works here. I was traumatized! I couldn’t believe it. I had even told my hair stylist to let me know if she ever left. Everyone knows that once you find the right stylist, nobody can do a better job, you don’t want to try something new, you want the same trusted person month after month. So, just like most people would do, I tried to find her. I even got her last name from her old salon (how stupid of them). I didn’t work. I tried searching on the internet without success.

A couple of months later, I tried again. I ended up on a chat thread and saw a site that is basically a directory of stylists…what a great idea! I think it is new…I didn’t find it the first time I searched. So, I went to the site and entered her info. You don’t even need a last name. The key is your stylist’s name and her last place of employment. I literally jumped for joy when I found my stylist’s name, old location and NEW location!!!

So, here’s the great site that has made my day, made my week, maybe even made my year! Where’s My Stylist is the greatest site invented!

Googling for recipes is dangerous. But sometimes I have to look outside my rookie cook book.

Being a salmon fanatic, I went searching for a good salmon recipe and found a basil salmon recipe worthy of trying.

Things were going OK… until I threw my chopped basil in. Maybe there’s a difference between “chopped fresh basil” and the kind of basil that I used (see below), but a lesson for the other rookie cooks out there: don’t ever throw in a cup of the package chopped basil unless you’re cooking for a village. The moment I poured it in I knew something was wrong. Good thing I stopped because the recipe actually called for one and a half cups of basil. Even after removing oh… 80% of the basil, things were still very basil-ly.

So… if you’re looking for a good salmon recipe, try the one above! But use like two tablespoons or something if your basil package looks like mine.

Given that I am a rookie cook, I tend to live and die by the recipe. Case in point is the oatmeal cookie recipe that I, uh, got off the back of an oatmeal package some years back… but man, those are some good cookies (the cup of butter helps).

Anyway, I found this great rice pilaf recipe. There’s nothing like a good recipe with pictures and a story. That, I am not providing here… just a link. I was a bit skeptical about this recipe at first, as it involved frying uncooked rice and then boiling (well, whatever the term is) it. That was a bit peculiar to me, but hey what do I know and double hey, the site with the recipe had pictures, a story, and nothing but positive comments! So, I followed the recipe to a T (OK, I skipped the pepper and cayenne) with some basmati rice and it turned out pretty well. I was feasting on this rice for a week.

I’ve always struggled with applying different headers, footers, and page numbers in word processors (mostly Microsoft Word). You know, when you want your title page to have no header, footer, or page number, but your preface should have roman numeral page numbering, and the rest of the document should have a standard header and footer with normal page numbering. I know it’s got something to do with styles or sections, but whenever it comes down to it, I turn into a frantic clicking, searching mess and it usually takes me half an hour to get it right!

So here I am, a newbie on a Mac, working with NeoOffice Writer, struggling with said problem! Maybe I should document my solution?

Searches like “openoffice.org different style first page” and “page numbers in OpenOffice” turned up empty. Eventually, I found this really handy tutorial that already has the information I need:

Tutorial on applying different page numbers schemes, headers, and footers to different pages.

Woohoo!

I wanted to do something like this in NeoOffice Calc (similar to OpenOffice.org):

Pressing Enter goes to the next cell in spreadsheets, instead of creating a new line in the existing cell. I think in Excel on a PC, you press something like Alt+Enter. Anyway, I needed to find the equivalent in NeoOffice. I googled for “line return in a cell NeoOffice” and came up empty. Then I searched in the NeoOffice help files and found this:

Pressing the Ctrl+Enter keys inserts a manual line break. This shortcut only works directly in the cell, not in the input line.

Being a Mac newbie, I kept following the above instruction and was met with no success.

So anyway, it’s Command+Enter. (Remember that the Command button on a Mac is the one with the apple icon on it.) And make sure that you’re editing the text in the cell instead of in the input line at the top. To edit text in the cell, double click the cell, and edit the text directly, like in a word processor.

Maybe they just copied over the instructions from OpenOffice.org and didn’t update it?