Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

Engineering beautiful software jon aquino labs | personal blog

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Book ribbons continued

Last month I wrote about how to add ribbons to a cherished hardcover book.

Some places will sell you ribbon for a buck a yard.

But if you head down to Michael’s, you can buy a 12-yard roll of 3/8" ribbon for $4.

Book ribbons

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Yay - Latin part 1 done

Rejoice with me! In my quest to learn Latin, I have finished typing out the Nouns table 200 times, using my Dowling's Wheel webapp. Evidently if I memorize this and five other tables, I'll be well on my way to reading Latin fluently, according to the article Latin by the Dowling Method.

Memorizing the first table was a fun way to spend a half hour in the evening for the past couple of months. If you've ever thought about learning Latin, check out the above article.

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Safety Tip: Add the hot chocolate powder to the milk after, not before, putting it in the microwave

Otherwise this will happen.

Hot chocolate explosion

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Favorite author, poet, composer: Austen, Eliot, Chopin

I have not read a ton of works of fiction. I don't get a chance to read as much poetry as I’d like. I rarely listen to music (surprising, as I enjoyed playing a lot of music in school).

but

I have derived much pleasure from the works of the following artists. I hope to delve more deeply into their works throughout my lifetime.
  • Favorite author: Jane Austen. Every time I read one of her books, I fall in love with the heroine.
  • Favorite poet: T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land. Four Quartets. Love it.
  • Favorite composer: Frédéric Chopin. Growing up, we had a Chopin cassette tape that I listened to over and over.

The highly reviewed 99 Most Essential Chopin Masterpieces (MP3s) can be downloaded from Amazon for six bucks (US residents only, alas).

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

I heart the PrintWhatYouLike bookmarklet

The PrintWhatYouLike bookmarklet is cool. It lets you take stuff out from the current webpage, to make it print better.

For example, I was trying to print out a webpage, but it was a little bigger than one page. I wanted to get it down to one page. Using this bookmarklet, I easily took out some useless stuff from the middle of the page, and voila: it printed out to less than a page.