Category Archives: Food and Drink

Friday Faves 01-04-13

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Happy New Year! Here are a few new fundraisers worthy of your attention – but first, a bit of self-promotion:

As you may recall, following on some compliments about my non-fiction writing (especially from a successful fiction writer) I decided to attempt NaNoWriMo in November. I did “win” by completing 50,000 words of a novel – my first long form writing of any sort.

Enough people have asked to read it that I’ve decided to serialize as I complete editing chapters. I’ve set up a separate blog for my literary endeavors, WhatBettyWrites.com – the first two chapters of Want It Back are posted now. You can subscribe to get notifications of new postings, or follow along via the Twitter acct @WhatBettyWrites and/or Facebook Page WhatBettyWrites. Feel free to leave feedback on that blog – most helpful to me would be things like “This chapter was interesting/boring/confusing because of ….”

And now on to other interesting links:

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Friday Faves 10-05-12

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News for ASCAP musicians who perform their original songs! You may now upload your setlists in order to be paid for performing your song catalog live:

OnStage allows writer members to notify ASCAP of their live performances via Member Access. This data is processed and a royalty is distributed to the writers and publishers of the songs based upon the license fee paid by the respective venue.

 

If you are looking to buy an inexpensive Windows desktop PC in the Boston area but don’t like the idea of taking a chance buying on CraigsList, check out Semi-New Computers. They refurbish obsoleted PCs from Harvard and other corporate sources, then sell to you with a 90-day guarantee for about $200 depending on RAM and HD size.

Kickstarter projects I’ve recently backed:

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Preserve Opened Wine Without Fancy Gizmos

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Sometimes you would like a glass of wine at home… but if you are the only person imbibing, or you and your partner aren’t up for finishing an entire bottle, what do you do with the unfinished portion?

Wine stores and websites will sell you all manner of devices claiming to preserve your leftover wine via various methods of removing air from the partial bottle to prevent oxidation. These usually involve a cork replacement through which either a reverse pump sucks out the air to create a partial vacuum or an inert gas is pumped in to replace the normal air.

But the point of these gadgets is to keep the wine from being in contact with air – so all you need is an appropriately-sized bottle with an airtight closure. This is what I use:

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Friday Faves

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Rescuing the instruments from 95 Columbia

Rescuing the instruments from 95 Columbia (photo by Peter Moulthrop)

UPDATE: While all of these projects are cool, if you’ve got some spare cash please look at this Facebook event page: less than 48 hours ago 12 friends from the Boston music/arts community lost their living situation and most of their possessions in a 3-alarm fire at their Cambridge MA apartment building.  Fortunately no one was seriously injured or died (but it was a close thing – 6 police officers rescued everyone), and firefighters retrieved much of their gear and instruments (though some are water-damaged). Please consider helping and spreading the word to others. You may donate directly via this ChipIn widget:

Some Kickstarter and IndiGogo projects I like:

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