Tag Archives: tips & tricks

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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Planning For And Handling Sudden Blog Notoriety

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If you are relatively new to being a public blogger one of your goals is probably to attract a larger readership. But are you ready for the day one of your posts suddenly goes viral?

It happened to me last week – I wrote an article giving my point of view on a topic about Amanda Palmer. She referenced the link in her subsequent social media communications and suddenly I had 4000 page views in 48 hours! Here’s how I prepared for this (in general – you can’t tell what post may go viral) and what I did to manage the resulting visibility:

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Cover Arrangements: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

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If you are a musician who is hired for weddings and other events you are probably asked to cover popular songs. Many of these are so ubiquitous that charts for them are readily available in “Real Books” and “Best of the Decade” collections.

But your customers have a wide range of musical tastes. While you may charge extra for obtaining the sheet music for their request, sometimes it is either not readily available or you need it arranged for a particular combination of instruments (e.g., string quartet, violin and guitar, etc).

If your usual method of arranging a pop song is to play the mp3 or YouTube video over and over while you attempt to transcribe what’s being played, here are a couple of helpful hints:

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Seeing a Landmark If You Are Not There

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Most people know that Google Maps includes Street View – they have vehicles mounted with cameras that cruise the streets taking photos every few feet. That’s a LOT of territory to cover, so at this point a portion of these images are likely to be several years old. But unless there has been major reconstruction in an area these photos are still a good way to actually see what a location looks like before you drive there.

Last week I used this feature to find something a friend mentioned in her blog, but regretted that at the time she had not taken a photo to post. Continue reading →