Tag Archives: internet

20 Pro Tip Life Hacks that will Literally Save Your Uninteresting Internet Dependent Life.

If this changed your life, is it really worth living?

If this changed your life, is it really worth living?

1. Remember the name of someone you just met by writing it down in an old tattered spiral notebook you keep folded in half longwise and hanging out of your back pocket. Bonus points for asking them to spell it and give country of origin.

2. Keep track of all of the cords around your computer or entertainment center by randomly unplugging them and looking to see what device won’t work. I can’t keep up with those little bread bag holders during the 10 days I have the loaf of bread, how am I supposed to avoid losing them long enough to build a cord labeling system?

3. Keep your car from running out of gas by looking at the fuel gauge and add more when the needle gets close to the E.

4. Look thinner in pictures by going on a diet and losing weight.

5. Use stuff like a paper clip or clothes pin or scotch tape or a chip clip or rolling tightly to keep your bag of chips from getting stale. Don’t use pant hangers, what are you some kind of freak?

6. Throw a Frisbee like….you know what? If you don’t already know how to throw a Frisbee, don’t bother trying now. There are some things you should just be able to figure out without the internet.

7. Make a grilled cheese the way your mom taught you and the way that has worked for a hundred years. Do you have any idea how hard it is going to be to clean the melted cheese out of your toaster, not to mention once you turn that thing on its side guess who has 3 years of crumbs to clean up?

8. Leave ketchup and mustard in the bottle they came in and set it out for a cookout. No one wants to scoop mustard out of your rusty old muffin pan and you know what is less than one dish to wash? No dish to wash.

9. There is a right way to put your daughter’s hair in a pony tail, dads, and it doesn’t involve the dirty hose from a vacuum cleaner. Stop being a stereotype.

10. Open a banana by pealing from the stem like a normal person. Stop making monkeys your life coach, monkeys don’t care if their banana is smashed but you have a shirt on.

11. Just turn your windshield wipers on low, there is no prize for spending your entire commute trying to lock in the perfect intermittent setting.

12. If you want extra ketchup grab another little paper ketchup cup. There is a stack of like a million right in front of you and they are free. Don’t hold up the line by unrolling the top of your little paper ketchup cup to hold 1/8 of an ounce more. What are you, a serial killer?

13. Use household cleaners to clean things around the house because vinegar smells like someone just peed on a pile of rotting fruit.

14. Get free on demand movies by calling your cable company when you finish watching it and telling them that your toddler did it by mistake, threaten to cancel your service if they don’t agree. (this one only works like 1 or 100 times depending on the direction of your moral compass).

15. Wear goggles when you are chopping an onion to keep from tearing up.  They also keep blood out of your eyes when you are chopping up people because what kind of psychotic freak cooks with goggles on, Dexter?

16. Use a crayon, brown marker, or furniture polish to cover scratches on wood. Or go out and find a place that will sell you a single walnut so you can try this thing you saw on the internet.

17. Keep milk from going bad by drinking all of it in a reasonable amount of time and never ever under any circumstances believe some nonsense on the internet that tells you to keep drinking milk past the expiration date. Gross.

18. Use a toilet paper roll for an iPhone speaker because that was the one decoration you were missing in your cubicle. Congratulations, you just became the weird guy people are afraid to talk to. Good luck dodging all of the ladies when you start rocking out to your toilet phone.

19. Instead of taking pictures of your friends holding the thing they are borrowing from you, get new friends that don’t try to steal your stuff.

20. Just pour your pancake batter out with a spoon or measuring cup. We don’t need it in a ketchup bottle. Stop creating fixes for things that aren’t broken. Have you ever tried to wash the inside of a ketchup bottle? Do you know how hard it is to pour pancake batter into a ketchup bottle? Just stop it, this wasn’t a problem or life struggle before the internet saved us from it.

 

 

 

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If Only It Could Be Bottled Up

Sweet

Turbo 

If you don’t recognize this from Spaceballs, I am questioning the entire foundation of our relationship.

Ever have a day that you feel like you hit your own personal turbo boost?  Your reflexes are faster, your attention is more focused, your productivity can’t be stopped?  Like that 10 minutes after your first cup of coffee when everything shifts into perfect focus only lasting for 12 hours?

Monday I returned back to the office after a week of vacation.  Sweet glorious sunburned nose and umbrella drink vacation.  I walked into my office and through the dark I saw that little flashing red light blinking from my phone.  It was welcoming me back with the notification that I had eleventy billion messages.

If I were Stallone in the movie “Over the Top” this would have been the part where I turned my mesh trucker hat backwards and got down to business. I was a sight to behold.  Luckily no one really saw it because that is the kind of productivity that can set expectations way too high.  I plowed through phone calls and emails scheduling meetings and solving problems.  I didn’t get up to pee, I didn’t eat lunch. For a solid 9 hours I was a machine.  I not only got my personal wheels of commerce moving again, I gave the squeaky points a shot of oil and got them running better than they were before.

I knew it wasn’t going to be fun, but I knew I had to do it and when the day came to a close I was pleased with the fruits of my labor.  I think we all have days like that where we get into a groove and can’t be stopped.  The satisfaction from a day like that sometimes makes me question why I don’t do it every day, but then I remember how much I love the internet and wasting time and how I never shy away from setting a bar too low in order to make my leaps over it more astounding.

If we could, we would put that kind of day in a bottle so we could use it whenever we needed to.  Some people do it every day and I commend them, but for me it doesn’t come around quite as often.  That was my Monday and it was totally sweet.

 

Weak

Coasting 

If Monday was a high-octane turbo adventure, Tuesday was cruising down a hill with your foot off the gas.  Perhaps I wore myself out or misplaced my mojo but Tuesday started something like this:  Made it to the gym first thing in the morning.  Broke a sweat untangling my earbuds.  Hit the showers.  Bought a $6 smoothie.  Buckle up world, I am on fire.

I hope I am not the only one that has these kind of days on occasion.  Where there just seems to be a light haze over everything and even going through the motions seems to require more effort than you are willing to part with.  You get the work done that has to be done but those little nuggets of productivity in the day seem to fizzle fast.  You read some blogs or stuff on the internet, look at boat trader for what seems like forever, catch up on some words with friends turns and before you know it, it is already 9:15.  What?  How can it only be 9:15?  I feel like I have already wasted the entire day.

If you were born with a special gift and talent for coasting like I was, you don’t have to dig too deep to maintain your low effort prowess for the rest of the day.  As new tasks arise, you calmly push them aside because you are still full from the big bowl of lazy you had for breakfast.  Eventually the day begins to come to a close and you smile at your accomplishment of basically keeping a seat warm and laughing at some potentially questionable internet humor.

The end of a day like that gives you a whole different feeling.  I would tell you what it is but I was way too lazy to remember it.  It is something like a very relaxed dusting of remorse sprinkled over empty. I take solace in the fact that the coast days are not the norm and the high level assessment of my work ethic and productivity is pretty solid.  That being said, I think we all have those days that just seem to drift by with little or no contribution from ourselves.  Everyone likes to be a smidge lazy, but when you realize you coasted the whole time it is pretty weak.


Dad, what’s a library?

Sweet

The Internet 

Remember when you would have a discussion with someone and a question would come up that neither of you knew the answer to?  You would banter back and forth about who played so and so in a movie or what team Dale Murphy retired with, and odds are one of you would say that you needed to look it up but if it wasn’t too important you would just go on about your normal life and forget about it.  Taking the time to look for a book at the library or flip through the pages of an encyclopedia wasn’t always easy and that was just the way things were, and we were happy.  Speaking of encyclopedias, remember those?  One day I will show my daughters encyclopedias and explain to them that these were Google before Google was born.  This was were you found answers to questions and if what you were looking for didn’t fit in one of those books you would have to get into your car and drive to a library.  Libraries were whole buildings full of books that you could go to and learn stuff (at this point I will contemplate breaking down catalog cards and the DeweyDecimal system but realize that I have already blown their minds enough).

It is pretty amazing to see how much things can change in a relatively short amount of time.  There is no longer any tolerance for not knowing something because the internet lives in your pocket or in the computer in your house somewhere.  There is no more wondering what movie or show you recognize that actress from or having to find a newspaper to see when a movie is playing (funny, one day I will probably have to explain what a newspaper was too).  The internet is super sweet.  They may have been amazing to us as kids but my parent’s stories about when Coke only cost a nickel kind of pale in comparison to the stories we will tell our children about giant phones attached to buildings that you would have to put money in to use.   Sure there is a lot about the internet that isn’t perfect but something that puts the 1989 Heisman trophy winner, a recipe for buffalo chicken dip, and adorable cat videos right at your fingertips is pretty sweet.  Even sweet enough to tolerate the new Facebook.  if you have small kids, what do you think will blow them away the most when you tell them about how their parents grew up in the olden days?

Weak

Grandparent Names 

I promise I am not trying to make fun of  baby boomers any particular generation, but do you remember when we called our grandparents grandma or grandpa or some close variation of those terms?  As a parent of young children with lots of friends in the same boat I have made an observation that there are fewer and fewer grandmas and more and more Nanas and Mimis and Yayas etc.  I don’t want to come off critical but it is kind of a funny observation.  Our parent’s generation is incredibly youthful and all of the new grandparent terms fit them well.  I wonder though, is this just something I see in my circle of friends or are we going to have to change the words to that “over the river and through the woods” song.  If you have kids, what do they call their grandparents?  This may not really be something that is weak but I have already kind of trapped myself into this format so there you go.


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