Lists & Systems

Some lists I used to collect, with the help of the members of a few USENET newsgroups. Someday, I'll put some of the lists up here. Here are the subjects of a few of them:

MTB slang
Road etc names (e.g., Arthur H Breed Fwy)
City nicknames
City residents' nicknames
World's Biggest City Parks (Gatineau, South Mountain...)
101 uses for a bandana
Silly Country Music Song (Titles/Lines)

Not sure whether to list "tips & tricks" under "lists" (above) or under "systems" (below), so I'll just put it in the middle here. Once I've written it up. For now:

Coding tip #1: C function definition: I always format these as name space paren. Function calls never have the space. This makes grep work well in my C sources.
Car camping tip #1: Carefully open the plastic outer covering of a roll of paper towels, only on the middle of the end. Then remove the center cardboard tube without wrecking the handy water-resistant plastic covering. Once you have the tube out, you can pull paper towels out from the center, one at a time (like a kleenex box), and the roll remains relatively dry even in wet weather.
Camping tip #2: get a marker pen and draw a little picture of each camping trip, on the wall of the tent. (Our larger tent is now 16 years old and has a nice record of many of the camping trips we took over that time.)
Home tip #1: Mix your own cereal. My main ingredients are usually Total + Great Grains, but I'll add Cheerios or some other oat-cereal, or Grape Nuts sometimes. I keep it in a Tupperware tub.
Home tip #2: Zip tie for the metal contraption that hangs from the showerhead. You can get these metal frame hook things (for holding soaps, shampoos, etc) that hang over the pipe that leads to the showerhead. But they always slip down the shaft of that pipe, away from the wall. To solve this problem, push the thing up against the wall, get a small zip-tie, and zip it around the pipe to hold the rack-thing in place. Thanks, Matt.
Home tip #3: Tie shoes with one extra loop. This will require some explanation (later). They'll never inadvertently untie.

On my "to do" list here is to flesh out more of the "Systems":

my post-Y2K date-stamp conventions
my keyboard layout
"Mlang", my near-phonetic alphabet for representing my dialect of English. Mentioned on my Radio weblog and even on my bzero weblog.
my mapping of Tolkein's Tengwar alphabet to English