I have cracked the code! For years I have been telling my dentist lies about me going to start flossing. Of course I never did. Tried it a couple of times, but that’s about it. Not because I didn’t want to. I just couldn’t really figure it out. First of all how to actually do it, and second how to get it into the system. I mean, you brush your teeth, and then… who really wants to do anything more after that other than maybe rinsing your teeth with some good and mild fluoride mouth wash? Not me at least. But I finally figured it out. Thanks to a blog post I no longer remember where was.
The secret
Always floss first. Then brush your teeth.
It’s that simple. Who knew?! Probably everyone but me! And now you know too, even if you maybe already did. And if you already did, good for you! Either way, go get some good dental floss, start flossing, and stop lying to your dentist!
Again, to really knock it in and make this post unnecessarily long:
- Floss
- Brush
- Rinse
Why I blog
Here are some of the reasons why I have a blog and why I try to write posts more often than seldom. Many of the links are pointed to the blog of Scott Hanselman, and he was actually the one who got myself started 🙂
- By sharing your knowledge you give back to the community. I’m sure I’m not the only one who have gotten lots of help from others. Your Blog is The Engine of Community.
- By writing stuff down you create a searchable archive of your knowledge both for yourself and others. I’ve searched my own blog plenty of times to put it like that, and if you have read any of my posts you might have noticed they’re often of the “I keep googling for this. Writing it down now”-type.
- I’m pretty sure everyone explain things to others, and if you do this just face to face, through email or internal closed intranets, then you are wasting your words. Only a very small amount of eyes will get the opportunity to see it and in addition you’re basically giving your words away to someone else. By blogging publicly you own your content and your words have the potential to be read by many other people.
- By explaining something to others in writing, you get practice in writing and thinking more clearly and you learn it better. Read this → Write, Think, Learn (many pages, but few words, so it’s quick)
If you’re thinking about blogging, especially if you’re a developer, I highly recommend that you watch the two talks by Scott Hanselman about How to be a better developer through social media and How to make your blog suck less.
If you already have a blog, here’s 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking.
What panic attacks feel like
In case you were curious.
Panic attacks are episodes of feeling extremely frightened together with having a number of physical symptoms related to fear – such as shortness of breath, rapid heart rate, feeling your heart pounding, butterflies in the stomach, sweating, feeling weak-kneed, tingling in hands and feet, dizziness, feeling that you are likely to faint, go crazy or die and feeling that you or your surroundings are not quite real.
— Freedom From Agoraphobia
Not experienced them for a while now, but have several times before. They hit more or less (seemingly) out of the blue and I can assure you they are no fun…
What forgiveness is not
These are some assorted notes I took during a sermon held by Harald Giesebrecht in Cornelius some time ago. One of the better and more useful sermons I’ve heard in quite a while.
Quotes
Once in a while I stumble upon some good quotes. Figured I might as well collect some of them here, rather than spread out in various text files and twitter/facebook messages…
How to care for introverts
Better piano sound in MuseScore
I’m singing in a choir, believe it or not, and I’ve started to type in some of our sheet music into MuseScore. That way I can listen to what I should be singing without knowing how to play the piano.
The default sounds, at least the piano sound I’m using, are pretty meh. Luckily it’s pretty simple to get better sound, if you’ve happened to read the manual like I have 😛
- Download the biggest SoundFont file from the MuseScore SoundFont manual page in their manual.
- Extract it using for example 7-zip (you’ll have to extract twice, first the gz and then the tar)
Open up MuseScore and go to Display, Synthesizer (see picture to the right)
- In the SoundFont field at the bottom put in the path to your extracted SoundFont file (or click on the blue folder thingy to select it that way)
And that’s all. The piano sound should now sound a lot better, and I’m sure other sounds do as well.
(Can’t stand the Ahh Choir sounds… yuck… that’s why I’m using the piano… anyone know of a good SoundFont for voices?)