Jury duty! (+ upcoming.org, digg.com, and me teaching calc on the web)

Just found out yesterday evening that I have to report for jury duty this afternoon. So I've got to get to the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant by 1:30pm.

That's about two miles from here, but knowing Muni, I'm going to give myself an hour. (Too bad the 19 isn't on NextMuni--I could have employed my new connecting algorithms for the first time!)

That gives me an hour to get some work done. I'm preparing a calc lecture for tomorrow. If you want to see me in action, go here. Or tune in tomorrow, 12:35-1:50pm (PDT). Assuming, that is, that I'm not stuck in jury duty.

Two cool information-sharing sites that are focused on social networks, both of which I came across in the past week: digg.com and upcoming.org. The latter I discovered just this morning, via this Flickr blog post. Turns out Upcoming is the newest addition to the Yahoo family!

If you get on either of those, connect to me: this is my digg page, and this is my Upcoming page.

Update: Shortly after finishing this post, I discovered how to incorporate the upcoming.org "badge" into the template for this page. So you should see my list of upcoming events in a table on the RHS of this page.

Lifehack: Emergency Preparedness

At some point over the last few weeks I came across Lifehacker.com, and subscribed to the RSS feed. (Once again, if you haven't done so, you need to start using some sort of RSS aggregator, esp if you spend any time at all reading blogs. I have been using, and highly recommend, Rojo.com.)

Noticed this Lifehack entry just now. I'd seen the linked-to NYT article last week, but didn't get a chance to read it.

Like many others, emergency-preparedness has been on my mind lately. We bought a big jug of bottled water a couple weeks ago. I also read another cool tip and started implementing it: keep some bottles of water in the freezer. In addition to having some more water around, you can move those frozen bottles to your fridge if the electricity is out, which will keep stuff cooler longer.

The other thing I want to get is a handcrank radio/flashlight. I bookmarked this site, which sells a variety of models. I've got my eye on the Eton FR300, since it also includes an adaptor for
handcranking a cell phone.