
How do you manage all the information in your life? For a busy person — and who isn’t these days? — it can be a challenge to find the right information management system. It may help to know that no system is perfect — each has its pros and cons — and you might end up using a combination of several tools to create a customized information management system that works best for you.
Posted January 5, 2006 by Mariva in books, business, career, gadgets, innovations, resources

What a fun surprise it is to receive a beautiful or interesting piece of artwork in the mail; with mail art, the correspondence is the gallery.
I’ve been a mail art enthusiast ever since my first exchange of letters through the postal service. For the past several Januaries, I’ve taken the previous years’ wall calendars and transformed the pages into glossy, colorful envelopes using the simple templates from Haila Harvey’s The Envelope Mill. (Creative Correspondence by Michael & Judy Jacobs is an excellent mail art resource as well.)
Mail art doesn’t have to conform to a typical stationery-in-an-envelope letter. Here are some of the things I’ve successfully sent through the mail:
Posted November 18, 2005 by Mariva in arts, books, community, fun, resources
Attention footwearphiles! If you’re between shoe-shopping sprees, content yourself with some eye candy — books about shoes:


Mad About Shoes
by Emma Bowd
$9.95


Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers & More
by Linda O’Keeffe
$11.16

Posted November 9, 2005 by Mariva in books, fashion, gifts

Reuters released a story titled “Electronic paper moves from sci-fi to marketplace.” The first paragraph references Neal Stephenson‘s sci-fi novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, because the plot features an electronic book that utilizes nanotechnological paper. Several companies are currently developing electronic paper, the first stage of this amazing technology.



Posted November 8, 2005 by Mariva in books, gadgets, innovations, news

When I think of Henry Winkler, like many other people, I remember "The Fonz" from the ’70s sitcom Happy Days. But apparently he’s done a lot of other stuff as well, some of it rather impressive.
On NPR’s Fresh Air, Winkler discusses his life, including being the son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, and he addresses having dyslexia,
something I didn’t know about him. He poignantly describes being diagnosed relatively late in life and coming to terms with it:
Posted November 3, 2005 by Mariva in books, education, entertainment