Looking for advice, bids, and suggestions:

I have a 1950′s era Cape with these sort of cardboard/wood pulp tile ceilings:

(click for larger image)

and

This is in a room that is approximately 144 sq. ft.

I want to get them replaced with this kind of ceiling tile from Armstrong, available at the big box home improvement store of your choice:

A few questions:

1. Has anyone done anything like that, and if so, is this the approach you would recommend, or is there a better/more efficient/more cost effective method for replacing an old ceiling like this?

2. What would you budget for this? The tiles are about $92/box, and each box is about 29 sq. ft., so off the bat it’s $500 for materials. What’s reasonable labor from an insured contractor to get this sort of thing done? Is it a DIY project for the reasonably unskilled?

If you’re in the metro Boston area and a contractor (or really enjoy traveling at your own expense), you are more than welcome to make an offer/bid! Either leave it in the comments or email me from this comments page.

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After a spate of travel on the road, there’s a few things I do to help reset, reboot, and purge the ills of travel from my system. As with any and all things health related, what works for one person may not for someone else and may cause serious harm to yet another, so use common sense and consult a qualified medical practitioner before doing something drastic.

1. The moment I get home, I drink as much water as I can. Travel tends to dehydrate more than normal, especially if you’re in the air transit system where liquids are banned at certain points. I try to keep this level of intake for at least a day.

2. As soon as I get home, I down a chewable kids’ gummy multivitamin. The reason I pick a chewable here is that nearly everything in the chewable vitamins is water soluble, otherwise you’d have kids who accidentally eaten a few handfuls going to the ER for overdoses of iron. Having a chewable means getting stuff that flushes out if there’s too much in the system already.

3. Saltwater bath. Throw a few cups of raw salt (you can buy it in 50 pound bulk bags, and it doesn’t have to be food grade since you’re not eating it) into a bath and stir until dissolved. You know the salt that goes into water softeners and is used for deicing? That’s pretty much the same stuff as in a small jar of exotic sea salt that you find in health and beauty shops for absurd markups. I like saltwater baths just to clean up and naturally disinfect after travel. Germs tend not to like salt water, especially in higher concentrations of salt. (that’s why the ocean doesn’t fester and mold, by the way)

4. Standard vitamin and water before bed. I find that I wake up feeling better if I do this. Whether it has any basis in real science, I’ll leave up to the scientists, but I’ve found that it works for me. Play with the time of day you take a multivitamin and see if it makes a difference for you.

5. Decent night’s sleep. Nothing wipes you out faster during travel than lack of sleep or irregular sleep, which is almost guaranteed. Nothing gets you reset faster than a night in your own bed.

6. Reduced caffeine intake for a few days afterwards. When I travel, I know for sure I overdo it on caffeine. Driving, flying, working in unfamiliar places – all of that taxes me and in the short term I compensate on the road with coffee. When I get home, I dial it back to a cup of coffee a day for a few days just to help things calm down.

What travel detoxification and reboot tips do you have to share?

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Want to see the almost-free ultimate DIY iPad case? Check out my homemade one in a short three minute video:

Feel free to copy the idea for your own personal electronics.

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Of all of the work I’ve done at Edvisors over the years, Scholarship Search Secrets, a free eBook on using Google and other tools to find money for college, is one of my proudest accomplishments. No other single piece of work has changed as many lives for the better as this one eBook, and the sixth edition brings new ideas to the table at a time when they’re desperately needed, because college isn’t getting cheaper but our collective wallets certainly are getting lighter.

In the sixth edition, I re-cover the ground in the previous five editions, from Google to RSS to calendaring, plus add new scholarship search tools for Twitter and Facebook.

The best part is that the book is completely free, no strings attached.

Visit StudentScholarshipSearch.com/ebook for your free copy today for you, for your friends, for someone you know. Try the methods out, and see if it works for you.

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I get a lot of email. When I came back from vacation this morning, I faced hundreds and hundreds of emails, from status reports to pitches and everything in between. How did I whittle this down to something manageable?

When I face a lot of email on the desktop client, there are a lot of choices – do I label it? Flag it? File it? Delete it? Archive it? Should I respond to this now? Should I put this on my calendar?

Too much choice can paralyze.

To solve this, I gave myself less choice.

It’s simple. I start by checking my mail on my phone. I never respond to email on my phone because frankly, that’s a pain in the ass. Even on the much vaunted iPhone, the keyboard is still too small to be practical for responding to stuff in volume. Instead, I use it as a first-pass filter and have four verbs to apply to each message based on what the GMail mobile interface lets me do quickly:

• Leave it alone
• Star it
• Delete it
• Archive it

Without an option to reply, without all the other clutter, and just four basic verbs, I can clean up my inbox very quickly and productively. This lets me prioritize as well, so that when I do get back to my desktop email client, I have a clear list of the stuff I want to tackle first and in what order.

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Stabilization equipment for handheld video

We in new media have enjoyed access to smaller, lighter, less costly equipment as the years have gone by. I remember when my father got our first VHS video camera. It shot at 320 x 240, 30 fps, weighed 17 pounds, sat on your shoulder, and cost a thousand bucks. Today, I carry a small handheld Sanyo VPC-CG65 camera that shoots at 640 x 480, 30 fps, weighs a third of a pound, fits in my pocket, and cost $363 on Amazon.

The downside of gear this small and light is that it’s extremely unstable. Human hands are not known for stability, and gear that light doesn’t weigh enough (and therefore have enough inertia) to self-stabilize. What to do? Well, some folks have come up with very innovative products to do things like stabilize video or enable hand-held distance pictures. Two such products are Manfrotto’s Fig Rig, and PixPal’s camera extender. The Fig Rig will set you back about $300, and a camera extender another $30.

This, then, is how to do it all on $7.

First, go to the hardware store and pick up a 5 foot length of PVC, two 90 degree elbows, one 45 degree elbow, one T junction, 2 female-female pipe connectors, 2 1/4″ x 3″ carriage bolts, and 2 wingnuts, 1/4″. You’ll also need a drill with 1/4″ bit and a saw. The pipe can be any width that feels comfortable, but make absolutely sure you buy connecting pieces to fit that width, and buy them all at the same store, since some piping systems are – yes – proprietary.

Note: the 2 connectors are NOT shown here.

Start by drilling a hole in the bottom of the T junction. You may want to use a kitchen knife to pare off any bits of plastic left over.

You’ll also want to drill a hole in the elbow. Aim the drill for the center of where the pipe will be.

Saw the pipe into 5 equal sections.

Assemble the pieces as shown below:

Now attach your camera(s) using the carriage bolt and wingnut. Do NOT overtighten or you’ll wreck your camera. Tighten until the camera doesn’t easily rotate, but not so tight that it won’t budge.

You’re ready to go. Use the video stabilizer to walk around and shoot video, and the camera extender to take pictures of yourself at a distance.

The best part of all this is that this all breaks down into small segments and transports easily in a suitcase or backpack.

And that’s the new media DIY project for the day. And the cost for this project, assuming you already own a drill and saw?

Demonstration at Boston Media Makers: (hat tip to David Tames)

There’s definite, noticeably less jitter on the stabilized ones. Now I just have to become more competent with a camera.

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