MSM tuesday edition

I have been under the weather this past weekend. I'm now at the same level as the weather and hope to soon be over the weather by mid week. Now that I'm feeling ok again I'm still not quite up for making more booger...uh..... sugar cookies, so I've stopped baking for other people. You're welcome. I did, however, manage to complete the thumbprint cookies, pecan brittle and fruit cake. I didn't get to the snowflake cookies or the pizzells and I made gingerbread muffins instead of cookies. So, no food this Monday, instead I came across an article that I thought was pretty cool. It was of course from my favorite magazine (real simple) and you may already know this stuff, but I didn't, so I thought I'd share it with you. We're making the most of Google searching.

To find: a product you saw online, but can't remember where...
Use: intitle:
Example: intitle:"dark chocolate and mint chips"
Why: "the term 'intitle' searches the words in the title bar of web pages and can be particularly helpful if you remember the name of a product you liked but not where you found it. Just be sure not to put a space after the colon and to use quotation marks around the phrase."
This particular search lead me to the blog "Lovin' from the Oven" where a woman is doing a clever 12 days of cookies! (I've tried the nestle dark chocolate and mint chip cookies and...let's just say we don't have any more and my pants aren't happy about it.)

To find: PDFs, Excel spreadsheets or Powerpoint presentations
Use: filetype:pdf, filetype:xls, filetype:ppt
Example: grocery savings filetype:pdf
Why: "If you include the file type in you rsearch, Google will turn up only relevant files." My example gives you coupon mom's guide to saving money while grocery shopping.

To find: narrowed down info
Use: a hyphen (a minus sign more like it)
Example: boxer -underwear -fighting
Why: "you want information about Boxers- the dog not the undies or the fighters. Placing a hyphen before terms you want to exclude will omit pages with those words. Type a space before the hyphen, but not after"

You can also do the following

• look up addresses-type in a persons name and phone number and if they're listed you can get their mailing address
• find movie showtimes- just type in movies followed by your zip code to see theaters and their showtimes for the next three days
• convert measurements-How many cups equal a liter? type in "cups in liter" and it'll pop up for you (btw 1L=4.22675284 cups) You can use this for currency conversions too.