Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I'm not asking for gifts, I'm asking for ideas. I can't come up with anything that isn't either trivial (another bar of dark chocolate with cherries, which I can get at the corner store for a few dollars), absurdly over-extravagant, or nonexistent (the tangerine herb tea I was very fond of, which has been discontinued).

The chocolate isn't trivial because it would cost less than five dollars, it's trivial because it's practically a staple in this household.

I didn't read carefully enough; yes, Win7 supports a version of PalmOS, but that version won't support my m515. And I went ahead and overwrote everything, instead of doing some complicated dual boot system.

I think that leaves me choosing between a smart phone and an Ipad. And running off just the portable for a little while: synching is valuable, but doesn't need to be daily.

Thoughts are welcome. Lighter is better.

It looks as though an airfare-plus-hotel package for a hotel not really handy to London might be cheaper than just the round-trip airfare. Are there likely to be problems, like weird extra charges or losing my return ticket, if I pay in advance for a round-trip ticket and hotel room, and just never turn up at the hotel? (I'm not going to challenge a hotel bill for the amount agreed and charged in advance; I just wonder whether this is like airlines cancelling your return ticket if you don't use the outbound flight.)

I may need to fly to London for a few days, on fairly short notice, quite soon. Obviously, short notice makes it more expensive, but we'd still rather not spend more than necessary.

Just to complicate things, I might be looking for an open-jaw Boston (BOS) to London and back to New York, rather than a straight NY-London round trip.

I think Heathrow or Stansted works at that end; at this end, it can be JFK or Newark (EWR).

If any of you either knows useful things yourself (like where to look online, especially for open-jaw tickets) or knows a travel agent who does this sort of thing, please let me know. I'd normally just book my own ticket for something like New York-London, but "normally" allows a good deal more time for planning.

This sentence is nonsense as written, but I have to work with it (it's in a state science standard, one of the sort that seems to have been written by a committee that did not include a competent editor or any final review process). I have a couple of guesses as to what they might have been groping for, but any suggestions are welcome:

"Summarize data to show the cause and effect relationship between qualitative and quantitative observations (using standard, metric, and non-standard units of measurement)."

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ETA: On the off chance it will help anything, here's the entire paragraph, which is part of the "inquiry strand" from the Mississippi eighth grade science standard:

"1c Summarize Data
The learner will be able to c. Summarize data to show the cause and effect relationship between qualitative and quantitative observations (using standard, metric, and non-standard units of measurement). (DOK 3)
Tools (e.g., English rulers [to the nearest one-sixteenth of an inch], metric rulers [to the nearest millimeter], thermometers, scales, hand lenses, microscopes, balances, clocks, calculators, anemometers, rain gauges, barometers, hygrometers, telescopes, compasses, spring scales, pH indicators, stopwatches, graduated cylinders, medicine droppers) Types of data (e.g., linear measures, mass, volume, temperature, area, perimeter) Resources (e.g., Internet, electronic encyclopedias, journals, community resources, etc.)."

"DOK" in this field means "depth of knowledge level," on a range from simple memorization of facts to understanding and using concepts. I think it runs 1-4, with 1 the simplest; the idea of the DOK3 is that it's not sufficient for them to be able to say "the meter is a unit of length" if they can't actually measure things, or know when to use meters, and when to use liters or grams or degrees.

Does anyone here have experience of a "dynamic disk"? It appears to be something that can be done under Windows XP and has options including setting up RAID 5 on one disk. I asked cattitude for his opinion of that versus a basic disk, and he'd never heard of dynamic disks.

So, the questions are, does this have any clear advantages, what are the disadvantages, and is it supported under Windows 7?

ETA: spacecrab answered this: it's a server thing and not actually relevant to anything I'd be doing.

Has anyone here flown via Milwaukee (the actual route is New York City to Madison, and I'll be flying out of either EWR or LGA, and preferably back through LGA)? I am mostly wondering what that airport is like, and looking for recent experiences of flying on Midwest. Also, is there still reasonably regular bus service from Milwaukee to Madison?

The latter is relevant because connecting flights are sometimes cancelled (weather, hardware, acts of Ghu); when that happened at O'Hare I took a three-hour bus trip to get to Madison, and when it happened in Detroit I had to wait and get rebooked several hours later.

(This would be for, probably, May 21 to Madison, May 25 return, in case that's relevant.)

Every so often, I get email telling me that someone is now following me on twitter. Presumably they did a search, since I haven't actually been using the account.

What I'm wondering is, for those of you who do use it, what about it do you find useful? Not "What, in the abstract, can it do?" but "What do you, someone I know who also finds LiveJournal at least somewhat useful or appealing, like about twitter?"

Also, how much time do you spend following people, and how often do you find it necessary to check in? (We'll get into questions of appropriate tools for posting and/or following later, if I decide I want to do either/both of those things.)

My aunt called a couple of hours ago, confirmed that we'll be at the seder, and asked me to bring a dessert.

Now I need to think of something. cattitude pointed out the existence of suitable bakeries; the problem is that most of them have been taking pre-orders for weeks, and may or may not have anything available for someone who just learned that she needs to bring dessert to a seder, especially since they will be closed during the actual holiday. (A side point here is that this is for Friday, and I'd have to pick up any cake from a kosher bakery no later than Tuesday evening.)

I am looking for suggestions of either things that would be easy for me to prepare, or sources of suitable desserts that I (living and working in Manhattan) can get to. I will almost certainly try the place I normally get rye bread, tomorrow, but they may not have anything. I may also try Zabar's and/or Fairway, because what's to lose?

If possible, the dessert should be parve. It also needs to be something that I can transport sanely on a rush hour train Friday morning, that will survive without refrigeration for a few hours if necessary. (Yes, there is an office refrigerator; whether there will be space in it for a middle-sized box next Friday is a separate question.)

Addendum: If the recipe contains flour and you don't specifically know it's suitable for Passover, it almost certainly isn't. Also, while I may consider sorbet as a fallback, there's a perfectly good supermarket a block from my aunt's house, so if we want something along those lines, she can get it there.

We're back to reading the mind of a committee. In this case, I have a state standard (Tennessee, in case you care) that says students should be able to "Identify the common outcome of all chemical changes."

What does this mean? My best guess is conservation of mass, except that's explicitly listed later on. Maybe that the identity of the substance changes?