As a new condo owner, my life is currently filled with moving details and arrangements: cable installation, lock replacement, and minor upgrades and fixes resulting from our home inspection. One detail that caught me off guard and required some research was the selection, purchase, and installation of a new garbage disposal.

Let’s face it: garbage disposals are not one of those things that an average person thinks about. Unless your unit is on the wane—or as in our case, dead—you’re unlikely to wake up one morning and say “I think I’ll shop for a new garbage disposal today.” You probably won’t find yourself habitually gravitating toward the disposal display in Sears, either.

But for the past few days, I have been preoccupied with garbage disposals. My browser has been choked with an array of tabs, each displaying search results and home improvement sites. I have been reading specs, making comparisons, and learning the jargon. I learned to pay attention to specific attributes: continuous feed, sound insulation, grind chamber capacityinduction motor vs. permanent magnet motor…

One model even comes with a “self-service wrenchette … for easy clearing of jams.” My word processor doesn’t recognize wrenchette. I suppose that’s a sort of faux French word for “little wrench.”

Another model makes your life easier because

two grind stages let you quickly grind difficult food waste you wouldn’t put in a standard disposer, like celery and potato peels.

I hate when food waste is “difficult.”

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This week, two significant events have created a buzz in the tech comm community.

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Since I launched this site last year, I have been looking for an effective way to reuse content on server-installed WordPress blogs. I wanted a solution that’s similar to creating snippets in MadCap Flare.

Flare snippets are the big brother of variables. They’re reusable blocks of content that can store formatting along with the text. They can also include variables and condition tags. You maintain them as individual files and can point to them from multiple topics and projects. A snippet is similar to a text inset in FrameMaker and a linked file in Microsoft Word.

So what’s the equivalent of snippets on wikis and blogs?

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