Reddit is always a source of great things that you want to remember later. One of the latest ones was a thread that asked what sort of psychological tricks can you use in the work environment. It’s an interesting question since many people fall prey to the tricks without even realizing it.

The following are the top four from the original thread:

Dealing with angry people: If confronting someone who is angry you should increase personal space, go to a non-threatening stance, lower your voice, but be aware if they calm down since they might be getting ready to attack.

Be silent. If someone is talking shut up and they will talk more. People hate the awkward silences.

I came across a list of life hacks from a company called theirtoys.com. The site has been suspended, so the life hacks only exist at an imugr link.

This is shame since the life hacks can be useful, though some are stupid.

The ones I found useful:

Remember to bring important things: This only works if you drive, but put important things underneath your car keys. It makes perfect sense.

Get a drink cold quick: I learned this a while back. The trick of adding ice and salt to water works perfect.

Prevent splashing: When using a toilet you can soften the impact in the landing zone by using toilet paper. Awesome.

The ones I found stupid:

My gaming nowadays is limited due to time, but more importantly, skill. The last game I tried playing online with people was F.E.A.R. and I was eaten alive. I do like the Doom games and prefer to play them as single player. Civilization has been an addiction of mine since Civilization 3. The game allows you to build a society from the bottom up. It rocked.

Civilization 4 came out and introduced a more detailed method to everything from religion to war to winning. If you enjoyed running an empire or a civilization it was the game for you. A large modding community popped up and everything was wonderful. Initial reports of a new Civilization version coming started circulating and before you knew it, it was released.

Charlie Brennan is a media personality in St. Louis and he’s been on the air for 20 years. His show is The Charlie Brennan show on KMOX from 9:00am to 11:00am CT. His show is a mixture of news, interviews, entertainment and opinions.

He’s the best media personality in the St. Louis area hands down. Why?

Focus on the region: Charlie is focused on the St. Louis region with a high priority. He’s started a non-profit to help make St. Louis city a better place and he co-wrote a book on walking through the downtown area. Many of his topics are confrontational in simple ways. Many times he’ll say, “Why can’t St. Louis do what (fill in city) does?” Simple ideas are also discussed such as ensuring trash is picked up in vacant lots downtown.

I put this under entertainment, as it will be fun to track the responses from the organizations.

Since it’s election time I thought it would be interesting to see how you actually get yard signs. We have one in our yard now for Rick Stream. He’s hoping to be re-elected to the state representatives. Hhis sign required no action on our part. Evidently, we signed up for a sign the last time he ran, so he sent us a postcard letting us know they would be by to put one up. They did it this weekend.

Which … is what got me thinking about how to get more election yard signs. I think it’s going to be interesting to see how well the various campaigns respond to my requests.

The Dave Glover Show on KFTK in St. Louis is the number one rated afternoon show. It’s an amazing feat, because most of the top ratings in the city go to KMOX. I’ve been a regular listener to the Dave Glover show for a few years, but recently the ratings have started to slip.

I don’t know the exact change in ratings , but if it’s enough for Dave Glover to mention on the air it’s serious. When you look for local rating online you’re not going to find it broken out by time period. The best I could do was find cumulative ratings for the station.

My thoughts on copy protection range from “it’s not needed” to “waste of my time.” I don’t understand why electronic content providers feel the need to add copy protection to their products. There hasn’t been a copy protection process developed that hasn’t been cracked, hacked or broken.

I can remember back in the old Commodore 64 days there were to copy protection processes that stood out:

1) Bad sectors on disks. This one was a classic. Vendors would purposely damage the floppy disk that held their software. Their program would do a check to see if the disk was damaged before it let you run it. Guess what? Hackers either stripped out the check or told people where to nick their disks.

I love posts like this. It gives me a chance to talk about a couple of things I love:

1) Saving money.

2) Vacation.

We’ve always made a big deal of taking family vacations. In the last ten years I think we’ve only missed one year. That week of time together, crossing the US, makes for great bonding.

With the increases in gas prices, though, the summer vacation is taking a back seat in quiet time. The new thing is called a Staycation. A staycation is a vacation where you stay home during your normal summer vacation time.

In a couple of articles about the new staycation effort, I learned it’s a new phenomena and the following things are common among the ideals:

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I listen to the radio online throughout the day. For those times I am coming to or going from work , I’ll listen in the car. One of the main stations I listen to is KMOX. They have a news focused morning show called Total Information AM. The hosts are pretty bland, except for this week.

This week Debbie Monterrey has been spectacular. Yes, there is the normal news focus, the weather and traffic every 10 minutes, but she was entertaining this week. She related stories from her life, made fun of her co-host and didn’t act like hosting a news show was life or death.

This post is mostly for me. I listen to various radio stations during the day, so I wanted one place to capture everything.

KMOX is St. Louis’ largest radio station. At night you can hear them across the country.

971.Talk is a small St. Louis radio station, but they have the number one afternoon show … Dave Glover.