Serendipity

10 Minutes for Health

I know we should all be doing 30 minutes a day of strenuous activity, but that's not always possible.  Yet, even 10 minute sessions can be helpful.  Interesting show on yesterday's NPR, Health

[to the right, a fun photo from the QuadCamera application on my iPhone, still life of pears]

A Wordle of the President's Speech last night.

 Wordle.net

Some images are uploaded on Flickr

under VictoriaJZ.  Many just for fun or of occasional events or trips.

Social Networking

I have been exploring the various social networking sites and over time, have been trying to discipline myself to keep up my blogs [one at HL, one at JZ and this one] and social network contacts [Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter mainly].

Candidly, getting my iPhone made a big difference because each of the sites has an iPhone application [my TypePad site runs my blogs and the others have their own applications], so I've used that to upload thoughts & information [trying to avoid non-informative or non-helpful posts].

Another GREAT application to promote discipline in this area is QuicKeys, a Mac application [also available for Windows] which allows you to program various keystrokes or events to occur through the selection of a key, setting of a time or happening of an event.  I set all my blogs/sites to open in Safari at 7:00 am.  I certainly can close them and do nothing, but this serves as a prompt to suggest to me it's time to update.  QuicKeys is a program made by Startly Technologies, a Des Moines-based company, which is an added benefit.

Safety Tips

Using Facebook:  From AllFacebook.com, 10 Privacy Settings You should know.

Using Macs:  The need for more safe computing, even for Mac users.  From UGN Infomanager.  [I do use a virus program and am careful about my setups - such as NOT selecting the preference to open 'safe' files in SystemPrefs]

A shepherd in the Cretan countryside [he and his wife very kindly invited us in for coffee and cookies one afternoon]

Yet another great video from Wimp.com

The Funny Video of yesterday is now joined with a fascinating and fun one of today, something from the TED Talks series, about Toy Blocks with minds of their own.  Watch it:

Siftables.

What if a corporation today had to design a Stop Sign?

Funny video.  And others in the collection are likewise.

Good Idea!

Cut down on use of plastic:  David Pogue at the NYTimes provides a number of Winter Tech Tips and this one caught my eye:  

* As the world goes green, how come more people don't decline the plastic cup of ice offered by flight attendants? The soda is already cold; if you just drink from the can, you minimize the risk of spilling, and you save one more plastic, non-biodegradable cup from making its way into the oceans. (U.S. airlines carry 2 million passengers a day; you do the math.)

Images listed at eBay

I sell photographic images at my Gallery site, but am also now listing a few of them at eBay. [This link to eBay takes one to my profile page where the first ten listings are linked;  if there are others, the links will take you there.]  The ones listed are some favorites of myself and others.

Cross-referencing

We are now in Greece and I'll be blogging about the trip at my JourneyZing Blog

Life on the Frontier

We sometimes forget this country has quite a variety of places people live in and experience.  On the frontier, life is much harder than that experienced by most of us:   Shopping Day in Nunam Iqua, Alaska

In these troubling times. . .

My suggestion is to turn off the TV and avoid watching all the gloom and doom about the economy.  Don't ignore it, but don't dwell on it.   Empower yourself.

I recall after 9/11 that we were innundated/saturated with television coverage of the incident, effects etc. and at some point after months, a psychologist noted that we were wrapped up in 24/7/365 news about it and that was contributing to our feelings of depression and powerlessness.  The same thing is going on now, with people honing in on all the terrible news.  Not that the economy isn't a problem, but the constant barrage of terrible news coupled with our own constant focus on it is probably doing the same thing. We can each focus on where we are and what we can do, and that'll help the economy more than watching bad news on the TV and feeling powerless to do anything about it.