First things first. Happy New Year!!!

Every year, millions of New Year’s resolutions are made. A couple weeks later they’re mostly forgotten. Of course there is always the odd success story. This year, one of those success stories is going to be yours.

We usually resolve to do something like stop smoking, lose weight, exercise regularly … basically we resolve to build a better lifestyle. A healthier lifestyle. No matter what your resolution is, it’s important to look at the big picture. With a few basic tools … er, rules … you can go after your resolution and make it happen.

These are the five rules for living a healthier lifestyle:

1. Make conscious decisions. All habits including the bad ones are things we do automatically. Unconsciously. It’s important to make a conscious decision if you want to create change. Write down your resolutions, your goals, your dreams. Write them all down in a notebook. And then write them down again, maybe on a sticky note. Put those notes where you’re going to see them when you need to see them most. Get a stickynote program for your computer. Part of making a strong resolution is to think about all the things you need to do to make it happen. Make a list of tasks and to-dos for each goal you’ve set for yourself.
2. Moderate. Even good things are bad for you if you overdo them. Fresh fruit is good for you - but if that’s all you ate, your body wouldn’t get the other essential things it needs like protein. And if you ate fifty pounds of fresh fruit every day … that’s a lot of sugar, which fruit contains naturally. A great cornerstone of good health is balance and diversity. Change your workout schedule once in a while. Try different exercises that will affect your muscles in different ways. Moderation in everything ensures that you limit the bad stuff, create a diverse mix of good stuff, and you never hit a wall and give up completely.
3. Replace bad things with good things. It’s difficult to make any progress running away from something. You’re always looking over your shoulder, and in a way, you’re still concentrating your attention on that thing you’re trying to escape. Run to things. Good things. Psychology tells us that we fill emotional holes with food or excessive alcohol consumption. We fill them with garbage which creates a cycle that’s hard to get out of. Fill your empty spaces with good things. Lots of different and good things (remember moderation?). When you run to something, that’s what you’re focused on.
4. Fuel up. Move. Rest. One of these things or two of these things … is one or two things too little. Your body needs a well balanced mix of fuel, work and rest to be at it’s fittest. Make conscious decisions to get all three. Moderate each of these things to get balance. Replace the bad things (like fatty fuel) with good things. Your body is the vehicle that takes you where you want to go and you only get one. Take care of it, and it will always get you to where you want to go. When you have the strength and energy to tackle your family or career goals, you will succeed.
5. Have fun. Don’t sweat the small stuff. If you’re not enjoying what you do, you won’t do it for very long. Make it fun. Make it enjoyable. Make your resolutions and goals into things that you want to do. This is how you replace bad habits with good habits effectively. It’s all about lifestyle. You don’t want to lose fifty pounds … you want to learn how to make the best chicken caesar salad on the planet and then go for a stroll along the beach with your friends so you can talk about how you’re going to take over the world.

Six girls. One cave. And a whole lot of shakin’ going on.

Get yourself a big bowl of popcorn, dim the lights, and wrap an arm around your favorite scary-movie-watching partner.

In The Descent, Shauna Macdonald and Natalie Jackson Mendoza lead a six girl gang of thrill seekers down into the depths of a cave. Their goal is to find a passage past the pain of the freak tragedy that opens the story. After a rockslide traps them inside the cave with a race of cannibal cave crawlers, their goal is to find a passage … the *bleep* out of there!

Neil Marshall does a great job writing and directing The Descent. The story is full of excitement, suspense and interesting characters. There is a clash of egos, a hidden history, and a fracturing of relationships that gives you more than you’d expect from a horror flick.

Get Inspired

After you’ve had your heebie-jeebies rocked and tossed popcorn all over your living room with every scream it’s time to get inspired. After all, this is a movie about adventurous girls. And it is a new year …

Rock Climbing For Women

Rock climbing is a great sport for women for two reasons. One, women have greater flexibility than men. And two, women have less upper body strength than men. Now you’d think less strength would make it harder, but that’s not the case.

Men, and even experienced male climbers, tend to rely on their upper body strength while climbing. Pushing your upper body to the limit saps your strength and can tire out your whole body very quickly. Women on the other hand, use their legs more because they have to. The best climbers of both sexes rely on the strength and stamina of their legs to carry them up a rock face.

Want a great workout? Rock climbing is a great workout. Find an indoor climbing gym near you and take a few lessons to kick off the new year. Or if you’re seriously hardcore, check out what other adventurous women are doing outdoors.

After you watch The Descent, don’t forget to check out the blooper reel … there’s nothing funnier than a dancing cannibal!

Clorox is best known for making your whites, white again. Yep, they make bleach which also happens to be one of the world’s most cost effective sanitizers.

If you want a one-stop source of laundry tips and advice for removing stains, using bleach and laundry basics the drlaundry blog can set you up. The site is sponsored by Clorox and there are a lot of Clorox products involved in the solutions they talk about on the site. But it is a good site with lots of great tips and probably a few tidbits of info you didn’t know.

Harold Baker

Harold Baker is the Senior Scientist for Clorox’s Laundry Care Product Development. He’s been fighting stains and developing laundry products for 30 years. I guess it’s safe to say he knows what he’s talking about. He sees every stain as a challenge to be met and conquered, so it’s no doubt he’s come to be known as Doctor Laundry.

Bleach

If you skip on over to Clorox’s website you’ll find a great little solutions guide that will help you tackle all sorts of things that Dr Laundry doesn’t cover. It especially gives you a great insight into the many uses of bleach.

Bleach is cheap, simple and effective. That’s why it’s used by so many people and organizations for so many different things. Here’s a short list of some sanitizing jobs that bleach (aka Chlorine) is used for:

• General purpose surface sanitizing. Germs bad. Bleach kill. Bye bye.
• Purifying drinking water. Especially in third world nations or in industrial applications. But if you’re having a serious issue with your drinking water in a crisis situation, 6 to 8 drops of unscented bleach per gallon will disinfect it and kill all the bacteria. Add your drops, wait 30 minutes and you should be good to go. You can leave the bottle open for a half hour afterwards or tumble the water between two containers a dozen times to get rid of any residual chlorine taste.
• Killing mold. Mold can cause serious respiratory problems and can be a huge problem after flooding or in damp climates. Bleach kills mold as well as bacteria.

Yikes! This is one of those scary areas in life that sparks off a million other questions. Should it be a big gift? Small? How much to spend? What do you think you’re going to recieve back? What message does the gift send - does it say this is a serious relationship? Too serious?

Finding a great gift for someone is hard enough, but trying to buy one for that certain someone that you haven’t known that long can be almost impossible. Maybe that’s why May-December romances end in December! The first thing to do is de-stress yourself. Whatever you like to do to turn down the stress level, do that first. The next thing to do is look at this fledgling relationship from an objective point of view to figure out where it’s at.

Here are some things you want to consider and they’re all yes or no questions:

1. Are you spending the holidays together?
2. Are you spending them with their family or yours?
3. Any talk of future plans?
4. Do you spend a lot of time together now?
5. Did you know each other as friends before you got together?
6. Is this person thoughtful or romantic in general?
7. Do you buy little things for each other sometimes for no reason?
8. Is this the time to take the relationship another step forward?

After you have an answer to all the questions, you have a pretty good barometer on how serious, intimate and involved the relationship is. On a scale from one to eight, you can add a point for every question where the answer is yes. The higher the score, the bigger the gift. Or the more intimate - however you want to look at it.

If you get a score of three or less, it’s time to de-stress again!

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Especially when she has super powers.

Would you like to hurl your ex’s car into space? Throw a live shark into his living room? Leave him standing awkwardly naked in front of his co-workers? You might be an ex-girlfriend. But if you actually could do all those things, you would be a super ex-girlfriend.

That’s just some of the stuff Uma Thurman does to Luke Wilson after their break-up in My Super Ex-Girlfriend. When Matt (Wilson) meets Jenny (Thurman), he thinks he’s found the perfect girl. Little does he know that Jenny is actually G-Girl, the city’s resident superhero. She flies, puts out burning buildings, catches the bad guys, and stops runaway test missiles. You know, the ususal superhero stuff.

But Jenny has a needy and jealous side. Matt dumps her because he’s really in love with Hanna (Anna Faris). Jenny loses it. Payback sucks. Matt then decides to strike back and hatches a plan to strip Jenny of her G-Girl powers with Professor Bedlam (The arch enemy played by Eddie Izzard).

My Super Ex-Girlfriend looks really cheesy on the surface, but it has a nice mix of romance, action and comedy. The only downside; Anna Faris doesn’t get to truly flex her funny. If you remember the toothpaste scene in Just Friends, you know how easily she can own a movie when she turns it on.

Diana Krall has put together a colorful and balanced mix of songs on her new album From This Moment On. She takes the tempo up, takes it down, shakes it about, and passes it around.

There is an air of playfulness in the album. Coincidentally, she and husband Elvis Costello became the proud parents of twins this December and you have to wonder if her new mom status is providing the fuel for the whimsical flow of it. Maybe the groove just comes with the verve. Whatever her inspiration, she’s put together an album that’s not your typical jazz offering. It’s something more adventurous. Something more interesting. Something better.

The first couple songs are pretty standard. From that moment on, the album starts to catch your attention. How Insensitive throws a little smoke into the cabaret. Exactly Like You and Day In Day Out take the tempo up. Whether you like the duelling brass of the title track From This Moment On, or you find a skip in your step while listening to I Was Doing All Right, the standout track is Willow Weep For Me.

Willow Weep For Me has a wisp of James Bond running through it. It’s cool. International spy cool. It’s the kind of jazz that’s bigger than life. It just works and Diana Krall works it with perfection.

Find out more at Amazon: Diana Krall - From This Moment On

ZingFu is dumb. Really Dumb. And that’s just they way they like it!

At ZingFu, you can upload photos from your computer or your photobucket account and dress them up with all sorts of fun and silly effects. Then you can share your crazy creations with your friends on ZingFu with your own zingfolio. You can also share them on other social networks like MySpace, facebook, xanga, piczo, bebo and Hi5. ZingFu has hundreds of zings that you can choose from ranging from the hilarious to the absurd.

Some of the zing categories that you can choose from include Celebz, Holidayz, and Destinationz. You can turn your picture into a magazine cover or an employee of the month style award photo. You can even add your own funny captions with speech bubbles.

There is an amazing new convergence of technology and media happening on the internet right now. The ability for anyone and everyone to produce their own TV show and broadcast it for next to no cost is forming a wave of creativity that can only be described as reality TV 2.0.

Payperpost is an internet startup that is injecting big media business savvy into the blogging world. They enable bloggers to write about an advertiser’s new product or promo spiel and get paid for it. This has always been controversial because it blurs the line between unbiased articles and advertisements. New policies of disclosure, stating that a post is indeed a paid post are calming down much of the controversy. As John Chow recently showed after conducting a poll of bloggers, pay-per-post blogging can be a great revenue generator for small, low traffic blogs.

Why Does Pay Per Post Work?

Unique people are grabbing the spotlight and creating runaway hits simply by offering their own unique perspective on things. The power of a unique perspective can capture an audience’s attention. While most people were recently writing about Time Magazine’s interesting choice for Person of The Year, Problogger Darren Rowse commented on how Time magazine made itself into linkbaiter of the year with it’s decision to crown you, me, and everyone else, Person of the Year for “seizing the reins of the global media”.

This kind of unique perspective on a big story is what makes pay per post advertising potentially so engaging, viral, and cost effective for advertisers.

Rockstartup and Reality TV 2.0

Payperpost.com is clearly an internet savvy group that’s playing with a cutting edge advertising model. But their own advertising push might even be more cutting edge.

They started a side project called Rockstartup where they film the daily adventures of building their internet startup. It’s reality TV on the web. It’s interactive, it’s unique content, and it’s an economical way to promote their company and get the word out there about Payperpost. They’re even welcoming interested network TV execs to give them a call if they want to pick up the show. This cool advertising push has become an interesting business model all in itself.

Do-it-yourself reality TV is here. And it has the power to level the playing field for small companies that can leverage the viral interactivity of the internet to get people involved.

The Future of Internet TV … Video … TV …

Google’s purchase of YouTube and the YouTube phenomenon in itself are fueling a scenario where your cable TV bill might one day come from Google. Not likely right. Tell that to the big networks like Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and perhaps CBS that are looking to join forces to form their own YouTube killer.

The internet is your TV. You are the reality. Better get started.

Disclosure? … this is not a paid post

Snow, lights, tree decorations, ribbons and bows. All very pretty. After-Christmas bills. Not so pretty.

Every season, many people tend to get in a little over their heads thanks to the magic of the credit card combined with the magic of holiday cheer. Hey, it’s a time for giving. But you don’t want to keep giving interest payments to your credit card company for the next six months afterwards.

Not to worry. There are a few rules you can take advantage of that will help out immensely. These are the 5 rules for managing your after-Christmas bills:

1. Put some thought into the gifts you buy. Time equals money. It’s easy to buy stuff that’s hot, cool, trendy and so on. It’s also usually more expensive. It’s supposed to be the thought that counts. A little thought will help you find the perfect gift and save you a few dollars at the same time. Besides, all the latest IT stuff on the shelves is usually follow-the-crowd and impersonal anyway.
2. Make a budget. If you’re strapped for cash, then make up a list of people you have to buy gifts for and assign a budget for each person. If you go over budget on one gift, try to trim the budget on another gift. Expand your budget to include whatever decoratons, holiday festivities, and however many tons of chocolate you also plan on buying. Then expand your budget some more and make sure your Christmas budget fits into your personal budget. Save all your receipts.
3. Get involved with your budget. The biggest mistake is to not look at how much you’re spending. There are people who earn thirty dollars a day that manage to save for the future, and there are those who earn thirty dollars a minute who can’t save a dime. The numbers might be really scary. Face the fear and keep track of all your earnings and your expenses. People always struggle because they don’t want to think about the numbers. Poor people that win the lottery become poor again because they don’t want to think about at the numbers. Be aware. Look at your budget. Plan ahead. Make sacrifices. Creating wealth is a mindset, and so is wasting it.
4. Lower your interest payments. Department store credit cards charge the highest interest rates. Next are regular credit cards like Visa, Mastercard and Amex. The break-your-legs rates that payday loans charge are nothing but pure evil. There are other options, and some great ones. You can sign up for a new credit card. Many banks have offers that allow you to transfer the balances of other credit cards to their card and charge you no interest for a certain amount of time. Look at these offers very carefully. Figure out if you can pay off the entire balance before interest charges start and look at what the rate will be once the interest charges do start. Another option is to get a line of credit from your bank and use it to pay off your credit cards. Often, you can get an LOC that only charges interest at prime plus 1 or 2%. If your bank won’t give it to you, talk to some other banks - they just might want your business.
5. Get great advice. If you’re not a financial guru, then find one. Talk to your wealthy friends or family members and tell them you need help figuring out the best way to attack your bills and win. Read some financial books. Surf the internet to find great advice from respected money gurus. If you get a variety of opinions from different sources, you can use them to form your own perfect plan af attack.

The virtual world of Second Life has a real economy where real people are making real money. And now some of those people are getting ripped off by a black market economy of knock-offs as their creations are being stolen by the Copybot created by libsecondlife. The Copybot was supposed to be a useful tool, but the script was modified by someone outside libsecondlife and is being used to copy objects without an owner’s permission.

Libsecondlife is an open source software project. The idea behind the project is to understand how SL works and provide a toolset that allows the creation of third party applications capable of integrating Second Life with the rest of the internet. The Copybot is one of those tools and after much protest from the SL community, LindenLab, the makers of Second Life, have declared malicious use of Copybot to be a violation of their TOS. Violators will be expelled.

The Genie Is Out Of The Bottle

Name brand knockoffs and counterfeit products have plagued businesses in the real world for centuries. From twenty dollar Gucci bags to shady guys with raincoats full of cheap Rolex watches, black markets have thrived and expanded to make fraudulent versions of everything from software to electronics, furniture, and clothing.

Knockoffs are very profitable for their makers. There’s a definite lack of quality in counterfeit products and in some cases a lack of safety standards in their construction. In recent years, knockoff manufacturers are increasingly making a real effort to infiltrate the market, not as knockoffs, but under the guise that they are selling legitimate products. The reason is simply to make much higher profit margins.

In the virtual world, creating knockoffs is easy, which makes it potentially even more profitable. Once a snippet of computer code is copied it can be duplicated endlessly without cost. Although the Copybot only copies objects and not the scripts that animate or bring life to them, new versions of the bot with increased capabilities can’t be too far away.

Protecting Yourself Against The Copybot

Like the endless war between spammers and anti-spam software, this is likely to be an ongoing struggle.

A few programmers have developed scripts which shout out instructions to any avatar that comes near them. The instructions tell the Copybot script to stop running if it’s present. The problem with these scripts is that they add a great deal of automated spam to any conversation. And they have already been circumvented by patched versions of the bot.

The biggest tools in the war against unauthorized copying are LindenLab’s commitment to expel offenders and the vigilance of Second Life citizens to find and report offenders. Neither of these efforts will completely erradicate devious use of the Copybot, but they will slow down the crime rate. The future will involve complex theft-combatting tools yet to be written. It might involve groups of vigilante script warriors taking on the task to hunt down and stop Copybot crime lords.

The only thing for sure … somewhere inside the virtual world of Second Life, reality is setting in.