Laughter gives you physical, mental, and social benefits. So, in order to be healthy in all three of those areas, you need to have a little humor in your life! So if you’re too uptight, better get with the program and start laughing. Here are some things you might want to know in a condensed bullet format:

Laughter:

1. Boosts your immune system by decreasing stress hormones and upping your antibodies, which improves your health and resistance to any illnesses.
2. Decreases pain and increases your tolerance of pain.
3. Triggers release of endorphins and adrenaline. Endorphins make you feel good and help you temporarily relieve pain.
4. Improves the function of your blood vessels and increases blood flow, leading to better cardiovascular health.
5. Makes you feel good about yourself, helps you relax, and recharge your body.
6. Helps you connect with others, increasing your social connectedness.

Looks like laughter can solve many problems. Want more info? Just go over to Google and type in “laughter health benefits”. Need I say more? So live your life and have a nice laugh with co-workers, friends, and family. Studies show that even faking a smile or a laugh can have all of the positive benefits. Most of the time, faking a smile or a laugh usually leads to a real one. Don’t forget to check out Laughter Yoga!

Wow, this is a pretty grim last post. As the last few days of the year tick down, it’s time to get sentimental, but look forward. Yes, learn from the mistakes, events and successes we’ve had in 2009, but move on. Pandora’s box was opened for a reason. Hope was at the bottom. Don’t close the box now. Let’s keep going and see what 2010 has to hold for us. I look forward to next year, when I do my obligatory 2010 post to have something positive to talk about. Either way, my next post will be dedicated to memorable events of 2009, for myself, our nation, and the world. Take care folks. Happy holidays and I’m wishing you a great New Years. Best wishes for 2010!

1) Salad: YUMMAYYY! Spring mix, tomatoes, onions, avocados, and your choice of dressing. No croutons for me this time around. I chose to go with the Bleu Cheese Vinaigrette. (It worked real well. I never would have thought to add avocados, but this was my mom’s brilliant idea) No need for instructions right? Wash, cut up, toss. Simple and not very time consuming.

2) Garlic Bread: Garlic, sourdough baguette, butter, chili powder, cilantro/parsley/green onion (take your pick), pepper, salt, cheese (if you want). Finely chop your garlic and cilantro/parsley/green onions and add to some butter in a little bowl. Heat it up in the microwave just to melt the butter. I find that it spreads real easy when it’s melted. Add some chili powder for seasoning and color. Pepper and salt to taste. Take your sourdough, cut it into nice little pieces and spread your butter and garlic concoction onto it. Use a convection oven or standard oven and bake until crisp. If you’re going to add cheese, do it near the end, and just put your oven on warm until the cheese melts. YUM!

3) Clam Chowder: Garlic bread goes great with some hearty New England Clam Chowder. Don’t buy those MSG laden canned chowders! Reserve those for your cravings when you don’t have any time. Ingredients are as follows: Potatoes, onions, celery, bacon, clams, cornstarch/flour, pepper, salt, Italian herbs (no essential but adds a layer of complexity), heavy whipping cream, chicken broth, cilantro/parsley/green onion. I don’t know how people make clam chowder, but I’ve finally come up with a way to make it real tasty, so here are my steps.

1. Let’s deal with your bacon first. Fry your bacon until crisp (so that it’ll crumble). Lay out some paper towels and let your bacon drain. Save some of that bacon fat for the next step.
2. Prepare your potatoes by skinning and dicing them up. Take the time at this point to dice up your celery and onions as well. If you want, you may also finely chop up your cilantro/parsley/green onions at this time.
3. Add a spoonful of your bacon grease to a pot. Take your drained strips of bacon and crumble them into the pot. I decided to take out some of the chunks of fat just because the texture doesn’t go well in the chowder (I know. I’ve tried using the fat. It didn’t work too well)
4. Take half of your celery and half of your onions and add it in the pot with your crumbled bacon. Fry this mixture for a minute or so and salt lightly.
5. Next, add some chicken broth and water. You want enough liquid to cover all the ingredients you put in and a little more because your diced potatoes are going in next.
6. Add your potatoes. Make sure it’s covered in liquid. Clams can also go in at this point, so the flavors will incorporate together nicely. Canned clams are the easiest. They often come in clam juice. Just empty the whole can in there. The clam juice gives your chowder a nice flavor as well. Put it on medium heat and bring all this to a light boil. Season with more salt and some Italian herbs if you want.
7. Check back often. You don’t want to overdo your potatoes. I prefer my chowder chunky. As soon as your potatoes are done, put it on low heat.
8. Next comes your heavy whipping cream. Add and stir until you get a nice creamy white color. It wont be a chowder yet, but it’ll be white.
9. Grab a bowl and put some warm water in it. Add either flour or cornstarch or a combination of both into the warm water and mix well. Get all those chunks out!
10. Once it is smooth, stir that into your pot and you’ll notice that it’ll get thicker. If it isn’t getting thicker, keep slowly adding more cornstarch or flour mixture until it does! Some people prefer to use potatoes as a natural thickener. I used to do that too, but I’ve noticed using flour or cornstarch yields better and more predictable results.
11. Once your chowder is a nice color and consistency, season with pepper and salt. Then give it a couple of nice stirs and turn your heat to warm. There you have it! Your chowder!

I like to serve it with garlic bread and a some garnish. YUM!

4) STEAK : I think you all know how to make a steak right? Good. It was yummy. Anyway, cheers! Have a good time cooking and experimenting! In cooking, I think experimenting makes perfect, not practice! Although practice can’t hurt!

1) Vince’s Beef Stew – Ingredients: Stew meat cut into chunks, flour, diced tomatoes, potatoes, tomato sauce, ketchup, hot sauce, beef broth, onions, celery, carrots, assorted vegetables (whatever you want to throw in), salt, pepper, chili powder, basil. Once you have your ingredients, let’s begin. Sorry I don’t do amounts. With some practice and tasting, you’ll get it down pat. Of course it won’t taste exactly the same every time you make it, but it’ll be close and yummy nevertheless.

1. Grab your ingredients and start cutting away! This is the prep stage and it makes everything a little easier as you move along. I don’t like the skins on my tomatoes because of the texture clash, but you can keep the skins on if you wish. If you want to remove them, boil a pot of water. Plop your tomatoes in there and boil for 1-2 minutes. Fish them put and immerse them in cold water. The skins should slide right off!
2. Dice up your tomatoes. If you like skins on your potatoes, just dice them up and set them aside as well. If you don’t like skins, then skin them and then dice them up. I like a mix, so I make a stripped pattern on the potato. That way there will be some with skin and some with none.
3. Take your onions and celery and dice them up as well. It doesn’t matter if they’re fine or not. If you like chunky soup like I do, leave them in larger pieces.
4. With the carrots, you can use whole baby carrots. That way you won’t even have to cut them. If you use large carrots, peel and cut to a size that you desire. Baby carrots are relatively cheap, good tasting, and don’t need to be cut. I’d definitely prefer those baby carrots. They’re perfectly suited for plopping straight into your mouth. You can also cut these baby carrots in half if need be.
5. Let’s get started with your stew meat! We’re gonna pan fry them with some flour to seal in the juices when we simmer it later on. The texture is preserved if you take care with this step. Get some flour in a bowl. Salt and pepper the flour and mix well. Take your meat pieces and cover it with flour. Put some oil in a skillet and pan fry all 6 sides of your stew meat (since it’ll be cubed). Do this with all of your stew meat.
6. Once you’re done with your stew meat, grab your stew pot, put a little bit of oil in the bottom and add your meat into the pot. Cover with beef broth and throw in half of your onions and celery. Then also throw in your potatoes, tomatoes, and carrots. Make sure it is covered with broth. You can also throw in some water for good measure. Simmer this mixture until the potatoes and carrots are tender.
7. Once your tomatoes and carrots are tender, check to make sure that you have enough liquid. If you don’t, either add more broth or water. Next part is thickening and adding your tomato paste. The tomato paste and ketchup is mainly for flavor and color. Add some of both. If you want, you can also add in some hot sauce. Season with salt, pepper, chili powder, and add some basil as well.
8. Simmer for a while longer to let the flavor set in. Then, turn down the heat on your stove. Take a bowl with warm water and add flour to it. Mix well, ensuring there are no chunks of flour. Then add this mixture to your pot and stir well! Eyeball it and make sure that it is thick enough! That’s that. Enjoy!

2) Italian Beef Stew – Ingredients: stew meat cut into chunks, flour, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, water, dry red wine, green bell pepper, onions, carrots, zucchini, green beans, celery, potatoes, garlic, oregano, olive oil, black pepper, salt. See all these ingredients? Sounds good already. I’ve included a link to the site with specific measurements for ingredients. Hope you have fun making it. It’s delicious!

1. Trim the fat off the meat
2. Dredge meat in flour and shake off excess
3. Slice and dice vegetables
4. Brown meat in oil
5. Add garlic, oregano, salt, and pepper
6. Add wine and simmer for ten minutes.
7. Add all vegetables and stir
8. Add tomatoes, tomato sauce, and water to cover
9. Simmer for an hour, half-covered

Simple, easy, mouth-watering goodness. I think I’m going to have to try this and perfect this recipe. That way I can add it to my belt of tricks. Enjoy!

1) Free Fonts: Check out these awesome fonts. It’s a great list. However, you do have to register at a couple of these sites before you are allowed to download them. They’re definitely worth checking out though.

2) Free Icon Sets: Another great post from Smashing Magazine. It’s a list of free icon sets. Not just one icon or two icons. FULL SETS! If you can’t tell, I’m really excited. Some of the sets have hundreds of icons. Enjoy! I know I will.

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve been using Zemanta on my Wordpress powered blog here for a while. It’s a great tool for bloggers and it’s getting even better! If you’d like to learn more about Zemanta, go ahead and visit the website. I’ll give you one of my brief descriptions about what it does. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it if you love blogging as much as I do. Let’s begin!

Zemanta is a plug-in for the most popular blogs out there that allows you, the blogger, to enrich your articles with fresh and exciting content. It’s simple, easy to use, efficient, and best of all, SMART! With not so much as a hiccup during install, Zemanta will allow you to give your readers a little bit more to look at. Zemanta helps you link your text, give you picture recommendations, and related articles. This, all only by pressing a couple of buttons. Zemanta analyzes the text of your article as you are furiously typing.

For more info, check out their website by clicking here.

Zemanta is currently available as an add-on for Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and as a bookmarklet for Safari and other browsers. I am currently using Zemanta as a Windows Live Writer plugin. You can also get Zemanta to go as a server-side blog plugin. Wordpress, Movabletype, Drupal, and Joomla are currently supported. Have fun, folks!

Image via CrunchBase

As some of you may know, I’m a heavy Google Chrome user. It is my default browser, ever since I left Internet Explorer in the dust a long time ago. Here is my browser progression. Went from IE to Firefox, then found Flock and started using that heavily. Along the same time, I also experimented a bit with Avant and Maxthon, as well as Safari. When Google Chrome came out, I started using it mainly because I got fed up with the Firefox load times. Even though I tweaked with the configuration, I couldn’t rely on it’s speed. Although I still have it on my computer, I haven’t touched it in a long time.

I had my doubts about Chrome when I first started. That was mainly because it was barely customizable and too simplistic for my needs. Then I realized that in a browser, simplicity may be the best way to go. Without all my add-ons, I felt lost at first, but I readily adapted to it. If you’ve switched to chrome, you’ll know what I mean. Sure, there are a few bugs here and there, but it works and is still under development. I’ve recently switched over to the developers build and started using some of the awesome extensions. Let me tell you right now, they are well worth it. You can find all of the extensions at Chromeextensions.org. Once you switch, you’ll never want to go back. Some sites are still not suited for Chrome, but that’s one out of many. When worst comes to worst, you can always switch back to your original browser.

Here are three extensions I found that I’ve been using most often:

1) Alwitt’s Facebook Enhancer: If you use Facebook (which I am betting that you do), you’ll want to grab chrome and install this extension. It has made navigating Facebook a lot less troublesome and increases your efficiency. Below is a picture of what you should expect to find. My favorite feature is pop-up images when you roll over them.

2) YouTube Playback 1.1: I’m also a heavy YouTube user. YouTube meets my everyday entertainment needs. This simple extension allows you to pause and play any YouTube video you have from another tab. That means you can have a video playing, open a new tab for some other business and still have the audio blaring. When you need to pause the YouTube video, just hit the pause button located conveniently in any of your open tabs. Works like a charm. Props.

3) Gmail Checker: Use Gmail? You might want to check this extension out. It places an icon on your Chrome toolbar which notifies you when you have new mail. When you click the icon, it’ll give you a drop down list of your new unread mail: sender, subject, and brief summary. It’s really useful. Want to read your unread mail? Just click on it and it’ll open a new tab with the message you selected. Awesome!

That’s it for now. If you have any other Chrome extensions that are your favorites, why not share them in the comments below?

Image via Wikipedia

That’s exactly what we are. I haven’t posted in a long time but I was just sitting around on my toilet, doing my business (#2 if you must know) and I was yearning for something to read. I had forgotten bring my reading material, so I reached for something that had words on it: the hand soap on the counter. Guess what? It was the Dial brand antibacterial hand soap. I don’t remember buying it, because I don’t buy antibacterial hand soap, but it gave me an idea for a quick post. Looking down the list of ingredients, I ran across a couple of nasty-looking names. After doing some research, I’m surprised these things are even in our soap. Ugh. Just thinking about it makes me shudder. Let’s just have a look at what I found and oh of course I’ll first talk about antibacterial hand soaps and why they aren’t so good.

The concern about antibacterial hand soaps has been brought to the attention of consumers time and time again, yet we still demand it (at least most of us do). What you might not know is that antibacterial hand soaps are both harmful to the environment, and can pose a risk to human health in the long run as well. Even with these concerns, there is no agency that specifically monitors them. People use them all the time, yet they don’t understand the fundamental difference between regular hand soaps and antibacterial hand soaps. Regular hand soaps are effective with proper hand washing procedures. There is no need to use antibacterial soaps because regular soaps clean just as well, according to the University of Michigan School of Public Health, which reviewed many studies pertaining to the effectiveness of antibacterial products. As it turns out, the active ingredient in a variety of popular hand soaps is Triclosan. For healthy individuals, Triclosan has no significant impact when compared with soaps that don’t have it.

So what’s the problem?

Doctors and researchers are afraid that Triclosan can create so called “superbugs”, which are resistant to widely used antibiotics, which would pose a serious risk in managing infections. The FDA announced that there was no evidence which proved that antibacterial soaps did a better job for preventing infection. However, many doctors are recommending antibacterial soaps for individuals who are very prone to infection.

What about the environment?

That’s another big problem. It has been shown that Triclosan, when combined with chlorine in water can produce small amounts of compounds that become endocrine disruptors. We’ll save endocrine disruptors for another day, but in short, they disrupt the functions of hormones in the human body, which can lead to severe problems. These problems have been documents in many amphibians, since they absorb these compounds right through their skin. Triclosan can also produce chloroform gas when combined with chlorine. The EPA has labeled chloroform as a possible carcinogen.

About Dial hand soap: Here are some ingredients: yellow 5, tetrasodium EDTA. There’s yellow 5 in soap too? Apparently it’s a pretty widespread compound. Tetrasodium EDTA is actually a persistant organic pollutant and is widely used. That means it lasts in the environment for a long long long long time. Scary though. Personally, I think I’ll skip the antibacterial hand soaps.

Be wary of antibacterial soaps and use them only when absolutely necessary. There have been movements to get some product lines off the market, spearheaded by environmental organizations. Will you join them? Or do you think there is nothing to worry about? READ YOU LABELS, FOLKS!

Currently, Google sync works with the iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia S60, and Windows Mobile Phone. It kicks butt all over the place! I like it. It’s a breeze to set up with the step-by-step instructions that you have to follow. I’ve already synchronized all of my email, contacts, and calendar items with one touch of a button. I find the calendar the most useful. Have at it folks!