Jennerosity

This year I’ve decided to try and re-establish a bunch of the good habits that I had when I was at my healthiest. These are simple habits, which aren’t difficult to do, but can actually make a fairly substantial difference in how healthy you feel.

Changing habits takes time and will power to stick with it, but the end result will be worth it. Each time I exercise my will power will strengthen it and make it easier for future me!

And there’s even an app for that! I found Healthy Habits Premium Plus and find it has a good balance of rewards and nagging reminders. Plus it’s easy to use and comes pre-loaded with a bunch of habits in case I run out of ideas.

I’m going to use the kaizen method and go very slowly. I’m only going to tackle 10 or 11 changes this year and will add them 1 at a time. Currently I’m working on flossing daily. Here’s my list of habits to tackle as I successively master each one:

• drink more water
• eat breakfast every day
• take my vitamins & supplements every day
• stretch every evening
• keep a food journal
• eat vegetables
• track my weight
• exercise my back posture muscles

What healthy habits do you want to try and incorporate into your daily life?

Things are going to be slowing down here for a while. You see, I did a lot of blogging from my iPod. And my iPod sacrificed itself to the porcelain goddess (fell in the toilet) and is pretty dead. I’m going to have to switch to using computers, but I only have access during the daytime and I’m a slow one-handed typist.

Before I became a mother I had read very few ebooks. But they have several distinct advantages (most of which relate to reading during the wee hours of the night) for new moms which quickly overcame my reluctance to read in that format.

• Because I use my iPod to read them, I don’t need to turn on a light.
• So long as I have my ereading device handy, the books are there. When I finish one I can start on the next without having to physically get up to get the book.
• It’s impossible to randomly misplace the digital version of a book somewhere in your house.
• You can download ebooks free from the library without having to leave your house.
• Even the lengthiest book weighs the same and can easily be held in one hand.
• Turning pages only requires the tap of a thumb.
• Most ereader programs automatically start you where you stopped. So even if you fall asleep reading, you’ll still know exactly how far you got.
• They tend to be at least a little cheaper than their traditional counterparts.

All that being said, I’m still not quite ready to buy an actual ereader device yet. For now my iPod is more than adequate. I’ve enjoyed the ebook experience so much these past few months that I think I’m more likely to purchase and read ebooks than I am paperbacks or hardcovers.

What are your thoughts, opinions, or counterpoints on ebooks? Do you still prefer physical media?

Now that you’ve gone ahead and signed up for Flickr & added me as a contact, you should be getting emails every time I upload photos. Not everyone wants to go online to see photos though, so this tutorial will teach you how to download the photos you like to your own computer. From there you can set them as your screensaver or desktop, or get them printed out from your favourite photo printing service. This will work if you have a Flickr account or if you’re viewing the pictures with an emailed guest pass.

1. Step 1: Select the picture you’d like a copy of.
   

It’s really just as simple as that!

Full disclosure right from the start… this post is selfishly motivated. The more people who follow these steps, the less work it is for me to manually email everyone once a batch of Locutus photos have gone up. This is exactly the kind of thing that technology makes easier for us. If you already have a Yahoo! account just sign in with that and follow the rest of the instructions. BEFORE YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT HAVING YET ANOTHER ACCOUNT TO CHECK … after setting this up, you would never need to remember to come back to your Flickr account as everything will be emailed to your preferred email address.¹ This will generate some email for you, but you can limit the frequency to weekly if you want.

• Go to Flickr.com
• Create an account/sign up
• List your preferred email address when it prompts you for an alternate email address
• Search for my name & add me as a contact. This will automatically notify me & then I will list you as a friend or family member
• Edit your account notification settings and make these 2 changes:

• set your preferred email address as your default address
• select your update frequency according to your preference

See how easy that was? Now every time I upload photos, Flickr will automatically let you know. The emails even have little picture previews so you can decide if you want to click-through to see more or not. Plus, if you ever are signed in to your Flickr account, you will be able to come over to my photostream and look through all of the photos I’ve marked as private for family & friends.

If you’ve got questions about the process please leave a comment! Or if you’ve tried to set it up but something went wrong I’d be happy to try to help you fix it!

1. Though you should still try to pick a password you can remember just in case you need to enter it again [↩]

I’ve decided to re-activate my Facebook account. I’m really hoping it doesn’t make me all crazy like it did last time! In an attempt to minimize it’s annoyance and intrusion into my enjoyment of life, there are some specific guidelines I’m using.

1. Family only – What convinced me to return was learning that one of our cousins was engaged to be married at a Christmas gathering. Apparently the news had come up on Facebook. That’s also how invites went out for the party. I’ve wanted the family to get involved in a central online scheduling and news aggregator for years and it turns out I was too dumb to notice that this is exactly how they’re using Facebook now.
2. Longer more meaningful updates – Since I know my audience, I’m going to cater to them more and give better updates. This will help eliminate duplication of content between twitter and Facebook.
3. Filter, filter, filter – Because my account will have a much more narrow focus, I’ll be filtering the content that I see as well. This will mean making good use of contact lists. Plus, if there are any family related apps, I’ll probably limit myself to those.

Even though I’m only using it for family, I’m not changing my stance on photos (eg. That we don’t want photos of Locutus on Facebook). However I will probably announce to Facebook when I upload to Flickr, so people can request guest passes then.

One of my past annoyances about Facebook was that family could see everything I updated. I’m really just reframing it so that this is used to my advantage instead of my annoyance. Isn’t it nice when we figure out stuff like that!

So I decided to deactivate my Facebook account so you won’t find me there anymore. Since no one has been frantically emailing me about it, I’ll assume my absence there has gone largely unnoticed.¹ Several things lead up to the decision . . . mostly, it was the fact that Facebook decided that I was posting spammy links. So every time I updated my status, I would get logged out from every interface (my work computer, my home computer, & my iPod) and then I’d have to log back in and click through their helpful information about spammy links, and then decline posting a warning about spammy links to my wall for my family & friends so that they would be able to learn about the dangers of spammy links as well. And I’d have to do that with every interface, after every update.

I didn’t spend much time on Facebook anymore, since I find twitter to be a much better fit for me. I very rarely think to keep up with people by checking their profiles and I didn’t do much by way of sharing photos there, writing on people’s wall, or writing comments. And I’d already locked down my profile a lot because of Facebook’s sketchy privacy policies anyway. For every useful feature of Facebook, there’s another social media venue that I can use to do the same thing. And while it seems counter-intuitive to spread out all of these individual facets to different services, I actually kind of like it that way. It means that those services can focus on doing that one thing very well. Like the saying goes . . . Jack of all trades is master of none.

Finally, I find that it is no longer a very useful way for me to keep in touch with people. All my ‘Facebook friends’ are either people that I don’t have much interest in keeping in touch with or people I keep in touch with other ways anyway. And the people that Facebook would be most useful for keeping in touch with, either aren’t on Facebook, or use it so seldom that it isn’t a very efficient way of keeping in touch with them anyway.

Now the account isn’t completely deleted. Which means I can change my mind and reactivate the account at any time.² Plus, I still get notifications if people email me through Facebook or groups that I was a part of have events or send out messages.

In case anyone is interested, here are the ways that we can still connect online³ . . .

• Here . . . through my blog, of course
• Twitter @Jennerosity for status updates & sharing links
• On Flickr for my photos
• On pinterest for things that visually inspire me
• On goodreads for the books that I read
• And I’m also on LinkedIn⁴

1. With the exception of one person I used to work with. Apparently she watches her friend total very closely so she knew that someone had left . . . just not who. [↩]
2. Though I sincerely doubt that I will go back full time. [↩]
3. these are just the ones that I use most often [↩]
4. though I really need to complete my profile there and keep it more up to date [↩]

It’s been a while since I posted anything about apps and tech stuff, but it’s because I haven’t found anything really exceptional lately. But, with Cozi, I’m excited enough about it that I figured I should do up a quick review explaining why I love it.

Let’s start with a story . . . I’m not the best housekeeper in the world. And, I feel like I should be doing better. Now that we’re expecting a baby, I really had a few areas that needed some serious decluttering and cleaning. In the past, I’ve felt most on top of things when I managed to keep a FlyLady¹ routine going. So, a little while back I went back to her site to try to get my motivation going again. And while I was there, I saw that they now had a partnership with the Cozi webapp (which also has an iPod/iPhone app) to act as a kind of electronic ‘control journal’².

Honestly, at first I was a little hesitant about jumping right on board. In the past, the FlyLady hasn’t demonstrated the most savvy use of technology which has left me overwhelmed with a flood of reminders in my email or a totally crammed calendar. And it was a little frustrating since a lot of it is set up with the homemaker in mind. So, it really didn’t help me to be reminded about certain housecleaning tasks while I’m at work. Plus, I already use RememberTheMilk as my main to-do list application. While it isn’t perfect, it does a very good job, especially for my recurring tasks or for things that I want to add notes or a url to.

So, what made me decide to try it out? Well one thing was that it’s designed as a shared service for families. I’ve seen family webapps in the past but they were usually aimed at being Facebook type services for extended families so each arm could post pictures and blog posts about what they were up to, so you could keep up to date with your family all in one (more private) place. But this was just like a virtual family calendar/white board where you can keep track of schedules, shopping lists, and general tasks. So I signed up and decided to give it a shot.

The result . . . I am totally sold! Love it!

Here are my favourite features:

• It figures out the date and time of appointments for the calendar pretty easily
• You can have recurring/background calendar appointments
• You can import any ical feed so you don’t have to re-enter everything if you’ve already set it up with google calendar
• You can filter the calendar to only see events that affect certain family members
• You can set up as many task lists as you want
• Task lists can have sub-headings set up
• Easy drag and drop organization of tasks
• Lists can be shared, or belong to any family member
• Checking off tasks doesn’t delete them automatically³
• Shopping lists are separate from tasks and you can create unlimited shopping lists
• Shopping lists can also be shared or belong to a specific family member
• Items on your shopping list that get checked off don’t automatically get deleted⁴
• The journal function reminds you to reflect on important events⁵

Here are the features that need work:

• The family shares a password . . . which feels a little odd to me
• You can’t personalize the display options much on the webapp
• There are some ads and such to deal with

Some things I haven’t used:

• Outlook sync
• Printing (we’re trying to use LESS paper)
• Sending info as a text to a cell phone⁶
• Punchbowl event planning
• Desktop calendar integration
• The messaging system
• The lists you can download from Live Simply

Now . . . the biggest thing I haven’t tested yet . . . how well it works with multiple people. Yup, it’s just me using it so far. I’ve only casually mentioned it to Benevolance. Maybe when he reads this post he’ll give it a shot.⁷ While I think it would work great if everyone in the family does use it, we aren’t the type of people to force a system on one another. So, if he sees it and likes it and uses it then that’s great. If not, I still think I’ll keep using it for myself because I like so many of the features. Though I’m going to keep using RememberTheMilk as a tickler file for the tasks that repeat, but don’t work as regular calendar appointments.

Sound interesting? Go check it out for yourself! (And now I’m clicking over to my Blog task list to check this post topic off).

1. If you don’t have any clue what I’m talking about, just go poke around her site for a bit to see how it works [↩]
2. FlyLady jargon [↩]
3. this is good if you have a set of regular tasks/chores that you do over time . . . work your way through the list, and then click to ‘uncheck all’ and the list is reset for you to begin again [↩]
4. just like you might have regular tasks, there are probably regular items that you need at the grocery store . . . this way you can review things you’ve bought there before and ask yourself ‘what do I need’ and then just uncheck it [↩]
5. I’m seeing this as especially useful for all the baby milestones as they happen. There’s even an option to send out a summary of the journal as an email newsletter complete with pictures. [↩]
6. since I almost always have the info on my iPod, I don’t really need it [↩]
7. Benevolance if you are reading this and wondering how to check it out, just let me know and I’ll give you the log in information ;) [↩]

Just a quick note to follow up my previous post that mentioned possibly changing the theme of my blog . . .  You see, the reason was for menu support. But the other free theme I found that I liked also didn’t support menus the way I wanted. And I managed to hack the code of this theme to allow me to use some of the menu features. So now I don’t really need to change the theme. If you were holding your breath in anticipation you can stop now.

I read a while back on lifehacker that February was a good month to buy a new camera.  And I decided that I might as well test this out.  I’ve been wanting to buy a new camera for a while now.  Partly, it’s just tech-envy as my husband’s point and shoot is so much smaller and sexier than my old Canon camera is.  But, I also lament the fact that I don’t take many pictures.  In fact, it was hard to find any pictures of my and/or my husband in all of 2010.  And I’d like to fix that.  Photography is one of those things I’ve always wanted to get better at and part of the reason I don’t practice is because my camera is bulky, weighs a tonne, and takes forever to turn on (though back in the day comparing it to a film camera it was so much better.)

Usually I’m not the type of person to throw money at things, but this time I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind and splurge on a new camera for myself.  So . . . got any pointers or recommendations for things to look for in a new camera?  Or easy ways I can practice and brush up on my photography skills? (I’m looking at Canon.  I know Nikon makes good cameras too, but cameras is one of the things that I have irrational brand loyalty for.)