“If you think of yourself as the woman in the Cartier watch and the Hermes scarf, a house fire will destroy not only your possessions but your self.” – Linda Henley, American consultant and motivational speaker

“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” – Babe Ruth, American baseball player

If you don’t say “wow” while watching the above video, you may want to check your pulse.

“Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”  -Abraham Lincoln

In life it is important to remember we need to focus on who we are and not who are aren’t.  We should focus on what our passion is so we can flourish and not be something different than what our heart tells us to be.  Whether it is kids, dogs, or people in general, I think that is very important.

Mozilla Firefox

Google Chrome

I’ve been trying out Google Chrome on Linux and Windows for the past few weeks now that extensions are available.  I like Chrome, it is very snappy and the number of available extensions are growing quickly.  I still plan on sticking with Firefox because it is open source and is something that just feels more familiar to me.  What are you using these days for your primary browser and why?

This is a great story about a 32 year old man named David from Phoenix, AZ who weighed 650 pounds. David had no friends or job and wouldn’t go outside except at night so he wouldn’t be seen because people would laugh and stare at him. The only thing that made him happy was food and soda. His life consisted of eating, sleeping, and watching television.

He contacted his local news agency for help and a week later a personal trainer named Chris Powell contacted him. The trainer put him on an exercise regiment and diet and in 26 months he lost 401 pounds. Chris didn’t make a drastic change to David’s daily life and didn’t just handle the matter physiologically but also psychologically. David’s diet and exercise consisted of high and low days where he could reward himself every other day.

David has had three operations to remove excess skin and according to him may need one or two more. The two have become friends and are roommates. Upon agreeing to help David Chris said he would help him lose weight if he agreed to pay it forward by helping others to do the same. TLC is airing the documentary tomorrow (7/12) they created titled The 650-Pound Virgin at 8pm. The documentary description on the website is: “Four years ago David Smith weighed 650lbs, he was eating himself to death and doctors said he wouldn’t hit 30. Now having lost over 400lbs he’s fit, healthy and hoping to make up for those lost years by finding himself a girlfriend for the first time!” Very inspirational and it is amazing what you can do when you truly put your mind to something.

Believe it or not I’m behind on my blogging.  Last week I was watching Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel because they were playing every episode in the series which allowed me a chance to watch all of them (filled up my DVR).  It is a great show and I really like Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan who constantly argue like school kids and even though Billy isn’t with us any longer due to his recent death it was obvious they cared for one another.

In one of the last shows of the season Anthony Sullivan had a great quote which I wrote down: “If you want to be in front you have to act like you are behind”.  That quote from Anthony Sullivan really rung true to me because I think we need to constantly remind ourselves to keep loving, keep fighting, keep working, keep living, but at the end of the day be content with what we have.  Sometimes when we are financially secure, our jobs and relationships are going well, our bodies aren’t ailing us, we stop trying as hard as we should.

Mays was wildly successful being the #1 pitchmen in the world which afforded him a Bentley and a mansion.  We all know money doesn’t buy happiness but my point is God gave him a talent and he wasn’t using that talent to its fullest extent.  In that episode Anthony noticed Mays lost his focus or hunger for achieving as much as his talent allowed (selling the Zorbees) and allowed Vince (who famously pitched the Shamwow) to steal some significant sales away from their product.  As Tony Robbins said in another more famous quote: “It’s not what’s happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it’s your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you’re going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.”

Probably the most famous example of this is Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky movies.  Read the summary below from Rocky II from IMDB: “Rocky Balboa is enjoying life. He’s got a lovely wife, Adrian, had a successful fight with Apollo Creed and is able to enjoy the wealth coming off the draw. Unfortunately, Rocky becomes embarrassed when failing to complete and advert and ends up working in a meat packing company. He believe that he will no longer have a career as a boxer. Apollo wants to rematch with Rocky to prove all his critics wrong that he can beat Rocky. Can Rocky once again have a successful fight?”  In the video below you see what happens when he once again rededicates himself to his passion and what talents he has been blessed with.

I could write about winning for a really long time, I love motivational books and quotes.  Below are some other quotes to wrap things up but always remember to give life your all but be content with what life has afforded you.

• One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.” – Anthony Robbins

• “Winning is not a sometime thing, it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” – Vince Lombardi

• “A quitter never wins and a winner never quits” – Napoleon Hill

• “Winning isn’t everything…it’s the only thing.” – Vincent van Gogh

• “Winning isn’t everything, but the will to win is everything.” – Vince Lombardi quotes

• “Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.” – Lilmmoe

• “There is no “i” in team but there is in win” – Michael Jordan

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but the product of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”

- Albert Einstein

This doesn’t look real but I guess it is???  If so this guy has some totally awesome but totally useless skills…

If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:

• The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
• 51 would be male, 49 would be female
• 82 would be non-white; 18 white
• 67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian
• 80 would live in substandard housing
• 67 would be unable to read
• 50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
• 33 would be without access to a safe water supply
• 39 would lack access to improved sanitation
• 24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)
• 7 people would have access to the Internet
• 1 would have a college education
• 1 would have HIV
• 2 would be near birth; 1 near death would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens

Source: http://www.familycare.org/

The BBC is reporting that Wolfram Alpha could be “as important as Google” when launched later this month.  Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram. “The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.”

•  ”Whoever guards his mouth, and tongue keeps his soul from troubles.”  (Proverbs Chapter 21 Verse 23)  
• This bit of verse by an unknown writer says it well:  “The boneless tongue, so small and weak, can crush and kill,” declared the Greek.  
• The Persian proverb wisely saith, “A lengthy tongue, an early death.”  
• Sometimes it takes this form instead:  “Don’t let your tongue cut off your head.”  
• While Arab sages this impart:  “The tongue’s great storehouse is the heart.”  
• From Hebrew wit, the Maxim’s sprung:  Though feet should slip, don’t let the tongue.”  
• A verse from Scripture crowns the whole:  “Who keeps the tongue doth keep his/her soul.”  

The other is Good.

I don’t know why I didn’t already know this but I wanted to share with the world how to synchronize your iPhone with Google Calendar and Google Contacts via MS Exchange.  If all of this is Greek to you, it basically means you can synch your Google services wirelessly via your cell service so updates you make via phone or web site are synchronized wherever you are in the world without having to connect your phone to your computer.  In testing it out I found it updated my data within a few seconds.  Google has written some easy to follow instructions so check it out!

This is a story about a dog who was born on Christmas Eve, 2002.  He was born with 3 legs – 2 healthy hind legs and 1 abnormal front leg which needed to be amputated.  He of course could not walk when he was born.  Even his mother did not want him.  He was rejected and scorned.

His first owner also did not think that he could survive.  Therefore , he was thinking of putting him to sleep.  At this time , his present owner Jude Stringfellow came into his life and wanted to take care of him.   She was determined to teach and train this dog to walk by  him self.  She thought , all we need is a little faith.  Therefore she named him ‘Faith.’

In the beginning , she put Faith on a surf board to let him feel the movements of the water.  Later she used peanut butter on a spoon as a lure and to reward  him for standing up and jumping around.  Even the other dogs at home helped to encourage him to walk.  Amazingly , after only 6 months , like a  miracle , Faith learned to balance on his 2 hind legs and jumped to move  forward.  After further training in the snow , he can now walk like a  human being.

Faith loves to walk around now.   No matter where he goes , he just  attracts all the people around him.  He is now becoming famous on the  international scene.  He has appeared in various newspapers and TV  shows.  There is even one book entitled ‘With a little faith’  being published about him.   He was even considered to appear in one of  Harry Potter movies.

His present owner Jude Stringfellow has given up her teaching job and plans to take him around the world to preach, ‘that even without a perfect body,  one can have a perfect soul.’

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In life there are always undesirable things.  Perhaps a person who feels things are not going as well as they could will feel better if they change their point of view and see things from  another perspective.  Perhaps this message will bring fresh new ways of thinking to everyone.   Perhaps everyone can appreciate and be thankful for each beautiful day that follows.  Life is the continual demonstration of the power of thinking positive and having faith.  Believe in yourself.  Never lose faith.

1. We will do our best not to go to sleep while we are still angry with each other.  We will work hard to achieve peace before shutting our eyes.
2. We will not add a burden to our relationship by living beyond our means.  It only creates chronic discomfort and triggers an argument.
3. We will try hard to respect each other’s different way of being in the world.  We will allow that there is not just one way of doing something.
4. We will each take responsibility for our own contributions to the problem we have, rather than point a finger at our partner.
5. We will remember to celebrate our strengths as a couple.  These are easy to forget when we are locked in conflict.
6. We will agree that violence can never be a part of our relationship.
7. We will accept each other as wonderful, flawed human beings with limits.
8. We will expand our support system so that our relationship does not carry the entire burden when we are under stress.
9. We will each take the risk of reaching beyond old, familiar ways of relating and discover a new mutually-rewarding way of experiencing the love that brought us together.
10. We will become skilled in the art of forgiving each other.
11. We will listen respectfully to each other.  We need not agree, but we do need to be heard – and to hear.
12. We will commit ourselves to maintaining a healthy partnership knowing that it takes work to create a rewarding life together.

Time to Reboot America

“I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

Merry Christmas!”