The Joy of Stress by Dr. Peter Hanson

I think this is the 2nd book finished this year, yay! Picked up the book long time ago from UNSW’s book fair for $2 or so. And never really had the interest to read it until now.

It was a good read, understood a bit about stress and what to do to manage it better.

Couple of quick points:

  • Stress is caused because you are losing control.
  • (Try) ignoring things that are outside of your control and focus with what you can do with things that you can control.
  • Both too much and too little stress is detrimental to your health.
  • Eating right helps with stress management (a big chunk of the book is dedicated on the food and nutrition.. ).
  • The secret to long life is a balance in the 4 quadrants: financial, personal, health and job.

Rescheduling

I have started working at Milsons Point now with a longer working hours (9.00 – 18.00). This creates a problem for me in terms of my commitment to regular exercise.

Before I was able to go to the gym early in the morning at about 8.00 and got to the office at 9.30. I was able to do this because I was driving so it takes shorter time to get to work, also the working hours was quite flexible (and shorter too).

There’s no question about the necessity of regular exercise, so I just have to think up some ways to get gym as a part of my routine once again. I can think up of few solutions:

  • Go to gym earlier, at about 6.00.
  • Go to gym after work.
  • Go to gym on weekend only.
  • Go to gym closer that’s closer to work.

So far I think the best approach (for me and family) is to go to the gym earlier, it’s certainly harder to wake up that early, but I managed to do that twice in the last week or so. Let’s see whether this will continue to work.

PS: note to self, if I can be motivated enough to wake up that early to go to the gym, why I cannot have the same motivation to wake up and have quiet time. After all physical exercise is of some value but godliness is useful for everything.. hm.

Windows Live Writer

I have been using Live Writer (http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/) for few days now.

I think I quite like the tool for few things:

  • I maintain few blogs, it’s nice to have one interface that I can use to post to different blogs.
  • It’s also nice to have a centralized place to put my draft posts. I tend to have quite a few draft posts as I usually have a lot of ideas that I want to explore in depth later on and finally turn them into blog posts.
  • This happens to me few times and I know it happens to at least someone else who has since stopped blogging (you know who you are :)). Once in a while you’ll find yourselves in the situation of writing a long entry and when you hit enter, nothing happens and your post is gone, you hit the back button and you just find an empty form. ARGH! Of course, you can always write your post first on Notepad and then cut and paste it, but that’s just a bit tedious. Live Writer will solve this problem since (I assume) Live Writer saves your writing in your hard disk and when you are ready to publish, you just hit send button, it will send it to your blog.

It’s nice that M$ puts up a decent and free application. Anyway this is my first post on focuser.net via Live Writer.

Holiday

I am really glad to be able to take a week + 1 day off during this Holiday season. I have been having a great time with both Lina and Jet.

  • Sunday and Monday, I managed to do some household cleaning up. I seriously own too much stuffs (and junks). On Monday night, we went to Christmas’ Service on St. Andrews Cathedral with Chenny. After that we went to have dinner at a Japanese restaurant near QVB, dinner was great, very good value for money.
  • Tuesday, we went to Johnson’s place to have a Christmas lunch, had a fantastic time there.
    Wednesday, Lina and Chenny went to the city to watch Golden Compass. Me and Jet were spending time together at home, he was a little bit cranky so I can’t say we had the greatest time together but a good bonding time nonetheless.
  • Thursday, we went to Bondi Westfield and then having dinner at a Thai restaurant at Waterloo which was really good.
  • Friday, we went to my fforesite’s office, introduced both Lina and Jet to my boss and colleagues. We then went to Eastgarden, I managed to buy a new vacuum cleaner (a great cleaner needs a great tool :)), I also joined NRMA for comprehensive car insurance (cheaper than HBA my current provider and they have offices in Sydney unlike HBA which is based in Melbourne).
  • Tomorrow, we are planning to go to Koorong bookstore, hoping to find some good bargains.

Having been to different shopping malls in the last couple days, I am quite proud to myself of being able to withstand the temptation to shop (well.. we haven’t been to Koorong). I guess we already have everything that we need and that alone is a reason to thank God, we are indeed a privileged people.

What I will be doing

I think it’s the time of the year again when I need a fresh look for this website. What looked good few months ago, now looks awfully disgusting.. Ain’t it funny..

What I am hoping to achieve in few weeks time:
1. Upgrade the blog(s) to Lyceum 1.0.1 in a week or so.
2. I will probably convert all of the stand alone contents to be WordPress/Lyceum pages. I haven’t done so, because I was experimenting tracking visitors on my site (yes your visits are recorded, sorry.. should have put some privacy policy somewhere).
3. Make a privacy policy page.
4. Choose a good web template, I don’t mind paying a bit if it is really good. Put the tracking code to template.. Ok, maybe the word “Tracking” is really bad how about statistics keeping?
5. Re-structure the site.