Farewell to North America Tour

Well, we have started our trip to Australia, taking the scenic route. We have successfully completed our visit to Saskatoon, and are now in Regina. Family visits are taking up most of our time. It is nice to see everyone again, as it has been a while since we came around this neck of woods.

We will be spending about couple of weeks in California. Cruising down California coast should be a blast. We are really looking forward to it!

The Source - book review

I just finished reading a well-written and even better researched book on keeping yourself healthy and using your body to heal itself. 'The Source' by Dr. Woodson Merrell talks about different ways that you can utilize your body's ability to heal itself, and offers innumerable ways to improve your health, reduce stress and increase your energy levels.

Dr. Merrell is a practising medical doctor, but he has been open to and has done a lot of research in other types of healing. Early in his practice, he noticed that pills and surgeries could only fix so much. He noticed that a lot of ailments were stress induced and by-products of a poor lifestyle. After spending decades on researching and using Eastern medicine, Native American ways, and other alternative ways of healing and improving your energy, Dr. Merrell puts his findings in this book and makes it easy for all of us to implement what he has learned over the years.

I have read a lot of books on healthy eating, healthy lifestyle, alternative medicine, increasing your energy and so on, but no book so far has affected me as much as 'The Source.' I am definitely going to start implementing many ideas from this book, and I am glad to notice that Carla and I are already doing a lot of what he recommends. In order for you to benefit from my research, I will share the main points of this book with you.

Six ways to reclaim your vitality:

Power Mind

-reduce stress by taking breath breaks, meditation, guided imagery

-improve mental state with acupuncture, yoga, tai chi

-use herbs and nutritional supplements to enhance the body's ability to deal with stress

Power Food

-eat food that will increase your energy and promote health (vegetables, fruits, healthy oils, herbs

-reduce intake of foods that pollute your body (refined carbohydrates, processed foods, saturated fats, red meat, trans fats, wheat, cow's milk, coffee, alcohol, cigarettes)

Power Detox

-switch to organic foods for the fruits and vegetables with thin skin (peaches, apples, lettuce, etc.)

-drink filtered water instead of the city water (install a filtration system at home)

-avoid plastics, carpets and other compounds that evaporate and become toxic in your environment

-certain cosmetics contain a lot of harmful chemicals (European cosmetics are healthier as EU has banned known toxic compounds from cosmetics)

-boost your immune system by eating foods with a lot of antioxidants (blueberries, colorful vegetables and fruit, nuts/seeds, fiber, yogurt, green tea)

Power Exercise

-exercising at least 90 minutes a week where your heart rate is at 70% of max

-exercise will reduce stress, help have better sleeps, improve balance and stability, and improve longevity

-always warm up before doing exercise

Power Rest

-your body repairs itself while you sleep, so it is really important that you have a good, restful sleep every night

-go to bed before 10pm, as your body gets important regenerative sleep between 11pm and 1am

-body requires about 8 hours of sleep to regenerate and repair fully

-power naps help but should not be longer than 15-20 minutes

-sleeping pills should not be relied on long term for a good night's rest

-get a good bed and pillow to increase the quality of your bed (quality of a bed is proportional to the price of a bed)

Power of Connection

-being a part of community increases person's health and lowers their stress levels

-there are documented scientific experiments where praying for sick people has had incredibly positive effects (for the sick person, that is)

-being a practicing member of a religion improved person's health

-being in a loving relationship, having friends, enjoying nature, art and music, had positive effects on person's health

New hard drive - 500 GB of goodness

Few days ago, I picked up a new hard drive for my laptop. It is a Seagate 500 GB 7200.4 with G-force protection, meaning that if I drop my laptop, the hard drive head should detect the fall and prevent damage to my data. I don't intend to test this functionality but it is a nice form of protection to have. It only cost me $5 more to get a hard drive with G-force protection, and I believe that the price difference is worth it.

I was concerned that I would have to reinstall Windows and all my applications when I made the switch to the new hard drive. After reading up on the subject of upgrading hard drives, I learned that I can copy data from the old hard drive to the new one, and simply switch out the drive, without any need for software reinstall.

I first tried using seeral freeware programs to copy my old drive to the new one - DriveImageXL and similar programs were supposed to perform the task easily. Unfortunately, my Windows 7 installation had created a tiny 100 MB partition at the beginning of the hard drive, so the freeware programs could not copy the hard drive accurately (or maybe they would but I could not try them all). One online article recommended a trial version of Acronis True Image for hard drive copying. The trial version gives you 15 days to use the software for free. All I needed was one day. :-) Acronis did an amazing job of copying data and partitions from one drive to the other. I highly recommend it!

When I bought my new hard drive, I also bough an external USB enclosure for a 2.5" drive. I put my new drive in the USB enclosure, plugged it into my laptop, ran Acronis, and less than an hour later my hard drive was copied. Then, I replaced the hard drive in my laptop with the new one, booted up the computer and everything was just the way it was before. Easy!

In the past, I had always avoided upgrading hard drives, but now that I know how easy it is, I would highly recommend it.

Live on the wild side - try Linux

I've had an opportunity to play around with few different versions of Linux over the last couple of weeks and thought that others may benefit from my experience.

A safe and easy way to try Linux is to download an ISO image of the Linux variant that you would like to try, then burn it on a CD/DVD and boot your computer with this new CD. As you are booting off your hard drive, you would not affect the Windows version that you have on your hard drive, and if you know what you are doing, you might actually be able to access your Windows data at the same time.

The method I just described is referred to as running Linux off of LiveCD. If you want to avoid the whole messy part of burning and using CDs, you can try a LiveUSB version of Linux.

To create a LiveUSB boot disk (on your 1GB or higher USB stick) I recommend you download UNetbootin utility from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ and follow the instructions. I prefer LiveUSB over a LiveCD version of Linux as CDs get scratched, are clunky and slower than USB sticks.

Once you decide to try Linux, you have to decide which flavour (also called a distribution) of Linux is right for you. For beginners, I would advise PCLINUXOS or Linux Mint. There may be others that would work but this is all that I have tried so far. Ubuntu is supposed to be easy to use, but I have no experience with it.

Let me know what your experience is with Linux and if you find another distribution of Linux that you like.

VISA!

We just heard today that Carla's student visa for Australia has been granted! We can now travel to Australia and live there for three years. Carla can work part time while she is going to school (law school) and I have the right to work full-time!

This is great!!!! Now we have a few weeks to pack, sort out our things in Ottawa and get on our way through the Prairies and then down through California, before we leave for Sydney. Ohhhh, we are so HAPPY!!!!

Book reviews - Snowball and Outliers

Just yesterday, I finished reading/listening to two great books: Snowball and Outliers, and thought that you would appreciate reading a quick summary.

Snowball is a biography of Warren Buffet, covering his life in quite a lot of detail. The writer does a great job of keeping the story interesting and enlightening. My only complaint is that it does not cover enough of his successful investment decisions. I highly recommended for anyone who is interested in investing and making a difference in the world.

Outliers is a third book by Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point and Blink). In this book, he focuses on factors which enabled successful people to become successful. His claim in this book is that successful people are given help and opportunity in the course of their life, thus helping them to achieve such great success. Gladwell covers some other cultural and quirky factors which tilt the odds in favour of some people, while negatively affecting others. This is good book and an interesting read that will make you think. What else can you ask for from a book!

Laptop lobotomy and a Windows 7 install

My computer got a complete hardware refresh today. As my 3-year warranty was going to run out in a few months, I called Dell last week. My LCD was really dim so I was hoping that they would replace it.

It took two hours on the phone with Dell technical support, but I hit the jackpot. They decided that my LCD needed replacing, along with my motherboard and hard drive. The motherboard is pretty much the same as the old one except that the new video card does not have an overheating problem (but still the same type of video card as on the old MB). I also persuaded them to change my hard drive, hoping that they would replace my 100GB drive with something larger. All that took place on Friday, and today a Dell support guy dropped by to replace the parts (he was ready to come by yesterday, but I was not).

The tech changed the LCD first and I could see a significant difference in brightness. The new LCD is amazing. I don't have to strain my eyes anymore. The problem with LCD screens is that the backlight loses brightness over the years. Having a 3-year warranty sure came in handy.

Then, the motherboard was replaced (successfully). Laptops sure have a lot of screws! The poor tech (who was about 60 years old) took a while to unscrew and screw back in about 25 tiny screws. He did a great job! Then, he replaced my 100GB drive with a 120GB drive. That is definitely not enough space for me. I ordered a 500GB laptop drive from a local computer store and will pick it up on Friday.

Until then, I first decided to run a LiveCD with a Linux OS (PClinuxOS). That actually worked out great, but then I found out that you can download Windows 7 for free (though it practically stop working on March 1, 2010). Took a while to download the whole 2.6GB but once it was done, I loaded it on the new hard drive. Then, I had to hunt for the right video drivers (Dell is not very helpful in this respect).

Finally, at the end of the day, I have a working laptop, with a bright screen, a new motherboard and hard drive, Windows 7 running and drivers making everything look pretty. I will let you know what I think of Windows 7 after I have been using it for a few days.