Many, if not most, aspects of my life are digitized. My photos are online in albums in Picasa. My favorite recipes are entered into recipe software. I use Google Calendar for my appointments and Remember the Milk for my to-do list. Even my knitting projects, yarn stash and needles are cataloged online in Ravelry, a knitting and crochet community site.

So, let’s face it – I’m a computer geek. I strongly believe, that for me at least, it’s the best way to stay organized and share things. Given that, you would think that I would be jumping for joy at the news that President-elect Obama is going to push for digitization of all medical records.

Not exactly. I’m of two minds about it.

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So you’ve discovered Fairy Godmother Tycoon, and you’re having a great time, except that you’re stuck somewhere (I got stuck in Pirate’s Cove for hours). I’ve now played through the game twice, and thought I’d write down some tips to help you get through the game with maximum enjoyment and minimum frustration.

• Use the Recipe Book for supply calculations. It will help you to cut down on waste. In the beginning it’s pretty easy to calculate what you need for yourself, but things get complicated later.
• In the beginning, spend as much on the advertising as you can. If the peasants don’t know about you, you go out of business fast. Blow it all the way up to Non-Stop Infomercials. As your percentage of customers goes up, you can gradually bring the advertising expenditure down.
• Don’t rely on using goons in large cities. I found that advertising was more effective.
• On days when the price of a supply is in red, only buy as many as you absolutely need. When the price is in green buy as many as you can afford and have warehouse space for. Remember that even on days that the text is black, the price might be good. They fluctuate constantly.
• Pricing of your potions is crucial. Don’t price them too low in the beginning or you’ll run out of money.
• Upgrade your potion maker as soon as possible in each village. It should be your first upgrade.
• Buy the Corporate Mole upgrade as soon as possible (after Tutorialville) so that you can find out what your competitors are charging. It can be eye-opening. Here you were charging no more than $45 for a Head-Shrinker potion, for instance, and they’ve been routinely charging $55. Just remember that the previous day’s prices will affect their average price.
• Keep an eye on the news for any reports that the peasants have more or less money to spend. It really does affect their price resistance.
• On slow days, decrease your Marketing costs and increase your Research costs.
• Remember that satisfied customers are free advertising.
• Try to have at least a five day jump on competitors when it comes to research. Having a potion before them can give a huge boost to your business, and make theirs drop like a stone.

People who want to learn things might do better by simply stopping to smell the roses, researchers reported on Thursday.

German researchers found they could use odors to re-activate new memories in the brains of people while they slept — and the volunteers remembered better later.

Writing in the journal Science, they said their study showed that memories are indeed consolidated during sleep, and show that smells and perhaps other stimuli can reinforce brain learning pathways.

Jan Born of the University of Lubeck in Germany and colleagues had 74 volunteers learn to play games similar to the game of “Concentration” in which they must find matched pairs of objects or cards by turning only one over at a time.

While doing this task, some of the volunteers inhaled the scent of roses. The volunteers then agreed to sleep inside an MRI tube. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to “watch” their brains while they slept.

At various stages during sleep, Born’s team wafted in the same scent of roses.

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As I’ve mentioned before, I am a big fan of psychotherapy. Although medication has had a greater role in my successful depression treatment, psychotherapy helped me to recognize my inner demons and banish or deal with them, thereby leading to my becoming a much happier person overall, which I would assume is helpful in fighting depression.

Treatment with psychotherapy is a tad more complicated than treatment with medication, however. With antidepressant therapy, once you’ve found the right medication (admittedly, sometimes a lengthy process) you basically take your medicine and deal with side effects. Psychotherapy demands more in terms of the right conditions and a commitment from the individual. It’s fairly common for roadblocks to come up that hinder the process. I’ve experienced two of these roadblocks in the course of my therapy, so I thought I’d pass on what I’ve learned about getting past them.

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Your office desk harbors far more bacteria than your workplace restroom, and if you’re a woman, chances are your workspace has more germs than your male co-workers’, a new research report shows.

Women have three to four times the number of bacteria in, on and around their desks, phones, computers, keyboards, drawers and personal items as men do, the study by University of Arizona professor Charles Gerba showed. Gerba, a professor of soil, water and environmental sciences, tested more than 100 offices on the UA campus and in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon and Washington, D.C. The $40,000 study was commissioned by the Clorox Co.

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Aaaagh! Where’s my Lysol!?

George is once again my hero. First of all, for Christmas he got me a Roomba and a Palm GPS system. I hate to vacuum and I’m always getting lost, so I was ecstatic to get both presents.

Unfortunately the Roomba died due to a battery issue, but they’re sending us a new one. It did work really well until then, though. Just put it down, block off any potential danger spots, like cords, and watch it go!

The GPS Navigation worked perfectly right out of the box. We used it to get to my sister’s house in San Francisco on Christmas Day. I love it. It actually talks and redraws route really quickly when you change course.

We wanted to get a Nintendo Wii for Christmas, but they were all sold out. So we waited until this weekend, when I heard that there were more coming in, but a very limited amount to each store. So yesterday morning George went down to our local GameStop at 7:30am and waited till 11:00. He was second in line. So we got one!

We had fun yesterday playing tennis, baseball, Need for Speed Carbon, Happy Feet, etc.

What a guy, huh?

New York Times:

Faced with a growing uproar, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman the News Corporation, announced this afternoon that his company had canceled publication of the pseudo-memoir/confessional by O.J. Simpson, “If I Did It,” as well as a related television special that was to be broadcast on the Fox network next week.

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Well really, what possessed them to think that this was a good idea in the first case? The man is a sociopath.