You'll want to have it on full volume when they turn into Brazil.
November 11, 2009
November 10, 2009
5 Best Antivirus Applications
Written by Jason Fitzpatrick
Computer viruses are increasingly sophisticated and pervasive. If you can’t afford to run your computer without some sort of antivirus software installed, check out these five popular options to protect your PC. Photo by Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M University Archives. Note: For each entry, we reviewed the lowest cost option available from the company in question. Most companies offer premium packages of varying cost and with varying additional bells and whistles, save for the always-free Microsoft Security Essentials. For the purpose of this comparison, we stuck to the free/entry level options. Avast! (Windows/Linux, Basic: Free, Premium $39.95 per year)
Having just celebrated its 21st birthday, Avast! is an old player in the antivirus market. Avast! has built up a solid following based on their philosophy of offering dependable and effective antivirus protection for free to home users. In addition to standard antivirus scanning, Avast! offers a variety of resident protection modules that cover different aspects of your computer like instant messaging, email, P2P applications, and more. Microsoft Security Essentials (Windows, Free)
Microsoft Security Essentials is the newest addition to Microsoft’s computer protection software. It replaces the Windows Live OneCare subscription service and Windows Defender by providing more comprehensive coverage than either of the two originally provided. Microsoft Security Essentials is free for all Windows users and provides protection against a variety of threats including viruses, malware, adware, and spyware. Avira (Windows, Basic: Free, Premium: $30 per year)
Avira is another antivirus app available for free, although the free version of Avira doesn’t offer as many bells and whistles as some of the other free offerings in today’s Hive. Nonetheless, you still get dependable antivirus scanning and protection from malware and rootkits. In addition to the free antivirus software, Avira also offers a Linux Live CD recovery disc loaded with Avira and other free system recovery tools to help you get back on your feet if fighting the virus infection from within Windows just isn’t cutting it. ESET NOD32 Antivirus (Windows, $39.99 per year)
NOD32 has built a large based of users over the years by having a low number of false positives and a high rate of early detection thanks to their community-sourced ThreatSense detection system. As a fun bit of trivia, American users may know the application as “NOD” and pronounce the acronym as an actual word, but the name is actually an acronym that hails from the Eastern European origins of the application. From the Wikipedia entry on NOD32:
AVG (Windows, Basic: Free, Premium: $54.99 per year)
The free offering from AVG is one of the lightest, feature-wise, among the nominations in this Hive Five. That said, if you’re looking for a basic antivirus application that will scan your computer, keep an eye out for spyware, and keep you from visiting malware and virus laden websites (via their LinkScanner protection), AVG is a solid free offering. |
November 9, 2009
How to Write a Great Novel (well, several ways)
[In terms of applying this personally, this is completely useless: everyone has his/her own approach. Nevertheless, this is terrific - there is no one way to write except, well, to write.]
From writing in the bathroom (Junot Díaz) to dressing in character (Nicholson Baker), 11 top authors share their methods for getting the story on the page
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
(See Corrections & Amplifications item below)
Richard Powers lounges in bed all day and speaks his novels aloud to a laptop computer with voice-recognition software. Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," shuts himself in the bathroom and perches on the edge of the tub with his notebook when he's tackling a knotty passage. Hilary Mantel, whose Tudor drama "Wolf Hall" claimed this year's Man Booker Prize, jumps in the shower when she gets stuck. "The number of pages I've got that are water marked, I can't tell you," Ms. Mantel said.
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Robert Rodriguez An unusually robust crop of books from some of the biggest names in literature has landed this fall. Kazuo Ishiguro, Orhan Pamuk, Mr. Powers and Nicholson Baker have new books out this fall, along with a host of other prominent authors.
Behind the scenes, many of these writers say they struggle with the daily work of writing, clocking thousands of solitary hours staring at blank pages and computer screens. Most agree on common hurdles: procrastination, writer's block, the terror of failure that looms over a new project and the attention-sucking power of the Internet.
A few authors bristle when asked the inevitable question about how they write. Richard Ford declined to reveal his habits, explaining in an email that "those are the kind of questions I hope no one asks me after readings and lectures." Others revel in spilling minute details, down to their preferred brand of pen (Amitav Ghosh swears by black ink Pelikan pens) or font size (Anne Rice uses 14-point Courier; National Book Award nominee Colum McCann sometimes uses eight-point Times New Roman, forcing himself to squint at the tiny type). Some now offer fans a window into the process, reporting on their progress on blogs and Twitter feeds. On his author Web site, John Irving describes how he begins his novels by writing the last sentence first.
Here is how a range of leading authors describe their approach to writing—a process that can be lonely, tedious, frustrating and exhilarating.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Corbis
Most days, Nicholson Baker rises at 4 a.m. to write at his home in South Berwick, Maine. Leaving the lights off, he sets his laptop screen to black and the text to gray, so that the darkness is uninterrupted. After a couple of hours of writing in what he calls a dreamlike state, he goes back to bed, then rises at 8:30 to edit his work.
He wrote his first novel, "The Mezzanine," by dictating to a voice recorder during his commute to work. For his recent novel "The Anthologist," a first-person narrative by a frustrated poet who's struggling to write the introduction to a new anthology, he grew out a beard to resemble his character, put on a floppy brown hat, set up a video camera on a tripod and videotaped himself giving poetry lectures. He transcribed about 40 hours worth of tape, and ended up with some 1,000 pages of notes and transcription. Creating the voice of a rambling professor "was something I had to work on a lot in order to get the feeling of being sloppy," said Mr. Baker.
Even then, Mr. Baker decided the first draft was too orderly. So he divided the novel into numbered sections, then went to a random-number generating Web site and arranged the chunks according to the random order it gave him. It was a total mess. He had to return to the original order, although a few random bits worked. "I had to claw myself back to the old way," he said.
ORHAN PAMUK
Writer Pictures
Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk often rewrites the first line of his novels 50 or 100 times. "The hardest thing is always the first sentence—that is painful," says Mr. Pamuk, whose book, "The Museum of Innocence," a love story set in 1970s Istanbul, came out last month.
Mr. Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with dialogue-like balloons. He sends his notebooks to a speed typist who returns them as typed manuscripts; then he marks the pages up and sends them back to be retyped. The cycle continues three or four times.
Mr. Pamuk says he writes anywhere inspiration strikes—on airplanes, in hotel rooms, on a park bench. He's not given to bursts of spontaneity, though, when it comes to plot and story structure. "I plan everything," Mr. Pamuk says.
HILARY MANTEL
Corbis Outline
British novelist Hilary Mantel likes to write first thing in the morning, before she has uttered a word or had a sip of coffee. She usually jots down ideas and notes about her dreams. "I get very jangled if I can't do it," she says.
She's an obsessive note taker and always carries a notebook. Odd phrases, bits of dialogue and descriptions that come to her get tacked to a 7-foot-tall bulletin board in her kitchen; they remain there until Ms. Mantel finds a place for them in her narrative.
Ms. Mantel spent five years researching and writing the book, "Wolf Hall," her Booker Prize-winning Tudor drama set in the court of Henry VIII, out in the U.S. this month. The trickiest part was trying to match her version to the historical record. To avoid contradicting history, she created a card catalogue, organized alphabetically by character. Each card contained notes showing where a particular historical figure—such as protagonist Thomas Cromwell, Henry's adviser—was on relevant dates.
"You really need to know, where is the Duke of Suffolk at the moment? You can't have him in London if he's supposed to be somewhere else," she says.
One day, she was in a panic over how she would fit everything she needed to into the novel. She took a shower—her usual head-clearing ritual. "I burst out of the shower crying 'It's two books!'" says Ms. Mantel, who is writing a sequel that will end with Cromwell's beheading in 1540.
KAZUO ISHIGURO
From the time he was a teenager until his mid-20s, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro tried, unsuccessfully, to make it as a songwriter. His early career helped him to develop his style of spare, first-person narration where the narrator seems to know more than he or she lets on at first.
Reuters
Mr. Ishiguro, author of six novels, including the Booker-prize winning "Remains of the Day,"typically spends two years researching a novel and a year writing it. Since his novels are written in the first person, the voice is crucial, so he "auditions" narrators by writing a few chapters from different characters' points of view. Before he begins a draft, he compiles folders of notes and flow charts that lay out not just the plot but also more subtle aspects of the narrative, such as a character's emotions or memories.
Obsessive preparation "gives me the opportunity to have my narrators suppress meaning and evade meaning when they say one thing and mean something else," says Mr. Ishiguro.
He collects his notes in binders and writes a first draft by hand. He edits with a pencil, then types the revised version into a computer, where he further refines it, sometimes deleting chunks as large as 100 pages.
In spite of all the groundwork, some novels fail to come together, including one that took place in medieval Britain. "I showed my wife a segment that I had honed down and she said, "This is awful. You have to figure out how they speak to each other. They're speaking in a moron language," he says.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Writers Pictures
Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje's preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with four layers underneath.
Words come easily for the author—the bulk of the work is arranging and rewriting sentences. "I don't understand this whole concept of writer's block," says Mr. Ondaatje, who says he is working on a novel at the moment but declines to elaborate. "If I get stuck, I work on another scene."
Mr. Ondaatje, who started out as a poet, says plots often come to him as "a glimpse of a small situation." His 1992 novel "The English Patient" started out as two images: one of a patient lying in bed talking to a nurse, and another of a thief stealing a photograph of himself.
Sometimes he goes through an "anarchic" stage, cutting out characters or rearranging scenes. "Some writers know what the last sentence is going to be before they begin—I don't even know what the second sentence is going to be," says Mr. Ondaatje, whose most recent novel, "Divisadero," came out in 2007.
RICHARD POWERS
Writer Pictures
Richard Powers, whose books are often concept-driven, intricately plotted and stuffed with arcane science, wrote his last three novels while lying in bed, speaking to a lap-top computer with voice-recognition software.
To write "Generosity," his recent novel about the search for a happiness gene, he worked like this for eight or nine hours a day. He uses a stylus pen to edit on a touch screen, rewriting sentences and highlighting words.
"It's recovering storytelling by voice and recovering the use of the hand and all that tactile immediacy," Mr. Powers says of the process. "I like to use different parts of my brain."
DAN CHAON
Philip Chaon
Dan Chaon writes a first draft on color-coded note cards he buys at Office Max. Ideas for his books come to him as images and phrases rather than plots, characters or settings, he says. He begins by jotting down imagery, with no back story in mind. He keeps turning the images over in his mind until characters and themes emerge.
His most recent novel, "Await Your Reply," which has three interlocking narratives about identity theft, started out as scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy's severed hand, resting on ice. He described each scene on a card, then began fleshing out the plotlines, alternating among blue, pink and green cards when he moved between narratives.
During the early stages of writing, he carries a pocketful of cards with him wherever he goes; as they accumulate, he stores them in a card catalogue that he bought at a library sale. It often takes two years before something resembling a novel takes shape. He eventually transcribes the cards onto the computer and writes furiously from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.
"I used to think my average as a short story writer was one completed story out of every 20," says Mr. Chaon, who adds that his average has improved as he's gained experience . "I have at least two novels that I think are dead—maybe three if the thing I'm working on right now sputters to a stop."
KATE CHRISTENSEN
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Corbis Kate Christensen was two years and 150 pages into her first novel, "In the Drink," about a boozy ghostwriter, before she discovered what the book was really about—so she dismantled the draft, threw out a bunch of pages and started over. The process repeated itself with her second, third and fourth novels, she says. With her 2009 novel "Trouble," a story about two women who go on a Thelma and Louise-like adventure to Mexico, the opening finally stuck. Ms. Christensen, who works out of her home in Tribeca, says a lot of her writing time is spent "not writing." Most mornings, she does housework, writes emails and talks on the phone to avoid facing her work. In the past, she's played 30 games of solitaire before typing a first sentence.
Last month, she started a new novel, titled "The Astral," about a 57-year-old poet in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who has been kicked out by his wife and is trying to get his son out of a mind control cult. "At the beginning, which is where I am now, there is always a certain amount of trepidation because the thing doesn't have a life of its own yet," says Ms. Christensen, who won the PEN/Faulkner Award last year.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Corbis
"Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you'll get a plot," Margaret Atwood says when asked where her ideas come from. When questioned about whether she's ever used that approach, she adds, "No, I don't have to."
Ms. Atwood, who has written 13 novels, as well as poetry, short stories and nonfiction works, rarely gets writer's block. When ideas hit her, she scribbles phrases and notes on napkins, restaurant menus, in the margins of newspapers. She starts with a rough notion of how the story will develop, "which usually turns out to be wrong," she says. She moves back and forth between writing longhand and on the computer. When a narrative arc starts to take shape, she prints out chapters and arranges them in piles on the floor, and plays with the order by moving piles around.
Twice, she's abandoned books after a couple hundred pages, one in the late 1960s and another in the early 1980s. She was able to salvage a single sentence from one book, and carved two short stories out of the other, including one titled "The Whirlpool Rapids."
During a career that has spanned more than 40 years, Ms. Atwood has gone from cutting and pasting passages with scissors and tape to the communication of the electronic age. Lately, she's been blogging and using Twitter while on tour promoting her recent novel, "The Year of the Flood."
EDWIDGE DANTICAT
South Florida Sun-Sentinel/MCT/Newscom
Before she begins a novel, Edwidge Danticat creates a collage on a bulletin board in her office, tacking up photos she's taken on trips to her native Haiti and images she clips from magazines ranging from Essence to National Geographic. Ms. Danticat, who works out of her home in Miami, says she adapted the technique from story boarding, which filmmakers use to map out scenes. "I like the tactile process. There's something old-fashioned about it, but what we do is kind of old-fashioned," she says.
Sometimes, the collage grows large enough to fill four bulletin boards. As the plot becomes clearer, she culls pictures and shrinks the visual map to a single board.
Right now, Ms. Danticat has two boards full of images depicting a seaside town in Haiti, the setting for a new novel that takes place in a village based on the one where her mother grew up.
She writes first drafts in flimsy blue exam notebooks that she orders from an online office supply store. She often uses 100 exam books for a draft. "The company I order from must think I'm a high school," she said. She types the draft on the computer and begins revising and cutting.
Finally, she makes a tape recording of herself reading the entire novel aloud—a trick she learned from Walter Mosley—and revises passages that cause her to stumble.
JUNOT DÍAZ
"I think 90% of my ideas evaporate because I have a terrible memory and because I seem to be committed to not scribble anything down," says Junot Díaz. "As soon as I write it down, my mind rejects it."
Juggling everything in his head has drawbacks, one of which is writing very slowly, he says. He threw out two earlier versions of his novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"—the equivalent of about 600 pages—before the final version began to take shape. He also researches obsessively. When writing "Oscar Wao," he read J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy half a dozen times to get inside the head of his protagonist, an overweight Dominican teenager who's obsessed with fantasy and science fiction.
He often listens to orchestral movie soundtracks as he writes, because he's easily distracted by lyrics. When he needs to seal himself off from the world, he retreats into the bathroom and sits on the edge of the tub. "It drove my ex crazy," he says. "She would always know I was going to write because I would grab a notebook and run into the bathroom."
AMITAV GOSH
Amitav Ghosh's first novel ended in failure. He was in his mid 20s, doing research on agricultural development at a think tank in Kerala, India. He worked on the first draft for a year. "It was terrible and I had to throw it all away," he says. He's since written six novels, including "Sea of Poppies" and "The Glass Palace," but the process is always fraught.
"It never gets easier; it's always hard, it's always a test," says Mr. Ghosh, who splits his time between Goa, India, and Brooklyn, N.Y. "I've reached a point in my life where if a sentence seems easy, I distrust it."
Mr. Ghosh writes by hand, then types a manuscript onto his laptop. Every morning, he revises what he wrote the day before. Every sentence that appears in his books has been through at least 20 revisions, he says.
Mr. Ghosh, who is now working on the sequel to "Sea of Poppies," which is part of a trilogy, is particular about everything from his pen to the type of paper he writes on. He insists black ink Pelikan pens are the best, and buys white, lined paper from a French manufacturer. "If you work on paper so much, you get obsessive about even the spacing of the lines," he says. "I need them to be fairly widely spaced."
RUSSELL BANKS
Russell Banks, a novelist who lives in upstate New York, writes nonfiction essays and reviews on his computer, but "gets blocked" if he tries to write fiction that way. He scribbles out his first drafts in longhand, working from 8 in the morning until 1:30 in the afternoon in a small writing studio. His studio, a converted sugar shack that was once used for boiling maple syrup, sits in a wooded area about 1,000 yards from his house.
His novels sometimes start out as a single sentence or phrase. As the story unfolds, he types up a rough outline that encompasses the whole plot, and a shorter, more detailed outline that maps out what's going to happen in the next 10 or 20 pages. "It keeps me from falling off a cliff," says Mr. Banks, whose books include "Affliction" and "The Sweet Hereafter," both novels.
He types his manuscripts onto the computer once he has a full draft, and goes through countless revisions.
Currently, Mr. Banks is about halfway through a novel set in Miami.
COLUM MCCANN
When he's in the middle of a novel, Colum McCann sometimes prints out a chapter or two in large font, staples it together like a book, and takes it to Central Park. He finds a quiet bench and pretends he's reading a book by someone else.
Other times, when he's re-reading a bit of dialogue or trying to tweak a character's voice, he'll reduce the computer font to eight-point Times New Roman. "It forces me to peer at the words and examine why they're there," Mr. McCann wrote in an email message.
Changing the way the words look physically gives him more critical distance, he says.
To research his 2009 novel "Let the Great World Spin," which is set in New York in the 1970s and is a finalist for the National Book Award, Mr. McCann went on rounds with homicide and housing cops, read oral histories of prostitutes from the era and watched archival film footage.
The hardest moment often comes at the end of the project, when he's emotionally spent and terrified that he'll never be able to write another novel, he says. At such moments, he reminds himself of Samuel Beckett's advice: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
ANNE RICE
When she was working on her first novel, "Interview With a Vampire," in the early 1970s, Anne Rice revised each typed page before moving on to the next. These days, she writes on a computer rather than a typewriter, and revisions are constant and more fluid. She writes a chapter a day to make sure each section is consistent in its tone and style, and often works for eight or nine hours straight when she's in the middle of a novel. Sometimes, she'll spend a year or two researching a book before she begins a full first draft.
She sets her font to 14 point Courier and double spaces the text on her 30-inch Mac computer monitor so that her field of vision is filled with words. "I find the bigger the monitor, the better the concentration," says Ms. Rice, who is writing the third book in her trilogy about angels. She edits her work continuously, down to tiny copy-editing changes at the end. "Even after you've done all that, somebody out there will find a typo and think you're a slob," she says.
JOHN WRAY
To write "Lowboy," which takes place in the New York City subway, Brooklyn-based novelist John Wray rode trains all over the city while pecking out a first draft on his laptop computer. He mainly rode the F, C and B trains, though "there was a time when I was really into the G," he says. He often sat in a corner near the conductor's booth with his headphones on. He worked like this, often for six hours a day, for nearly a year.
Initially, he wrote on the train not for research purposes, but to cut himself off from distractions like email and phone calls. Then the people and conversations he observed on the subway began to creep into the book, a novel about a paranoid schizophrenic teenager. One of the characters, a heavy-set homeless woman, is based on a woman Mr. Wray used to see at the Stillwell Avenue stop in Brooklyn. Bits of dialogue he overheard appear verbatim in the novel, including a strange conversation about how prospective homeowners should spend the night in a house before buying it in order to check the property for paranormal activity.
Writing on a noisy, crowded train was hard at times, but it was pleasant compared to the conditions under which he wrote his first novel, he says. In 1996, after losing his job in an art gallery, Mr. Wray lived in a tent in a rat-infested basement in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood. He wrote in the tent on an old 1940s typewriter. "I tried to approximate every cliché of the struggling novelist possible," he says.
LAURA LIPPMAN
Mystery writer Laura Lippman, who writes a popular series featuring detective Tess Monaghan, creates elaborate, color-coded plot charts, using index cards, sketchbook pages, colored ribbon and magic markers.
The diagrams vary from book to book, but Ms. Lippman says she can tell a novel is off-track if her chart lacks symmetry.
She first used the technique on her ninth book, "By A Spider's Thread," which had two lines of action. She assigned a color to each point of view and made a chart with alternating blocks of color. For her novel "To The Power of Three," which had seven different points of view, she bought seven different colors of ribbon and assigned a color to each character. Then she created a grid and strung colored ribbon representing each character between chapters where that character appeared, creating an intricate colored lattice.
Ms. Lippman says she becomes "somewhat obsessive" about her charts.
"Every time I show people these things they seem to find them mildly disturbing," she says.
Corrections & Amplifications
Dan Chaon is the author of "Await Your Reply." An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled his last name as Choan.
November 8, 2009
November 7, 2009
November 6, 2009
November 5, 2009
7 Ways to Keep Your Metabolism Burning
Written By mademan
Keep Your Metabolism Burning
Quick kickstarts to keep you going all day
Not all of us are blessed with bodies like David Beckham. Furthermore, many of us can’t find the time to fling ourselves crazily across a soccer field in search of an improved set of muscles (lke David Beckham), but still, don’t we deserve some dietary success? Just because we mysteriously inherited Aunt Linda’s thick thighs and Uncle Danny’s giblet means we’re doomed to wear sweatshirts to the beach, right? No, silly, of course not. It simply means you’ll need to give your metabolism a little TLC, a little time to repair, a lot of inspiration and (surprisingly) a lot of food.
Early Morning Meals
Okay, here’s the first big problem in the American meal plan. In Europe, breakfast consists of a small croissant and/or fruit with coffee – something simple to start off consumption with ease. In America, we cram pancakes, waffles, eggs, bacon and various other staples of gluttonous deliciosity down our throats and sit around wondering why our pants don’t fit. Well, that’s why. To consume such heavy carbohydrates so early in the morning stunts your metabolism and lulls it back to sleep. Your rest/digest rhythms are extremely important to your overall health. Says, Paolo Sassone-Corsi, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Pharmacology Via Science Daily:
“When the balance between these two vital processes is upset, normal cellular function can be disrupted,” Sassone-Corsi said. “And this can lead to illness and disease.”
The findings suggest that proper sleep and diet may help maintain or rebuild this balance, he said, and also help explain why lack of rest or disruption of normal sleep patterns can increase hunger, leading to obesity-related illnesses and accelerated aging.
Instead, drink a tall glass of water as soon as you wake up (and as much as possible throughout the day). This allows your digestive system to slowly prepare for your first meal, which should be something no larger than the size of two hands cupped together. Egg white omelets, fruit bowls or yogurt and granola combinations are a perfect breakfast for beginning to boost your metabolism.
Snack Work
Snacks are extremely important to the art of cleansing your arteries. Of course, (unfortunately), we don’t mean chips, popcorn or bagels. We mean fruit, crackers, cold cuts and juices. Instead of thinking in terms of three hefty meals, try to think in terms of five smaller meals, so that your snacks actually become semi-scheduled as well. This means that about an hour or two after eating a modestly sized breakfast, you would eat a small snack, and about an hour or two after that, you would eat your biggest meal – that being lunch.
Exercise in Relation to Eating
By lunch time, someone in search of a faster metabolism should have already worked out. This is because working out before lunch jolts your metabolism into action and keeps it running all day, whereas working out at night is only burning the fat you’ve already consumed. Usually, working out a half an hour before lunch is the best idea, because by the time your meal arrives your body is ready to swiftly metabolize. Eating within the first half hour after exercise is essential to inspiring a metabolism, so spending the first half hour of your lunch break jogging and the second half eating is essentially the best thing you could do for yourself.
How Much Exercise
Obviously, this kind of thing bears the promotional statement: the more the merrier. Unfortunately, not all of us have that kind of time. In light of this fact, and the fact that exercise is only worthwhile when applied to your body on a consistent basis, try to exercise every day for thirty minutes rather than three or four times a week for an hour. This daily endeavor enlightens your metabolism, teaching it to expect stimulation and, therefore, to better burn waste from your body. Without grazing and snacking in a regular manner as an accompaniment to modest meals and without consistently moving your ass, your metabolism will refuse to resurrect itself. By attempting to eat as little as possible, your metabolism shuts down and stores fat rather than sheds it. So whatever you do, don’t starve.
What To Eat
After working out, protein is key. Lean protein, meaning chicken and fish rather than heavy red meat, with fresh vegetables will pass right through your system and restore nutrients to your body. The most important thing about eating while ‘dieting,’ is eating things that don’t stick. Meaning, eat foods that aren’t fried, that don’t contain a ton of potatoes and bread products and that generally contain the color green. This way, you’re helping your body constantly run like an active engine, instead of having to stop and restart at each light. Also, probiotics and magnesium vitamins often help keep your body on a healthy, digestive roll.
Afternoon Slump
Afternoons can be hellish periods of time, especially when you’re blood sugar’s dropped and there’s three hours left to dinner. For this, trail mix and a little chocolate, an apple and a piece of cheese or crackers with some slices of deli meat are ideal. These will curb your appetite, give your metabolism some attention and still keep you excited for dinner.
End of the Day/Dinner
If you live close enough to walk or ride a bicycle home from work before dinner, do so. After sitting around all day after your morning exercise, a short walk or jog before dinner is a nice reminder to your body that the day has not yet ended. Of course, dinner should be smaller than lunch, because your body will have less time to process this meal before sleep. In fact, it is necessary to never eat after nine or ten at night, because by then your body’s digestive system is painfully slow and preparing for sleep. Eating desert is entirely okay, especially if you’ve exercised, so long as it does not contain corn syrup. Corn syrup, thick carbohydrates and creams are terribly difficult for the digestive track and clutter your insides with crap. Instead, go for frozen yogurt (which contains probiotics), dark chocolate or fruits. Drink a last glass of water before bed and begin again in the morning. Consistency is truthfully the only thing that counts here.
Spies Not Like Us - The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception
You might not be surprised to find a magic wand hanging next to a hidden camera in a toy shop, but what about a real-life magician working at the C.I.A.? Back in the 1950s, the Agency did in fact employ a magic man named John Mulholland, who wrote a surprisingly entertaining and illuminating manual on deception that has just now been published as part of The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception. For spy buffs and those interested in the art of illusion, it’s a quick and delightful read, complete with wonderful sketches of spy tools and plenty of history, too.
At the height of U.S. paranoia over the spread of communism, the C.I.A. would stop at nothing to give American spies the edge. Authors H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace describe the fear and paranoia over Fidel Castro, the K.G.B. and other Cold War enemies, and delve deep into a top-secret program called MK Ultra, for which Mulholland was recruited to write his manual. Hollow pencils hiding secret powders, trick matchbooks, disguises—all the James Bond stuff is in here. What’s most shocking is that it was all for regular men, and not for Daniel Craig.
Spies Not Like Us - The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception
You might not be surprised to find a magic wand hanging next to a hidden camera in a toy shop, but what about a real-life magician working at the C.I.A.? Back in the 1950s, the Agency did in fact employ a magic man named John Mulholland, who wrote a surprisingly entertaining and illuminating manual on deception that has just now been published as part of The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception. For spy buffs and those interested in the art of illusion, it’s a quick and delightful read, complete with wonderful sketches of spy tools and plenty of history, too.
At the height of U.S. paranoia over the spread of communism, the C.I.A. would stop at nothing to give American spies the edge. Authors H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace describe the fear and paranoia over Fidel Castro, the K.G.B. and other Cold War enemies, and delve deep into a top-secret program called MK Ultra, for which Mulholland was recruited to write his manual. Hollow pencils hiding secret powders, trick matchbooks, disguises—all the James Bond stuff is in here. What’s most shocking is that it was all for regular men, and not for Daniel Craig.
12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done
At the center of just about every personal productivity system are lists – GTD has it’s context lists, Pomodoro has it’s action inventory and daily to-do lists, todoodlist has, well, the todoodlist, and so on.
But there are a lot of different kinds of lists besides your task or to-do list that can help you be more productive. Lists in general are powerful tools – open-ended, constantly growing, and effective at extending our memories past the 7 or so things we can keep on our mind at any given time.
Some of the lists that can make you more productive or otherwise make life easier include:
- Task lists: Naturally, the most obvious is the task list, a simple list of things you have to do. A running list of the tasks you have to get done can make your life significantly easier, provided you use it religiously. For more information about task lists, check out my “Back to Basics” post from last year.
- Project planning: Creating a list of tasks associated with a projects can be a great way to wrap your head around the project, as well as a prompt for what to do next when you finish a task. And a list of projects will help you make sure you’re keeping up with all your commitments.
- Wish lists: A wishlist is a list of things you want to buy but don’t need right away. For example, I want a new electric guitar, but I’m not going to run out and buy one. When you have the money, or the time, you can take out your list and see what you want most of all.
- Grocery/shopping lists: One of my most effective lists is a simple one-page list I made of all the groceries I regularly bought, arranged in the order I’d find them at my local store, with a few blank spaces every so often for one-off additions. Every week, I’d print it off, cross off anything I didn’t need, and add anything that wasn’t on the list, and go shopping.
- Gift ideas: Nothing’s worse than the approach of Christmas with no idea of what to get someone close to you. Keep a list of odd, attractive, or just-right-for-you-know-who items throughout the year to help make Christmas, birthday, and anniversary shopping less stressful.
- Checklists: Any recurrent multi-step tasks – like packing for a business trip, arranging a presentation, or winterizing your home – can be done more easily and with fewer errors if you write up a simple checklist of all the steps involved and equipment needed.
- Reading journal: A while back I suggested that students (and other readers) keep a reading journal. Basically, this is a list of books you’ve read with notes and adequate information to recall the text later.
- Links and logins: In these days of proliferating web applications, almost everyone has dozens, if not hundreds, of websites they need to log into on a regular basis. Keeping a list of all these sites and your login info can be a lifesaver! Also, if you keep a list online, you can have active links to each application, making a pretty useful start page.
- Life lists: A list of your short- and long-term goals can be a great motivator, as well as a trigger list to help generate new projects. I also like to have a list of areas of focus, the different roles that I play, each of which comes with a different set of tasks and goals.
- Reference: Any information you find yourself referring to often can make a useful list – metric conversions, file types, software registration keys, birthdays, the names of your children, whatever.
- Logs: Broadly speaking, a log is a list of events tied to specific dates/times. Keeping a list of your exercise achievements, food consumption, words written, or other set of data appropriate for your projects will help you measure your progress as well as identify problems (like if your output drops on certain days of the week or month, or you seem to crave certain foods on certain days).
- Daily summaries: A one- or two-line summary of the day’s events can help to remind you of problems that arose as well as how you dealt with them, as well as track behavioral patterns that might point to illness, conflict with certain people, or other issues.
How to Keep Track of Your Lists
All those lists seems like a lot to juggle, doesn’t it?
Actually, it’s not that hard. Whether you’re a committed web 2.0 wonk who wants all your lists to live in the cloud, a hardcore pen-and-paper person, or a techie who’s not quite ready to live on the Web just yet, there are simple solutions to keep your lists handy.
Pen-and-paper: A notebook (I like Moleskines and Moleskine knockoffs, but whatever works) can be easily modified to make all your lists accessible. I use Post-It tabs to identify different sections of my notebook, with tasks up front and book wishlists, gift lists, and others towards the back. A tab somewhere near the middle separates my project planning lists from my task list.
Desktop software: If you’re using Outlook or Lotus Notes, you have a task list manager at hand that can easily hold other kinds of lists by assigning categories to them. Other options include using a note-taking program like Evernote or OneNote, with a separate note for each list. These are easily backed up, which is nice, plus they can be sent to others. And they’re searchable, too. And if you’re a super-geek, check out Gina Trapani’s todo.txt-cli, a command-line based productivity program – just use contexts or projects as list types instead.
Web Applications: Any task-list manager that allows categories (Todoist is a great one, since it literally allows you to create multiple lists), or any project management application (each list can be a separate project; make sure your membership level allows you to create enough projects), or most GTD apps (use contexts or projects to separate your lists, or tags if yours offers them) can be a great list manager. For simplicity, I like tasktoy, but whatever is comfortable for you.
Wikis: Wikis are excellent list management tools. I’ve listed them separately because various wikis run on your desktop (like TiddlyWiki, a self-contained, easy-to-use wiki) or online (try PBWorks or WetPaint). You’ll have to learn some simple syntax for adding to your lists, but after that, wikis are not hard to use at all.
What other lists do you find useful? How do you manage your lists? Tell us al about it in the comments!
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College. Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
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