Living In the World, Not on It

If your mind is racing and you are having difficulty falling asleep, a few minutes of simple but effective breathing exercises can help calm your nervous system on a chemical level and lead to greater success in hitting the sack. The awareness and control of breath has been a central component of yoga, martial arts and Taoism for thousands of years. There are dozens of different methods and exercises you can explore through a good teacher or book. The practice of breath control in yoga is called pranayama. I'll detail a simple pranayama exercise here that is particularly effective for falling asleep called alternate nostril breathing (that's "nadi shodana" for the Sanskrit posse out there). Alternate nostril breathing is a great way to clear obstructed nostrils, balance the yin and yang energy of the body and focusing the busy mind on the present for a deliberate and calming exercise. When our nostrils are unobstructed, we involuntarily alternate breathing through one...

It is a grey, rainy, icky, stay-inside-and-read-a-book kind of day. What does one do when down? SHOP! I made a quick foray onto e-bay and started with candles. I love candles and of course I'm heartbroken that Illuminations has closed its doors. Not that I have been able to find some of the really old fragrances like Pear and Wasabi but there was a teeny ray of hope that maybe I could when they still were open. I found a couple of candles under Woodwick (new to me) and White Barn Candle Company, but nothing exciting. I skipped around then, looking briefly at office organisers, DVDs, etc. And then I typed in "crystal". Crystal brought up all sorts of stuff - bowls, jewelry, etc., but I realised that this was too general. So I typed in "flourite", and then got specifically flourite items, but again, most cut into gemstones or jewelry. Ah. So I typed in "flourite balls" and hit gold - or in this case, flourite! I did do some fast shopping - two beautiful ...

with Anu Garg If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this week we'd be featuring 5000 words. Each of this week's words is accompanied by a wonderful, whimsical illustration by cartoonist Doug Pike ( dpike@doubtfulaccounts.com ). Besides the word of the day, each cartoon includes many other unusual words. Doug's cartoons have illustrated many magazines and his new book Gone With The Wine has just been released. smalto PRONUNCIATION: (SMAHL-to) MEANING: noun: Colored glass or enamel used in mosaic ETYMOLOGY: From Italian smalto (enamel, glaze), related to smelt (to melt) USAGE: "Using Carrara marble, Venetian gold and glass smalto, Elaine M. Goodwin creates mosaics inspired by the Classical, Byzantine, Victorian and contemporary worlds." Going out; Staying in; The Times (London, UK); Jan 14, 2009. agnosia PRONUNCIATION: (ag-NO-zhuh) MEANING: noun: Loss of ability to recognize objects, people, sounds, etc., usually caused by brain injury ETYMOLOGY: From Greek a...

with Anu Garg A few hundred years ago if you spoke about the importance of exercise, people would laugh at you. They got all the exercise they needed from work, outside or at home. Making a living, raising a family, walking to and from places, gave them enough movement, so they didn't have to worry about exercise. Today we have fitness centers, gyms, and personal trainers. There are high-tech machines, and even electronic games to help us exercise. Each gadget comes with its own selling points. Some you can strap to your arms and legs and tummy and relax in front of the TV -- they claim its vibrations give you your daily recommended quota of exercise. There are virtual reality exercises, dancercise, elliptical, and who knows what else. In that spirit, consider this week's words as your complete exercise system for the fingers. This fingercise provides the daily recommended exercise according to federal guidelines. Each of the words featured in this week's A.Word.A.Day, when...

If you're old enough to understand the reference in this headline -- George Carlin, anyone? -- then you're old enough to need a refresher course when it comes to talking about technology. We've put together a list of outdated tech terms, phrases that you shouldn't be using at work anymore because they will make you seem old. This is especially true if you're looking for a new job. For example, on an interview, you should be talking about "cloud computing," not "ASPs" even though they are basically the same thing. This list is useful for 20-somethings, too. Now when the senior person in the office uses one of these terms, you'll know what he's talking about. 1. Intranet Popular in the mid-90s, the term "intranet" referred to a private network running the Internet Protocol and other Internet standards such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It was also used to describe an internal Web site that was hosted behind a firewall...

It makes sense that while the main "Happy Anniversary" post should mirror the topic of having my blog turn four, the second post to this would be best served in updating my bio - life was very different four years ago. So here goes: Yes, this is me. I've explained the nickname Tr'Aislínge at some point in the last four years, but not in the original post of 21 August 2005. My name is really Aislínge, pronounced ash-lin[g], but years ago when I worked at Miller Harness Company (then located in East Rutherford, New Jersey) as an assistant to the Apparel Purchasing division, three of us went out to lunch, actually had a drink or two and made up nicknames that have stayed since. Melissa Kaplan (now in Texas) became Smells, Rio (originally from England) became B.O., and I'm commonly called Ash, so I became Trash. I put the apostophy in shortly after to make it look more like a nickname, and since I prefer the long version of my name, I have Tr'Aislínge. I've ha...

On a sunny day in 2005, I'd gone to the mailbox as I'd done so many times when I got home from work and retrieved my mail. In there among the cheesy adverts and myriad bills was my guilty pleasure, People Magazine . And inside the magazine was an article on 40-year-old virgins. The movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin with Steve Carrell had just come out and that engendered this article. I was sufficiently motivated by the article that the half-idea of joining a blogging service suddenly became the whole idea. So on Sunday, 21 August, I sat down in my home office in front of my desktop computer and found Blogger, opened up my account, filled in the information about myself (which does get updated from time to time) and finally, after inputting, designing, mulling, and selecting, I was finally at my first posting ever! The first post was not "First Topic: 40-Year-Old Virgins". The first post was actually entitled "All About Tr'Aislínge" and went like this: All A...