Gluten Gluttons

It all started a week or two ago when I was having a casual conversation with a coworker. The conversation worked it way around to Celiac Disease. This an autoimmune disorder caused by gluten. She has it, and it led to Rheumatoid arthritis in her case. From there we talked about how it is under diagnosed in the US, some of the other issues it can lead to, etc.

This led to a wealth of internet research by my wife and I. After some conversation and research we both think that celiac may run her family. She comes from right genetic background for it to be an issue, and has a few relatives that have gone gluten-free only to see their health improve dramatically.

So... we've decided to give it a try. For the next several weeks we are going to go gluten free and see how it affects our health. The hope is that some of the chronic issues my wife has developed, since the birth of our second daughter, will be lessened or (fingers crossed) relieved by a change in diet.

This is in addition to our recent banning of new High-Fructose Corn Syrup purchases. We're working our way through the items that have the HFCS, and replacing them with more natural versions as we do.

The combination of these two things means that there are about 3 things in the grocery store we can buy. More seriously there are a lot of products we can buy, but they are typically 3-4 times more expensive than their HFCS/Gluten counterparts.

Test Post

Nothing to see here. Simply testing something out -

Long Time Off

I obviously haven't posted here in quite a long while - in the interim I did a few blog posts for a local arts group, and a few more for a local business. I'm going to attempt to write a post a day from here on out. We'll see how it goes ...

A quick update on a few free iPhone apps that I have really been diggin on in the last few days:

1. Tap Defense - This has been a fun little game. Easy to play, but hard to master. I imagine I'll be playing this for weeks, if not months, to come.

2. Darkroom - I'm not 100% happy with this app, but it does seem to work a bit better than the built in camera on the phone.

3. Facebook - Really shouldn't have to explain this one.

4. The Weather Channel - This is much, much better than the built in weather app -

Small Business Marketing Advice?

My wife runs a massage therapy business in Staunton, Virginia. We are both looking for marketing ideas in our small town. Ideally we would like to find something out-of-the-box, but are certainly open to traditional options.

She has a website, a blog, a Squidoo lens, etc ... I've preached Web2.0 marketing from the start.

These ideas could also be used for our local arts organization - so bring 'em on.

Here are some links to check out what we are doing now:

Tabula Rasa Massage Website

Tabula Rasa Blog

Tabula Rasa Squidoo

Ampersand Arts - our local arts organizations Wiki Page can be found at:

Ampersand

Eventually we will be setting up a blog and maybe forums for Ampersand - as well as a community calendar about local art events and music happenings -

Any other ideas?

Blogging Success

There is a great post today over at ProBlogger:

5-prerequisites-for-blogging-success

This post really gets to the heart of what blogging is all about, and how to make it work for you (and your readers).

I will be trying to incorporate this advice into my own blogs and into much larger project I have going on at work(adding a community section to our website).

Between the fulltime job in the Consumer Electronics Industry and working on my MBA the amount of time I have to blog is limited, but it is certainly something I will work harder to get out there in the coming months.

Laziness or Productivity?

You can call it laziness if you wish, and perhaps it is. However, this morning I found a Google module (for my personalized homepage) that I found very exciting. You can find it here:

Socializer

This module basically aggregates several of the social bookmarking and social media sites. Instead of having a separate module for digg, del.icio.us, and reddit - I now have them all in one place.

Six months ago I was excited about adding the individual modules because I no longer had to go to each site. Now I don't even have to look at several modules. It is all condensed down to one module. Awesome!

You can call it laziness, but I see it is a major productivity gain. One module vs. 3 Modules (1-month ago) or 3 separate websites (6-months ago).

The speed of change is amazing.

I also recently found the following module which is great if you are into the tech junx:

TechBlogs