Anytime you plan on making a significant lifestyle change, it helps if you have a social support structure around you to help you make that change. It's very difficult to quit smoking when everyone in your house smokes. You can't lose weight if the rest of your family keeps eating unhealthy food. One way to incorprate weightloss and a social support structure is through social applications. Smartphones are great becasue they have great apps! And some of them can help you lose weight.

One of the best apps for this is Calorie Conter by MyFitnessPal.com. You can search for it on your phone and download it. It is completely free.

You enter your sex, age, height, and weight, Then you give it a goal weight. It calculates your daily caloric intake allowance. For example, it may say, you may eat 1500 calories per day, and in 5 weeks, you will weigh 160 (assuming that's your goal).

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I was really hoping to be able to take the doors and roof off the jeep this weekend. But the 40 degree weather (down from 95) wasn't conducive to taking it apart. Instead, I decided to share some pictures of what it would look like if I were to take it all off!

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Amazon.com has introduced their new Cloud music player and Cloud services. Any music you have, can now be stored on your Cloud drive. You can play it at home, at work, on your phone, or from anywhere you want. But it's not only a music player.

Amazon.com gives you 5 GB for free. You can store files, musci, videos, whatever you want. When you purchase music on AMazon.com MP3 music store you have a choice of downloading the music onto your phone, computer, or other device..... or saving it to your Cloud drive and accessing it from anywhere at any time. This is pure genious!

What else can you do?

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The battle for browser supremacy still rages on. Internet Explorer 9 has finally been released in it's final form. Google has just released Chrome 11 (beta), and Firefox has just released it's shiny new Firefox 4. They are battling for top honors. Who will win?

People use the web more than ever. We no longer just use the web to read static information, we use it to interact! The single most used piece of software on any computer is the browser by a hige margin. You use a browser every day! Better have a good one!

Is Google taking over the world?

They already have the best email, the best online office suite, an awesome online calender, awesome RSS feeds reading capabilities, tons of online storage space, the best picture and video manager in Picasa, an awesome mobile phone operating system, great cloud services so your phone is always connected to your information and data, and now they also have the best browser! Google's Chrome Browser! More...

I just got done taking the American Board of Osteopathic Internal Medicine exam and here are my thoughts.

Can we discuss the test?

Yes, you are allowed to discuss it and tell people about it. I signed an agreement at the beginning of the exam stating that I will not try to memorize the questions and reproduce them. I won't do that. Just a general discussion of strategies on how to take this test, which topics I felt were covered, and what is the best preparation. More...

I was able to play Modern Warfare 2 on my computer for about 30 minutes before my computer overheated and shut down. Apparently, the fan on my graphics card got old and tired of working. Needless to say, it took me about 2 days to get everything up and running at full speed again. Turns out one of my RAM chips came slightly out of scoket as I was troubleshooting, which caused even more problems.

Finally got it up and running at much cooler temperatures (thank God for fans and water) and the game is awesome! 

Call of Duty 4 had awesome weapons, amazing gameplay, amazing graphics, and was the best game I had ever played... ever! It was a culmination of years of computer graphic genius coming together into a perfect, awesome storm! More...

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

This title is set to be released on November 10, 2009 (11-10-9) and is expected to break all media sales records for this year. Media and entertainment sales include movies, videos, music albums, etc. This game is highly anticipated and is expected to shatter all of 2009 sales records. It's already broken all of Gamestops "preorder" records to date. That's pretty impressive for a game. It'sThis is technically Call of Duty 6. Call of Duty 4 was Modern Warfare 1, Call of Duty 5 was World at War.... and so this must be 6 or 2 in the Modern Warfare series. More...

We finally settled on the impressive new 2010 Honda Pilot.

We wanted an SUV with third row seating. That left us a few options. The large Cadillac Escalade, Yukon, Suburban, and Denali type of SUVs that are way too big, and way too expensive (especially the Caddy).

Then you had the Acura MDX, Toyota Highlander, Acadia, and Traverse which were reasonable. We didn't care for Navigation or DVD features. And we didn't want to pay more than about $25,000-30,000.

The Acura MDX and Toyota Highlander were high on our list, but dealers didn't have any good ones in stock. The MDX were running close to $40k and that was a bit much. They had no reason to lower their price, since the MDX is the best selling Acura, and we couldn't find any on dealer lots. Fully loaded, the Acura was nearly $50k.

The Toyota Highlander was nice and probably we could get them down to about $30k, but dealers didn't have any in stock (or only had sky blue ones).

I never even considered a Honda Pilot, because of my preconceived notions of what they looked like and what they were.

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I have moved from the Palm Treo 755p to the Palm Pre. I was one of those nuts that got the Palm Pre the day it came out. I spent countless hours researching the Pre and decided that it was the future of smartphones.

Palm Treo

I have had a Palm Treo ever since the 650. Even before that, I had a Palm III back in 1993 when it was made by US Robotics (before Palm). The Treo 650 was an awesome phone. It did a lot of things well. It surfed the net, checked email, and most importantly, allowed me to use my large library of medical software. I love the calendar, the memos, the tasks, the browser, the email. But most of all, I use my medical software the most. I have to have that. I had the Treo 650 on Verizon, and since data costs an extra $40, I never bothered to activate it. I was happy using my phone as a palm pilot, text machine, and ocassionally to make voice calls.

Then came the Sprint Sero plan. For $30 a month, you could get a Palm Treo 755p, 500 minutes of voice (of which I use may 20 minutes), and unlimited everything else. This is when I started using the browser, email, google maps, and other features. And, it still allowed me to use my medical software. I switched to Sprint immediately!

The Treo 755p is a great device. It does a lot of things well. MP3s, videos, email, etc. It is very well integrated and I appreciated the short cuts and speed that it operated with. No complaints. The thing that it was lacking was the browser wasn't a full browser and it did not have WIFI. But that's it. I didn't realize I needed anything else and since I never went online with it, I never cared.

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