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Finding a good baby carrier is like finding a good man...

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It takes a lot of time and you have to go through a lot of bad ones. Before I had a baby, I thought the simplest way to figure out what kind of gear I would need was to read reviews on sites like Baby Gear Lab and Baby Center (if only parenting were this simple.) As ergo was consistently named one of the best carriers, I felt fortunate when my sister-in-law re-gifted me her never used ergo carrier. Unfortunately, my baby did not feel the same way. I quickly discovered why the ergo was never used by my sister-in-law. Whenever I put my baby in the ergo, he cried. Not cute little kitten squeals, but full on pterodactyl type shrieks. So desperate was my little one to escape from the ergo that he would arch his back and use his feet to launch himself off of me in some kind of deranged baby suicide attempt. There was nothing ergonomic about the ergo for my baby or I, so we moved onto the baby k’tan. I loved my baby k’tan – it was soft, comfy, easy to put on and oh so cuddly. It rem...
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My AdSense Account

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My wife and I started this blog as a project we could work on together as a couple.  The premise of the blog was to write book reviews.  Since then it has evolved into a myriad of topics such as: sports, anime, self-help, etc.  Pretty much whatever tickles our fancy. We thought about monetizing the site to generate passive income.  We signed up for AdSense but that took forever to clear.  In the mean time we did Amazon Associates to see if it could generate any revenue.  I can say with no hesitation that Amazon Associates is pretty useless for a blogger such as myself.  I can't dedicate much time to this since I have a job, a family, and other interests. When AdSesnse did clear through and we put in the widgets, our life was getting pretty crazy.  Our son was due, getting the house ready for a baby, family visiting.  It inevitably led to the blog being left on the backburner for almost a year. So I was shocked to see that after a large ...
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The Brooklyn Nets 2018 NBA Summer so far

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It's been a long time since I've posted anything and to be honest I wasn't planning on writing a blog post anytime soon.  However, as a Nets fan I wanted to share my thoughts with other Nets fans and see if the feeling is mutual in regards to this year's off-season. In my opinion I felt that the Nets should address their greatest issue which was rebounding.  If you look at last year's team statistics the Nets are ranked pretty well in rebounding.  However, if you watched the games and review the advanced statistics they rank 25th in rebounding percentage. In many of the games I felt that the Nets played solid enough defense to force missed shots in the earlier parts of the games.  However, they could never clear the boards and were forced to play extra defensive possessions against teams. A large part of this is because the Nets bigs couldn't clear the boards due to their size.  However, if they did have size like Mozgov, they were unplayable because the...
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Could TV watching be good for us?

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I recently wrote a post citing a study that reading fiction makes a person more empathetic because they can imagine themselves in the position of the characters they are reading about. These skills then become transferable to a person's real life when they interact with others. How about other forms of fiction, however, such as watching a TV drama? We have long been told that watching TV rots our brain, but could TV actually be good for us? Some studies suggest that TV could indeed be good for us, though to be fair most of these studies are cited by  Bustle and HuffPost , so make of them what you will. The most convincing argument I could find for why TV watching is good for us is that TV watching helps decrease levels of cortisol - the hormone associated with stress - especially in women. Researchers speculate that this is because TV watching is a passive activity that gives people a break from their over-scheduled days. This ability to disengage and de-stress actually ...
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Influence People

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Today we continue exploring Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People.   The first part of this two series post was on How to make friends which you can check out by clicking the link below: How to make friends The other portion of this text is about influencing people.  If you'd like to read all the points that Dale Carnegie suggests, wikipedia does a nice job of laying it out in an easy to read format in the link below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People While Mr. Carnegie lists out twelve key points to winning people over to your way of thinking, I'd like hone in on a few of his points that in my opinion are the most important.  I think because these points feel so counterintuitive that it becomes difficult to understand how these points could be valid. Nonetheless, I would like to share my thoughts with you on these few ideas and pair them with a brief anecdotal.  Then you can be the judge and d...
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An Ice Cream Binge Across America

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For those of you who read my post about the science of ice cream making , you already know how much I enjoy making and eating ice cream. In her book, Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America , Amy Ettinger claims that the average American eats twenty-two pounds of ice cream a year. I bet I eat at least twice that. For an ice cream and book reading enthusiast, such as myself, Amy Ettinger's book, Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America,  would seem to be the perfect combination of my two great loves. Ettinger shares some interesting histories that I had not known before, such as the fact that the United States Food and Drug Administration considers ice cream a potentially hazardous food item because it "accounted for 2, 594 illnesses between 1990 and 2009, mostly from contaminated eggs or spoiled milk" (Ettinger 56). Ice cream is apparently so hazardous that some historians, according to Ettinger, contend that American President Zachary Taylor died after e...
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How to make friends

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How to make friends and influence by Dale Carnegie is one of the most influential books of all time.  Much like the title suggests, it is a self-help book that provides a mindset and strategies to make friends and influence people.  As an exploration of this text, we are going to do a two-part series on Carnegie's book, with today's post focusing on making friends. I found out about this book when I was reading an interview on Barbara Cocoran.  The founder of the Cocoran Group and current panelist/investor on Shark Tank.  In the interview she mentioned that the last book she had read was the aforementioned text.  She stated that this book was her guide to interacting with people and with making sales. I must admit that even in my own life I have incorporated parts of this book into my interactions.  In addition, as a person who has gone through leadership training programs, I am shocked at how much of his teachings are incorporated into the modern e...
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