GroovyMojo.com

This is not really a diet; it’s a simplified version of eating awareness training as originally developed by Molly Groger.  While her excellent book is currently out of print, you can usually find copies on Amazon and eBay.  As with any major lifestyle change, you may want to consult with your doctor beforehand.

Body vs. Mind

The human body didn’t evolve to be a couch potato.  We were meant to hunt gazelle and climb trees for fruit and to throw spears at saber-toothed tigers.  By some fluke of nature our brains became supercharged, which has allowed us to systematically outsmart just about everything — including nature.  The result is that, as animals, we’re overachievers, able to fend for ourselves so well that the days of chasing gazelle are long gone.  To go hunting we merely have to walk 30 feet to a car then drive to a supermarket.  In some cases we don’t even have to do that — a simple click of a computer mouse will result in the delivery of groceries, or fresh hot pizza, or an order of Chicken Lo Mein.

At the same time, our big brains are constantly inventing new and ever more fascinating ways to entertain ourselves without exerting physical effort.  So now more than ever, we’re more likely to be exercising our fingers on a TV remote or game controller rather than exerting entire body effort to beat a flying ball around four bases, or to race a bunch of other people to a finish line.

So you see we’ve already put ourselves at a disadvantage.  But add to that the fact that since we were babies, our parents used food as a reward and as a pacifier, programming our bloated brains to eat for reasons other than hunger.  We now eat because we’re happy, sad, bored, frightened, or nervous.  That would be a bad idea even if food still consisted of berries and gazelle spleens.  But no — our misguided intellects have designed for us much more tasty morsels: chocolate bars, Oreos, French fries, Whoppers, and Big Macs.  Yum!  I don’t know about you, but I love these things — or at least my brain does, because the flavors are so refined they directly stimulate the mind’s pleasure center to almost sexual intensity.

Face it, we’re way too clever for our own good.

That’s the bad news.  The good news is that only a few simple changes can make a significant difference in this dilemma.

Demote Your Brain

Here’s where you begin to unlearn and then relearn.  For some of you this initial stage can be a bit tricky and seem weird, but that’s because you’re about to question some fundamental behaviors.  The goal is to take the decision to eat away from your mind, and give it back to your stomach.

The idea is simple enough.  When you’re hungry, eat.  When you’re no longer hungry, stop eating.

For many people that seems to be a no brainer.  To them it’s already natural.  You’ll notice one thing these people all have in common:  they’re thin.  And in America they’re in the minority.

I once was one of those people, back before I got my first car, in those long-ago days where I had to ride a bike or walk everywhere.  It was also before video games.  I used to ride for miles and hike through the wilderness, and climb trees, and dig big holes in the ground with a shovel.  I also was much less into eating, because back then there always seemed to be more important things to do.  Sure, I watched TV, but there were only three channels, and I usually only had two favorite shows at a time … and they were on only once a week.

Things are much different today.  I sit at a computer and type all the time.  I love good food.  I have hot and cold running DVD’s at the push of a button — I figure if I get into an accident and both my legs are broken, I have enough quality TV to watch for three months straight.  Add Netflix to that and it could stretch to infinity.

Then there’s those bugaboos from childhood:  You didn’t finish your dinner!  You’re not a part of the “Clean Plate Club!”  There are poor starving children in Africa.  And left over from babyhood, when food was used as a pacifier:  If I feel unhappy, a box of cookies will make things better.  If bored, eat a tube of Pringles.  Nervousness brings on munchies for candy like you wouldn’t believe.  When things are going good, it’s time to celebrate by going out for a huge steak dinner … with ice cream for desert!  Ice cream drowned in 5 pounds of caramel and hot fudge.

My peak weight was over 350 pounds.  My doctor used to give me alarmed looks while checking my blood pressure, and began prescribing pills.  I started noticing lots of little problems, like my back had become fragile, and my knees would make breaking-celery noises when I went up stairs. 

Things didn’t begin to get better until I learned there was a difference between being “full” and being “no longer hungry.”

Learn To Listen To Your Stomach

Listening to your stomach doesn’t mean waiting until it growls and gurgles.  It means relaxing your mind and letting yourself feel those signals it’s sending you.  There are levels of hunger, ranging from slightly-maybe hungry to gnawing-open-pit-of-pain hungry.  What you need to do is try an experiment, and practice it a few times during the next week.

Pick a time when you don’t have a lot of distractions, and skip a meal.  Feel free to drink water (and I mean water, not coffee or soda, or anything with caffeine — which is an appetite suppressant).  You’ll find that in the beginning, when you’re just starting to feel hungry, it’s hard to tell the difference between hunger and thirst.  So when you start to notice that feeling, take a drink, and see it that makes the feeling subside.  In many cases it will, and you’ve just learned your first important lesson.  Sometimes when you think you’re hungry, you’re actually thirsty.

Continue the experiment, paying close attention to your feelings of hunger as they grow over time.  When water no longer does the trick, then you know you’re experiencing real hunger.  Memorize this feeling.  This is your cue — your ONLY cue — to eat.

When you feel you’ve mastered the art of identifying genuine hunger, the experiment is over.  It’s time to take the next step.

You’ve established you’re hungry, so go ahead and eat something.  Don’t worry about carbs or calories, just make sure it’s real food and not Hostess Twinkies or an ice cream cone.  If you’re craving  pizza or fried chicken, then indulge yourself.  But eat slowly without distractions — no TV, no talking on the phone — and pay very close attention to signals from your stomach after each swallow.  The moment your hungry feeling goes away, stop eating.  You’re done.

This is one of the hardest things to get used to, because here is where your mind — not your stomach — is going to tell you to keep eating.  Your mind will say things like:

• I can’t possibly be full.  That was only seven bites!
• This food is too good, there’s no way I’m stopping now.
• I paid for this huge meal.  If I don’t eat more than this I’ll be wasting money.
• If I don’t eat more, he/she will think I don’t like his/her cooking.
• Etc.

Here’s where you’ll come to a startling realization: we really do eat way too much food!  Also, here’s where we must accept an unpleasant fact: when we do eat too much, we are abusing our bodies.

I’m going to repeat this because it’s so important.  We as a society eat too much food, and when we do, we are abusing our bodies.  We are abusing our bodies just as sure as a smoker is abusing his lungs; as sure as a demented glue sniffer is abusing his poor damaged brain.

Is saving food, or money, or someone’s misguided feelings worth shortening your life?  Is it worth wrecking your health, causing you to spend more on healthcare and the like?  Is it worth the stunted self esteem of being labeled a fatso?  The shame, humiliation, and the self-loathing?

Freaking no, man!  No!  It is not.  And so you must ignore your brain when it sends you these signals to keep eating, or to begin eating in the first place, and listen ONLY to your stomach.

Only your stomach!

So continue practicing the art of listening to your stomach, determining when it is really hungry (as opposed to thirsty), and only eating until the feeling of hunger goes away.  If you eat until you feel full, then you’ve eaten too much.

Don’t freak out if just a tiny bit of food satisfies your hunger.  Remember that the moment you feel hungry again, you can eat again.  This is not about starving yourself.  You can eat as many times a day that your stomach tells you to eat.  You can eat just about anything.  But only eat until your stomach tells you it’s no longer hungry.  If that means seven tiny meals a day, then so be it.

Also, begin to really trust your cravings.  Once you get in tune with what your body actually wants, and not what your mind wants, you’ll realize that you’re craving things because of what’s in them, like specific vitamins you may be low in.  Once you’ve been doing this a while, you’re going to begin craving certain vegetables,  like carrots, or perhaps specific proteins like fish or chicken.  You might think to yourself, for example, “Mmm!  Jell-O sounds good!”  Yes, Jell-O is good for you — your body may be craving the gelatin it needs to grow your fingernails.

Your body instinctively knows what it needs.  It knows when it needs food, and it knows what kind of food.  All you have to do is listen to it.  Trust it.  There’s millions of years of programming in your DNA, the result of millions of generations of your ancestors who survived the harshness of live, all leading up to you.  You inherited all that wisdom.  Trust it.

Help Your Body Outsmart Your Brain

As clever as your human intellect is, it’s really a spoiled brat.  It’s used to being in control of when, what, and how much to eat, and now that you’re shifting the job back to your stomach where it belongs, your brain is going to fight it.  It will complain, throw tantrums, and try to sabotage you.  You must accept this and be ready for it with a arsenal of tricks to help your stomach retain control:

• Prepare smaller portions:  As you begin to get a feeling of how much you’re likely to eat before your stomach says “enough,” only prepare that amount.  Maybe even less, and if afterwards you still feel hungry, follow it up with something like apple or orange slices.  Make it a habit to keep healthy, readily available snacks that you can use to top off your meal and sate your hunger.
• Order a to-go box up front:  At restaurants you know that they’re going to serve a portion that’s more than enough, and you know that there will be some left over.  If you have the to-go box right there and handy, you can put the extra food away the moment you need to.  This sabotages the brain’s penchant for sitting there and picking at the food just to have something to do while you’re talking.  Box the leftovers up and put them on a chair or under the table — out of sight, out of mind.
• Deface the food:  Say you’re in a situation where there will be no to-go boxes, and you can’t just get up and leave.  Say, a business meeting in an all-you-can-eat Chinese Buffet.  You’ve served too much, they won’t let you take it home, and it is sitting there on the table tempting you to pick at it.  Now is the time to deface the food.  Put something ugly on top of it.  Mix a inappropriate sauce into the plate, or dump an entire shaker of salt on it, or take your napkin and squish it into the food.  Make it unappealing.  Short circuit your mind’s temptation for mindlessly continuing to eat.
• Sip water:  Unconscious eating is a nervous habit.  You can replace the act of picking at food with sipping a glass of ice water.  It will satisfy the nervous habit, and it’s good for you.  Extra food turns to fat, but extra water does nothing but clean out your system.  The only downside is that it may cause repeated trips to the bathroom.

Besides all these tricks you can pull on yourself (and I’m sure you can come up with an endless supply of your own), you can also enlist the help of your friends and family.  Explain to them what you’re doing and why.  Get them in on it.  Help them help you.  Who knows, they may even join you — then you can help each other.

This is also important:  if you succumb to your brain’s urgings and do overeat, don’t beat yourself up over it.  This is a learning process, not a fad diet.  What you’re attempting to do here is modify your lifestyle.  It’s not going to be an overnight cure.  You will no doubt stumble from time to time, but when you do, simply shrug it off and keep going.  If in a moment of weakness you eat an entire box of Oreos, or a jumbo two pound mushroom Swiss cheeseburger, then make it a learning experience.  Pay attention and memorize the feeling of being over-stuffed.  Memorize how uncomfortable your stomach feels.  Take a mental picture of how awful you feel, and show it to yourself the next time you sit down in front of the same type of meal.

Falling down once or twice doesn’t mean you just give up and lay there until you die.  You pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and keep going.  Life is like that anyway, so why should eating be any different?  The point is to enjoy yourself while you’re here, and you can enjoy eating, too.  Eat when your stomach says you’re hungry, eat something you enjoy eating, and stop the moment you’re no longer hungry.

Amazing how difficult such a simple thing can be.

What Else?

Surely there must be more to it than this.  Right?

Wrong.

You don’t have to count calories, you don’t have to eat only low carb food.  You don’t have to completely cut sweets out of your diet.  You don’t have to measure your serving sizes.  You can completely disregard anything you’ve ever read about dieting.  The only thing you have to do at the “South Beach” is take a nice walk in the sand.

No fasting is necessary.  Meditation is optional.  Eat organic food if you’d like.  Have an occasional Twinkie, it’s okay.

Listen to your stomach.  It tells you two things:

1. I am hungry.
2. I am no longer hungry.

That’s all you need to know.  Where eating is concerned, your stomach is the boss.  If you feel full, you’ve eaten too much, or you’ve eaten too quickly.  Slow down, pay closer attention to your stomach’s signals, and learn when to detect when the hungry feeling has gone away.  When it has, stop eating.

Period.

You will lose weight.  How fast it happens depends on how far out of balance you are from your natural weight as determined by your DNA.  In most cases you’ll lose more weight up front, and it will gradually slow as you approach your natural balance.  It will take some time, so don’t be in a rush.  Maintain patience.  Even better, simply put it out of your mind.  Don’t obsess on weight loss, but instead concentrate on making your new eating habits so ingrained in your psyche that you do it without thinking — like scratching your nose or breathing.

If you do that, your body will take care of itself, and weight will never again be a problem.

Bonus Objectives

If you live a sedentary lifestyle, commit to walking every day.  Walking is the best exercise.  It’s also the easiest.  Don’t overdo it, but slowly build up to a healthy mile or so a day if possible.  If you do this, it will dramatically increase the benefit of your change of eating habits.

Drink more water and less soda — including diet soda.  Flavor the water if you have to.  Use a squeeze of lemon or lime, or a dash of spearmint extract.

Diet soda can actually keep you from losing weight.  The reason is that your body isn’t smart enough to tell the difference between an artificial sweetener and a real one, and so it still releases insulin to counteract the sugar it thinks you just consumed.  Insulin released in your system makes it harder to lose weight.  You’re much better off drinking water or tea sweetened with just a hint of citrus than you are drinking something with an artificial sweetener in it.

One last but important tip:  accept and learn to love yourself as you are.  Under no circumstances should you compare yourself with a supermodel or hunk actor on TV.  Those people are not normal.  Statistically they are genetic freaks.  Random chance, as well as some very expensive dental and plastic surgery, have given them uber-attractiveness which has been even more augmented by make up, professionally styled hair, and custom tailored clothing.  Repeat after me, right now, out loud:

“IT’S NOT REAL!”

I mean it.  I want you to speak these words to yourself.  I want you to say them every time you see one of those commercials or billboards.

Those images you see are not real, and they’re not realistic.  Don’t compare yourself to them.  Don’t compare yourself to anyone.  You are you.  If you love and respect yourself, you’ll treat yourself better, you’ll treat others better, and things will naturally become better.  You will inspire others.  You will enjoy life more.

And that’s what it’s all about.

Further Reading

• Eating Awareness Training by Molly Groger
• Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
• The Rules of “Normal” Eating by Karen R. Koenig
• Eating Mindfully by Susan Albers

This is a very embarrassing topic, but my girlfriend urged me to write about it as a public service. “It could make a difference in the relationships for hundreds of couples,” she told me.

The subject is control over how long a guy lasts during lovemaking.

Quoting my girlfriend: “Why is it that so many men don’t care about control when it is so very important? Don’t they realize that it makes such a huge difference to their relationships? Why can they not see that a satisfied woman will do anything for her man?”

This is obviously a wide spread problem, otherwise you wouldn’t see it as one of the most popular subjects for annoying Spam mail.

The ironic thing is that teaching yourself how to last longer in your lovemaking is simple, and unlike what all those junk emails tell you, you don’t have to buy a pill or special cream. All it takes is the willingness to learn. Or, actually, unlearn.

Because of the sexually frank nature of the subject, those who might be offended should stop reading right here. I mean it. Stop reading.

You’re still reading? Okay. You have no one to blame but yourself if you’re offended…

Premature ejaculation in men is nothing more than a bad habit.

The habit is learned usually as a boy during puberty, directly after experiencing his first orgasm. He’s not to blame, either, it’s our sexual prudishness that is the root cause of the problem. The fear of getting caught.

All boys masturbate. All of them. Most men do it as well, and most will lie about it too. It’s extremely embarrassing, and guys would rather die than be discovered.

Why? Because we’ve all been taught that sex is bad. It’s dirty. It’s a sin.

Well, it’s not, but that’s not the point of this article. However it is this stigma over self-gratification that causes boys (and later men) to rush through it as fast as humanly possible. They feel the urge, they find a quiet place, and they take care of business. Over and done with. The original wham, bam, thank you hand.

The human penis is a simple creature. It only has a couple jobs in life, and it only does what it’s been taught to do. It stands to reason that if you spend years teaching it to ejaculate quickly, then that is what it’s going to continue doing. It doesn’t care what the circumstances … or what is doing the stimulation. It knows what it knows.

Fortunately, a penis can learn to change. Slow down. Relax and enjoy the journey instead of focusing only on the destination.

The simplest way to unlearn the bad habit is doing the very same activity which originally caused it, but with a different mindset. There are two feelings you have to master, one which you know and another you may not be too familiar with.

Lesson number one starts with you getting friendly with yourself. That’s right, it’s okay. You have an excuse. This is a class.

Start getting friendly with yourself, but pay close attention to what you’re feeling. There’s a point of no return, and there’s a point right before orgasm. They’re two separate places along the journey. Get to know these two places, but more specifically, get to know the difference between the two.

So it’s feeling good, and you feel it working up to that point, then … pay close attention … you’ll feel when it changes. You haven’t reached the point of imminent orgasm, but there is that place where you know it’s going to happen any moment. There’s a point where there’s no going back, it’s going to blow. Then, anywhere from a split second to maybe ten seconds later, you know the orgasm is about to happen.

Then it happens.

Did you feel the difference? Can you spot these two points? Don’t worry, it may take a while, but here’s the good news. You have permission to keep trying. You’re not going to unlearn this bad habit overnight. Give yourself three or four weeks of practice.

When you start being able to feel that place where you know, if you keep going, the orgasm will happen … back off. That’s right, back off from what you’re doing. Stop and let it calm down for a few moments, then start going again.

This is lesson number two. Play with yourself for as long as you can without reaching your orgasm. Work yourself almost up to, but not past, that point of no return. Having a hard time figuring out where? Keep slipping past it? No problem. Here’s what you do: if you even think you’re near it, stop. I don’t care if you have to stop every five seconds, just stop. Let it calm down. Start again.

Keep going. I don’t care how much you want that orgasm, you goal is not to have it. Why? Let me quote my girlfriend again: “Why can they not see that a satisfied woman will do anything for her man?”

That’s why. There is absolutely nothing in this world like completely satisfying the woman you love. So…

Keep practicing. See how long you can keep it going without passing the point of no return. Challenge yourself to go longer and longer. When you feel you are starting to get the hang of it, it’s on to lesson number three, which is putting it to practice with your lover.

Now remember, you’re still unlearning the bad habit. Don’t be discouraged with failure … just keep trying. You will get better.

Let your lover know what you’re doing. Let her know you need to be in control, and why, and I’m betting she’s going to be more than willing to help. Don’t rush through the foreplay, and when it’s time to enter, pay close attention to what you’re feeling. Move slowly, don’t get too caught up into it. The moment you even think you’re getting close to that point, pull out, and let it calm down. Then continue.

You’ll find something amazing. Your penis is not so dumb after all. It can learn something new, and you’ll find that — as you get used to not rushing headlong toward that orgasm — your penis is going to get better at letting you know when that point of no return is. Also, you’ll find it takes longer to get there as well.

That’s the penis learning.

Aren’t you proud of it? Good penis! Well done!

If you haven’t noticed by now, there’s a benefit to you as well as your lover. The longer you hold back your orgasm, the more intense it’s going to be when you finally reach it. Instead of just an, OOOH! AHHHH! WOW! it will start becoming a OOOOOOOOHHHHAAAA OH MY GOD! AAAAAAHHHGGHH!!!!! YES YES YES!

And she’ll be proud of herself for giving you such a big one, too.

If you’re not convinced yet that this is worth the effort, consider this (especially you married guys) … bad lovemaking leads to less lovemaking, which leads to even worse lovemaking, which can lead to zero lovemaking. A downward spiral. Conversely, good lovemaking leads to MORE lovemaking, which leads to BETTER lovemaking, which leads to EVEN MORE lovemaking. An upward spiral.

That’s the kind of love that makes your world go round. It can make you healthier, happier, and live longer too. And, let me quote my girlfriend one last time: “Why can they not see that a satisfied woman will do anything for her man?”

So guys, what are you waiting for? Get busy. Practice makes perfect!

An email showed up this morning warning me not to feed grapes or raisins to dogs, and I thought … oh that’s BS. I’m checking Snopes.com.

But sure enough, it’s true. It can cause their kidneys to fail. So I read on and found a number of things we eat that are poisonous to our canine family members:

• Grapes
• Raisins
• Chocolate
• Coco
• Macadamia Nuts
• Onions
• Potato peelings and green looking potatoes

I don’t currently have a dog, but plan to adopt one again sometime in the near future, and I’m going to keep this list handy (and updated here on the web) because I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ever wonder if some of those things that pop up in your email are real? Are people really raising kittens inside glass bottles? Did a turkey really bite President Bush in the privates? Is Starbucks really a money laundering operation for the mafia?

Fortunately for everyone, you don’t have to guess. Simply go to Snopes.com and look it up. If they don’t have it listed, give them a few days, it’ll show up.

Most of that stuff is complete BS … but more surprisingly, some of it is actually real. Urban legends have to start somewhere. But do yourself and everyone else a favor. Make sure to let that friend who keeps forwarding all that stuff know they should be checking Snopes before clicking the send button.

Snopes.com just penned a funny article about unintentional Internet name gaffes, where a company puts two words together, adds a dotcom at the end, but ends up with a surprise. “Powergen Italia” becomes Power Genitalia and “Pen Island” becomes Penis Land. They mention one I had discovered myself, and had written about in my personal blog a few months back: “Experts Exchange” becomes Expert Sexchange. A few years ago I, too, had a brush with this: My site “Writers Cam” unintentionally turned into Writer Scam. Needless to say, I dropped the “s” altogether, making WriterCAM.com.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists agree, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing.

Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

- Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World

The best way to come up with a photo of yourself for an online dating site is to get a digital camera (there are even disposable ones now, it doesn’t have to be super high quality), then stand in front of a mirror and take a bunch of pictures of yourself. Dress nice, of course. Snap the picture when you think you’re looking your best. Take as many pictures as you need. Then go through them and pick the one or two you like the most.

This shows you as fresh and honest about your appearance. You have nothing to hide. You’re telling the world, “Hello! Here I am!”

Keep them to a resolution of around 640 x 480 pixels, or what they call standard VGA. If it’s a close-up head shot, you can even take it down to about 320 x 240 pixels. Bigger sizes make files that are slow to download over a modem (not everyone has broadband). Make sure there’s plenty of light and you’re close enough so they can see the color of your eyes.

While you can use other photos, it’s best to avoid specific types…

Professional glamour photos: They usually doesn’t show the real you, which may be disconcerting or even misleading when you finally meet your dates face-to-face. Remember that you want to attract someone to YOU as you are, not to some photography studio’s fantasy version of you.

Photos of you with another person, even if that person is cut out or scribbled over: These photos raise doubts, as in, who is that other person? Why are they scribbled out? Will I be scribbled out next?

Old photos of you from when you were much younger, thinner, had more hair, whatever: Face it, that’s just not honest. Unless you look exactly the same, or better, you’re not projecting who you are NOW. Stick to the photo in the mirror technique, you’ll be much better off.

No photo at all? Talk about a blind date! Look, no matter how little you think of your own looks, someone out there will think you’re pretty darn cute. As my girlfriend (who I met via Yahoo Personals) says, “there’s a lid for every pot!” Me, personally, I think my head looks like a lumpy potato with fuzz, but my girlfriend thinks I’m adorable.

Go figure.

Microsoft’s new operating system “Vista” has a lot going for it, and it’s beautiful to behold.  The things you’d normally have to add are already part of the operating system:  anti-spyware, disk-imaging backup, a screen capture utility, etc.  I was very excited to get a evaluation copy of it.

Installation on my HP laptop seemed to go smoothly.  Seemed to.  Unfortunately my system, while rather fast and with plenty of memory, did not have the sticker on it that read: “Vista Ready.”

Now, I’m always up to a technical challenge, and so when my wireless network adapter didn’t work, I simply tracked down the beta drivers directly from Intel.  I got everything on the computer working except for the memory card reader.  And in doing so, while also installing software (Office 2007 rocks, by the way) I also began to realize something…

Windows Vista took my zippy and cool XP laptop and turned it into a moderately slow and slightly crippled laptop.

The turning point for me was when I discovered that no one, anywhere, had bothered to write even beta drivers for the memory card reader.  I use that reader a lot, as it’s how I get info on and off of my camera and PDA.  And I know if I am patient, someone will eventually write the driver to make it work.  But still…

With XP, it already worked.  Everything worked.  It worked great, it was fast, and it had the benefit of running an operating system that Microsoft had been working to perfect for several years now.  Why on Earth would I want to replace it with something brand new, full of bugs, not completely working, which made everything run much slower?

I uninstalled Windows Vista.

When I get a new computer that comes with Vista, that is when I will use Vista.  Maybe.  Or I might uninstall it and load XP and make that machine really fast.

I use Firefox for just about everything — including writing articles — and even though Internet Explorer is playing catch-up I doubt it will ever have the vast array of fun and useful add-ons available to Firefox. These are the ones I use personally:

• Ebay Negs - Displays all the Negative Feedback an eBay user.
• Google Browser Sync - Synchronizes Firefox settings between home and work computers [Google discontinued this plug-in.  Boo! to Google.  Boo! Boo! ]
• Google Notebook - Allows saving articles with notes while browsing
• IE Tab - Brings up Internet Explorer as a Firefox tab for those (dwindling) sites unfriendly to Firefox
• Xinha Here - Full WYSIWYG HTML editor in a window! Awesome for blogging, etc.

There are a zillion more. This is where you can find the rest: Firefox Add-ons

Also, if you’re using IE Tab and want a spell checker inside, get the Internet Explorer extension IE Spell.

I’m somewhat famous for having erased an entire novel, and since then have become a fanatic about safely backing up my files. I use a combination of methods, all of which has saved my butt a number of times.

Tip #1: Invest in a USB Hard Drive

This is your first and foremost defense today against losing files.

Don’t bother with a tape drive, because those are so slow and unreliable it makes backing up nearly as painful as losing the data. If performing the backup is such a horrid experience you’ll end up putting it off, and you don’t want to put it off.

Burning data to CD’s or DVD’s is a better answer, but as our hard drives get bigger and we accumulate more stuff over the years, even that can become tedious. So a nice big external hard drive — which have become fairly inexpensive lately — is the fastest and easiest answer. Most come equipped with backup software, too, but if you are like me and you put together one for yourself, go get a free copy of SyncBack and use that. I have yet to run across a better file-based backup software.

Tip #2: Invest in a Good Disk Imaging Program

If you want to backup your computer as a whole, and not just the data you’ve created, I highly recommend Norton Ghost. It’s not free but the expense is worth it, and you’ll be thanking yourself for spending the money the first time you have to use it. Ghost has rescued me more times than I can count. This will put your computer back exactly the way it was, operating system and all. Windows Vista users won’t need it, as Vista has that built in … but all you XP or earlier users will find it a godsend. With either, though, you’ll want that external USB hard drive.

Tip #3: Backup Data Among Multiple Computers

If you’ve got a home network with two or more computers, and those computers have some extra space on the hard drives, you can use a synchronization program such as SyncBack to automatically back up data files from each computer to the other. Obviously you don’t want to do this with private data, but if you’re in a trusted environment and others in your family understand not to go in and mess with those files, then this is a good way to keep all the computer data backed up without having to have a separate system such as the USB hard drive.

The trick is to create shared network folders on each computer, usually in the root directory, so that the other computer can map to it and use it as the destination for the backed up files. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, or are nervous about sharing files on your home network, then I would instead go with the USB hard drive.

Tip #4: Use Off-Site Storage

There are many free and paid services on the Internet where if you have broadband access you can store gigabytes of data. The two I use (even though they’re still a bit buggy) are XDrive.com and Jubii.com. XDrive offers 5 gigabytes of space for free, with an optional 50 gigabytes (not free), and also offers backup software as part of the deal. Jubii offers 10 gigabytes free if you sign up during their beta (hint, sign up now). I use both these sites to back up irreplaceable data, such as manuscripts etc. (Remember what happened to my novel?) That way you’re protected even if you get hit with a disaster and lose your computer and the USB hard drive.

The added benefit of these online systems is, if you are away from home and need a file, you can log in from any Internet connection and access what you need. That recently saved my butt at a SF convention where I was scheduled to do a reading — and forgot to bring the story! Lucky for me I had it online and also had my Wi-Fi enabled PDA with me … I downloaded the story at the very last second and was able to do the reading.

If you are uncomfortable storing files on the Internet, or if you don’t have broadband, the alternative is to back up select files to CD or DVD disk and put them somewhere else, like your office, a friend’s house, or even a safe deposit box. If you already have a box, then, there you go. Here’s something else to store inside it.

Tip #5: Remind Yourself To Actually Do It

Why? Because your computer hard disk WILL FAIL. It’s not a question of if, only of when. They are mechanical devices that experience wear and tear, and even though they’re more rugged and reliable than ever before they are still the Achilles heel of your computer.

I use Yahoo Calendar to send my cell phone various reminders via text messaging, and one of them is to do a backup every Thursday night. You don’t have to be so high tech. A calendar or even just a post-it note might work just as well. Just remember to do it, because … and I have seen this so many times … people usually lose their hard drives the day before they intend to back it up.

You have to perform the backup while everything seems to be running fine. Don’t wait, just do it. You will thank yourself.