If you’re a smoker like me, on more than one occasion you’ve seriously considered quitting smoking. And, on just as many occasions you’ve actually tried to quit. Almost all of us understand the health risks of smoking, and actually care about what smoking does to our bodies and those around us. In terms of finances, we get how much we spend on our habit and if we were to look at  a pie chart showing how much we spend on tobacco products compared to food or clothing, we would hang our heads in shame.

Because my work is done in front of a computer all day, and I’m in my own home, I go through just about a pack of cigarettes a day. Maybe about 5 of them actually get smoked. It’s a physical and psychological habit that I don’t know if I can break. I have no trouble going to a movie and sitting for a few hours without a smoke. I can sit in an office and survive without a smoke until a break or lunch. But at home, at my computer, I have no control over myself.

With that said: I was in my bedroom this afternoon, a room in which I don’t smoke, and turned on the tv. There was a commercial for Chantix on and they were singing their own praises that 44% of their users quit smoking within 9 to 12 weeks. Sounds pretty good. Makes it sound like it’s not all cold-turkey and total dt’s, right? So the commercial then goes into the risks and side effects of using Chantix. Um, I think I’d rather keep smoking…     Read the rest of this entry »

More and more everyday we, as a society, are always looking for the quickest and easiest way to spread information. Right now, as you’re reading, I’m spreading information about a woman who is being harassed because she tweeted about her son’s death.

There are many things about this story that I don’t like. There are two issues here. Whether or not an accident could have been prevented and whether or not it was appropriate that a mother should choose to share her tragedy on Twitter. That she left the checking on a two-year-old to an 11-year-old instead of checking herself, not ensuring that a pool enclosure wasn’t secured herself…but when it comes to pools I’ve found that no matter what a parent does, accidents will happen. I cannot judge the pool incident because I wasn’t there, and accidents will happen no matter how much care and security and intuitiveness a parent has.

I can however offer an opinion on the mother tweeting about her son falling in the pool and, sadly, passing away.     Read the rest of this entry »

Carmen Huertas got smashed at a birthday party, filled the car up with kids, and had a deadly accident on NY’s Henry Hudson Parkway. And now the city is worried that she might commit suicide. Really?

In October, Carmen Huertas attended a birthday party with her family, including an 18-month old. After the party, Huertas was going to bring a group of girls, including her own daughter, back to her home for a slumber party. Interestingly enough, when it was time to leave, Huertas collected the children, including the toddler, but her “worried” husband decided to keep the baby with him.  Eight children piled into a station wagon with a woman whose blood alcohol content was off the charts. And the other party-goers knew it! Read the rest of this entry »

The NY Daily News online is reporting that a pregnant lawyer in Valley Stream, on Long Island, left her toddler in her car seat and went shopping at Walmart for more than an hour. Really? Are you serious?

In an age when children aren’t safe walking to their school bus stops or even playing on their own front lawns, who in their right mind would leave their child in the backseat of a car while they went shopping??? Well, apparently, this chick thought it was just fine and dandy. Say what you will about New Yorkers, but thank goodness someone saw this child in the car and called police.     Read the rest of this entry »

It’s almost funny. I grew up in NY…Queens to be exact. I had a terrible Brooklyn accent and loved riding on the subway. That’s a great thing about being a kid – not having the same fears that grown-ups have. Go out or stay out late at night. Hang out on street corners or in schoolyards or parks. I’m not going to fall on the old cop-out that “things were different in my day.” Things are always different for every generation. Every age is a different age. I cannot begin to compare myself to kids running around today. Things are, in fact, different.     Read the rest of this entry »

Before I go into my rant, I just want to say that I’m sure Craigslist still serves a purpose for many other visitors.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can now say that Craigslist is of no real use to me. I’ve gotten so much run-around from the job postings that it’s no longer worth it for me to check the site even once a week anymore. Posters post for the sake of posting and never follow up on what they were originally posting for. I’m not even going to go into the recent headlines where people have been killed when responding to a Craigslist post, like in the case of the “Craigslist Killer.”     Read the rest of this entry »

So everyone wants to know what the quickest and easiest way is to get their site a high ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an extremely difficult science to master. I don’t know what the current stats are for sites being added to the web everyday, and there isn’t any consensus by internet reporting agencies about how many sites actually exist. I’ve read that Google has indexed in excess of 1.3 billion sites, but Google actually indexes pages, so who knows what 1.3 billion objects have been indexed. Even if we used only half of that number, the competition is tough.

In any event, people are under the misconception that if they launch a website, people will come. They have the latest and greatest product and everyone and their brother want to buy it. That may very well be true. Who’s going to tell these people about their product? How does anyone tell the public they have a product to sell? You might not even be selling something per se. You may have your own blog, a forum, or game or just about anything you can think of, that you want for people to know about.     Read the rest of this entry »

I used to think that having a blog would be something I could play with as I learned more about developing sites and driving traffic. When I had MTOD launched previously, I found that I needed to post at least once a day in order to keep my visitors coming back and increase my page ranking. While this is still very true, I’ve found over the past couple of years that there is so much more involved with having a blog – or any kind of website. I guess I could just jump on everyday and do exactly what the title of this site implies, provide my thought of the day and carry on. I do that, sort of. MTOD is a WordPress site that I haven’t taken the time to really customize. I happened to stumble across this theme while looking for a theme for another project and wound up registering this domain just so I could have an excuse to use the theme.

When I write a post I don’t hesitate to share my opinion on whatever the topic is. In my most recent post, I told of how I use dvd’s to provide the background noise I need in order to work. Do people really care about that? I dunno. Although I enjoy sharing my thoughts and opinions, one of the biggest purposes of this site is to drive traffic to my other sites. I have several other projects that I’m currently working on and if I have traffic to my blog I increase the chances of driving traffic to one of my other sites because their links are listed in the left column.     Read the rest of this entry »