Here are more links with security tips, this time with great stuff from Lifehacker.com.

On passwords:

• I Will Use Good Passwords, by Joe Kissell of Macworld.com
• Password Hasher, a Firefix security add-on.
• Pick A Good Password, part one and part two (which is basically a very short mnemonic tip).
• How I'd Hack Your Weak Passwords, by John Pozadzides, plus this great article on The Threat of Free Public Wi-Fi, with videos.
• Making your passwords safer.

Assorted phishing and protection tips:

• A phishing flowchart for the uninitiated, and a guide to avoiding online scams.
• 8 methods to avoid phishing scams, at Marvquin.com, and 44 more ways at Focus.com.
• Report phishing attempts at Phishtank, so other people can protect themselves too.
  
• Protecting yourself from malware attacks.
• Protecting your data the right way.

Here's a little compilation of useful articles from an excellent resource, MakeUseOf.com, to give you a few helpful suggestions on more secrute browsing and internet use.

Whether you're doing business or buying stuff, you can check out the following articles for safety tips on account security and credit card protection.

• How to safely connect to your online banking account.
• Keeping your credit-cards safe when shopping on-line.
• Keeping your PayPal account secure.
• Keeping your important accounts safe.
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I know we just finished a series on business lessons from defensive driving, but I'm assuming you're all adults and are responsible people.  That being said, this post is about beer.

To be more specific, brewing your own.

The resources cited below are from past visits and click by's on Life Hacker, The Simple Dollar and GenX Finance. You're certainly free to do your own research, since these are just starter lessons and simple tools for the brewing process.

In case we haven't mentioned the site before, Trent Hamm's finance blog, The Simple Dollar (with 73,000 readers) is one of our most frequently visited resources. Since his blog has been around since 2006, this means you have years of entries to choose from with great advice on a wide variety of issues, from making your own laundry detergent, to the merits of cooking at home, to reader Q & A's, to the pay-off's of making sensible money choices in the face of other people's negative opinions (and he also shares on how to deal with those opinions).

Hamm also has a Small Business section too, and aside from the many well-thought out articles (especially his 14 part Money Rules series)  you can also download his free e-book, “Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on Just One Page.”

Another favorite is Wisebread, a blog community updated daily with deals, commentary, analysis and advice on personal finance. Play around in their forums for stimulating discussions geared towards helping you "live large on a small budget."

Power-napping is not just for cats (as those people lucky enough to support a cat can attest to). Da Vinci did it. Edison did it. Churchill did it. Millions of less-stressed-than-you people do it and managed to keep their lives running smoothly, you can too. See,it's not really the difficulty of taking a nap in the middle of your work day as it is getting over the intense urge to Do Something More Productive, and the guilt that comes with laying this urge aside.

Circadian rhythms govern our resting and active periods. Modern life lets us control this (somewhat) with various drugs of choice, the most common of which is caffeine. Napping can bring you back to the rhythms of your body, leading to better performance.

Remember nap-time when you were very young? Children needed time-outs from the frenetic activity their enormous energy levels could give them, so, boom, nap-time. Adults usually get to control their energy slumps with quick-fixes like coffee, but why not try implementing a small nap in your daily cycle to re-charge yourself?

Some of the following sites were recommended by a JROX resource, MakeUseOf.com. I visited the sites and here's my take:

The previous article, Bridging the Gap (Parts 1, 2) was all about making a real and sustainable connection between your dreams and your reality. This article is all about dealing with the stress of doing so.

Now, this may come as  a shock to you, but mental stress can be much harder on the body than physical stress, especially  if it's sustained. It's true, and for a large part of the time we do it to ourselves, unconsciously.

There's already a lot of evidence out there proving the mind-body link is real and very important, it's just that in our hurry to Get Somewhere, to Make Things Happen and Get Things Done, we tend to forget that link.  What happens then is we split our selves in two, Mind and Body, paying much more attention to the Mind (and what happens inside it) and treating the Body as just another object to take care of and control.

Don't just take my word for it, look at the statistics and news.  Check around at your workplace and your own health and see for yourself how stress manifests itself, physically as well as mentally. Insomnia, weakened immune systems, back pain, the list goes on and on.

The writers of Tripwire Magazine, featured in an earlier resource post , collected over 50 assorted tools and methods to help you present your data visually. Now, lest visions of pie graphs and death by PowerPoint put you off, wait just a bit. 

Forged by evolution, we're a visual race, and living in these modern times we tend to take this aspect of ours for granted, casually ignoring all the in-your-face-advertising and screaming messages that assault our senses every day. Just like we use filters to weed out spam on-line, we learn very quickly to filter out the thousands of pushy messages we're targeted with, in sheer mental self-defense.

How do we do this? We zero in and focus in very short blips when we need to.

Results: A forcibly shorter attention span and a  generally diffused focus (we usually don't see anything out of the ordinary unless a) we pay attention or b) something jumps out and waves at us).  It's the "Ooh, shiny!" magpie moment. If it doesn't look interesting, pass on, pass on...It's the rare person who can take the time to throttle back and take a second (or third), closer look, what with all the stuff competing for their attention.

• Holly Lisle, acclaimed science-fiction and fantasy writer, has a free, 209-page e-book full of very memorable advice on writing, available for download here.
• No Train No Gain, an online resource for newsroom trainers (in journalism writing), has a resource page to help improve writing.
• The Purdue Online Writing Lab has writing resources and instructional material meant for writers and teachers/trainers.
• Forward Motion, an online community aimed at helping writers get  published professionally, has back issues available, with some as free PDF downloads

And these are just a few of the thousands of writing resources, communities, organizations and downloads available on-line. Are you getting an idea of where we're heading with this now?

Writing is a skill. As with any skill, there are levels to writing that can't be reached by any process other than study and deliberate application -- practice, practice, practice. Some of the resources above are meant to break writing down to its very nut and bolts, others attend more to the process of writing, and still others to a particular goal -- getting published, or mastering journalism. All of these resources can help you write better, if you apply yourself.

Tripwire is a very informative online resource for web designers and web developers. With literally hundreds of tutorials, tools, tips and step-by-step examples of the best design and development out there on the web, Tripwire's writers share information that can help change the way you think about and approach design and the Internet.

A quick preview of post titles should give you an idea of what to expect in terms of samples and other helpful tools:
16 Scarily Realistic 3D animations
15 Stunning Fresh Photographic Effects from DevianArt
10 Brilliant On-line Tools For Freelancers
30 Essential Tools For Web Designers

Tripwire offers articles on things from CSS, design and development, icons and Javascript to Photoshop, themes and logos. For the artistic and the analytical among you, this site offers hours of fun, inspiration and helpful lessons on how to expand your repertoire of skills, and expose you to how other designers and developers think. Have fun.

It's December! Blink, it'll be Christmas. Blink again, it'll be New Year's day --snap!--just like that. Take this moment before the unavoidable seasonal rush to get a head start on planning your 2010.

For the master planners and list-lovers out there, Compact Calendar Creator helps you print-out an entire year on one page. It's a very simple (and free) online app that lets you pick between a Sunday-Saturday version (where the 5 workdays are sandwiched in between the 2 weekdays) or a Monday-Sunday version (with Sat-Sun ending the week).

PDF Calendar also lets you print out your choice of calendar --again, for free-- from the usual month-at-a-glance to 12 weeks per page, an option which you can format to fit your preferences with shading, borders, margins and even page-orientation.