Over the past year we've made it the norm in our family that we have a salad with most dinners (some dinners don't really work well with a salad, so this rule is more general than absolute). We buy big tub things of mixed greens (Fortinos, a local branding of Loblaws - I think they made an Italian sounding name to pander to the nearby Hamilton market - has an awesome very high quality, organic, already cleaned tub with something like 2KG of mixed greens for ~$5. With proper storage it lasts for about a week), and then add in some cut green onions, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and whatever else tempts our taste buds that night.
The health benefits are unquestionable, but more importantly it's an epicurean delight.
It is remarkable how accessible, and inexpensive, such quality-of-life improvements really are.
Every 6 months or so I sell myself on the idea that I need to go to the gym more consistently (meaning "more than every 6 months", demanding of myself that I "find the time" which more accurately means "make the time"), so I pull together all of the gym-related paraphernalia, discovering once again I can't remember the combination to my lock.
So every 6 months I end up buying a new combination lock, promptly putting the combination hint sheet in a "safe place", and then forgetting it over the coming 6-months of gym downtime.
I wonder if you can buy combination locks in bulk.
Two weeks back I derisively mentioned Microsoft's Live.com gadget creation contest (where they're trying to egg on development of gadgets for their web app by contest giveaways). Now Ebay is getting into the game - they've announced prizes for the best applications that hook into Ebay, extending the value of their services. So Ebay gets a more vibrant developer community, with more tools and services for their highly lucrative clients, and the developers get...a remote chance at winning some token prize.
As a professional software developer and enterpreneur, this serves as a huge omen, yelling out "There is no money to be made in this market". The normal carrot that draws developers into a niche is revenue, with which there is little need for additional incentives (e.g. Why would I care about your token game machine when I'm planning on selling 50,000 copies of my software at $49.95 each?). So when an organization becomes desperate enough to start doing giveaways, you know that niche is undergoing pretty unhealthy times.
A bubble is expanding, and for those of you who missed out on getting rich like everyone-else-supposedly-did during Bubble 1.0 (being in the technology market, it was confusing to relatives that I wasn't a hundred-millionaire in the late-90s: The newspapers were telling them that everyone in tech was overflowing with cash. On the flip side they were confused that I remained employed and making a good wage after the crash, because the newspapers were telling them that everyone in tech was unemployed and replaced by offshoring), here is your magic machine to tell you what you need to do. Press the button and start raking in the millions!