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10 Great Free Apps for BlackberryYesterday

Blackberries may have been overshadowed lately by the success of the iPhone, but they still offer and incredibly powerful platform.Plus, since the Blackberry operating system is build on Java and has always been open, there are a slew of useful and mature applications, many of which are free. Since I’m a cheapskate when it comes to software, I’ve loaded up my Blackberry Curve with a boatload of free programs. Here are the ones I use the most:

1. Google Mobile

Google Mobile is an all-in-one package combining Google’s excellent mobile apps (Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Sync) with links to Google’s mobile-optimized web services (search, Picasa, Reader, Docs, Google Notebook, etc.). Although Blackberry’s already handle email fairly well, I find the Gmail application a much more comfortable way to access email. The Maps application does everything you can do with Google Maps on your PC (search, get directions, switch to satellite view, and so on), plus it will use either the nearest cell tower or, if you have a GPS-enabled phone, GPS to pinpoint your location. The Sync app lets you do a two-way synchronization between the calendar on your Blackberry and Google Calendar. The rest of the links open services in Bl

5 Easy Ways to Shake Off a Bad MoodYesterday

Everyone gets into a big ol’ bad mood sometimes. I’m talking about the kind of mood that throws a spanner in the works, has you fuming at every little thing and threatens to ruin a perfectly good day.

Sometimes these moods happen just when you don’t want them to and they can get in the way of doing what you want to do in the way that you want to do it. Here’s how to shake them off quickly so that you can get back your life.

1. Leave the room

Get a change of scene. Right now. Bad moods can be triggered by all kinds of things and often it’s something around you that ticked you off, and if you stay in the same environment it’ll continue to nag at you and play on your mind. Go to a new environment, surround yourself with different things, different people and different sensations and it’s easier for you to leave your bad mood behind you.

2. Give yourself a treat

When you’re in a bad mood it’s easy to look for things to fuel that bad mood or reinforce it. Why? Because you want to feel like your bad mood is valid, so you look for things to validate it and make it right.

Break th

10 Investments You Should KnowNovember 18

It’s impossible to miss the fact that stocks, real estate and bonds all make for decent investments (at least most of the time). But there are so many different investment options, most of which get minimal marketing. If you want to take a look at a wider variety of options, you should be able to at least tell an American Depository Receipt apart from a Convertible Security. There are about twenty investments that any investor should at least be familiar with and the ten listed below are the first half of that list.

1. American Depository Receipt (ADR)

ADRs are traded on U.S. stock markets just like regular stocks, but they actually represent shares in foreign corporations. An ADR is issued by a U.S.-based bank or brokerage, which buys a large number of shares from a company based outside the U.S. Those shares are bundled into groups and then resold; they are usually labeled with a ratio representing how many shares a particular ADR represents. The sponsoring bank collects detailed financial information about any company whose shares it resells. ADRs are a relatively simple way to invest in foreign companies and avoid the administrative and duty costs of international transactions. Other countries besides the U.S. h

Do You Determine Your Beliefs, or Do Your Beliefs Determine You? (Part Two)November 18

Following on from Part One of this three-part series on beliefs. Here is part two:

Catholic Craig

Growing up in a Catholic home which was regularly frequented by nuns and priests (friends of my folks), attending only Catholic schools, being taught about life (God, religion, marriage, relationships, sex, good, bad, right, wrong) exclusively from a Catholic perspective, hanging out with my Catholic friends and only ever seeing the inside of a Catholic church, I was probably never gonna be a Buddhist by my fifteenth birthday. Or even a Baptist or Anglican for that matter. My upbringing, my environment and my education taught me that I was born into the one true church. Whatever that means.

As a teenager, I honestly felt sorry for all those non-Catholics who were going to hell; the ones in the fake churches. Whatever that means. After all, we had the Pope on our team; God’s personal representative on planet earth and a direct successor to good old Saint Peter - the first Pope. Apparently. How could I possibly go wrong?

Fortunately for me, I had somehow stumbled on to the righ

Be Heard. Speak Plainly.November 17

Every semester I get a handful of students who have settled on the idea that the more big words they use, the better. Regardless of whether they know what those words mean or not.

So I get papers elucidating the patriarchal configuration of the social arrangement, rather than telling me about male-dominated societies. Or they pontificate on the topic of inadequate provision of pedagogical resources vis-à-vis the particular requirements of participation in the modern form of governance, instead of describing the failure of schools to prepare kids to be good citizens. And so on.

They learn it, of course, from the bad writing that plagues many of the works assigned to them. But it is because we as a society hold such work in high regard that students ape the style of the complicated stuff instead of the more readable work on their reading lists – which is just a s common as the hoity-toity stuff. They thing writing smart must mean using big words and tortured grammar, mistaking difficulty of a work for some measure of its quality.

If you have to work at it, the thinking goes, it must be worth working at.

Of course, this is nonsense. Yes, there are works of exceeding difficulty that are worth reading – in spite of the difficulty, not because of it. And these works – even the best of