Andrew Parks Life Blog Experiences & Interests

I have one health related book that has stayed on my nightstand as a quick reference for a few years now, and I use it whenever I have some type of health issue. It is called Inner Cleansing by Carlson Wade and I highly recommend that you take time give it a read, then use it as a reference. It is a very easy read. The book has large font letters and you can breeze through the chapter quickly.

I have employed many of the suggestions in this book to improve my health and overall well being.

It has chapters on arthritis pain, cholesterol cleansing, longevity, skin, blood pressure, digestive system, recommended food and juices, allergies, youthful power, supercharge your heart, miracle foods, dynamic circulation, release wastes from aging stiffness, cleanse your vital organs, bloodstream, arteries, body motions that wash away aches and pains, de-age your cells, total cleansing, hemorrhoids, ulcers, varicose veins, nutritional cleansing, detoxify your digestive system, constipation, diarrhea, stomachache, raw juice, super cleansing, healthy youth at any age, and an excellent index that covers most health issues.

I refer back to this book often, hopefully it can help others.

Inner Cleansing: How to Free Youself from Joint-Muscle-Artery-Circulation Sludge

Posted under favorite books

One of my dreams and goals for the future that I would like to achieve withing the next five years is as follows.
I have discussed this at length with my Wife and we agree on most points here of the goals.

1. Move away from the suburbs, urban sprawl, home owners associations, heavily populated areas, etc..
2. Purchase a small working farm / hobby farm on several acres of workable land.
3. Build and install my own energy generating methods by what ever means is available
The list here is not all inclusive, solar panels, wind turbine,geo-thermal solutions, passive solar,
grid tied system, battery backed system, emergency generator, solar hot water heater, high R value
Insulation, high R value double pane windows,utilize the latest technology in photovoltaics.
Hydro-electric power from a creek or river on my property.
The list could go on here in this area of alternative energy sources, and I will add to it here as
Technologies change.
4. Become less dependent on grocery stores and restaurants for my Family’s food supply.
5. Participate in a growers co-op, and community gardening.
6. Have our own water well.
7. Live a simpler life
8. Seek out a more organic diet for me and my Family.
9. Find a more spiritual side of my life.
10. This should have been step 1 – Secure the financial means to achieve steps 1-9.

These are not such lofty goals considering the government is offering tax breaks and incentives to individuals that install and use alternative energy sources, as well as the tax breaks that you get if you operate a farm.

I ordered a very thick book a few months ago called the solar energy source book. The company that publishes the book has been around since the mid-1970′s. It is packed with alternative energy ideas, and the actual sources where you can get everything you need for living a more self-sustaining lifestyle.
These people where probably called hippies then, but are considered innovators now.

I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this sort of stuff.

A wish list

Posted under General interests, Hobbies, favorite books, goals and dreams, home, projects

Today a friend of mine let me play around with his new Amazon kindle 2. Needless to say I am jealous, tech toy envy is not good. I was aware of the older legacy kindle, I think is was called the kindle 1, and it looks like the designers really packed this new puppy with features. If you don’t know what a kindle is, basically it is an electronic book reader. Here is the cool thing though, unlike reading a PDF or a word document on a laptop, which becomes very tiresome, the kindle uses something called electronic paper technology.

The technology behind electronic paper is that it does not have the same glare that you get when reading text from a laptop, or PC. If you have ever tried to read anything on a laptop on a sunny day, much less even a cloudy day forget it, the glare is too much to deal with.

Carlos gave me a quick tutorial on using it, I have to say it is an easy learning curve, even for the most technically challenged.If you have a hard time with small fonts, what I call mice type, kind of like what you may be reading now . The Kindle2 has a function where you can change the font size, and font type on the fly. The kindle really looks like something apple would have designed, because it is very thin like the new Iphone, itouch etc…

By the way Carlos also has an iphone, he downloaded the free app on the Apple app store, and we did  some comparisons, if you like constantly having to move the page around to read it, I guess it is close to reading any text on the iphone. Not sure if they have an app for itouch?

It weighs around 10 ounces but has a very sturdy feel just like apples products. He says the battery life is around 4 days, which I question that, but from what I have read about the new things they are doing with battery life technology I guess it is possible.

I have been very interested in ebook readers for sometime, I read articles about what was coming years ago when I got into reading e-books on my laptop. It looks like the technology has finally caught up with the predictions. So much is packed into this thing and the learning curve on it is dog simple.

You can bookmark pages and go back to where you left off reading. Also it has a feature where you can make notes / annotate sections on the sides of the pages just like you could in a real paper book.

I have always had an interest in finding ways to not use so much paper. I quit taking the newpaper years ago when I was able to get all my news, local and nationwide online. This little device has green written all over it’s face. I can only imagine the eco-friendly devices, and solutions to our wastefull habits that are in store for us in the future.

So my question is, how many of the books that I like to read are available on the kindle 2. Carlos says the info he read states right now there are around a quarter of a million books available for download.

I really go excited when I found out that free wireless connectivity is included in the price. You can browse Amazon’s kindle book store, and find your book and download it from any location where their wireless coverage is available. It seems that the wireless coverage should be pretty good, as Amazon’s whispernet they say is somehow linked in with Sprint’s 3G network. I know that sprint has really been beefing up their 3g network over the past few years, it, “publicly available wireless connectivity” is just one of the “big shifts” of the internet. So you know what this means for the kindle, and any other device using an available 3g network? No more looking for a wireless hotspot.

Previous owners of the original kindel can download all their previous purchases.
The big draw to me is if you are an avid reader like me you can save half on best sellers, you can get your subscriptions to your favorite magazines and news papers, and I looked out on Amazon and it says they are auto delivered to your Kindle 2. It had big name newspapers like the Wall St. Journal, and The New York Times. Can you imagine how much paper could be saved.

Last he showed me that it has free wireless access to wikipedia included, and free access to an online dictionary, I forgot the name of the dictionary site.

I think I covered all the feature that he ran through in about ten minutes.

Oh, almost forgot this one, when your eyes get tired of reading you can switch over to text to speech mode, and it will read to you. It sounds like the normal top of the line text to speech program, which I really don’t like that much, but nevertheless you can rest your eyes and finish off a chapter or two.

So I started searching for prices out there, I looked on ebay and found kindles being bid up beyond the new and used prices that are on Amazon, that does not make sense to me, unless you like wasting money.
I will be putting this on my wish list for Christmas. I usually don’t get expensive gifts for Christmas, although I would gladly forgo a Birthday gift to get my hands on one.

Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

Posted under General interests, Hobbies, Real-time, books, favorite books, gadgets

I seem to be a bit late to getting around to watching the latest movies, and I practically have to be drug to the movies. The last movie theater that I visited was when my Wife and I went to see Mama Mia, I was reluctant to go see a movie with a name like that, I knew nothing about the movie, then after the first few minutes my Wife informed me, “Oh by the way this is a Musical” as she laughed at the look on my face.
Well needless to say Mama Mia seems to be one of those movies that you start out hating, then all of the sudden it grows on you. We now have the DVD and did a family movie night, my daughters ended up hating it too, then ended up saying it was a good move. It is one of those movies that gives you a good feeling once it is finished with it.

So again with Twilight the movie, I am sort of late here as well. My daughters have been reading all the Stephenie Meyer Twilight series books way before the movie was made, of course while watching the move they informed me several times that the book was way better than the movie. And they kept saying something about “is robert pattison’s married? They googled it, the answer is no.

I have to say the movie was pretty entertaining, I doubt if I will ever get around to reading even a chapter of one of the books. I am more of a technical reader that a pleasure non-fiction reader, I need to change that I’m told.

Now I am looking  forward to the release of the next movie, New Moon.

Posted under Family, General interests, Music, My Life, books, favorite books, home, movies

Well I just finished a new book called “The Next 100 Years” written by George Friedman. Friedman starts the book off and inclusion throughout by giving a very accurate account of last several decades, ties in past global history into a concise view of how past history has set the stage for the United States of America the superpower it is militarily, technologically, and economically, and how it sets global geopolitical landscape that opens the curtain for his predictions for America, and the world for the next 100 years.

Broken down in decade bi-decade formats, predictions of wars, reshaping global powers, and a coming golden age.

Even though I read this book through my own perception of a Christians world view, I think based on his understanding and scope of tying together past history with the present and shaping the predictions he has about the future of the next 100 years, he is quite possibly the only Author that I have ever read that has been able to pull this off so that a layman like me can understand it in a light bulb going off kind of way.

In school we all where taught facts about history, and you learned it becuase you had to, this book pulls all those facts together in a way that you can view the modern world powers and their history and future in a new way.

I think this book should be put on the recommended reading list for educational institutions, even though it is a prediction based work, founded on factual past histories, the book somehow helps the mind understand history in a different sort of way.

Update: 3/19/09

Ok I found the link to the book on Amazon, looks like you can probably get it for much less on there.
I picked up my copy at Barnes and Noble, although I think I paid just under 25.95 with my bookstore discount card.

What is really cool is they have a Kindle version available for download, also in CD and Cassette audio formats.

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century

Posted under General interests, Real-time, books, favorite books