More deaths are caused each year by tobacco than by all deaths from HIV, illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murder combined.

I think everyone should read that sentence again and pay extra attention to the word COMBINED. It’s also the number one preventable cause of disease/cancer. Let’s not forget just a few awesome side effects that really impress all the young dudes (and dudettes) :

• bad breath
• smelly clothes, hair, home & car
• yellowed teeth & fingertips
• poor circulation
• heart disease
• cancer
• coughing & wheezing
• shortness of breath
• secondhand smoke
• decreased sense of smell and taste

Most of this information has been ingrained in people of my generation since elementary school. I think smokers my age knew all of this before they even started. Was it really worth starting smoking to get that extra 15 minute break at work? (that the cost of that pack of smokes totally cancelled out) Oh, you only smoke when you drink? That’s so cool. I’m impressed. Take me now. You smoke because your sister smoked and you thought she was cool?  News flash, every smoker has an excuse, anyone with any addiction does – they’re twelve for ten cents the way I shop. We don’t want to hear it over and over, we just want you to stop, for your health and ours. Which brings me to my point…

The UK has given us many awesome things, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Queen…and No Smoking Day is another one of those things. We should definitely have one in the US, but we can adopt this holiday. The No Smoking Day campaign helps smokers who want to quit by creating a supportive environment for them, and by highlighting the many sources of help and advice available. Each each year millions of smokers choose March 10th to try to stop smoking. To learn more about No Smoking Day, visit the website.

No Smoking Day

I know the topics hit the hardest when it comes to smoking are the ones I’ve already listed, but I found something just as shocking as finding out smoking a pack a day is like pouring a cup of tar in your lungs a year…the financial costs associated with smoking. At $4.50 a pack-a-day smoker goes through $31.50 a week, or $1,639 per year. That’s a nice vacation or hefty payment on something.

Smoke in your car? That’s a minimum of $150 for a cleaning and extraction before selling, and/or up to $1,000-$3,000 off the resale of your car depending on the model and damage done by smoking (smell, burns, ash, etc.). The same applies to a smoker’s house, which has to be professionally cleaned and painted before sale, usually coming in at a few thousand dollars.

Also expect to pay around $50 more per month for health insurance, and $1,000 and up more for term life insurance. When it comes to homeowner’s insurance, nonsmokers can usually receive a discount of 10% or greater, because they are much less likely to burn the house down.

Studies also show that smokers earn from 4% to 11% less than nonsmokers. Not only is there a loss of productivity due to smoke breaks and poorer health, smokers a perceived as less attractive and successful.

Need and extra pack of gum to masks smoker’s breath? That’s $50 per year. Need to have your yellowed teeth whitened? That’s $400 per year. Need to have your suit dry cleaned once a month? That’s $144 a year. The side effects of smoking all cost money.

Use Wednesday, March 10, 2010 to break free with millions of others. Don’t forget, nothing says No Smoking like Freddie Mercury in drag:

While sitting on my butt, watching youtube videos of Led Zeppelin, The Donnas, The Runaways, Tom Petty and various others – I felt a bit of remorse for having enough time to click on links to videos for two hours, yet not enough time to update my blog. (Ok, I felt a bit more remorse for having never learned to play guitar, but let’s live in the now.)

It’s nobody’s fault but mine, and not only did that lead to a wonderful tie in to my favorite Led Zeppelin song and give me an excuse to make a graphic – it’s also true. So. I’m going to get started with what’s been rocking (or at least causing mild aftershocks) since my last update.

Blippy

Blippy is a service that allows you to see and discuss what your friends and others are buying on services such as iTunes, Netflix, eBay, Amazon, and more. You can even set it up to show purchases from credit cards if you wish. You can also comment on your purchases and your friends purchases. All you have to do is go to blippy.com and join, then you link the accounts of the services that you’d like your friends to be able to see purchases from.

I signed up on blippy a few days ago and I’m liking it so far, I just need a few more friends to use the service to make it really fun. Feel free to sign up, follow me,  and commend me on my excellent movie selections on Netflix, such as Conan the Barbarian and Pink Cadillac… blippy.com/khara

Google Buzz

Google Buzz was released yesterday, and if you don’t have a gmail account, or aren’t a big googlite you probably haven’t a clue as to what it is. Let me tell you, I have a several google services and I can’t even tell you exactly what it is. It’s googley, it’s new, and it’s under your inbox link in gmail. Go play with it until your head explodes…see you in five.

Seriously though, it’s a service that pulls in feeds from services you link it with, such as, twitter, picasa, and anything you’ve put on your google profile – facebook or a personal blog to name a few. It does the same for your gmail friends and you can all see and comment on each other’s activities. You can also post something directly into buzz for your friends to see with the option of making it public or private. I don’t think I’ll be using Buzz too much though, I already see the info on sites like facebook and twitter before it’s fed over to Buzz.

iPhone Apps

I’ve gotten in the habit of downloading free apps before bed and here are the best ones I’ve downloaded in the past week:

TanZen Lite – this is a game in which the object is to arrange paper shapes into origami type animals and objects, and it’s very addicting. (it kept me more entertained than a repeat viewing of Transformers II)

Flood-It! 2 - I am pretty terrible at this, you have to flood a square with the same color by starting in the left corner and changing the colors of squares within the main square as needed to accomplish this.

Classics – this app resembles a book shelf lined with many classic books, you can choose one and then read the entire book, you even get to turn the pages. Books include Alice in Wonderland, The Time Machine, The Iliad and several other classics.

Have you downloaded any good apps this week? Already have a blippy.com account? Know what to make of Google Buzz? Let me know in the comments!

Stomach Death Flu 2010

Ahhh, the reason I didn’t get a post in last night (there are various other excuses reasons for the days before…) I don’t actually have the stomach flu yet, but dealing with the aftermath of another having it was almost as awesome. I hope I’m not calling the dinosaurs soon as well. BLARF!

Ever designed something or had something designed which didn’t have any copy text to go in it yet? Then you may be familiar with Lorem Ipsum, if not it looks something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem Ipsum in action on heyletsrock.com

Lorem Ipsum is dummy text used to fill in content areas until the real content arrives. It’s commonly called Lorem Ipsum because those are the first two words of the text. Lorem Ipsum has been the standard dummy text used in the print industry since the 1500s, when a typesetter used the Latin text to typeset pages to show examples of different type (fonts).

However, it’s not just a bunch of random Latin words as it appears (or “Harry Potter text”, as one client called it). Lorem Ipsum actually comes from passages in “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. The book became very popular during the Renaissance and Lorem Ipsum is taken from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of the book.

Here is the first section along with it’s English translation: (you’ll notice “delorem ipsum…” about halfway through)

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

In English: (1914 translation by H. Rackham)

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

Heavy. Who knew that’s what was filling in for their real content? So why is Lorem Ipsum used for dummy text instead of say, the same word over and over or, you know, something in English? The same word repeated over and over “copy copy copy copy copy” doesn’t look natural to the eye and “real” articles used as dummy content are distracting to the reader, well, because they actually know what it says. (I think the chance of a Latin professor reading your Lorem Ipsum is pretty slim).

Want some Lorem Ipsum of your very own to use when the situation arises? Head over to www.lipsum.com to generate as many paragraphs, words or bytes as you want.