Pete’s Musings

It’s nice to have a semi-scientific rationalization for this drive to blog. lol

Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Source: Blogging:It’s good for you (Scientific American)

I was in the midst of writing a huge and awesome blog post about my surgery … when I accidentally hit the backspace key outside of a text box! In firefox, that means that the page goes back to previous in history and I LOST THE POST. I was devastated. Not only was it thorough and well written, it was funny. I wanted to cry. Anyway, I guess I’ll get back to it soon, but in the meantime I decided to make a few changes here.

1) I added a message me box to the right. If you write me a message there it goes directly to my new Instant Messaging software. If you stick around, Read More »

thought I would change it up a bit. Let me know how it looks … or if you know of a better theme. hehe

yes, i’m bloggimg from my cellphone. why? not entirely sure, but it’s cool!

Sometime today my website counter crossed the 4000 site hits (8500 page counts). In the grand scheme of things, I guess that’s not a lot for just under 3 years … but it’s not insignificant for sure! Works out to about 4 hits a day. No one is subscribed to my RSS feed except myself (do people actually use this? lol)

Main visitors seem to come from Read More »

Changing the look of the blog … kinda tired of looking at the old one. Maybe I’ll be more apt to write something if it’s less ugly. lol. Don’t count on it!

My domain name expires today and I don’t yet have the money to renew it. So as of tomorrow, peacekeeper.biz will likely become unreachable to everyone. Hopefully, I’ll be able to scrounge up the 9-20$ needed for this and be able to get the domain back before someone else grabs it. Going to take some time though, because I don’t have a CC to pay with, and need to rely on paypal transfer or regular mail, each of which take weeks to go through.

I feel kinda bad about this, but gotta eat and at least pay my car and bankruptcy every month. If I miss any of those, my future is pretty much in the shitter. I’ll never be able to finance another car if I loose this one and Read More »

OK, switching over to a new blog wasn’t as easy as I hoped! But I’ve got it mostly back the way it was before. The biggest challenge was the random picture block on the right … it was a huge pain to get right! I know, I could have just used the normal flickr thing like before … but the pictures were small and it was a bit distracting. This new picture block is actually part of a larger photo album plugin that I have installed. The album itself is going to take some time though as I have to manually edit the files so it looks right with this template - right now it looks absolutely horrid! Read More »