Hasta La Gadget!

I didn’t learn to knit because I’m a crafty person. I’m creative, sure, but more in a “how can we make this work?” kind of way rather than a “let’s make this pretty” way. I didn’t learn to knit because my mother taught me; her mother didn’t teach her either. In fact, I don’t know any women in my family who actively knit or crochet. And I didn’t learn to knit because I just LOVE knit objects and couldn’t help myself.

I learned to knit because I was desperate.

A few years ago, I was freelancing in a high-stress industry that expected a minimum of 12 hours of work a day, usually six days a week. I loved my job, but those hours and that stress — not to mention the commute — was just too much. I had great friends and family, but finding time to see them was just as stressful as working. Not to mention, constantly disappointing them when I couldn’t show up wasn’t fun either.

The lack of friend and family contact started to get to me. My exhaustion led to depression, and I started spending my free time alone in my room with Netflix. I’m a huge supporter of Netflix binges, but only in moderation. When it’s the only thing you do outside of work, that’s when it becomes a problem.

It was bad enough that I was tired and unhappy most of the time, but then, as it so often happens, my depression led way for anxiety. Feeling anxious was probably the worst thing I’ve ever experienced up until that point. I used to love going out and chatting with old friends, but when I tried my whole body would shake, my breathing would labor, and my vision would blur. Oh, and I did I mention that I would get lightheaded and have trouble walking? Not fun.

In an act of desperation, I quit freelancing and found a boring job in an office with normal hours. If you think making a radical change like that would be a cure-all, you’d be wrong. It just made things worse because I started having huge second thoughts about leaving my career.

This was all a few years ago, back before the Affordable Care Act. Back when freelancers were screwed on options, and you were denied health care because of pre-existing conditions. (And no, my new office job didn’t offer health insurance, either.)

I couldn’t afford psychiatric help in New York City, though I’m a huge believer in it. Seriously, if you can go, you should. But I didn’t have that option at the time. So what to do?

At my new, terribly boring office job, I had become a news junkie. In between all of the horrible stories about rapes and shootings and other disasters, there was a study about how working with your hands was good for you and good for your brain.

I already loved cooking, sewing and gardening (though my skills at the last two are somewhat questionable), but it wasn’t enough. I needed something else, something where if I messed up, I could just start over instead of ruining (or killing) my project.

I actively avoided knitting for a very long time. Friends would try to get me to take knitting classes with them, and I refused. What’s the point of knitting, anyway? I have plenty of scarves. Thanks, but no thanks.

But when it becomes a struggle to leave the house, you’ll try anything. Including knitting. It helps to see articles from CNN and Canadian Living, among others, always popping up and touting knitting as being wonderful for your brain. I decided to give it a shot.

I tried teaching myself to knit, rather unsuccessfully, from a variety of YouTube videos. The quality wasn’t that great, and it was a bit of a struggle at first.

I was so irritated that I couldn’t learn from home that I sucked it up, rounded up some friends, arranged for private lessons, and spent my evenings working on a lace blanket. I started going to knitting meet-ups so I could meet other knitters and improve my skills, and slowly, my anxiety and depression started to slip away.

To say that knitting pulled me out of my deep rut is a bit of an understatement. I believe knitting saved my life, and I didn’t even realize it was helping because I was so focused on figuring out which needle went into which hole to make a pretty design (or at least something recognizable) that I didn’t have time to worry about the stresses of my life.

Now I try to always keep my knitting projects nearby, and I usually have a couple going at the same time. I love knitting each night to take my mind off the day. Sometimes, if I know it’s going to be a hectic day, I’ll knit in the mornings before I get going.

It’s my favorite form of mindful meditation. I take a few minutes for myself each day, focus on my breathing, on the feel of the yarn in my hands, and I listen to the clicking of the needles as I work. I can zone out from the ambush of negative and stressful thoughts that sometimes invade my consciousness AND be productive at the same time.

I cannot endorse knitting enough. I even started offering knitting courses online as a way to reach out to others who still want a safe, home-based activity that helps them achieve a little bit of peace (and a finished project!). Knitting helped me fall back in love with the world, it saved my life, and it just might save yours too.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

I’m on the island of Oahu taking the whole family on an epic Hawaiian vacation.

Babette says she wants to visit a waterfall because she loves the idea of being under a waterfall in Hawaii.

I check the guidebooks and pick an excursion that will take us on a trek through a Hawaiian rainforest only minutes from our hotel room on Waikiki Beach.

The same location where they film movies and TV shows like The Hunger Games, Jurassic Park and Lost.

Our tour guide says the hike to the waterfall is less than a mile on a “beginner” type of trail.

Oh good, think I.

He drives us up a windy mountain road until we are literally in the clouds.

There’s a slight mist that makes everything damp and slick.

We start our hike.

The path starts out nice and flat.

The views are absolutely stunning – here’s one…

Here’s another…

It’s not hard to imagine T. Rex and velociraptors still might be roaming around the next curve.

Gradually, however, the path becomes a little steeper…

Then a little steeper…

Suddenly, we’re climbing up a very steep, slippery path made even more treacherous by the presence of that fine mist that makes every step like trying to climb up a mud bath.

But guess what?

The entire time we’re going up, I’m thinking…

“If it’s this bad going up, how bad is it going to be coming down?”

Because I’ve done enough hiking to know that as hard as a mountain may be to climb up, it’s twice as hard to come down.

Then I see some fellow hikers coming down the mountain, and they all have walking sticks to assist them.

And I’m thinking, “God, I wish I had a walking stick for the trip down.”

Then we finally come to the waterfall – and it’s totally worth it.

Look…

(The actual waterfall is over 150 feet tall, so you can’t see even a tenth of it in this photo. Trust me: Totally worth it.)

But I still have a very huge problem.

How to hike down that treacherous path we just came up without killing myself.

I’m silently praying: “God, I really need a walking stick to make it down this mountain.”

Babette and the kids decide to jump in the fresh water wading pool at the base of the waterfall.

I’m watching them with a smile, silently praying, “God, I really need a walking stick to make it down this mountain.”

I look at the time and realize that we have to start heading back down the mountain to meet our tour guide for our ride home.

And I’m silently praying, “God, I really need a walking stick to make it down this mountain.”

Amber comes out of the wading pool and says, “Noah, could you use a walking stick?”

And she hands me what looks like Gandalf’s staff from Lord of the Rings.

It had been laying there the whole time, about ten feet from where I’d been sitting, just out of my sight.

The fact that she found the perfect walking stick was miraculous enough.

But what made it truly incredible is the fact that the stick was at the top of the mountain.

That means someone had to have left it and NOT gone down the mountain with it.

There are no words to describe my gratitude for the appearance of this miracle walking stick.

And believe me – I don’t know how I would have made it down the mountain without it.

Here it is (with Amber who found it for me)…

The power of intention + Asking for help + Someone who can see something you can’t + Taking action even in the face of doubt = Miracles

Noah’s Note: Sometimes miracles happen when you least expect them. In fact, isn’t that the definition of a miracle? 

I believe in you!

If you like today’s article, please comment and share if you want more content like this…

Noah St. John is famous for inventing Afformations and helping busy entrepreneurs to accelerate income, boost self-confidence, and make success automatic.

His sought-after advice has been called the “secret sauce” for creating breakthrough performance.

Get Noah’s new video training series How to Boost Income and Self-Confidence Using Power Habits ® FREE at www.PowerHabitsAcademy.com .

Inventor of Afformations; founder of Power Habits®PowerHabitsAcademy.com

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Outlook (2007 to current) has started to give me security warnings about an application that wanted to access my email and contacts (it’s called programmatic access). The message reads:

A program is trying to access e-mail address information stored in Outlook. If this is unexpected, click deny and verify your antivirus software is up-to-date. For more information about email safety and about how you might be able to avoid getting this warning, click Help.

The first thing I did was to deny it, but the dialog would come back right away and basically blocked me from using Outlook and it is pretty alienating.

Outlook did not provide any clue whatsoever as for which app or plugin was responsible for this, so that was a bit infuriating. My research showed that it also happens routinely with other version of Outlook as well, so here’s are a few ways of getting rid of that irritating message, without compromising security.

Prerequisite

We are going to tweak some settings, so it may be better to run Outlook as an administrator. Here’s how to do it: right-click on the Outlook Icon and choose “run as administrator”. That’s it.

First, you can actually “deny” the alert for 10mn. It’s not very intuitive, but you need to pick “accept access for 10mn” and click Deny. The Microsoft help page on this topic is vaguely helpful.

Here are a couple of ways to prevent this from happening, without compromising your security by totally disabling the alert, which is an equivalent of “ignore the pain”…

My configuration

• Outlook 2010 (also tested with Outlook 2013 on my laptop)
• .NET programmability support NOT installed
• Digital Certificate for VBA installed: this is supposed to suppress warning for known “good” add-ins.
• Visual Basic for Applications installed (removing it may help further)

Method 1: update your anti-virus

If you read the options carefully, you may realize that Outlook will emit more warnings like this if your antivirus is not up-to-date or disabled. When there’s an active antivirus, Outlook probably considers that security is tight enough to let programmatic access happen.

The simplest way to do this is to activate or update Windows Defender, the built-in antivirus from Microsoft. Here’s how to do it:

• Start > Search box > type Control Panel > open the control panel
• Control Panel Search box > type Windows Defender > open Windows Defender
• You will see if Windows Defender is ON and up-to-date
• Update it if necessary
• To enable it, to go Windows Defender > Settings Tab > Check “turn on real-time protection”

Windows can detect a number of third party anti-viruses as well, so if you are using a well-known 3rd party app, it should fulfill the same role as far as Outlook is concerned. Outlook should explicitly say if it detects such a software, or not. With an anti-virus active, it will be less likely to freak out and output warnings.

Method 2: disable/remove add-ins that you don’t need

If activating the anti-virus was not sufficient, it means that one of the add-ins makes Outlook upset, but without any information as to which, you will need to poke around to see what is causing the warning.

Depending on your installation, you may have a number of them. For example, apps like Evernote will install an outlook add-in to facilitate sending clips.

To disable add-ins, in Outlook, do this:

• File > Options > Add-ins > Manage: COM Add-ins > Go
• Uncheck all the Add-ins that you don’t need
• Press OK

Restart outlook in default mode (not administrator), and see if the warning message re-appears. You can then re-add the add-ins you need one by one.

When in doubt, and if you don’t need it, you can also completely remove the “Visual Basic for Applications” component by going back to Control Panel > Programs > Outlook > Change

By doing this, I have successfully removed this very annoying message from my Outlook and was on my way back to productivity. If this doesn’t work for you, drop a comment, and explain to us exactly what your configuration is, and what message you are seeing. Maybe myself or someone else can pitch in to help.

Good luck!

If someone from #Microsoft reads this: please give users the information about what App/Add-in/DLL/anything tries to access so that we can accept or deny with a clue. Secondly, we need to have something like “deny forever” so that we don’t need to do this every 10mn.

How To Stop Outlook’s Security Warnings , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

A recent Gallup poll has great news for animals.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

“In the Army, I heard an electric guitar that wasn’t playing spiritual. It was T-Bone Walker doing “Stormy Monday” and that was the prettiest sound I ever heard in my life. That’s what really started me playing the blues.”
B.B. King

Singin’ The Blues (1956) signed by B.B. King

Mr. Blues The King B. (1963) signed by B.B. King

Blues On Top Of Blues (1968) signed by B.B. King

Live In Cook County Jail (1971) signed by B.B. King

“When I sing I play in my mind, the minute I stop singing… I start to sing by playing Lucille.”
B.B. King

Born in 1925 on a cotton plantation outside Indianola, Mississippi, young Riley B. King started playing a guitar and became “Beale Street Blues Boy” who became “Blues Boy” and finally, B.B. King. An oft told tale, B.B. King saved his guitar from a burning night club. Later, he found out that the two men who knocked over a kerosene barrel which ignited the fire were fighting over a woman named Lucille. B.B. decided to name his guitar (and every subsequent guitar he played) “Lucille” as a reminder never to do anything as foolish as run into a fire to save a guitar.

B.B. King has had an incredible career. He is “The King Of The Blues” or “The King B.”, and he has influenced Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, and virtually every electric guitarist since. An indefatigable road warrior, it is estimated that B.B. King has played more than 15,000 concerts in his 60 plus year career, playing 200-250 shows well into his seventies. And I saw a bunch of them.

In ’93, The Blue Note in New York City advertised “A Rare Club Date With B.B. King.” I bought tickets, and Erin and I and some friends showed up early for the first come, first served general admission. We ended up front row center, directly in front of his eminence. B.B. had his entire twelve piece band with him and it was quite a sight in this small, intimate and fabled New York jazz club. In those days, the Blue Note had mostly jazz quartets and quintets, and they were not equipped to service B.B.’s large band requirements and retinue. In fact, B.B.’s three piece horn section was relegated to off stage because they could not fit. They played off stage mostly, but when they did a solo, they scurried on, blew a few beautiful notes, and returned to the shadows. The life of a side man. Not twenty feet from greatness, more like eight…

B.B. and his band played an incredible set of music. He opened with “Let The Good Times Roll” and we were transported to another world. “Lucille” never sounded better as B.B. coaxed and bent beautiful, crystalline blues. As he went through “Sweet Sixteen”, “When It All Comes Down”, “Rock Me Baby” and “The Thrill Is Gone”, the blues were never so joyous and life affirming. The crowd erupted into a standing ovation as he finished his set. A bunch of folks started reaching out to B.B. for a handshake or a memento. B.B. saw Erin directly in front of him, smiled and handed his guitar pick to her. B.B. always had an eye for the ladies, and he has reputedly sired 15 children with 15 different woman. Apparently, as hard as he worked on stage, he was as equally tireless off.

B.B. King was very kind and gracious when I met with him backstage. He loved seeing some of the old albums. “Look how skinny I am. And young!” He was especially interested in Singin’ The Blues, his debut album released in 1956, and he paused as he looked at the song titles with care. He couldn’t have been nicer as he stuck out a big paw to shake hands.

Several years later, he published an autobiography, Blues All Around Me (1996), which was an honest and open look at his career and influences. Perhaps a little too open and honest. I found it interesting that he loved Frank Sinatra: “I’m a Frank Sinatra nut. No one sings a ballad with more tenderness…and when Sinatra wants to swing, no one swings harder. No one phrases any hipper.” And for guitar inspiration, he listened to Les Paul, inventor of the solid body electric guitar and many other recording advances like overdubbing. Less interesting was a chapter entitled “Someone Asked Me About Oral Sex.” Really B? I can think of a lot of other questions. This must be the most improbable chapter in the history of music autobiography! Prurient, salacious, and completely unnecessary, it is hard to believe that a publisher or editor fought for this chapter’s inclusion. I couldn’t believe what I was reading so I read it over and over and over and over again….just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

B.B. King, blues icon, legend, ladies man. Never have the blues felt so satisfying. The thrill is never gone.

B.B. overcome with excitement, backstage, Blue Note 1993

B.B. King Guitar Pick/Blue Note Program 1993

Back In The Alley (1980) signed by B.B. King

Blues ‘n’ Jazz (1983) signed by B.B. King

Live At The Apollo (1990) signed by B.B. King

all signed albums from my collection

copyright 2015 all rights reserved

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.