Steve's Seaside Life Blog

What to do when you’re feeling rough

I’m an expert at what to do when I’m feeling rough (body wide pain, brain fog, exhausted). But everyone can improve, at least that’s the message of Heidi Grant Halvorson: The Incredible Benefits of a “Get Better” Mindset (video at the end of this post) I have to agree.  When...

Are we making progress?

I’m feeling terrible today, aching all over and wading through brain fog.  The number of mistakes I’m making typing this post is just crazy.  Still the topic under discussion is ‘progress’ prompted by three events: the demise of my almost brand new, top of the range, ThinkPad Twist, which forced...

The power of placebo

There are few topics in science as fascinating as the placebo effect, I’ve been following the studies for years as the effect has gone from the sidelines to become one of the most promising areas of mind-body medicine and I’ve been hacking the ‘principles’ myself, here are some of the...

User Experience

I wrote this post yesterday and lost it due to some random combination of problems with WordPress, Chrome and my laptop.  It’s ironic because the fact that I lost an hours work, and maybe key ideas that I won’t be able to remember didn’t get flagged to my companies service...

All in a nights work

My current laptop, a Lenovo Twist, has been getting increasingly unreliable, each time it crashes or needs a hard power off the risk of corruption increases and today it’s poor reliability reached the rebuild threshold.  I needed to hard reset it 3 times today, after the first reset Lotus Notes...

Rossall Point

As befits the best of Saturdays today started with reading at Caffe Nero for 90 minutes, followed by a walk along St Annes prom and back home, where I collected Debbie and we set off for Cleveleys.  I’ve been looking forward to eating brunch at the Cafe Cove for a...

Community spirit

I had a lot of reading to do today, and needed to finish my think-week audio book, Dogfight, so I needed somewhere close with good walking and cafes so I chose Cleveleys.  I love Cleveleys, it’s close, has a great beach, fun sculptures, good practical shopping, a great cinema and...

Making my life easier, one step at a time

When I’m not feeling too good I try to find something to do that will make my life at little bit easier.  Typically this means finding ways to simplify, increase flexibility or resilience.  I’ve pulled off all three today by setting up remote access (from outside the house) to my...

The rise of the virtual assistant

I’ve tried a few of the so called ‘virtual assistants’ over the years,  crude applications that run in the cloud, on my smartphone or both and they never fail to disappoint.  I’m afraid my expectations are high, set by the character Jane, created by Orson Scott Card in the Ender...