“I promise I will hit the gym way more often, get in shape and never eat bad stuff again.” By February, about 80% of the new year’s members at the local gyms have fallen away. But it’s easier to keep your brain cells in good shape - so try this cool site I’ve been hanging out at.

It’s Lumosity. There are some pretty cool game/workouts to use everyday and I’ve done it for about a month. I’ll tell you, there’s a fee attached - a small one - but Lumosity offers a free trial. I guess the people who developed this site and did the research deserve compensation, just as I require compensation for the writing I do or you get paid for the work you do.

The site sets up a program for you, just as your physical trainer might. Each day, when you login, a set of half a dozen games comes up and you work them one at a time. Each takes about 3 minutes or so. The entire set is well under 20 minutes - a nice break from real life.

The games, or tasks, work out memory skills, retention, attention, thinking speed and others. There are reports on Lumosity that people are finding they can remember more and retrieve info from their brains more quickly.

A vision of our daughters?

Dr. Phil interviewed drunken teen girls from Facebook or MySpace groups that post photos of falling down drunk young women. Dr. Phil was appropriately stern - but I was more struck by what Dr. Phil’s guests said. An employment counselor admonished the drunken teens that employers screen prospects on MySpace, Google and FacePage. A college recruiter said colleges do, too. Prospective landlords screen tenants online. Dr. Phil said what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet.

Dr. Phil is right. Here’s proof - 15 years ago the Internet was a toddler - about three years old. I was newly divorced, tired of seeking companionship in clubs and, well, you know. I registered online with a dating service - in Israel, of all places (I was in small town Illinois!) Cool, true story. I met my husband, Dan, through this service. Happy ending. But comments I sent to the service are still on the ‘Net. And do you know there’s a site that archives every Web site?
If you Google my name, you’ll find references back to the beginning of time about my work and Web sites I created - and I’m not a high-profile anyone. So what of these cocky girls? One said, “It isn’t meant to be serious and nothing anyone could say would make me stop.” Her mom sat in Dr. Phil’s audience, smirking. !

Here’s what they do not get. When these young women aren’t cute, clever, hip and 17 or 20, and there are bills to pay and a life to live and their kids are in school and someone comes up with a portrait of mommy hanging over a toilet or a video of her puking or lying naked in a pool of her own vomit, what does mommy say to the kids? How does she laugh off pixelated examples of incredibly poor judgment?

Those images aren’t going anywhere. They’re viral and they’ll likely spread. Women, we’ve struggled a long struggle to prove what we’re made of. We are moving into true equality and true empowerment. Is there anyway to head off this trend and mentor young women into sanity? Or am I just a nagging old fart?

And can I ask this again - where the hell are their parents?

Steel Cut or Pinhead or Scotch Oatmeal (a recipe I saw on Good Eats with Alton Brown, the Food Network. Episode was Oat Cuisine). I loved it - in fact, hubby and I have eaten it several times a week since Christmas, causing us to eat less junk and lose 5 pounds - a fine idea.

1 tablespoon butter
1 cup steel cut oats*
3 cups boiling water
1/2 cup whole milk (2% works fine)
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon low-fat buttermilk (try Yogurt - but I really got to like buttermilk)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon (or to taste - I avalanche it on)

In a large saucepot, melt the butter and add the oats. Stir for 2 minutes to toast. Add the boiling water and reduce heat to a simmer. Keep at a low simmer for 25 minutes, without stirring. Combine the milk and half of the buttermilk with the oatmeal. Stir gently to combine and cook for an additional 10 minutes. Spoon into a serving bowl and top with remaining buttermilk, brown sugar, and cinnamon. You can add any dried fruits, fresh fruit, or canned - heck, even frozen. Experiment, but this stuff is grrrrreat!

Steel cut oats are also called “scotch” or “pinhead.” most of the hull is still on the grain, so you get lots of fiber and nutrition. find them in the cereal aisle with the other oatmeals or go online and order them up.

Quick post today - I’ve stumbled on an interesting site - ProduceGuru. Food for thought, as it were. Families are being bombarded with admonishments to eat better. In fact, today on Good Morning America Martina Navratalova said you’re better off to eat good nutrition and not exercise than vice versa. Be that as it may - we can use all the help we can get. Produce - fruit and vegetables, should be a big chunk of our food intake. They taste good, too, but finding good produce can be challenging.

I live in the South - where you’d think (I thought so, anyway) that good produce would be stacked high in every grocery market. Just ain’t so. Recently, when I was up in Chicago, I found far better fruits and veggies at far, far lower prices. I’m told growers here ship the good stuff up North - bigger profit margins.

Anyway - ProduceGuru has a newsletter you can subscribe to, free. There are recipes and verbiage about getting kids interested in the right foods. ProduceGuru has links to other good resources on a pretty easy-to-navigate site - the downside is, like many sites, there’s too much text for people who want to browse quickly for nitty gritty information about fruits and veggies and nutrition. They could use some slimming down in that area, but the info, once you get to it is worth a look.

With a flick of my wrist I can change images in the picture frame on my table across the room. Who’d a thunk we’d have the pleasure of remote-operated digital picture frames like something out of Harry Potter? I got one for Christmas - and they’ve come down in price from a couple hundred bucks to as low as $40. Mine is a n Optipix brand made by Smartparts.

Having never really seen such a gadget up close, I’m bowled over by my digital frame. It isn’t perfect, but who cares? For those who don’t know, a digital picture frame is a tiny computer made to look just like a photo frame. They come in sizes from 4×6″ up. Actually - with today’s newest technology, you’ll find teeny frames that fit pocket or wallet.

Mine is wood grained - very attractive. I put it on a console table in my living room and it looks great. It’s 5×7″, my preferred photo size, anyway. In the box, I found the frame, a manual, a quickstart guide, a DC power adapter, software CD. I sat down to set up the digital frame and found it more puzzling than I would have liked.

You have to install software, which plunks an icon onto your desktop. There isn’t much instruction for what to do with that icon, so I didn’t know the best way to load pictures into the digital frame is to load them through the program that comes with it. I dove in and began using my own photo organizer. It recognized the frame and showed it to me in my Windows Explorer. But when I tried to load pictures, the digital frame’s onboard system (the operating system, built into the frame that tells it what to do) didn’t recognize my images as something it could work with.

After a bit of frustration, I deleted what I had uploaded and tried the desktop icon. It was easier then, but still, especially if I were a beginner with computers, I would have liked more user-friendliness. Once I got a set of images loaded, I was delighted.

The 800×600 pixel resolution (clarity - number of pixels per inch - quality with which the screen shows the picture ) was beautiful and the back lighting makes me feel like I’m using a ViewMaster (remember those?). I was able to choose a couple of different ways for the frame to show images, I chose slide show. Now, every time I walk by, I see another favorite snap of my grandson, daughter or husband. They don’t move, like Harry Potter’s friends-in-frames, but the frame handles video - I can only imagine how cool that would be. My Smartparts digital frame also handles Mp3 files, so I can put background tunes in it.

Bottom line- this isn’t the most expensive frame out there, but it’s a good one. I’d like to see the maker give more thought to helping new-to-digital users work with it comfortably. But anybody into digital photography should have one to get images out of the computer and into the world. How beautiful to see my favorites all day any day, in any order I like. The digital frames handle hundreds of images at a time with onboard memory and many accommodate chips or sticks right from digital cameras. Best present I’ve gotten in a while - I think you better go out and get one!

The toddler in my house can’t resist typing on keyboards. Cuz we all do a lot of keyboarding. I found a site fwhere he can hit any small letter key and cause a terrific response.

Even if you’re toddlerless - take look at ZeFrank’s site. The man is an odd genius. You’ll see a small orange square in the middle of the page. Click in the square, and hit any letter of the alphabet - lower case. Each one produces a character and a sound that will repeat the more often you hit the key.

When you’ve had enough of that, hack the url down to its root or use this link to visit ZeFrank’s main page. He has a list of dozens of quirky little programs. Try animal sound in the first column.

God I love this guy’s mind.