Spot the deliberate mistake! There is no such thing as “properly”. OK, so I wrote this in brainstorm format, but I think it works better that way. It’s about prayer and spirituality and how these things look in ordinary life. Hope it helps.

Prayer should be raw. True. Honest. Say what you really think, otherwise you’ll go no-where. It should be instinctive. Intuitive. Pray for what you want, not for what you think you should want. And never feel guilty for praying for yourself.

Don’t do all the talking, however. Don’t pray and then hang up the phone. Keep listening. When God speaks it’s nothing flashy, most of the time. It sounds just the same as your own thoughts, only there’s a peace and a sense of life and cleanness about them. People either take spirituality too seriously, or they make it spooky. It’s neither, even though it is serious and it is “mystical”.

The word “spirit” is from the Latin word “spiritus” meaning breath. Spirituality is as ordinary, everyday and easy as breathing.

Stay alert for “promptings”. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right to be so “honest” (i.e. moan about something), but to be grateful, or to pray for someone else instead.

I use a Macbook, a PC, and then also Windows when it’s running on my mac (through remote desktop). I also use keyboard shortcuts like my life depends on it. These are not standardised across the various platforms, and it’s been driving me crazy when I press certain keys expecting the cursor to move to the end of the line, or whatever, and suddenly it disappears to the end of the file. So I’ve worked out what keys do what in each OS, and made a table.

Yes, this makes me an awful geek, but it will save much of my sanity. I hope that this helps you as much as it will help me!

It’s such a massive cliche, but it’s really true. It’s just about being positive, but pro-actively positive.

I’m a natural depressive and pessimist. That means, I immediately spot the problems in ideas, the costs, the downsides, the ways it won’t work, the reasons why we shouldn’t do it.

Let me tell you, if you’re the same type of person, that being loyal and faithful to that side of your character will close down your life. You will get smaller and smaller till one day you realise that you’ve no life to speak of. Better for that revelation to come when you’re still young than when you get old, believe me!

The trick is to keep building positivity. Invest into a habit of positive thinking. The more you do it, the better you’ll get. The more you train your brain to be positive, the more opportunities you’ll see for good things. Sometimes the trouble isn’t that there’s not any opportunities, it’s that you see them all as problems. Problems are opportunities, it just depends what glasses you have on: the rose-tinted ones or the poo-tinted ones (remember diamonds and dog turds?).

Poo-tinted glasses see the turd. Rose-tinted glasses see the diamond. I guess in “reality” both the diamond and the turd are there. In one sense, pessimists and optimists are both realists. It’s not so much a case of seeing problems/opportunities, it’s more a case of whether you value the benefits enough to pay the costs. If you’re starting a business, do you value it enough to go through the hard times setting it up? If you really want to build your own house, do you value that dream enough to go through budget problems and design flaws and materials running out, etc. Pessimists don’t care enough about the dream to go through all the hard work.

Building optimism is hard work, but the more you do it, the easier it gets: the less unpleasant it is to say yes to things you can’t be bothered to do and the more you enjoy the process of getting there.

So I’m thinking of starting some new blogs. I keep posting stuff about personal development that I’d like to move to another blog. I’d also like to start a blog about teaching yourself a language. I have a real ambition to learn German, who knows why, and I think it would make a good blog! There’s also another blogging project that I had a while ago that I think would be good to resurrect, but I might seek guidance on that one.

Anyway, my question to you, my readers, is what should I do about the address? I have already bought some domain names for them, but can’t afford the hosting just yet. In the interim, which is better:

• joy.beingmrkenny.co.uk
• beingmrkenny.co.uk/joy

It’ll only be for about a year, but which do people find easier as a web address?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying out the Bing search engine instead of my usual Google. Bing is Microsoft’s revamp of Live Search, which was its revamp of MSN search.

I’ve never really liked Microsoft’s offering to the search engine industry, mainly because I don’t like its online presence. I hate MSN, I hated hotmail, I don’t like Live mail. I think they are all inferior products, and I really can’t understand why people don’t make the switch to Google’s online products. Up until now I would never have given Microsoft’s search engine another look, but I don’t like things staying the same for too long so I thought I’d give it a spin.

Firstly, I think Bing is much prettier than Google. They have a new background image every day, and the whole design is obviously more deliberate than Google’s 1990s colour scheme. I appreciate that. I never liked Google’s boring logo, nor its ugly results page.

Also, the images search function is light years ahead of Google’s. With Google you get 20 pages of about 100 image thumbnails that you have to laboriously scroll through. With Bing you get a sidebar of thumbnails which is refreshed with Ajax. You never have to leave the page, and you can still view all of the thumbnails it finds. I like the efficiency, convenience and cleverness of it.

They’ve copied Google’s novelty logo idea. Google puts up a special image for Christmas, New Years’ and special occasions, like famous scientists’ birthdays. There the focus is on learning more about, e.g., the famous scientist. With Bing, it’s more about you using their search engine, which I don’t like. It’s a sneaky way of promoting yourself by promoting someone else. It’s funny to see how deep that runs in Microsoft. They’ve resisted web standards, preferring instead to release their own proprietary codes, right up until IE7. I really hate this tendency in Microsoft.

As for what was going through their heads when they called it Bing, I can only hazard a guess. It’s a dreadful, awful name. Interesting to see that they’re stepping away from all their other branding (Microsoft, MSN, Windows, Live, etc).

I hate, and will always hate, multimap. This is probably irrational, much like my hatred of Yahoo. And there’s video adverts on the main page. I hate video adverts.

As for the quality of its search results — obviously the most important thing — I haven’t really looked into it all that much. I guess my expectations in that area are mostly unconscious ones, so I’ll continue to do side-by-side comparisons for a while till I find out what I prefer.

So far, Bing doesn’t feel like proper searching yet. I must confess I don’t really care. (It’s not exactly the most hugely important question in life, is it.) What wins is whatever works easiest. Bing is pretty and excellent with images and media, but has a dreadful name. Google has a boring design, but it’s familiar.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out in the long run. My personal prediction is that in a year or so they’ll have another rebrand (they’re on their fourth as it is). We’ll be introduced to “Swish”, or some other equally silly name, but unless they do something fundamental to searching online muchbetter than Google it will fail to raise much interest.

Maybe pay people every time they use Bing. And change that wretched name!

Today I had my first dental appointment in … well, you read the title, don’t need to type it again.

It was really good fun! I booked it about a fortnight ago, and it made me feel grown-up and responsible. I encourage you all to take your diary right now and book in a check up! (I also registered with a doctor a few months ago, and I have just filled out an electoral roll form — I am all about the taking responsibility at the moment).

The appointment went much as I expected it. I used to want to be a dentist when I was about 14 (ha ha!). This came about because we learned about teeth in biology, and I found the whole thing blindingly fascinating.

Isn’t that weird?

Interesting enough that, when I had 4 pre-molars taken out to make space for my crooked teeth to move about it, I kept them. I still have them today in a film cannister (remember them, before the days of digital cameras?). They’re about an inch long, with the root, and I think they’re pretty cool. I’ll show you them if you ask nicely.

Anyway, I listened to the dentist reporting the status of my teeth to her assistant, and I mostly knew what she was talking about. I actually quizzed her at the end of the appointment. I’m like some kind of dental geek. I asked her about my wisdom tooth, because she’d said, “8 … watch” so I thought “Uh-oh dental caries!” and it turns out I have a small one forming that may need filling, but maybe not. (Teeth are numbered 1-8, 1 being the incisors at the front, 8 being the wisdom teeth right at the back).

I’m a little sad about that, actually. My wisdom teeth are only about 6 years old, and they’ve still got that new feeling to them. Kinda like when you buy a new pair of shoes, except they’re smaller and in my mouth. And sharper, on average, than my other molars. It’s a shame that one of them already has signs of decay.

Anyhoo, turns out I need two small fillings in tooth 6 or 7, I forget which, so I’ve got another visit coming up in October.

Hooray for NHS dental treatment, by the way! I walked past the practise the day after it opened. How lucky! I bloody love the NHS. Goodness me, thanks to Obama and all the American opposition to health care reform — and all those snide comments from across the pond about the quality of our teeth — I suddenly feel very proud of my country and its fraught-with-problems health service (a friend and I recently spent 7 hours in A&E). It may be inefficient, but it beats the horrors of health insurance. Just ask any American family on low income.

P.S. Isn’t it great? This is the first silly post on this blog in a long time.

Other people are probably the biggest cause of pain in our lives. It probably outweighs financial and career woes in terms of heartache. Maybe you have an unappreciative boss, or your parents never affirmed you much, or you have a lazy colleague who takes the credit for your hard work.

These things are truly painful circumstances to deal with. They’re burdens to carry.

The way to deal with them is to do just what you do with a burdern — bear it. Because these are problems that involve other people’s free will, you can’t solve them like you do other problems. Let’s not be lazy: you should try to solve them as and when you can. But do so with the utmost care, and recognise that A) it will take a long time, and B) it may never be solved.

So what do you do? Here you are with a big, emotionally costly problem that will be around for a long time.

The answer is to let the burden strengthen you, instead of weaken you. If your boss is unappreciative, stop trying to please him and just do the best you can, and count it all as generosity towards the company you work for. You end up being a bigger person as a result. If your friend is controlling and bossy, learn to stand up to it, and use the emotional pressure as a motivation to get some steel in your backbone. If your parents are critical, take the difficult but incredibly rewarding journey towards a more independent self-esteem.

Above all, learn forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t for their benefit, it’s for yours. It doesn’t mean being a fool and staying open to the hurts, but it does mean refusing to see the other person as a monster and letting hatred eat you up on the inside. Twisting the knife only ever happens in your own guts!