Parkour.

If you’re not practicing it, you should be. If you are, well, then you don’t really need to be reading this do you? Go outside and have some fun.

Anyway, back to the people who are the actual targets of this article – people who don’t practice parkour. You might be wondering, “What in the world is parkour anyway?”. I’m glad you asked.

Parkour, as defined by Mark of American Parkour, is “…the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment.” Now, that’s just speaking strictly of parkour, there’s also freerunning. I’m not really going to touch freerunning for right now, since there’s a lot of debate over what ‘real’ parkour is and I don’t want to get into it here. Suffice it to say that parkour is moving over obstacles in the most fluid and efficient way possible.

Put another way, parkour is the art of making the entire world your playground.

You’re going to hear this from me a lot, so get used to it – before long, you’re going to be dead. I don’t mean that as a threat or anything, I’ll be dead too, it’s just that we really don’t get very long to live. As a male in the U.S., ranked #36 in world life expectancy at the time of writing, I’m told I’ve got about 75 years total. At 23 years old, that means one full third of my projected life is gone already, and most of that time has been spent wasting away in compulsory schooling.

With that in mind, don’t you think it’s a good idea to try out this 5 easy little things that you can do to improve what time you do have here?

Imagine for a moment that there were a way to make yourself a happier, more productive person. Something that could, without any harmful side-effects, literally change your brain chemistry to make you more cheerful. On top of its ability to alter your brain, it would be completely free of charge and extremely contagious – improving not only your life but the lives of everyone around you as well.

Thankfully, and as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, I’m not talking about some magical, imaginary technique. I’m talking about smiling.

That’s right, just smiling. Most people don’t realize how drastic of an effect smiling can have on us. I’m not just talking about seeing other people smile either, just the action of smiling directly affects what chemicals are released in our brains. Let’s take a look at some of the effects.

No, not chrome the metal – Google Chrome. After I talked about using it to automatically translate pages you would normally view in your native language into your target language, several people have been asking how to do it. Enough people have asked that I decided to just make it into a quick how-to.

For those who have been living under rocks for the past year or two, Google Chrome is a web browser developed and released by Google. Personally, I’m fond of it. Not just because it’s fast, but because of all the handy little tricks you can make it do – at this point, I’ve almost completely been converted over from Firefox. You can get Google Chrome from Chrome’s download page.