When your alarm goes off in the morning, what do you reach for? If you're like me, your alarm is your phone, and it's the first thing you see every single day. We often forget about the power of something called "self-fulfilling prophecy" and the roles our phones play in our daily lives. When you reach for yours, what do you see?

Self-fulfilling prophecy is when we predict something in our heads - whether it's correct or incorrect - and then consciously or unconsciously make it happen. It's a really insidious part of human psychology that often serves us no good. But because positive affirmations are so effective in helping us help ourselves, there's no reason we can't use these to combat self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

Here's the scientific explanation: "The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come 'true'. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning."

Back to the alarm on your phone in the morning. Have you ever considered the power of the messages on your phone's wallpaper? You read them over and over again. We unlock our phones perhaps hundreds of times each day - why not make that activity one of strength and positivity? It's a little life hack that goes a long way. I change my phone wallpaper to say all sorts of interesting things. and I'm a better person for it. Give it a try!

For more commentary, follow me on Twitter @dbirdy, for more positive affirmation photos like the ones I made above peep my Flickr and to see all videos, subscribe to my YouTube channel here!

You know, for all of the adventure to be had out there in the world, there really is nothing like getting a good ol' home-style slice-o-life in from time to time. Charlotte's got some gems in her crown that are just serendipitous. Parks and greenways are everywhere around here.

According to their website, "Mecklenburg County Park & Recreation Department is home to 210 parks and facilities located on more than 17,600 acres of parkland throughout Mecklenburg County. Parks in Mecklenburg County come in all shapes and sizes ranging from small neighborhood parks to large district parks."

For example, Little Sugar Creek Greenway is downright gorgeous. I cannot wait to see that place blossom in the spring. Also, The Pocket is Charlotte's best open-air park. It's going to be a prime real-estate outdoors lunch spot once it's a bit warmer.

For an organic hometown experience, though, I would recommend an empty neighborhood playground. There's no way I could make a list of all the great spots in Charlotte because for them to be full of bliss, you have to stumble upon them. Be open to the idea of re-experiencing such an elementary activity as an adult and get on a swing. Swinging is so innocently fun, the breeze pushing against your face while your legs pump back and forth. You can't help but get off feeling quite uplifted, no matter what might have been weighing on your mind.

Another option is to simply gaze at what is certainly one of the best skylines in the world. Just walk around Uptown and look up at buildings. Doing so really puts you in perspective in comparison to this big world we live in.

The moral of this story is that we've created a beautiful shared space together, and it's worth taking in. Get outside, be thankful for and connect with our city, even if it's for a fleeting moment. You won't regret it.

Mike Alt, creator of Harvest Geek, has an idea to revolutionize food production through the use of what he calls "brains for your garden." It's a small bit of robotics, hardware and software that could bring about a whole new era to agriculture by providing insight into what's growing as well as connecting the growers through data.

"Imagine if we could choose to share this data with other farmers growing identical crops. What patterns will we start to see emerge and how can we use this information to grow the highest quality and most productive plants?" says his website.

This project is absolutely lovely for a few reasons:
1) Mike is a local! YAY, CHARLOTTE! This guy is making the Q.C. look good!
2) Everything is open source, meaning it's open to the world to change, build upon, and adapt to an unending set of variable needs.
3) He's running a Kickstarter. This isn't special, a lot of people do them, but this really shows his ethos and dedication to this being for, and by, the people who need this most. Instead of going to a large company like, say, Monsanto, with his brilliant idea, he's come to the people who will benefit most: the rest of us. The world needs more of this.

Can Harvest Geek end world hunger? No. Is it a building block in the foundation towards that? Absolutely.

More info: http://www.harvestgeek.com

Repeat after me:

Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
All my base
are belong to you

Nerd love is a special kind of love, and it takes a special kind of person to really strike the right note with a sapiosexual gal. If you're hoping to be that person for your lady-geek, here are some gift ideas that will turn her into an 8-bit princess in all the right ways this Valentine's Day:

Arduino Uno Board with Workshop Starter Kit - $67.99
Let's be honest, electronic components are sexy, and so is a woman who knows how to make things with them.

Facebook is an ever-evolving beast and its next evolution is called the Facebook Graph Search. The latest round of changes that you'll see (or may be starting to see if you signed up for the preview) as this is slowly rolled out will be access to your information that has previously been private if one of your friends doesn't have his or her privacy settings locked down. The long and short of it is that once this is made available to everyone (as it stands now there is no "opt-out" option), anything your friends have tagged you with or have liked as it relates to you leaves you wide open to snoopers. Remember the instacreeper I wrote about? This is going to put that guy on steroids, and it should rightfully freak people out.

A less than savory example: I did a search for "my friends who like Ashley Madison" and, well, I got more info about people I know than I ever wanted to. (Ashley Madison is the dating site for married people who want to have affairs.) "My Christian friends who like Satan" is another interesting one, and a third search for "my friends who like doing heroin" and well, you see where I'm going with this. "My North Carolina friends who like marijuana reform" certainly reinforces the statistics and news that says 58 percent of N.C. supports medical marijuana. It goes on and on.

In anticipation, here are a few good links to get you started and will help you help yourself before the Facebook apocalypse comes and crushes a lot of people's online glass houses. That said, the best way to prevent your dirt from surfacing via Facebook Graph Search is to, get this, not have any dirt. Not such a novel idea, is it?

EFF.org: How to Protect Your Privacy from Facebook's Graph Search

Huffington Post: Why Graph Search Could Be Facebook's Largest Privacy Invasion Ever

ABC News: Facebook Graph Search: Now Is the Time to Go Over Your Privacy Settings

If you have 45 minutes to watch the long-winded Facebook announcement about this tool, here's the video:

Get to it all ye Facebookers with skeletons (and the rest of us who don't but want to protect ourselves on principal)!

The video is silent, so play the music alongside it!

North Carolina, you're quite the multifaceted ol' gal, aren't you? All beautiful and grown in your wrinkled old age. I love these parts of you with sentimental tenderness. You've come a long, long way.

For those of you who haven't had the joy, nay, pleasure of visiting Oxford, N.C., you really, really should get out there. There's not a lot to do but there sure is a lot to take in!

Their history is like many other cities in N.C.: a crippled textile industry (though Revlon's home base is there), a cultural mentality of if it ain't broke don't fix it as is seen by its vibrant historic district, and a group of locals who, most importantly, love each other regardless of blood relation. Oxford is a place where it's easy to see the America Norman Rockwell did. The segregation is gone and love remains.

Slideshow Oxford, NC

6 slides

Oxford, NC

By Gray Powell

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