I wanted to wish everyone a Healthy, Happy, and Prosperous 2009. I know 08 was a tough one, but the future is ours to make what we will of it. I believe that there is a lot of opportunity out there right now and in the upcoming year if we only choose to find it. There will be a lot of millionaires made this year…I’m thinking we should all be one of them.

The older I get, I realize what is truly important to me…..My God, My wife, My family, My friends, My health, My belief in myself and others, Good Mentors, Passion for whatever I am doing, Humor, Teaching/helping others to be more, Learning new things, and the understanding not to take myself too seriously.  I know that when any of these are not going right, my life is not going right.

 As most of you know, I wrote The Joy of Diabetes and published it in 2008. It has been a true blessing to be involved with and work with so many great and interesting people in every aspect of Diabetes-publishing-marketing-internet-sales-P.R.-Development and the like. What an amazing industry…and a truly helpful group of diabetics who care.

Sometimes folks look at me funny when they hear Joy, and Diabetes in the same sentence.  I believe they are thinking “excitement and elation”…that’s more like Happiness…

Joy is about Peace and Confidence…..That is what I strive for and what I strive to help others find also.  I think it is safe to say that I have found Joy in my situation.

 I wanted to thank everyone whom I have worked with, been friends with (hopefully both), been helped by, and who have intersected my life in 2008.

 I look forward to finding Joy in this year of 2009. I look forward to you being Joyful in 2009 too…..

 I hope that you, your family, your work, your business, your finances, and your health, are all that you hope for this year. Best wishes………Keep going…………Peace,   Bob

 Ok…I gotta include a couple of my favorite Jim Rohn quotes again here.

 “We must wage an intense, lifelong battle against the downward pull. If we relax, the bugs and weeds of negativity will move into the garden and take away everything of value.”

“Don’t take the casual approach to life. Casualness leads to casualties.”

 “America is unique because it offers you an economic ladder to climb. And here’s what’s exciting: It is the bottom of the ladder that is crowded, not the top”

Hey everyone,

As many have already noticed we pushed out some new revisions a few weeks ago as we’ve made a few big as well as small upgrades to SugarStats. While there are various user interface and design changes, the majority of it went on under the hood.

What we’ve launched is a solid foundation for a lot of cool things we’re looking to add and launch in the next few months. After taking so long with this last release, our goal is to make much smaller yet quicker iterations and rollout new features on a more frequent basis to keep things constantly evolving. As we roll those out we’ll be sure to post about them here and on our Twitter feed for notable changes you should know about.

You can get more feature details of various features in our help site: https://sites.google.com:443/a/sugarstats.com/help/

New Features Overview

Here is an overview of some recent changes:

• New, cleaner design throughout the site
• Overall performance and stability improvements as well as many bug fixes
• A new “Dashboard” page to give a quick overview of things
• Completely new and more interactive graphing system based on Adobe Flash 8
• We’ve add an all sugar entries graph as well as avg per day
• The graphs are zoomable (click and drag to zoom in) as well as clickable (On avg per day graphs, click on a data point to go to that day)
• We’ve added a few other new graphs, namely bar charts for tags and carb charting. More to come.
• We’ve replaced the “events” for each entry with a more generic tagging system. You can now customize and have multiple tags for each entry
• For premium users, food and activity input has been changed. You now simply type the name in and if you’ve added it before it’ll auto complete it for you.
• For premium users who track food intake you can now specify how many servings of a food you had
• “Day Notes” has now become the “Diabetes Journal” feature allowing you to have a personalize diabetes blog. You can mark blogs private if you like, all existing day notes have been migrated into the blogs feature and marked private by default.
• We’ve added a “Store” tab for those who want quick access to buying diabetes supplies online
• We’ve added Gravatar.com icon/avatar support

These are some of the big things and again this is only the beginning of a lot more to come. We’ve set a solid foundation to build off of and taken all the wonderful feedback you all have given us over the last year to great a overall better system for everyone.

Sharing, Privacy and the Friends System

A few notes about the changes in TrustedVue and new sharing features/friend system:

• “TrustedVue” has been expanded into a more standardize friend and sharing system. The biggest request to us was the ability to allow you to connect with others and share your stats easier. Now you can add others as friends and now non-diabetes can create accounts much easier. You now only need 1 account and can see the stats/accounts of those who accept you as a friend.
• We’ve also added a new friends tab at the top which lets you find others like you.
• When a friend views your account, they can see your stats, graphs, journals (that aren’t marked private)
• We’ve added sharing/privacy settings so you can set who and who can’t see your account. You can set it to Public, Members Only, Friends Only or Private.
• All existing users by default have their sharing settings set to “Friends Only”.
• All new users by default have their sharing settings set to “Members Only”.
• You can switch your sharing/privacy settings easily in your settings at any time.
• You now have a profile page your friends will see when going to http://manage.sugarstats.com/yourusername.
• You can now also include your bio info about yourself, similar to Facebook/MySpace, on your profile page.
• Friends can also add comments to your profile as well as journal entries.

As noted above we made a lot of changes regarding TrustedVue and sharing your stats with others. While the topic of privacy in a hot one in the Health 2.0 field, we feel in the context of diabetes the community and our diabetic support networks (friends, family and doctors etc) greatly benefit from collaborating with the patient and viewing their diabetic progress and status.

We highly encourage sharing your stats in order to get positive encouragement, motivation and support from others and we’ll be building more and more social networking features into SugarStats over the next few months to help facilitate this.

But we do know to some they may want to keep their account private or share with a select few and we want to respect this. For those people they can easily select from a few different privacy/sharing settings to find the one that best suites them. All existing users before the update have had their sharing settings set to “friends only” which is the same as it was before.

You can find out more about sharing/privacy settings in our help section: https://sites.google.com:443/a/sugarstats.com/help/privacy-and-sharing

Let us know what you think!

We want to know your thoughts and get your feedback. The good, the bad and the ugly as well as any features YOU want to see added in SugarStats. Shoot us an email at support@sugarstats.com

If you notice any issues/errors, see something that looks off or in general have questions please let us know as well.

Updates and Help

Keep an eye out on the blog, our Twitter stream and your email for more detailed updates from us.

You can check out more of these features in details on our help site: https://sites.google.com:443/a/sugarstats.com/help/

Wow, who woulda thought….?  I recently was lucky enough to celebrate my 46th Birthday and have been a Diabetic for almost 45 of those 46 years. I think back to how lucky I have been to be born to parents who were so totally involved and who told me I could do or achieve anything I wanted to…..I just had to work with my Diabetes and not against it.

When I was younger, I wondered if I would survive until 30!....But as my mindset and technology and knowledge of the disease improves, I truly believe that it is up to me to set my own course. I will or I won’t win,  based on the decisions and efforts I make every day to set myself up to be successful.

My mindset and approach to this disease will either help me or hurt me. I choose Joy because it’s not about elation  and excitement,...that’s Happiness. Joy is about Confidence and Peace. I have been blessed to have that!

Diabetes, a chronic disease   

Chronic.............7 little letters, but it’s a really, really,  realllllyy looooooonnngggg word!  Hopefully!!!!

Keep going,..................Peace,     Bob

I recently read on the ADA website that they believe there to be 57 million americans with Pre-diabetes.

Holy cow! That would mean with 24 million Diabetics, and 57 million Pre-diabetics, there are 81 MILLION Americans who are basically some kind of diabetic. With a U.S. population of about 300 million, that means that about 1 in 3.7 people are affected by some sort of Diabetes.    Wow!!!  I am afraid the healthcare system is about to be taxed , or maybe overrun…...   I hope that by managing my disease well, I won’t have to be a burden to the system. I think that if managed well, we can all have a positive impact on the health care system by working towards better control.  I guess that is why there is so much interest recently in Diabetes as the numbers of D’s are growing dramatically.

I feel pretty confident that technology will continue to improve the Diabetic’s life over the next few years and maybe even help to slow down the growth of the disease. ....or maybe even that “cure thing” would be nice…It is a matter of time. In the meantime, stay in control and keep the damage to a minimum….

Which is why I really like my cgms….

Wishing you “well”    Bob