This week's thesis work is Windows focused, which means that I was working in Windows 7 all week long. It was going a bit slow earlier, but I made a lot of progress today, and I almost am at the stage where I put the portable app together and start beta testing. There's a bit of server work to do still, but I think I should meet my goal of opening to the public in early February.

Today has been quite productive, getting the client to the stage where I am comfortable packaging it up. At the same time, it was quite frustrating throughout the day looking at the clock and seeing that I wasn't making the progress that I wanted on my hour goal. The goal for today was to get 8 hours of real work done on the project. I think that I am counting today as about 7 hours, even though I only logged 6. At the same time, I worked from about 10:30 am to 9 pm, with only a couple breaks.

If you think that math is a little wonky, it is. Even if we take out the breaks that I did take -- half an hour for lunch at around noon, and an hour and a half for my regular run around the neighborhood, it should be eight and a half hours of work. However, I'm using an interesting bit of math for counting my work on most normal days, and I was trying to continue it for the "thesis day" that I have scheduled each week.

I mentioned this method before, the Pomodoro technique. I have my intervals set at 30 minutes for the work time, and 5 minutes of break. It usually works, and I'm not exactly not thinking about my work when I walk away from the desk to do something else. I also have a long break every 4 pomodoros I do of 15 minutes. Today, I have performed 12 pomodoros, which equates to 6 hours of real, focused work. I don't check email, I don't do Twitter, Facebook, and I even am a little short with anyone who is walking up to me (sorry, honey!) when I am on a work interval.

The breaks do add up though, and it makes my time calculations a little bit weird. 12 pomodoros have 9 short breaks, and 3 long breaks in them. This means that I have an extra hour and a half that I'm on a break, doing something else which is not related to the work. That means that those 6 hours of focused work add another hour and a half of scheduled breaks, which I really believe make the focused work better.

If I add those to my "real" breaks that I took in the day, that comes to nine hours. I don't really know where the remaining hour and a half disappeared to. I am guessing that I was a little lax in getting back to the desk right away on some of the rest breaks and took a few minutes here and there, or maybe my lunch was really an hour and not just half an hour.

It's really teaching me that getting real work into the project is difficult. I've decided that I am going to count my scheduled break time as 2/3 of normal time on the days when I do enough to make a long break, which will make today count for 7 towards my 12 hours a week goal, but keep my 1 hour thesis days at a real, solid hour because I won't count any of the break in the middle, which I often take my daily run between, making that one much longer than the five minutes.

There's still nothing more frustrated than looking at my pomodoro count at 12 and the clock at 21:00 though. It's like I feel that I could actually finish at 16 for the day, but I would have very little time to myself. Maybe I'll try to get started earlier next week, and the wallclock time won't get on my goat as much. In the meantime, you can watch my progress towards the 12/week goal on my beeminder graph.

It's our first subject with fur!

It's a Wooly Mammoth! Look at how huge it is. Wait, the cropped version here doesn't have a good sense of scale - maybe you should gander at the source image from photos.com, where there is a friendly scared dude with a spear to see how big this guy actually was. They could get almost 10 feet tall. Unlike everything up until now, there is actually some evidence that humans, or neandertals were around when the mammoths were walking around, because there are some cave paintings.

One of the most interesting parts about these large creatures, are that they often aren't fossilized, but just freeze in place, so you can end up finding one just frozen solid. I've thought sometimes in the Minnesota winter that I might end up in a similar fate. The latest one was found less than five years ago. They are often still found with their soft tissue intact. This means that there might actually be a real-life Jurassic Park situation, where they could extract the DNA of a frozen specimen and make up a clone. It doesn't look like there is an actual clone coming anytime soon though.

I spotted something on the Verge liveblog of the Apple event today.

Remember, kids:

• Books are not durable.
• iPads are durable.

Lately I've been thinking about tablets, partially because I ended up with a iPad over this Christmas season, and partially because the tablets that are coming out that I actually want are starting to heat up and look a lot better. I have a rant which has been working around in my head for a while about this, and it's not really going away.

Part of this is my own fault, because I'm one of those crazy people who reads a lot of Apple focused tech blogs even though I don't (or didn't recently) own any Apple products. Recently, it seems like every time someone in the mainstream tech press talks about the competition in the Android tablet market, some snarky examination and explanation of the many reasons why we shouldn't care happens in the Apple blogs. John Gruber, being the most prominent of the bunch, brings to mind the most examples in recent memory, although Marco Arment makes the point earlier in the year.

It's not that I am disagreeing with these stories, or their viewpoint that non-iPad tablet sales are much smaller than iPad tablet sales. That's pretty much written in black and white on the reports that the news stories draw their numbers from. The thing that is irking me is the implication that the stories shouldn't be written at all, or they should more focused on how iPad is dominating the entire area.

There clearly is a market for non-iPad tablets. Using the same report that the most recent spat of articles (and echoing on each other's linkblogs) is using, we see that the headline is that non-iPad sales are at 1.2 million tablets. That's a big market. Let's have some fun with numbers ourselves.. Assuming that those tablets are selling cheaper than the iPad 2, let's say maybe $300 on average, the market size is around 350 million dollars in the first three quarters of 2011, that makes the non-iPad market almost half a billion dollars a year. The same report states that non-iPads are selling once for every 10 iPads. (btw, let's look at the trend - in August Gruber estimated one for every 20)

It's pretty boring to just focus on the winner, especially when there is no competition for the best tablet for the general consumer. I can easily admit that the iPad is winning hand over fist, but the exciting news is in the competition, which is pretty heated in the Android field. CES this week brought us announcements of Asus Transformer Prime, Acer Iconia Tab and Visio VIA. All three are quite interesting and in direct competition with each other. Which one will sell more? That's a question that you might not know the answer. You know which tablet will sell more than all of them? The iPad 2. I don't care because it's an obvious conclusion considering the state of the market.

There's a lot of competition, and a lot of different options, because Android is a lot more open than Apple is. When I shop for an Android tablet I need to pick what size, what resolution, whether I want mobile data, which manufacturer, colors, and many other options. The only choice on an iPad is what size I want, or whether I want a 3G modem. They're all essentially the same. Let's compare the iPad to the iPad. Boring. On the other hand, comparing a Galaxy Tab 10.1 to a Motorola Xoom is something where you might actually learn something.

The tech press is reporting on the non-iPad market because it's where all the interesting stories are, and they can actually contribute to the discussion, and there is an actual market there. You only need to tell me once that the iPad is a great tablet. What if I don't want one? What do I buy then? Now you have a question that I need to look into.

(I'd also like to hammer about how market share is somehow important for tablets, but not important for phones now, because the iPhone is losing the market share battle in phones but winning in tablets, but it's getting late. Maybe another time.)

It's only been a couple weeks since the last report, but I have a full column in my tracking notebook so I guess I'm getting back on track with these reports. I've mostly been on track for the month, with a little blip around the holidays as expected. Exercise has been going well, which is really encouraging to me in many ways. I've also added a new style of workout to my schedule that I will work in as I can.

Looking first at the weight chart, it's pretty obvious that I took a week or so off from caring about what I eat, right around christmastime. This isn't really a big surprise because we went on a stay-cation for the holidays this year, which involved a bunch of room service and eating out at the same time. It was quite relaxing though. Lately I've been pretty happy with the progress that I show on the scale, and able to ignore it when a day or two goes blipping above the trend line.

Little changes in my weight and trend look really big on these graphs now, which is actually a good thing, meaning that I'm not fluctuating or going all in one direction, keeping to my weight maintenance goal that I've been doing for the last couple months. My resolutions call for a loss of at least 12 pounds, which comes out to about 212 at the end of the year. That's not a lot of weight lost compared to last year's 75 pound loss, but I really don't want to push it and really want to be able to keep this weight indefinitely.

I've been good at the exercising lately, which is actually somewhat viewable on my beeminder running graph. I'm on track for my goal of 100 miles in each month, with 47.7 miles so far that should climb to above 50 when I finish my workout today. The training plan has been working out well, as yesterday I just upped my interval running time to three minutes. I'm still taking two minute breaks, which means that I will be lowering the walking break time in the next time I change the intervals, probably two weeks from now. Lately I've also had a few runs with a sub-45 minute final time, which means that I'll probably change up the route a bit in the next month so that it is longer.

Weather was something that I was worried about when I started running around the neighborhood, because I do actually live in Minnesota, meaning that it can get very cold and the snow can definitely pile up and cause some problems. I promised Diana that I would not run when it was exceedingly icy or piled with snow outside, but this year we have had a mostly mild winter so I haven't had to worry about it that much. There are some patches of ice around sometimes on the sidewalk that I have to be on my toes watching for, as the case may be. Mostly I've been worried about the cold, which hasn't been overbearing, but has gotten in to the single digits a few times. Lately I just finished up my gear by buying some running gloves which should keep me from frostbite. There were a couple days before I acquired them that I ran insidje on the treadmill in order to avoid injury though.

I outlined my running schedule in the last month's report, but part of the treadmill running gave me an idea for a different type of workout that I can do on my non-training days. Last Wednesday on one of those indoor days I did what I call a "pacing run" but is probably more accurately referred to as something else. I set the treadmill to the average pace that I run in one of my training runs, and just left it there for the majority of the run. So instead of running 8 mph and then walking at 4 mph on a rest interval, I run 6.5 mph the whole time. I was somewhat worried that I would just get tired and wouldn't be able to continue even at the slower pace.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to keep such a fast pace through twenty minutes of straight running, completing more than two miles without stopping at all. I didn't really know how to run slower, as it were, until I had the treadmill keeping the pace. If weather encroaches in the future and the treadmill is open when I show up in the exercise room, I think I will use the equipment to my advantage and have these runs to try to teach my body to run a consistent pace for a long time instead of the running / walking intervals that I normally do. I am definitely more bored when I am just running and not doing intervals though, I may need something to distract me from the monotony. Maybe it would be different if I was outside and the landscape was falling by, but I don't really have a good instinct to run at that slower pace continually yet.

I still haven't written about how I keep warm, but I think I'll put that off until next month's report. Lately it's been in the 40s here, which means I haven't even had to use much of the cold-weather gear that I have around, just walking around in shorts and long sleeve shirts. Even if it doesn't get too cold, I'll write about keeping warm in the next report though.