Getting to the gym consistently is one of the biggest hurdles that I have stuck to jumping over while I’m trying to lose a bit more than a few. I seem to have no consistent schedule, except that I do end up doing it every day that I can. One downside of this is that I tend to work out late at night, almost always an hour or less before I go to bed. I’ve heard that this is not the best for the sleep, but I suspect it is actually better than nothing, so I continue to get to the gym at 11pm or 12pm. Unfortunately, I found myself with some extra roadblocks this week: the exercise room was half broken. The breakers on one half of the room tend to trip when the air conditioner and two machines that are on that circuit are all in use. This means that no one can use those machines until someone from the coop management goes and resets the switch. The treadmill machine, my weapon of choice for shedding a few pounds, is inconveniently on this circuit, and can’t be plugged in anywhere else. This happened 3 times this week, Wed-Fri. I’m calling the office for the second time tomorrow.

It is significantly harder to exercise when I don’t have the treadmill handy — the stepping machine works on semi-powered days, but it tires me out much too quickly and I cannot get enough exercise in. I’m not the kind of person to reliably run in place or do jumping jacks. My solution was to move the exercise bike to the powered side of the room. The biggest problem with semi-powered days is motivation. Usually I have the motivation to get to the exercise room and start the machine, and once I’ve started I can stop. Opening the door to a bunch of non-working machines is a huge motivation hit though. It’s so much easier to take a roadblock like this and skip a day — in fact I did this week once. Luckily I discovered that the bike is on wheels on one side so it is easy to move to the other side of the room. However, I’d like to solicit suggestions for alternate exercises for semi-power days. The things that work in the room are a weight machine with a bunch of attachments, the stepping machine, and the exercise bike. I can’t really go outside and exercise, because of the late hour and neighborhood that I live in, so it needs to be an inside task. The last requirement is that it focuses on losing weight, not gaining muscle. I’m fairly sure that I’ll be gaining some muscle along this process, but the goal is to drop the weight.

I have taken Saturdays to be my day off, so that I can get a little rest and not be so stressed about things, but I’m not taking it this week as I need to “make up” for the skipped day.

This week (Nov 3 - Nov 9): Minimum: 338.0 (-0.5) (Nov 7) Maximum: 340.0 (-1.0) (Nov 4) Average: 339.25 (-0.35) (139.25 to goal) Exercise Calories: 2314 on 5 days Average Calories per session: 462.8

Exercise is hard work. It is hard to keep going to the exercise room every day, and getting on that machine and doing the exercise. It is only loosely assuaded by the fact that I can listen to music or read a magazine while I am doing it. The saddle on the stationary bike is uncomfortable, and the treadmill is annoying when it asks for my heartrate. Don’t get me wrong, I am comitted to my exercise regimen and will be keeping it up for the forseeable future. I really do believe that I am improving my overall health and wellbeing doing it. Walking down the hall back to the apartment is a good feeling, and it’s strangely satisfying to be all sweaty and gross. This week was fairly erratic with respect to exercise. I ended up taking saturday off mostly by accident, completely filling up my schedule with other things. Other days I would start early – around 7pm instead of my normal 10pm, or would start an hour late. Tuesday was a particularly crappy day as half of the exercise room was tripped on the breaker and I had to resort to the horrible stepping machine and some weightlifting to get my 30 minutes in. Hopefully this week I will be able to get a better schedule going.

I am frustrated. Two weeks of dieting and exercise, and I don’t seem to be losing weight. This bothers me because in the past I would have received at least a little bonus on the scale just for dieting, and I don’t seem to be getting that this time. I tend to weigh myself after my workout, because there is a fairly nice physician’s scale which I can use to weigh myself, and doing after every exercise is a good way to remember. This causes a problem however because I usually exercise at the end of the day. One day I may eat more and then weigh more, and another day I may eat less (or ahem, output more) and weigh less that night. It doesn’t deal a good hand to my psyche to sometimes weigh more than I did the day before. I do seem to be getting a hang of guessing when I will weigh more though. I am thinking of switching to weighing only once a week, but I am afraid that I will forget, and the hacker in me wants as much data as possible on this.

This week (Oct 27 - Nov 2): Minimum: 338.5 (Oct 31) Maximum: 341.0 (Nov 2) Average: 339.8 (139.8 to goal) Total Exercise Calories: 2562 Average Exercise Calories: 427

I’ve been using DreamHost to host this blog and most of my persistent online activity for the past 10 months. All in all I have been really happy with them. Others seem to have issues, but I don’t have any gripes. I’m only paying a paltry fee, so I don’t complain too much if my server isn’t five-nines reliable. However, I am starting to have a problem with one of the services available. The email support is somewhat lax. My current situation is that I am using mutt as a reader on the server itself. This requires me to SSH into the server and read the mail on there. Because DreamHost doesn’t realy expect that people will have this activity (most people check their mail by IMAP or webmail) it sometimes sees my mutt process as long-running, and decides to kill it with a HUP on the SSH connection. This is pretty annoying. Also, I get a lot of spam. No, really: on a typical day, I receive over 400 spams. Currently I am using SpamBayes for spam filtering, which works reasonably well - it catches most spam at least in the unsure folder. The same problem with mutt shows up with spambayes though: it takes up too much CPU and gets killed by DH’s watchdogs.

These problems lead me to this experiment. The hassle with my mail is just too large, and I hear that GMail’s spam filters are reasonably aggressive and work well after you train them slightly. I have decided that I will run an experiment. Starting with November 1st, all of my mail will forward to my GMail account. I will document the spam filtering (or lack of) abilities here on Base Zero, and I’ll see how it works out. I have years of data from other methods of spam filtering so I can compare.

However, this experiment isn’t only going to be about spam filtering. GMail also employs some different mail models than what I am used to. The first that I am interested in is tags. GMail uses tags instead of folders, the normal way of organizing mail. This is touted as better because you can have more than one tag assigned to a email at once, and therefore orgniaze mail which should be in two categories better. For messages which are in an Inbox you just use a Inbox tag. Spam messages get a Spam tag. So I will be orgnaizing my email with tags as much as possible. The second thing which intrigues me is the idea of emails being conversations instead of threads. GMail puts related emails together, but uses a flat structure as opposed to the tree structure that I am used to. I wonder if this will confuse me because I am on a number of lists which tend to use the tree structure a lot, with many branches. I may not like some of the things that GMail does – in these cases I will look for hacks or build ones myself which attempt to solve these problems. I am also probably going to try and do some user interface critique.

Some people are concerned about GMail and scanning emails. This doesn’t concern me that much: most ISPs can scan your emails for viruses and spam nowadays anyway, webmail particularly so. I can understand the effect that this could have on some people however. If anyone reading this message would like to be excluded from the email going to GMail, just reply to this post or email me. I will oblidge by filtering your following emails to a special folder on my server. Just realize that I will only read those emails weekly at best.

GMail will not be the only Google service which gets tested by me this month. Stay tuned for more information. Until then, hail to Google, our dear and glorious leader.

Welcome to the first of I hope many diet and exercise weekly posts. As I noted previously, in the past week or so I have started trying to lose weight. Currently I am using two websites to track my progress. The first is Traineo, which has nifty graphs which show the progress in many different logs. Traineo has a very high caloric recommendation for me, almost 3500 calories. I almost never go above the calorie recommendation here. Traineo also is highly encouraging to exercise. However, it lacks a large component of calorie tracking for me: daily ingestion. This leads me to use a second site: TheDailyPlate. DailyPlate has an insane amount of foods in it’s database, I suspect seeded from USDA database at first, but updated by different users. The site allows you to add your own food and then everyone can use your data. I’ve added one or two items I think since I started. TheDailyPlate also has a caloric recommendation for me, which is sitting at 2600 calories or so. I’ve been below my net calories on both of these sites daily.

Along with watching my caloric intake, I’ve started exercising on a daily basis. It is actually much easier than I thought it would be, mostly because no one uses the exercise room during my “normal” workout time. The equipment in there isn’t the greatest, but it works for burning calories and aerobics, which is what I’m aiming for. My weekly routine is currently 4 days fat burning, 3 days aerobic exercise. My fat burning is on a treadmill, going at about 2.5 miles an hour which is just a slightly faster walk than normal for me, and keeping my heart rate in the “fat burning zone” which is generally below 140. Because I’m so out of shape, I don’t need to work that hard. Because it’s not as much work, I tend to do the walking for 45-60 minutes. The aerobic exercise is a 24 minute program on the stationary bike.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’m making that much progress. The Traineo graphs aren’t exactly correct. I’ve actually lost net 0.5 pounds on the scale in the exercise room, which at first I subtracted 4 pounds because I obviously am wearing clothes and shoes while I’m on it. I would weigh in the morning, but the scale that I used before is very unreliable for some reason - I can get on it, weigh, and instantly get on it again, and have the change be 4 pounds or more. I’m hoping to find a more reliable scale at a reasonable price that can handle my weight. The problem with all the cheap scales is that they’re not reliable or they don’t go over 330 pounds, which I’m above of course.

I’m trying to be open with my weight and weight loss throughout the process. Towards that goal, I’m adding this to my sidebar:

Life has been hectic to say the least, but I am taking control of it finally. School started, and I finally got settled into a schedule. I am taking two classes with highly overlapping material, both focused on user interface design. They are focused on separate aspects however and only overlap slightly. They are required. Also I am working at Honeywell still, programming away. Things are going better there, we just got past a critical juncture so I have about 2 weeks (15 hour weeks, but still weeks) of work laid out for me. I was getting worried because we were hitting a critical path issue: all the other programming things which needed to get done were based on a decision which we didn’t feel like we should make without consulting others. Anyway the decision is made, and while there is slightly more work than there was previously for me, I am glad because the work glass being full helps rather than hinders there.

I’ve started drinking green tea, which supposedly has some nice health benefits, and sleeping earlier and waking earlier, which also isn’t that bad. I’m currently trying out different green teas, and liking all of them unfortunately. They aren’t really that different to my taste buds, but at least they’re all good. Now that my day usually starts around 8am officially, its nice to be up at 6:30 and have some time to get the motor running. I’ve also started working out regularly, and dieting consistently. I’ve started a log at Traineo, a website which banks upon the concept of others checking out your progress as you go along. I hope it doesn’t become annoying to anyone who I put down – also I’m trying to be open about it, so if someone wants to be on the “motivators” list, I’d be happy to add you. I think I’m limited to 4 at the moment, so there’s one spot available. I could probably eliminate one as they are closely related to another of my motivators, so they’d be a 2-in-1. Things are going well so far, as you can see.

[lj user=”ceilingsarecool”] asked me the second or third day why I decided to start the diet and exercise regiment, and I couldn’t tell her exactly. I think it’s a mix of many things which are happening at the moment. It’s like I hit a tipping point. Anyway it’s time to go out to eat. Hopefully I’ll have some time later.

Classes have started for this semester, which means that I am just a bit more busy than I was before - and I had a pretty full plate before. Luckily, both of my classes are fairly similar, allowing for some overlap and giving me two different perspectives on the same topic. I suspect that I will end up skewed toward one direction or the other. Both are on Human Machine Interaction, one from psychology and one from computer science. I am particularly interested in improving software interfaces and novel interfaces, even though it isn’t really in my defined research topic. Homework on both doesn’t seem like it will be an issue. There will be usability studies at the actual professional usability lab at the U.

I recently got fed up with the crappy javascript support that safari has, so I decided to install Firefox 2.0b2 and give it a try. I was immediately presented with some new user interface elements. Close buttons on each tab is an annoyance for me, because usually I close tabs with Ctrl-W (Loop-W on my Mac) so I didn’t want them around. I found an extension that supposedly removed them but found in the comments an about:config variable that you can set to get rid of them. Problem 1 solved. This leaves two remaining annoyances for me. The go button by the URL entry not removable as it was in 1.5 - this is only a minor annoyance, I can ignore it easily and it doesn’t take up much space. The more obtrusive change however is that when you close the last remaining tab, now it doesn’t close the window, it just clears out the tab. This doesn’t happen when you have the tab bar go away if you only have one tab open, so that’s a good workaround for now, but I sincerely hope that this is just a bug that they haven’t fixed yet.

Both of these things have a strange sort of antagonistic synergy for me: I’m trying to learn what is the best interface for everyone, but at the same time I want my interface exactly the way that I specify, generally usability be dashed. Then again, I did prefer to use ion for a while.

Labor day weekend approacheth, and myself and [lj user=”ceilingsarecool”] have secured a little getaway for ourselves. It is proving to be a nice way to relax a while before a big rush of work. I have been in all true form not updating the blog lately, so I get to give everyone a big update all at once.

The iBook problems which I mentioned in the last blog entry proved to be fatal to the machine, so I went out and bought a shiny new MacBook to replace it. Given the pricing behind most of the small laptops and the experience that I had with my iBook, I was happy with my decision. I plan to add ram (Apple’s ram is so expensive) and replace the hard drive (also cheaper elsewhere) sometime before the end of the year. After I bought the new book, looking through my old receipts I discovered that my iBook is still under AppleCare so I took it in to get it fixed. The Genius Bar at the MOA store was very busy today so we had to walk around the mall and then wait for ages still. However, we successfully got the thing to freeze twice in the presence of a MacGenius(tm) so it is now off to the magic depot in the sky for fixing before I sell it used to someone. It is a nice machine and works great other than the freezing which will be fixed, and I was informed by the MacGenius(tm) that the AppleCare travels with the machine, so if it breaks in the next 8 months or so the buyer can get it fixed for free.

Honeywell this week was pretty hectic and non-normal. There was a deadline which required the working of an application I hadn’t planned on having working until the end of the week, so I had to work Monday and Tuesday, putting in 20 hours before mid-week. This made it slightly hard to get anything else done, but still not bad because it means I have a little leeway for next week. The good news is that we got it done, and the even better news is that it’s possible to focus on other things which I have more experience in there now.

After the weekend (which I’m sure we’ll have pictures from) is the start of the new school year. This means that my schedule is being impacted a lot, and I will need to get used to classes again. With any luck, this semester will be the last time I ever take classes in grad school. I also need to start a paper next week which is due on the 14th, so it’s a little tight on the scheduling end. Hopefully I will be able to pull it off, because the conference is in Italy next year and [lj user=”ceilingsarecool”] has a keen interest in going with me.

But for now, I get a little R&R time before rejoining previously scheduled overwhelming work, already in progress.

• One Year Ago: “The new place is great - even with all of the boxes it’s better than the old apartment”
• ~Two Years Ago: “THEN DON’T TAKE IT ASSHOLE. IT’S NOT YOURS.”