It’s been a while since I read this book, having picked it up at Powells on our Portland vacation last year. It was sitting on my shelf for a while before I read it, but when I finally did get to it, I was pleasantly surprised at the discovery. I had originally picked it up because I liked the title, the blurb on the back, and the lego man on the cover (the current version is less lego-y), but it was some good fiction, and strangely relevant to today’s times.

The book focuses on a group of software developers who are working at Microsoft on the bottom rung, which isn’t necessarily a bad place to be, but in the 1990’s when this book is set it meant that you were basically a geek of the highest order and didn’t really have much of a real life. The main characters are staying in a typical of the time “Microsoft House” which meant that they were all workaholics and sharing a house with a bunch of other Microsoft employees.

After a couple of character-establishing chapters in which we are introduced to all of the characters and all of their quirks, the whole house gets recruited to Silicon Valley to become part of a startup which will be revolutionizing the industry and making something that has never been made before. The product they are building is a kind of object-oriented block-building world, with procedures and things that you can attach to everything. It is very reminiscent of something like Second Life and eerily similar to Minecraft when it is described in the book. The product and company itself goes through some interesting transformations and pivots, but that’s not really what makes this book any good.

It chronicles from the perspective of Dan, who could be called the main protaganist. It reads really like a geek blog, with time passing between chapters and things happening that are discussed in the past tense. Every chapter brings new things, and like a blog, it can meander from subject to subject from times. It also contains some of classic blog-style interdictions of “computer thought” which are really just some random words which are placed strangely across the page and make you think because of their placement between the chapters, about what is missing between these tellings of goings on.

It’s grounded in the reality of the 1990s and the dot-com and tech boom which happened around then, so there are the main players like Sun and Apple which are marginally involved. The style of writing really makes you feel like you are reading from someone who is inhabiting this world of startups, high ideas, spending money and coding sprees. True to form, the startup company begins in a company house and then moves to an office which has it’s own style later on.

There are somewhat of a group of plots in the book, each riffing off of each other in strange ways and connecting at various points. One of the group at the original house didn’t leave Microsoft and there are various little interludes to keep us up to date on what is happening with him, and the main character gets hooked up and a love story develops with another of the developers at the company. There is also a lot of family dynamics between Dan and his parents - his father is one of the older generation who worked in the valley when it was just getting started and doesn’t know what to do with himself.

All in all, I would say that this book is surprisingly relevant and a clear look into a geek culture which exists even today, even though the pages of the paperback that I got were yellowed and frayed, almost 15 years after it’s publication. The main storylines are connected and the characters are written very true to life. Some of the references are dated but you could place these same people in a similar situation at a company today (although Microsofties have grown up quite a lot I think) and it would be believable and just as compelling.

The only downside of this book is that it feels like it’s lacking any type of closure. You get to the end of the book and there really isn’t anything resolved, and while you’ve though about some interesting things along the way and the journey was great, there really is no destination that the author takes you to. Some would say that this is a bonus, because there is a lot in the story about how life is always evolving, but it still felt like there was a chapter missing at the end for me for some reason. I give it a B+ because it could be better, but it’s extremely satisfying in it’s own right.

In the last two months or so, I’ve been working a different way when I am at my desk computer at home. On July 7, I converted my desk from a traditional desk into one where I am standing up while I work. I had been a bit curious about standing for a while, owing it to a couple of people I know who had tried it out. They claimed that there were a lot of advantages to working while standing, not the least of which was that they felt more productive than they were when sitting down all day.

After reading their accounts, I was thinking in the back of my mind that I had somehow worked out the perfect system for my desk where it would be easy and free for me to try out this new form of working. When I originally moved to the Twin Cities for the beginning of grad school, I needed a desk, and somehow got it into my head that it would be a very cool thing to have a massive work area to work with. Someone introduced me to the idea of wire shelving, and I eventually put two and two together and acquired with great effort a 3 foot by 5 foot sturdy wire shelf, which I covered with a Lexan sheet and use to this day as my main work area. (Diana uses a second one - incidentally at the time I had to buy them in pairs.) One of the great advantages of using a wire shelf as a desk is that you can adjust it to be as low or as high as you want, in one inch increments. This meant that for the majority of the time that I was working or playing on the computer – something that takes a significant portion of my life – that I was sitting at exactly the right height for ergonomic purposes. It also meant that I could do this transition without too much trouble:

I moved the main desk from 25 inches off the ground to 40 inches. It wasn’t exactly as simple as pushing a button, which some more fancy standing desks use in order to make it easy to sit for some periods of time as well, but I figured that if I was going to give it a try, I should really go all in and try to stand all the time. I still had a sitting desk at my day job, so it wasn’t going to be all the time I was standing.

Directly after the transition, the first thing that I noticed was that I was a little more attentive, and was just a little more comfortable. This was despite the fact that I had miscalculated the height which should be comfortable by about a third of a foot, which meant that I was standing with a wide stance in order to be the right level to type and look directly at the screen. I moved my chair to the other side of the room and didn’t even look back, starting on work right away. It was refreshing to be standing. I also felt that I had a better handle of the situation for some reason. I felt pretty productive that first night, but got tired pretty quick and retreated to the living room and my laptop on the cumfy couch.

I tried it out for the majority of a month, working at least an hour a day at the standing desk every night, for most of my thesis work and a bit of other work as well. When I am working at the standing desk, I am much more likely to do a little bounce to the music that I’m listening to, which I think will probably be good for me in the long run - I’m not really standing statically and stoic. Even when I am not listening to anything, I feel like I am more active than when I am sitting because I will shift from one foot to the other, just to even out the weight or get a little more comfortable. When I am in a chair, I am content to just get comfortable and sit there for a while, but when I am standing, I seem to be unconsciously vigilant about how comfortable I am at each given moment, and adjusting to make it that much easier to work.

After about a month, I remedied the situation of the four inches suboptimal placement of the original desk, and it just became more comfortable than it was before, and I can stand there for much longer periods of time. When I had to wide-stance in order to work there, it wasn’t bad but it was still somewhat uncomfortable, and now I can just walk right up to the desk and start typing on my computer. I’ve played games for hours on end there with no trouble at all, and I will spend a significant period of my day standing there working when I can.

One of the side benefits that I haven’t heard people write about before is that when I do decide to sit down, it’s a much more relaxing experience now. In the same way that cutting out a lot of sugary sweets from your diet makes the chocolate cake that you eat on your birthday that much more tasty, standing for most of your work makes it just that much more relaxing to sit your ass down on a cushioned couch and watch some great TV.

So I’m two months into the experiment, and I feel confident saying that it’s been a success so far. I would recommend trying standing for anyone who can wrangle a way to get their work space up to that level. I think that it’s definitely not for everyone, and there are still a few bad things about it (I think that I need to get a standing mat now), but the advantages in productive work and just general active feeling for me have been great.

We’re continuing to zoom out into bigger and bigger viewpoints through these first seven images in the flashing montage at the beginnign of the show. Today we are seeing some amphibians, just like the last image:

This image again is available in source form, and in color, through Jupiter Images. The title of the image is “Marine iguanas on rocks”, which is exactly what this image depicts. Marine Iguanas are unique in the world, and are only found near the Galapagos islands. It relates really closely to the image from last week, because it can forage and live off of the sea, not needing any of the things on the land. This image might be the first hint of a slant (other than the obvious timeline with billions of years) towards an evolutionary angle, as they were commented on by Charles Darwin when he was on his visit to the Galapagos.

They are protected by the Equadorian government, and are considered threatened by many becuase their food source is affected and these rocks that they bask on in order to raise their temperature (they are cold-blooded or course) are both affected by the El Nino effect.

It’s been a quiet month on the blog front, mostly because I don’t have a lot of organizing energy lately. I should be able to put these up once a month at least, so true to the promise to myself, I’m putting this one up now.

The last month has been pretty good to me in my diet. There has been a lot less roller-coaster-ness than there was in the previous months, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel that I might be able to hit my goal before I head off on vacation in the middle of September. That would be nice. In regards to my diet, I’ve been mostly still keeping with the keto diet that I have been on before, focusing a lot on the protein and fat portions and limiting myself when thinking about carbs. Lately I have been loosening up on the restrictions of the diet lately, and not watching the ketostix as much as I did when I was hard-core on the diet. Now I just am kind of passively trying to stay below 50 or 75 carbs a day by not eating any bread in general, and counting the carbs along with the calories that I’m eating.

Lately weekends have been a pretty good deal for me, because I told myself last month that I was going to start letting myself eat a little more freely over the weekends. So I get to give myself a treat on Saturday before we go out to the farmer’s market here in town and have some pancakes or hash browns. I’ve found that some of my tastes have changed though, since the last time that I have been eating out “normally”. I’m ordering a lot more things with peppers and tomatoes in them, and with cooked onions. They are pretty tasty and give an otherwise bland breakfast omelet some more zing. I’ve also been avoiding a bunch of carbs by having pancakes with sugar free syrup. Almost every restaurant which serves breakfast will have some kind of sugar free syrup available, which means that you won’t just be pouring on the carbs when you eat your cakes. I am likening it now to asking for diet soda - because I have the sugar free syrup, I can have a couple of pancakes.

In the last month or so, I’ve decided that I need to start upping my exercise. I mentioned last month that I had a new course for my training, and I started interval training. I’ve stuck with the running course pretty religiously, because I think it has a good mix of hills and slow climbs along with some falls, and goes far enough afield that I can feel accomplished every time. It also helps that it goes past five of the parks here in northeast Minneapolis, so I get to have a little bit of nature on the walk.

The running pace has been going up a little bit, but I am staying with the type of training I was doing before, which is a two minutes walking to one minute jogging or running throughout the whole course. You can see some of my intervals on RunKeeper (look me up and add me if you want). I really like the graphs on there, because it shows how fast you run and it is really nice. I am still logging at dailymile as well, because I have more people cheering me on at that site. At any rate, my best pace has been improving dramatically lately, with the best pace dropping over a minute in the last month to 11:25 per mile. I’m really happy about the fact that there is such a tangible improvement from these runs. I’m hoping that I can make my goal of doing the course in less than 45 minutes by the end of the year.

After a rocky graph last month, it is heartening to see that most of this month’s graph is green. I have a little blip above the line at the end of the first week of August, but it is working out pretty well for me, and the weekly loss is spot on to what I have been aiming for on the calories scale, so it works out overall. I am somewhat terrified to see what these will look like when I start ramping it down and eating a little more. I am worried that my body will rebel at the idea of eating more foods and start gaining weight instead of just going to a steady state. I am really, really close to the “before and after picture” goal that I set for myself, and with any luck I will post it with next month’s report.

The yearly graph looks great. I have even apparently sped up my weight loss in the last two months, despite the heavy upwards blip around the fourth. I’m slightly worried that my next vacation will have a similar uptick, but a graph like this will make me just get right back on track and lose any gained pounds.

I’ve mentioned my transition to a different period a couple of times in this month’s report. I’ve decided that I want to get comfortable where I am for a little while, at least when I get to the next goal that I have set for myself I will start focusing on toning and being more fit instead of losing weight necessarily. If I’m lucky, I’ll still lose some of the pounds just because I will be getting rid of some of the excess fat rolls that are on my body. I’ll still be posting monthly on my progress, but it will start focusing on fitness and such instead of just the diet itself. I’m hoping that by keeping really close track of everything, I won’t have a problem staying at around the same weight until the end of the year.

Wow, it’s been a long time. Maybe I can do these weekly like the Project 52.

This is our first image which I couldn’t reliably find on one of the stock images sites. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere, but I just can’t search through the millions of fish images and amphibian images out there. It’s set in the timeline on the screen at about 10,000 BC.

It’s meant to depict the evolutionary link from sea to land, one of the Tetrapods who have similarities to the frogs or lizards of today. I think it looks most like the Tiktaalik. There is a nice image on the Wikipedia page which shows one walking out of the sea. Of course the 10k BC number is off by a ton, as the Tetrapods were all from more than 300 million years ago or more. Then again, things haven’t really been that accurate up to now (and I don’t really expect them to be more accurate).

For the longest time I remember that the evolution deniers saying that they hadn’t seen any fish coming up on land, but they just didn’t like to look at the amphibians or something. There was always the “those don’t breathe water” things about them though. I also think that those Darwin stickers that people put on cars are cute, but I wouldn’t put one on one of my cars. For some reason I am quite timid, and that seems like a pretty direct jab at christians. I believe in evolution, but I don’t want to be hostile about it.

I got behind again. I need to take more pictures.

Well, I’ve been a bit lax in the updating of this blog lately, and it seems that I’ve let an entire month go by without updating everyone on my diet status. I’ll try to be a little less flaky in the future, but for now, you get two, two, two months in one update.

The last two months have been the most roller-coastery of the entire diet so far. Even so, I’ve managed to keep an average steady pace in the weight loss domain and keep eating the foods that I love while avoiding the ones that would cause problems. I’ve still been keeping mostly to the ketogenic diet, which is very low-carb, but I have been able to be a little bit more lax in this month than I have been able to in the past. Partially this is due to me actually measuring when I am in a state of ketosis (that is the state when the liver is breaking down fat to produce glucose). I’ve been using these Ketostix in order to measure when I am in ketosis and when I am not in it. They are a clear indicator of when I need to keep a better eye on the amount of carbs that I am eating.

In the last month I took my first long vacation from the diet in a while (when I was in Spring Green, and I had a big jump in my weight right away because of it. Luckily I think it was mostly water weight and “shock weight” because after a couple of days of being back on the low-carb diet I was below the trend line again. I am somewhat concerned about it now, because I do eventually want to turn back to a more natural eating style where I can have a greater amount of carbs in a normal day, although probably not the unrestricted amount of carbs that I was having before.

According to many, the ideal amount is 55% of your calories from carbohydrates, and then 30% from proteins, and 15% from fats. Ketogenic diets turn this on it’s head, with as few as 5% of of the calories from carbohydrates a much greater percentage from the “good fats” that are in animal meats. I think I will try doing something different like maybe swapping the proteins and carbohydrates, and making sure that more of my carbohydrates come from good sources like beans and grains. One of the main things that I didn’t realize how much of was in my diet before and I am coming to terms with now, was how much refined sugar I was having. In a typical day I would have more than 100g of refined sugar, which is pretty appalling considering how little I have now and is super sweet. I was convinced that I was not going to be one of those people who would shirk at the sweetness of things (I’ve always had a sweet tooth, and still do), but after just a little of a sweet thing, I can’t have much more. It could also be a big factor in the blood sugar levels, which make a big difference for me now.

I’ve been pretty consistent with my exercise in the last few months, with most of the exercise coming in the form of outside walking around the neighborhood. I’ve started taking pictures of these little lions that are situated around my neighborhood, that I didn’t notice before because you just notice more things when you are walking at 4mph instead of driving along at 25mph. I am maybe going to map them out and see what I can do. In the month of June it was pretty much straight walking, and I tried to cover the map with my walks, making sure that I walked every street. I got a decent amount of it covered, but there is only so much wandering that I can do with the limited amount of time that I gave myself each day. I still think I did a decent job of covering the neighborhood.

In the month of July, at least for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been keeping a consistent path and trying to see if I can get my speed up and start going faster. This all started when I took a longer walk than normal and saw a tiny lake which was nearby. The walk itself was quite enjoyable and actually walks nearby five of the local parks, and is of a distance that I feel like I am accomplishing something every day that I can exercise and do the whole loop. I’ve been doing it pretty consistently every time that I go out. Since it is mostly straight lines, but it is still very much variety on the walk, I can make sure that I go the right way and it gives me something to measure against when I try to go faster. Lately I’ve been trying to incorporate some short jogs into the runs, with intervals like 2 minutes of walking to 1 minute of running or jogging, and have been getting faster. Right now it’s my goal by the end of the year to be able to do this course in the 45 minutes that I had been allocating to my exercise before I started the extended walks. That would mean that I am very close to a rate that is a 10 minute mile. Right now my best pace is 12:30 a mile, which is still much faster than I’ve ever been able to run as I can remember it.

This is probably the worst graph of diet progress that I’ve been able to present this year. The hump in the middle represents the shock of those many cheat days on the vacation. They are also estimated by the graphing system here which is those open graph marks. I’ve still been steadily going in the downward trend nowadays though which is great, and I have had a solid week of all below 250 pounds which is a good milestone to be happy about. If I keep going at this rate, I’ll get to my first major weight goal before the end of August, and then things will get more interesting as I try to maintain the weight until the end of the year. I also promise a before and after picture of me when I get to that point, if only to remind myself that I want to maintain the smaller me.

The year to date graph again looks pretty nice, with a net loss of about 50 pounds since the beginning of the year, and only one major blip there at the beginning of this month. Even with the bump it looks like I’m right back on track already and haven’t really had a major setback.

It’s an odd month, so let’s look at the graph showing all of the progress from the beginning of me trying to get fit, exercise and lose weight. I’m almost 100 pounds down from my previous weight of 340. This graph looks great. One part of this graph which is encouraging to me is actually the part that probably looks pretty bad to you, which is the time right around October 2010. In this period I was able to just stay at the same weight for a very long time, which suggests that it will be possible for me to do it again. I’m thinking about that because it is what I will want to be doing soon.