A Whole Lotta Nothing

Weight loss tips for geeks

I'm halfway through a big bet and I just weighed in at a tad over 210 pounds this morning, right on schedule for winning my bet. Getting down to 220lbs from 230 at the start of the year was easy, but the rest of the pounds were much harder. I'm now on a pretty good weight loss streak of a couple pounds per week with no end in sight. Different things work for different people but I thought I'd share what worked for me in the hopes that maybe one or more of these tips will help your own weight loss as well.

Read the Hackers Diet

A good starting point is reading the bible for geek weight loss: The Hacker's Diet. It's a simple free book you can get a copy of online and read on almost any device. It's pretty basic stuff, talking about how food equals calories equals pounds and how to count and curb calories while exercising to further your calorie deficit. The book does a great job of laying out a simple engineering approach that doesn't concern itself with what foods you eat or how you prepare them or even what exercise you choose to do, it's all just simple math on how to make small changes to lose a pound or two a week to meet your goal and maintain your ideal weight. The only downside to the book is that it was written a long time ago and you should ignore all the mentions of spreadsheets and the screenshots of early Excel running in Windows 3.1 because thankfully there are iPhone apps and online apps that can keep track of your data much easier.

Weigh yourself every day, use a moving average to analyze it

I've heard many times in many places that you shouldn't live and die simply by the scale and that you should instead plot your daily weight on an average curve that smoothes out the daily fluctuations in weight. I never had the patience to do this until recently but now that I have I fully understand the benefits.

It's also important to limit your variables by taking your weight at around the same time every day, with the same scale, under similar conditions. I do this every morning right after I get up. I usually pee, get undressed completely, and take my weight. I've been doing this for almost a year and I used to get depressed easily if I happened to shoot up a few 10ths of a pound one day. It wasn't until I switched to a moving average that I started to see the light. It takes a couple weeks to get enough data points but trust me that it is worth it.

There are many explanations of why one would use a moving average, but I'll just say that it covers your weight trends and lessens the daily fluctuations. This means if you drop 0.1 pounds every day for a week then one morning you weigh in at one full pound heavier than the previous day, your entire week wasn't shot that morning because you'd still be trending downwards. If you stick to your plans you'll often see weight continue to go down even with the occasional hiccup.

After trying out several online tools and apps, I like physicsdiet.com the best. It gives a nice history graph and you can use the basic green-means-good, pink-means-bad to continue exercising and watching what you eat. Sometimes it can be frustrating if you suddenly lose a few pounds and your moving average still reads a pound or two higher than what the scale says, but having a slow moving average has done wonders for my happiness each day. An average weight loss trend removes a lot of the emotion from daily weigh-ins, in a good way.

Practice mindful eating

When I first started trying to lose weight I hit a plateau early on. I was doing more exercise but I wasn't losing any weight for months on end and it wasn't until I realized that I was eating larger meals to counteract the exercise that I solved the plateau problem.

Being mindful of your eating for me means a few things. First, I try to have small dinners, early in the evening. Secondly, at every meal and especially dinner I stop every few minutes while eating and take a quick assessment of how full I am feeling. In the past, I've pretty much just shoveled food into my mouth until a plate was cleared, but now I frequently have small light dinners with 14 hours or so before breakfast the next day, which really helps lower my daily calorie intake. Another quick tip came from somewhere deep in Ask MetaFilter: if you're presented with some large meal, rich food, or incredible looking dessert, ask yourself if you'll remember it two weeks from now. If the answer is yes, by all means go ahead and eat it and enjoy it and think back on how wonderful it was weeks from now. If the answer is no, put the fork down and go do something else.

Pick an exercise that doesn't feel like work

I know a lot of friends that have done the Body for Life thing have told me to not just try a diet and not just try a workout, but change your schedule permanently so you can do healthy things forever and it's true. My big win on losing weight was increasing my exercise but doing so with an activity I love to do (cycling). So it wasn't a chore to increase my weekly miles on a bike, it was a chance to spend more time doing something I loved. Even if you hate gyms, hate working out, hate running, hate cycling, and hate jumping rope, you have to find something physical you love to do in order to make it work. Once you find that exercise embrace it and use enthusiasm to help burn some extra calories.

Overall I'm really happy with my 20lbs lost since early this year and I'm looking forward to losing another 15lbs more before I try to stabilize my weight below 200lbs. A lot of it comes down to self-control -- there are so many opportunities every day to gorge yourself on free office bagels, high calorie coffee drinks, and rich desserts that it's often hard to say no, but with good feedback and some clear goals it makes it much easier to say no.

Elvis Costello: adenoidal

I want to share a small snippet from the latest MetaFilter Podcast. To anyone but the most hardcore users of MetaFilter, the podcast I do with the other moderators of the site (Jessamyn and Josh) is oddly impenetrable to most. We talk about the things we see on the screen, so it makes it difficult to listen to anywhere besides in front of a computer. But I don't want this snippet to be lost forever so I've plucked 30 seconds out of our hour long recording to share this:

It's based on this comment at MetaFilter, which uses NYT's own search to skewer them slightly (Daily Show megaclip-style) for repeating a phrase about a great performer.

MaxFunCon

Teddy Bears Have Their Picnic, originally uploaded by mathowie.

It's pretty hard to summarize or even relate how MaxFunCon went last weekend, so maybe I'll start with some history.

Nearly a year ago, Jesse Thorn emailed me to say he was seriously considering throwing a comedy/internet type conference/festival outside of Los Angeles, and would I like to sponsor it to get the ball rolling. Jesse described who he'd like to have in the nightly line-ups, and had a loose idea of some podcasts being recorded live in the day. I had no idea what to expect, but I had a feeling it could be good, so I gave Jesse some sponsorship money and the ball started rolling.

This past weekend is mostly a blur, but I remember laughing so hard I cried both nights of comedy. I learned a ton about cooking simple desserts from Julia Crookston. I loved hearing nerds sit quietly during a musical set and instead of yelling at the performer, when they did make noise, it was to offer cooperative harmony that actually made the songs better. I thought the podcasts were great as well.

But the thing that really made it all work was the people. I listen to podcasts alone for the most part, and for The Sound of Young America, I only know one other person that listens to it that I can discuss shows with. I think most podcast listening is a solitary thing done in the car on long commutes or at the gym climbing imaginary stairs, so when you bring everyone that listens to a podcast together, I had no idea what that kind of crowd would be like.

Turns out they are extraordinarily nice, tremendously open, and generous with conversation and sharing of spirits (booze). Having only 150 people worked wonderfully as the five strangers I met the first afternoon became quick acquaintances and no matter where I ate at each meal or stood next to during an event, it was easy to strike up a conversation about the weekend and ourselves. The "famous" people that starred in the shows were attendees themselves and I found everyone to be approachable, funny, and interesting to be around.

The food was great. I don't recall a conference ever having food that surpassed standard airline food (I mean, what's the deal with airline food, amirite?), but every meal was amazing and didn't taste like the standard institutional stuff that passes as catered conference food.

It was great that we didn't need money while we were there. When Jesse said everything was taken care of, he was right. Being outside of LA and basically in the sticks also helped -- we were isolated which made making friends and sticking together for three days straight much easier. In the end, the whole thing felt like some sort of magical cruise loaded with people I liked, people I knew, and tons of people I never met before but somehow the cruise director knew I'd like.

About the only downside of the event was one of my own making. I drink very rarely, on the order of a glass of beer or wine once every 3-6 months. Maybe once a year I have more than one beer and it's even rarer when I drink to the point of being tipsy. I drank several beers on Saturday night then followed it up with a couple delicious daiquiris prepared by Dr. Cocktail. I drank tons of water at the after party, stumbled home, then awoke with every symptom cliché in the book. Everything was too loud, too bright, and anything in my stomach was quickly ejected. I missed most of the last morning thanks to my first adult hangover of my life. Stupid me, but next time I'll definitely slow it down and keep it under control.

In the end, it was some of the best times I've had. It's tough to compare to other conferences because I mostly attend serious technical conferences unconcerned about how much fun attendees are having, but MaxFunCon was worth every penny of the sponsorship. I think Jesse stumbled upon a perfect combination of small but manageable amount of attendees that were extraordinarily nice combined with ample good food and drink and finished off with amazing comedy, music, and podcast showcases.

If I could sign up for next year's event today, I would.

"Why would anyone send me this?" — Aunt Fannie

I just had that thing happen with an online store, where if you once bought a gift item for someone, and had it shipped to them, all subsequent orders you place for yourself (even years later) end up being sent to your old giftee, instead of yourself.

This has happened to me several times over the past few years and every time I've gone back to double- and triple-check that only my address appears anywhere in the order forms, and still, the items end up on the doorstep of a long lost friend or family member instead of my own.

It feels like someone, somewhere made a bad programming decision ten years ago as a shortcut -- why look up the order details from the most recent order when you can just automatically assume it is going to the last address on file? -- and we're all paying the price of that decision today.

Build this: Visual TiVo for my computer

I spend hours everyday on my main desktop computer, and I come across bugs in my own code and others' code often. Today as I was trying to help a friend move a blog off wordpress.com, I swear I saw a status screen change an important value when an unrelated setting was changed. It was a showstopper bug but I could not reproduce it. I couldn't switch Firefox into offline mode to see it, since it already reloaded the page to show the new value on the status screen.

At that point I wished for something similar to Time Machine, but for not only what URLs I had previously loaded (already in browser history), but what the pages I'd viewed actually looked like. Even if I was crazy and the values didn't change, it would have been nice to look back and make sure some other action changed the setting. I realized it's not just websites that this might come handy for, but for any application running on my desktop.

So here is my idea: Build an app that takes a screenshot of my entire desktop every 5 seconds silently in the background. At any point I want to look back and figure out how I caused a bug in my application, I'd launch this automatic screenshotting background app and it would assemble a quicktime movie of every desktop screenshot taken in the last hour. That's exactly 720 total images, so playback at 24 frames per second would give you a 30 second movie of your last hour of using a computer in a tidy little movie.

As a programmer and designer myself, I know finding bugs is hard enough in my own stuff, but reproducing them for other programmers is much harder. Something like this kind of application could really come in handy -- if you couldn't figure out how exactly to reproduce the bug, at least you'd have a nice little video of the bug in action to show a developer and visual proof of the results.

To a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail

Google Searches for Staffing Answers, from the WSJ:

The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

I never thought they'd do it, but Google just invented QuitRank™

Greener airline loyalty plans

I just returned from NYC, where I spent the week enjoying a vibrant city and a couple days of the GEL conference. The conference was great, a ton of fun and great experience overall though I have to admit there wasn't a lot of stuff I could take away and use to build web projects even though I came away inspired. One of the many informative talks was given by Graham Hill of Treehugger and he talked about cutting carbon for Americans by making a few small changes. One of them was eating less meat ("weekday vegetarian") and the other was flying less often (non-stop, stay for at least a week, group trips into one).

I got to thinking about how seldom I fly these days, on the order of maybe 3-4 flights a year, where a few years ago I averaged about once a month or more. Ever since I cut back on flights, my award travel from various airline loyalty programs has basically dried up. Some stored miles have expired to zero, while the one airline I use most often seems to add miles so slowly that I'll be lucky to take one free trip after six years of saving miles up.

While listening to Graham Hill, I thought about all the ways that frequent flyer miles are the exact opposite of the advice he was giving. They encourage regular travel by plane. They encourage many short flights (Graham mentioned going non-stop over multi-stop since take-offs create the most pollution). They encourage long trips to rack up the miles. I understand why they do all these things -- they want to fill seats and sell tickets, but eventually all this plane travel is going to bite us in the ass and the current CO₂ levels just might be one result.

I'd love to see an airline (someone ballsy like Virgin or JetBlue) take the lead and reward travellers that stick with the same airline, but consciously reduce their short flights, reduce their total miles, and reduce their frequency. They wouldn't even need to offer free flights or upgrades for loyalty -- maybe plant a tree in my honor every time I fly only 4 times or less a year.

It'd be nice to see something other than rewarding people for frequently using the one of the most polluted forms of travel.

Resubscribe to my RSS?

A bunch of readers have reported various bugs to me over the past couple months since I switched over to Typepad for this blog's host. I used to have numerous RSS feeds from various systems at a bunch of different URLs. Since I used to host the site myself, I could redirect them all to the newest actual feed. Once I moved, those old feeds died and a few people have asked me why I haven't made a post since last summer. A few have also reported weirdness with my baked-in delicious links. Something about them showing up as new items constantly even though they aren't new.

The new forever feed for this site should continue to be:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AWholeLottaNothing

If you're having any troubles, try unsubscribing to my feed, then resubscribe using that URL. Hopefully that fixes things right up.

Conversations I'll someday have with my daughter that will make little to no sense to her no matter how much I try to explain

"I remember the day we got cable"

"I remember the day I finally got broadband internet"

"The Safety Dance was the first 45 single I bought"

"My brother got one of the first CD players on our block"

"I owned many, many cassingles"

"For ten years, I watched a 19" TV from across a large room"

"I remember the Tears for Fears CD costing almost $20"

"My first cellphone charged you money just for keeping it turned on"

"I once delivered bundled newspapers as a kid, on my bike, and later in college, using my car"

"There was a time when you couldn't buy music digitally from any record label, but you could download it or convert your existing music for free"

"When I was 11, our phones had cords and you had to put them onto this device, then tell your Commodore computer to call Compuserve, and it was basically just a crappy text-based encyclopedia and a private message system"

Spring Blossoms

Spring Cherry Blossom blooming from Matt Haughey on Vimeo.