02.17.07
Wii!
Step 1, join costco.
Step 2, browse store.
Step 3, do a double take when seeing costco has Wii’s in stock.
Step 4, buy Wii along with a ton of bottled water and paper towels.
See more progress on: Buy a Nintendo Wii
01.26.07
43things
So I finally figured out 43things. Heard about it for a while, never took the 30 seconds it would take to grok it. In any case, I’ve started using it and replaced the list of stuff on my goals page. Much easier to keep up-to-date.
A year and a half.
I set up a bunch of smart playlists to help me finish this. Each playlist is 3 unrated songs from my library. One playlist per day.
I’ve been rating 3 songs a day for a while now. I still have a ton of unrated songs, but I have found a few gems that I didn’t even know I had.
That said, at this rate (Ha! No pun intended) it will take me over a year and a half to rate them all. That’s assuming I rate all my new music as it comes in… which, in fact, I’ve been very good at.
Now, realistically, a year and a half isn’t all that long when you consider that this incarnation of my iTunes library has existed for over two years now, and I still have 1800+ unrated songs. I just wasn’t getting around to rating vast swaths of my library because, lets face it, that’s boring as hell.
611 days to go.
See more progress on: rate all my songs on iTunes
11.23.06
Been Quiet
Yep, I’ve been quiet here. Not really intentionally.
But I had to brag about this… did a 1RM squat test today, hit 335. Back over 300, so I’m officially over the torn quad and torn hamstring that kept me from squatting heavy. Plus a new all-time PR. Can’t beat that for a Turkey Day workout.
10.17.06
One Windows Beats Mac
I know, blasphemy
Maybe I’m just ultra picky, but it seems to me that Windows has the Mac beat hands down when it comes to recipe management software. I can’t find a Mac app that does what I want. I don’t think I want much just the following:
- Calculate nutritional information. Partial credit for at least tracking it for me, I can figure it out once… but you have to let me say “I made 1.25 of this thing, because that’s how much chicken I had, figure out the calories.” I could come up with some hacks, but everything I looked at only scaled by fixed amounts, like 1/2, 1 1/2, 2 times, etc.
- Help me plan my meals for the week.
- Make me shopping list.
See, it took me all of 30 seconds of googling to find a Windows program that did all this. And then some. It’s really kinda cool looking, and is making me consider firing up Parallels to give it a whirl.
On the Mac side, I’ve tried everything verstiontracker knows about. Twice. Six months apart. They all suck. The ones that track nutritional information of some kind either get it very very wrong (calories, carbs, fat… WTF? Where’s protein?) or they don’t bother and get it all nice and shiny. Why the fuck do I need Spotlight support for my recipes. I’m not going to search my computer for ‘cookies’ and go “oh yeah, those cookies, I should have some.” If I’m searching for food to make, I’m going to have a pretty specific context to it.
Sure, spotlight support is easy, but a the expense of other features? It seems to me that the Mac applications are only about six months behind. Maybe a year. For one guy full-time. What boggles my mind is that they’ve not caught up in the time since I last went looking for a meal planning kind of program, they’re basically frozen in time.
Maybe my dream app will help out with this one. I certainly won’t be able to make the time to write it my own damn self… which is really what I need to do, but Excel is “good enough” for the time being.
The ironic part is that this is a program that everyone has written at least once. It’s like “Computers 101″ for nerds. You’d think someone would have come along and done something different by now. Different like how Delicious Library was different, even though everyone had written (or thought about writing) a database app to track their books.
08.09.06
Context Killer
So I took Merlin Mann’s advice to simplify my contexts and killed off a bunch of my useless ones today. I had over 20. Even subtracting a few that just weren’t ever used because they only existed because I was trying out some ideas that didn’t fly, that’s way too many. It turns out rather than separting them by what I could do I was separating them by what I wanted to do. This is exteremely bad, of course and no where near the point of having contexts.
I got so caught up in wanting to be sure I never saw a task I couldn’t or didn’t want to do that I became very skilled at hiding the things I really should be doing. Plus I could hide all the stale tasks I wasn’t working on, and wasn’t going to anytime soon. Stuff that really belonged in Someday/Maybe, or needed to get culled… really it was more like I had a half dozen Someday/Maybe contexts that weren’t serving any purpose.
I’m down to a 11, with a few more that will go away. I’ve split into three major ones Work (stuff I do for money), Hacking (stuff I do for fun), Chores (stuff I have to do at home) and Errands (stuff I need to do out and about). There’s a few other miscellaneous ones, like the one that depends on a specific computer with my music library before I can do work, but really this is much more managable.
My original thought was to schedule blocks of time to work in specific context. It was well-meaning, but wrong-headed. I don’t need to pick what context to work in, I need to know what context I’m already in and let my system filter it. I may need to ignore some tasks that I can’t do (say, “talk to so-and-so” and he’s out of the office) but that’s the price to pay to keep the whole list fresh. Also I’ve found that I end up scheduling project-specific time, rather than context-specific. It’s been working much better, the past few weeks I’ve been doing that.
07.18.06
I’m an Apple whore
This should come as no surprise to, anyone… and it should be obvious that I couldn’t resisit getting an iPod nano and the Nike+iPod kit. I’m not really much of a runner, but it works for walking and was only $29. (Well, and the excuse to buy a nano, but don’t tell Aoife.) Plus I sorta have a goal of being able to run a 10 minute mile… not much of one, but that was the “fitness” test in middle school I could never quite manage.
Anyway, I just discovered it doesn’t work on an elliptical, like they say. I even tried rigging it up to the pedal and it didn’t help. I played around with the sensor and it seems to register at the extension of the foot, when running. I can think of some mechanical ways to rig an elliptcal to simulate that, but I don’t think they’d be very sturdy. I might just have to buy a second one to rip apart. Supposedly when you have two sensor/receiver pairs iTunes can differentiate them and associate different Nike+ accounts, so presumably there’s some data on the iPod that would let you differentiate between the sensor you use for running and the one rigged up to the elliptical (in theory).
Speaking of the data on the iPod… it’s plain old XML and there’s some interesting stuff in there. Particularly interesting is this:
<extendedDataList><extendedData dataType="distance" intervalType="time" intervalUnit="s" intervalValue="10">0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0082, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0164, 0.0228, 0.0228, 0.0313, 0.0313, 0.0313, 0.0313</extendedData>
</extendedDataList>
</code>
Essentially says to me that it’s keeping track of the total distance traveled every 10 seconds. Must be how the data gets translated into the spiffy graph. There’s also a hex string in there for the calibration… presumably you could save that out and substitute it for a different calibration profile if you did manage to make it work with an elliptical after calibrating it for the elliptical (something I didn’t do).
Also, vaguely interesting when using the elliptical it will claim there is no data after two minutes and “press center to continue workout”. After that happens twice it seems to give up, so you can continue to use it as a time tracker, if nothing else.
Now off to look at the tcpdump of the data iTunes sent to Nike for me.
07.14.06
Trust me, that was hillarious.
From Stargate: Atlantis…
“Ugh. Their operating system is a mess. Thank goodness I remember DOS.”
See, I chuckled. Yes, it was funny… but not hillarious. Then he adds:
“Trust me, that was hillarious”
Pricless, but I hate them for pointing out that I’m such a nerd.
06.26.06
Hot People
I’ve noticed something recently. Most people don’t work out. Most people laugh about how they don’t do it. But the really hot people? They just do it. They don’t talk about it because it doesn’t make for interesting conversation, like washing your car or mowing your lawn doesn’t make for interesting conversation. It’s just something that gets done.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of people who are damn fine and don’t work out at all… but the ones that are jaw droppingly hot? You can bet they do.