Joel Hainley : San Francisco Bay Area Software Consultant

I’ve been taking a psychology class over at DVC and while going through some assigned reading came across a section titled “Behavioural Dieting”. I’m not sure if this is what Dr. Phil, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and others suggest but I thought it was interesting, and might be of interest to others who spend their days, and nights, and weekends, working at a computer.

1. Get Yourself Committed To Weight Loss - get yourself involved with others to help you work towards your goals. Things like weight watchers, jenny craig, etc.
2. Exercise - Yeah, still gotta do that, changing your eating behaviors isn’t a silver bullet, you still have to exercise, which is just changing another behavior.
3. Learn Eating Habits By Keeping A Diet Diary - they advocate making a complete 2 week record of when/where/what you eat, how you felt about it. Note if your feels/emotions just before and after eating.
4. Learn To Weaken Personal Eating Clues - Once you’ve figured out what you learned from the previous step, try to restrict your eating to a single room. don’t read, study, listen to the radio, watch tv, etc. The idea here is to have to interrupt what you are doing to eat, and to only eat when you are eating. ( ha! )
5. Count Calories, But Don’t Starve Yourself - Interesting thing here, if you’re having problems problems dieting, try dieting every other day. Apparently, people who diet moderately everyday lose as much as people who diet intensely every other day.
6. Develop Techniques To Control Act Of Eating - smaller portions, wait 15 minutes before you get another plate of food etc.
7. Avoid Snacks -eat a meal if you’re hungry, if you’re not hungry enough for a meal drink water, or set a timer and make yourself wait 20 minutes, and see if you’re still hungry.
8. Chart Your Daily Progress - you need to keep track of your progress, but you need to realize that the real goal here is to change your habits towards food, and eating.
9. Set Threshold For Weight Control - studies have shown people that set a threshold limit on their weight, tend to keep the weight off.

I though this was pretty interesting, the points that really caught my attention were items 4 and 6. As a developer, or any computer/network professional, we spend a lot of time in front of the computer. When we’re hungry we eat, but we don’t want to lose our focus, so we end up eating in front of the computer. Pretty soon we’re snacking in front of the computer, and then we’re never leaving our desks and having food flown in. ( well perhaps it’s not quite that bad but you get the idea ). There’s two really great things about forcing yourself to eat in a particular spot. You tend to eat less, because you have other things to do, and you take a break from what you’re doing, so you feel less and less like you spend the whole day sitting in front of a computer working.

The second point about “controlling the act of eating” is also interesting. I discovered the reality of this for myself last November when Shad ( a friend ) and I had lunch together at an indian buffet. I got a plate of food, and sat down and wolfed it down, and was headed back for another plate, when we got into a conversation. Fifteen minutes later I finally got up to get food and I was still pretty hungry, when I got back to my table with another plate of food, I took two bites and realized I was stuffed. Since then I’ve been forcing myself to wait 15 minutes for seconds, and if I still go back I try to make sure that it is a smaller portion and filled with only veggies and such. I can’t say that I’ve lost a huge amount of weight, but I definitely don’t get up from the table wishing I had stopped sooner. It’s nice to not overeat.

I drove down to Santa Barbara today, and checked into the local Holiday Inn for a few days to do some work for a client down here. Unfortunately, I was a bit behind on a proposal I needed to get out so I walked over to the grocery store picked up some food and went back to the hotel room to spend the night working on the proposal and then trying to get to the bottom of a javascript bug that i’m having problems with.

I need to figure out a way to do proposals better/faster I have a helluva time getting them done in a brief enough period of time. ( well brief enough for my tastes ). I want them to be accurate and well thought out, but it’s hard sometimes to spend a lot of time on something that you know is going to be shopped around and end up being used to get some other guy to go cheaper.

It was kinda nice to spend some time just driving along looking at the sites, heading south looking at the ocean stopping to look at the water for a bit, having a leisurely lunch, getting into town towards the end of the workday and spending a couple of hours getting some work done.

Hopefully I’ll have more interesting things to say tomorrow..but don’t hold your breath

2006 ended about 15 days ago and 2007 has begun.

I’m finding myself rather busy this year, with a few different things going on.

1. I’m doing my first century of the year on March 03, 2007 in Death Valley. : i’m feeling like i’m in decent shape for this but i’ve got to keep working. Amy got me a stationary trainer for my bicycle for the days that it’s raining/etc and I need to get some training in. I have ridden the bike to work in the rain, but it seems to be really hard on all the components so I’m not sure whether i should/will continue this. The trainer allows me to get a fair workout in when the weather doesn’t cooperate.

I did my first 50+ mile ride last saturday, it felt good to get out there and push a bit. I can definitely feel a difference from my first 50+ mile ride in the summer. I’m stronger and my body is quite used to the riding now. I picked up a brooks saddle after the Davis Century and i REALLY like it. Its hard as a coffin nail, but i don’t have the chaffing problems i had before during a week of commuting.

2. I’m taking a class at DVC this spring: I was talking to an old friend and she asked me “what are you gonna do when you retire”. I thought about it for a moment, i’d never considered the question before, and replied “I think i’d like to go get a college degree in something”. This stuck with me for a while, and one day i kinda realized, well i don’t have to wait till i retire to go to college, i could just take a class or two a semester and enjoy the process i don’t have to get into “school mode”, and quit working etc. So starting this spring i’m going to start working through my general education requirements. I declared my major as Mathematics when I applied, as I’d like to throw myself at something that isn’t directly computer related but is applicable if necessary. Plus i’ve always wanted to be able to understand the math in Knuth’s books.

3. Looks like i’m going to be making a go at climbing Mt. Shasta this summer. I’ve talked to a couple of people who are also interested and it looks like it’s a go. So after the Chico Wildflower Century on April 22, i’m going to switch over to hiking mode and get ready for that. Probably do some hiking up in Yosemite, Sonora Pass, Mt Diablo to get prepared for that effort. Should be a good time and definitely a clear goal. Either one makes it to the top, or one does not.

4. Contracting stuff continues to grow, lots of work to get done in the first month of the new year, going to be a bit of a challenge to balance everything out but I’m hopeful that I can keep everything moving forward. I would like to be at a point where I can do contracting part-time when/if i get accepted to a 4-year institution.

5. SimplyAlerts.com is slowly being finished, going to get this completed in the first quarter and hopefully I can get some interest in it. If not, well, i’ve learned a ton about php, smarty, perl, postfix, postgres, etc. It’s comparable to the functionality provided by redalert.com, or will be, and i have some cool ideas to implement once the base is in place that would make it MUCH cooler than redalert, and i think i can offer it cheaper.

I’ve decided to start keeping a journal. Not this blog, but an honest to goodness journal, something for me only. A chance to get out all of the things that I want to say but don’t to burden people with listening to. Sometime I’ll talk about why i decided to start a journal, and a few other things i’ve been considering doing. For now, I just want to talk about what software I ended up using for journaling.

I looked around a little at various software packages that were available for journaling. I specifically didn’t want to just use a big text file, because getting to a specific day would be a pain. I didn’t want something that worked on windows only. I use windows for a few minor things, but tend to prefer OS-X/Linux for my personal stuff. I wanted an interface that is mostly the same across the various systems, something that would allow me to easily move the journal around and keep it synced up among my various environments.

What i ended up with was……………ascii text files. 1 file for each entry. Broken out into year and month sub folders, but with the full date in the filename, edited with emacs, and stored in subversion. Pretty simple eh? Yeah i thought so, i’d even spent 10 minutes considering writing my own software till i realized that it was rather a silly thing to write software for.

With this setup it should be relatively straightforward to write a script to create a book form of this data for printing out if the urge ever hits me. Hopefully someone will do me the favor of running rm -rf journal when expire so that noone ever reads the journal.

Another area where simplicity won was in my bookkeeping, i tried Quicken, I tried Money, I now use one of those composition books they sell at staples to do my books. I have a spreadsheet that mirrors this mostly so i can pull out some numbers at the end of the year. Both Quicken/Money seem to manage your money at the end of the month, or when bills show up in your bank account. I don’t find this particularly useful. It’s much better to write down what you spent every day, that way when you get a bill you know it’s accounted for. The simplest way to do this for me has been just a composition book with a few columns drawn in with a ruler, and a few minutes every evening/morning.

Simplicity..wins.

There are a bunch of people I owe emails to, if you are one of those people, i’m sorry for the tardy responses. I’ve been “hiding” ( as Tina puts it ). I’ll try to get caught up on email in the next week or so. Reasons for hiding, you ask? I’m just gonna keep that all to myself, but thanks for asking.

I’ve been riding the bicycle regularly since the end of June and have now logged over 1000 miles. I rode 88 miles this last Saturday, not very hilly though. I’m preparing for a ride around lake tahoe ( 72 miles ) in october, and then the next weekend a 100 mile ride in the davis area. The training has been pretty straighforward, i’m no longer taking bart to concord, but am riding down highway 4 and getting about 18 miles a day of riding in. There’s a few good hills and some good flat stuff, so i’m getting a great bit of training in every day. I tend to push myself during the week, and then just go with what’s comfortable on the weekends. That said, I did 77 miles in a little under 5 hours on saturday, then met up with Amy in Pleasant Hill and rode back to Baypoint with her.

The century ( 100 mile ride ) in october is my big ride for the year i guess. I don’t think i’ll be doing any more centuries during 2006 but that could change. I’m going to pull back on my weekend mileage a bit, and try to increase my speed and do some more interval training on the weekends, but I also need to spend some time riding with Amy and help her get some mileage under her belt. That’s hard to do when i’m going out and riding 75-90 miles on the one day when she can go riding with me.

Some people have made comments about how fast i’ve been able to get back into high mileage riding, however I have a few responses to that.

1. I’m commuting to work every day ( or at least 4 days a week ) on the bicycle, and though it’s only 13-18 miles per day depending on the route, riding every day has a dramatic effect on your strength/stamina.
2. I’m not just riding to work, but pushing myself towards my limits every day of my commute. I don’t get a lot of miles on my commute so i’m trying to make the most of them by really pushing myself.
3. 100 miles is not really high mileage. It’s a good goal but it’s not that far. Look at the double centuries, randonneurs, brevets, Firecreek 508 and other high mileage rides. 100 miles is a great goal, and a good amount of distance for your first year of riding, or even your first 4 months back on the bike in 22 years.
4. I’ve been here before, i was riding centuries when I was 9 years old on an all-steel “girls” bike. It’s amazing what the body remembers, and how easily it jumps back into old routines.

Let’s see what else has been going on. I’ve been working on a C# windows application using windows forms for a client. I have been trying to figure out the best approach to using MVC in C#, the approach that I ended up having to use in VB6 is not really applicable/possible in the windows forms world. I’ve almost got it figured out but it’s required me to dig back into my texts and relearn everything i thought i knew about MVC. I might put together some more notes here when I get things where i’m happy with them.

Someone gave me a 14-day free trial to eve online. The game is really cool, but it’s apparent that one could lose a lot of time playing it.

Let’s see what else….oh been doing some work with Smarty on php, i kinda like it. When it was first mentioned to me, i didn’t see that it was terribly useful, and to some extent it wasn’t with the framework that i’ve put together for php, but at the same time, extending the framework and little bit and dropping it in there, makes the separation between developer/html-monkey that much clearer.

I’ve also been doing some work with Mysql5. I’ve used mysql for a few years off and on, written a bunch of apps on it, but have always thought of it as a hobby database. Postgresql is the clear big dog of the open source db management systems. However, mysql, for whatever reason, has a lot more traction, i don’t quite get it, but whatever. So i’ve been spending some time getting up to speed on mysql5 because it’s now starting to have some interesting features, although they are still FAR behind postgres on the extensibility front. Not to mention the command syntax for the cli is easier in postgres ( fewer keystrokes ).