Experiments in Life

Boy, vacations sure are a lot of fun. In the middle of May, we spent a week in Virginia at Erin’s house. Everyone had a blast and I am pretty sure that Emily and Jake enjoyed having a playmate for the week. We even managed to get back early enough to have a couple of days off due to the Memorial Day holiday. However, things have just been off with me ever since we got back. I have been tired, short-tempered, and generally stressed. I attribute all three symptoms to two root causes.

First, I have gotten out of the habit of getting up early and exercising in the morning. I believe that not exercising during our vacation has started a positive feedback loop. Not exercising means I am not as physically worn out at night, so I do not sleep well. Not sleeping well means that I feel too tired to get out of bed early enough to go exercise in the morning. Both of these symptoms feed back on each other causing both to get worse.

Second, it has been difficult for me to focus on projects that I have been wanting to get done. When I get home at night and finally get Emily to bed, I have been so tired that I just want to watch television for the 1.5 hours I have before I go to bed. Generally, this makes me feel guilty since I can think of so many other things that I want and should do. The guilt is likely contributing to my lack of sleep as well. Additionally, my task list and inbox keep growing since I am not really clearing them out. All of these contribute to a downward spiral where I get very little done.

So, what can I do to turn things around?

1. I need to start exercising again as soon as possible. This weekend will be the perfect time because I do not have to worry about getting up extra early to exercise. Getting back in the exercise routine in the morning will increase my endorphin output and cause my day to start on a bright point. This alone might be enough to turn my mood around and kick me out of the funk.
2. I need to do a really good weekly review. I put it off completely right after vacation because I was unable to get any “me” time to work on it due to sleeping in so late. This past week, I managed to get one done, but it was hurried and really was not very good. Doing a weekly review will get things out of my head. Getting “stuff” out of my head will let me concentrate more on what I am doing and less on what I could be doing.
3. Strangely, I have found that getting out and working in the yard is putting me in a better mood. On Friday, I came home in a bit of a funk and just really wanted to be by myself. Luckily, I needed to get out and mow the yard. Doing that before dinner relaxed me and made it so that I could be back inside with the family without being irritable. Working out in the yard allows me to have the little bit of “me” time that I need to recharge my batteries after a long week.

I am going to work on applying these three principles over the next couple of weeks and see if that will break me out of these post-vacation blues.

So, in writing the previous post on my Weight Tracking spreadsheet, I came upon a bit of a conundrum. I wanted to export my graph as an image, but I could not figure out how to do that in Numbers. I am sure that there is a way to do so, but it was not immediately obvious, even with a brief Google search. So, being a good engineer, I decided to roll my own weight tracking script.

Writing my own script has several advantages. First, writing my own script gave me a simple project to begin learning Ruby, something I have been wanting to do. Second, it allows me to extend the script with functionality that might be clumsy in a spreadsheet. Right now, I am just keeping track of the same information that I did in the spreadsheet, dates and weights, only I track it in a simple text file. The script calculates the sliding average for me. If needed, I can easily munge the data in other ways or pull together a secondary text file with other information like my workout routine. I know that I could do the same thing in a spreadsheet, but I like the flexibility that a full programming language gives me over the comparative restraint that I feel when I am hacking together formulas in a spreadsheet. Additionally, my data is kept in a simple text file instead of being tied to a Numbers spreadsheet.

Finally, and most importantly, I was easily able to pull in a library that allowed me to plot my weight and the sliding average of my weight over time and export it as an image file.

There are two obvious improvements that I will likely implement. First, I am calculating the sliding window average of my weight as an integer. That is what causes the strange steps on the graph. I will probably change to calculating the average as a real number, just to make the graph a little smoother. Second, I think that I want to have more points on the X-axis of the graph. Looking at it, I think that the first of each month should be marked on the graph, possibly with lines of demarcation running in the Y-direction at each monthly border. I will have to play around with it and see what all I can do with the graphing library. That is the great thing about being a programmer; if the software you are using does not do what you want it to do, you can either fix it or write your own version.

In late March, I decided to do something about the abysmal shape I was in. On the exercise front, I started doing push-ups, sit-ups, and walking/running six days a week. Long before I started any of that, I began putting my data collection skills to use by tracking my daily weight. So, in the last few days of March, I set up a simple spreadsheet to log my weight every day just before I get in the shower. I graph my weight versus time off to the side of the spreadsheet. Additionally, I calculate a 7-day sliding window average of my weight to try and smooth out the little fluctuations that occur from day to day. I also graph this and overlay it on the raw weight data.

In the early April time frame, I was very carefully watching what I ate and, as the month moved on, I noticed my weight graph showing a nice, downward trend. Then, as I began seriously working through the push-ups and sit-ups, before I began walking and running, I started to notice the graph sloping back up. At the moment, I am attributing that to the muscle-building workout that I have been doing, since I have not changed my eating habits in the past several weeks. Starting the walking and running seems to have curbed the incline, but I am still not doing a large enough amount of cardio exercise to push the trend back downwards.

I am considering augmenting my spreadsheet with push-up, sit-up, and walking/running data per day to see if I can correlate a decrease in my weight to increases in my workout routine. If everything is going well, I would expect to see that correlation. If not, I suppose that means that my eating habits have changed and I just have not noticed.

As I mentioned before, Tasks has its share of warts, but it seems to work well enough for me at the moment. In keeping with the GTD tradition, I split my tasks into two categories — projects and actions. Tasks does not have the concept of projects; it only has the concept of tasks. However, I can assign sub-tasks to a task. Additionally, I assign a tag of my choice to a task. So, I combine those to features to give me project support:

• A project is defined as: a root-level task that is tagged with ‘project’ OR a root-level task that is tagged with ’someday’
• An action is defined as: either a sub-task of a project OR a root-level task that is not tagged with ‘project’ or ’someday’ and has a date assigned to it.

I use these conventions to help me do my weekly review every Sunday morning. First, I scan the actions associated with my projects and try to schedule actions for the upcoming week. Next, I scan my someday projects and decide whether I want to promote them to projects or not. This all works fairly well in Tasks because I can look at my tasks by tag.

On a daily basis, I tend to heavily use the Upcoming screen in Tasks. The upcoming screen nicely breaks down in Overdue tasks, Due Today tasks, and Due within 7 Days tasks. So, at any point, I can see what I need to get done that day and in the near future. If, in some strange twist of fate, I run out of tasks to work on that are either overdue or due that day, I fall back to tags again. All of my actions are tagged with a context like ‘home’, ‘work’, ‘web’, ‘errands’, etc. When nothing else is pressing, I check the tag for the appropriate context I am in and try to see if there is anything that I have the energy to work on. If so, I work on that. Otherwise, I can rest.

To move forward on my goal to get healthier, I have started doing two programs that will get me in the habit of exercising: One hundred pushups and Two hundred sit-ups. Both of these programs take you steadily towards the goal of being able to do one hundred pushups and two hundred sit-ups over the course of six weeks. I have just finished the two week mark on both of them. For a desk-jockey that has not consistently done any form of exercise in eight years, both programs are tough, even in the early weeks.

Each program starts you out doing five sets, three days a week. After the two week mark, I am doing 30 pushups total and 48 sit-ups. Since each program is only three days a week, I am staggering them so that I do pushups one day and sit-ups the next. Sunday, I get to rest from both programs.

Now, I realize that just doing pushups and sit-ups will not make me any healthier. Sure, it will build my upper body strength some and strengthen my core, but it is not going to help me lose and weight and it will not work on my spare tire at all. Ultimately, that is not the point. The point is, it is getting me in the habit of doing some exercise. I really have no excuse to skip doing these; I just get up in the morning and do them before I do anything else. It does not matter if it is raining or cold outside; all I need is a bit of floor space. The key is to make exercise a part of my routine.

With the upcoming, beautiful spring weather, I am going to integrate some cardio into my exercise routine. Starting Monday, I am going to begin working on the American Running Association’s 12-week Walk/Run Program. This will be a little more difficult because it will be a greater time commitment and I will have to work around the weather. My goal is to do my pushups or sit-ups and then head out to walk or run. In a couple of weeks, I hope to post a positive update.

What do I use to get things done? My memory is garbage, so I have to use lots of tools to help me keep things straight. I have gotten into a daily routine; this is the process I go through to keep everything straight and to encourage me to get tasks done. It is a modified version of GTD as described in Getting Things Done; it may not be for everyone, but it works for me.

The most important part of my process is ubiquitous capture — if I have a thought, I had better get it written down somewhere so that I can do something about it in the future. Currently, Evernote is my tool of choice for ubiquitous capture. I have the Evernote application installed on my iPhone so I can quickly dump text or photos (or voice, which I do not use) into Evernote when I am not at a computer. Likewise, I can use the Evernote desktop applications for Windows and Mac OS X to dump text notes into whether I am at work or at home. Additionally, I have Evernote extensions plugged into Firefox and Outlook so that I can save snippets of webpages and emails straight into Evernote. Lastly, I have written a very basic extension to Emacs that hooks the wonderful RememberMode into Evernote so that I minimize the amount of time it takes me to stash something away while I am editing code. That is the key to how I use Evernote — record something as quickly as possible and get back to what I was doing. I will deal with it later.

When I add something to Evernote, it goes straight into my default notebook, the Inbox notebook. It will not stay there long; generally just until I can review my notes in the evening. When I process the notes that have been stashed into my Inbox, I decide what to do with each note based on the type of note. I have three basic types of notes:

1. Informational Notes — if a note is purely informational, I move it into my Archive notebook and possibly tag it with some metadata to help me find it again. Since I can search Evernote from anywhere, I can always retrieve things that I have archived.
2. Immediate Actions — if a note is something that I can do immediately, I go ahead and do it. For example, I weigh myself first thing in the morning and record my weight in Evernote because that is more convenient that pulling out the laptop and putting it in the spreadsheet. When I process my Inbox, I take the weight and log it in a spreadsheet for further tracking.
3. Projects/Tasks — if a note is something more involved than an immediate action, I need to record it in my task tracking software either as a project or as an action on a project. For example, two weeks ago I was attempting to calculate some statistics on task data and really struggled with it. So, I stashed a note in Evernote of “Refresh myself on statistics”. Obviously, this is something that will take a little while to do, so it has become a project in my task tracking software.

I process my Inbox every night; an empty Inbox is the goal of this review.

What is my workflow for managing projects and tasks in my task tracking software? That will be the subject for next time.

I am more than willing to admit it; I am horrible at managing tasks on my own. Some people are able to remember what they need to do and where they need to be all on their own. I am not one of those people. I depend on technology to be my memory. It all started so innocently back in college. I needed a reminder of when my classes were and what assignments I had due. So, I purchased a Handspring running PalmOS. I was able to keep track of my calendar, my tasks, and my contacts; everything that you would expect a PDA to do. Life was good.

Then, I started to notice that my cell phone and my PDA were bulky. I hated to carry both of them together. Plus, my address book on the PDA was always getting out of sync with the address book on the phone. I thought, “You know, if they would just put a cell phone and a PDA together, life would be good again.” And lo, I discovered the Palm Treo. It was very expensive, so I just made due with what I had and gradually the PDA got less and less use until I had been working for a few years and could afford to get a Palm Treo. Now, I had my calendar, my tasks, and my contacts all together AND I could make phone calls with the same device using the same address book that I synced to my computer! Life was good again.

Then, I started to notice that my Treo and my iPod were bulky. I hated to carry both of them together. I needed the life-line that was the Treo, but I really got used to listening to music while I worked. So, I thought, “You know, if Apple would just put a cell phone, PDA, and iPod together, life would be good again.” And lo, Apple did just that and released the iPhone. It was very expensive, so I made due with what I had. Finally, Apple came out with a version that had a lower up-front cost, so I jumped on that and purchased an iPhone 3G. Now, I had my calendar, my tasks, my contacts, my music, my email, the Internet, AND I could make phone calls with the same device. Life was good again.

Then, I started to notice that I had lost the ability to easily track my tasks using the iPhone. It took too long to interrupt my train of thought to pull out the iPhone and enter in appointments and tasks using the iPhone interface. Ideally, I really wanted to be able to just capture information quickly and come back and enter it in at my leisure. So, I signed up for Evernote and installed its iPhone application. Plus, Evernote also has Windows and Mac clients which make it even easier to stash information.

Finally, I became dis-enlightened with the iPhone task-tracking application that I was using. Once again, it just took too long to enter information into it. I could purchase an expensive Mac client that would wirelessly sync with it, but the keyword here is expensive. So, I decided to give Tasks a try. It has some warts, but it is the best solution that I have used so far. Plus, it is a web application, so I can enter information into it from my desktop, my laptop, or my iPhone.

Next time, I will go over my work-flow and explain just how all of these tools work for me.

Except for today, and probably tomorrow, it has been warm enough for me to break out the grill and cook out some. Emily likes to take those opportunities to play on her slide in the backyard. We have a few pictures of her sliding in the album.

Occasionally we go out to eat for dinner. In this picture, we had gone to Red Robin. Emily carried on for 15 minutes wanting a balloon that they give away to the kids. Finally, we relented and got one for her. She went NUTS with it!

You can see some more pictures in the At Play album.

On Friday, the Iowa Supreme Court found a law banning same-sex marriages to be unconstitutional. Good for Iowa! Hopefully, rational minds will prevail there and this court decision will be allowed to stand. Unlike Iowa, Alabama passed the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment in 2006. Although I voted against this, 81% of my fellow Alabamians voted for it so it was easily able to pass. At the time, I tried to reason through why so many of the residents of my state are against same-sex marriage, but was never really able to come to any conclusions. So, in light of the Iowa decision, I decided to do a little research and see if I could figure out why people are so against same-sex marriage.

The New York Times article made a reference to traditional marriage, so I hit up Wikipedia to see what it had to say about traditional marriage. Here is a summary of the arguments for traditional marriage and against same-sex marriage:

1. Marriage has historically been defined as between a man and woman, thus it needs to be protected because that is how it has always been defined.
2. Marriage between a man and a woman must be preserved for the children! Children need stable homes with two parents to become happy, productive members of society!
3. Same-sex marriages would erode religious freedoms and encourage rampant homosexuality throughout the country.
4. Same-sex marriage is unnecessary because the homosexuals can just decide not to be that way anymore.

OK, so my summary was slightly facetious, but it is only because I do not really consider any of these to be valid reasons. I think that the real reason is fear of people who are different.

Redefining institutions to correct social injustice is something that should be strived for, not shied away from. Just because slavery existed for hundreds of years in this country did not mean that is should be perpetuated (although that was one of the arguments for it at the time). Just because women and African-Americans had never had the right to vote in this country did not mean that they should not have the right to vote. So, why keep same-sex couples from marrying just because that is always the way it has been done?

The children issue is a sticky one. Now that Ashley and I have a child, I could not imagine raising one by myself; this is hard, people. However, people do it by themselves all the time and I greatly respect them for that. I believe that raising children is best done in a happy, loving home. Note, that happy, loving home could be with a single parent, two heterosexual parents, two homosexual parents, or a whole group of parents. If the parents love the child and the child loves the parents, I don’t see the harm that can come of any of these households. I personally think that the more parents you have, the better off you are when it comes to raising kids. That way, when your kid is being a snot and irritating you, you can trade off with a parent that might not be quite so frustrated at the time.

I do not understand the “eroding religious freedoms” argument. I do not know of a group supporting same-sex marriage that says that your religion must allow same-sex couple to marry inside of your religion. This is a civil issue, not a religious issue. The government should not allow a ban on same-sex marriage; I do not care what your church allows or disallows inside its walls. If your church chooses not to allow same-sex couple to marry inside the church, then so be it. Additionally, the government allowing same-sex marriage does not mean you have to marry someone of your gender; same-sex marriage going on in your state is not going to make you gay.

No, I am pretty sure that the real reason people are against same-sex marriage is fear of people who are different, mixed with a bit of zealotry. So, if you are against same-sex marriage, try doing the following. Imagine you have found the perfect person that you want to spend the rest of your life with. For many of you, that is your spouse; for others, maybe you have just not found them yet. You love them with all of your heart and they love you back just as strongly. In fact, the two of you love each other so much that you want to get married and be together for as long as you live. Now, imagine that you are not allowed to marry, basically, because some other people just do not want you to be together. They do not think you belong together and, in fact, tell you that it is wrong that the two of you love each other. How do you feel now? None of you reading this would want this situation to happen to you; why would you want to put someone else through it?

I have decided to completely give up on New Year’s Resolutions.

What? That is stupid. It is the end of March; why are you talking about New Year’s Resolutions?

Because this is just something that I have been thinking about lately. I mean, if I am going to mark time arbitrarily, why choose New Year’s Day? It makes much more sense to me to resolve to do something on my birthday, since that signifies me finishing up another year on this planet.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t your birthday back at the end of January? It is still the end of March, you know.

OK, when I say thinking about lately, I really mean “thinking about for the last four months or so”. Just work with me here, I am trying to make a point. You see, this all has to do with my impending thirtieth birthday next year. I started evaluating my life and trying to figure out if I was where I needed or wanted to be by thirty.

Yeah, but, thirty is not that old.

Well, you are right, it is not. But, I decided to get an actual physical for the first time in years back in August and the doctor chastised me for things that I knew were problems, but I had avoided dealing with because, hey, I was young, right? Things like elevated cholesterol, elevated blood pressure, and being 45 pounds overweight. I decided that I wanted to fix all of that by the time I was thirty so I chose my birthday as the time to meet this goal.

Slow down; did you say a goal? I thought we were talking about resolutions here.

Well, I really don’t see a resolution as what I need here. A goal is defined as “the result or achievement toward which effort is directed”. So, I have set a goal of being “doctor-approved” healthy by my thirtieth birthday. If you look at the definition of a resolution, you see that it is defined as “a formal expression of opinion or intention”. To me, a resolution is the means that moves you one step closer to achieving the end. A goal is something to focus on; it is the end result for which you are looking.

Can I have an example? I am not clear on the difference here.

Well, the first step was to come up with the goal of being doctor-approved healthy. Next, I asked myself, “What do I need to do to meet that goal?” Well, I need to look at why the doctor considers me unhealthy. That is easy; the doctor came right out and told me: cholesterol, blood pressure, and weight. Then I asked myself, “What can I do to correct any or all of these problems?” Once again, the doctor came right out and told me the solution again: change your diet and exercise. Now, I can come up with some actionable resolutions that will help me to meet my goal. One actionable resolution has been cutting red meat out of my diet. Another actionable resolution has been to start walking 30 minutes a night for three nights a week. I have done fairly well with the former, but the cold and damp weather lately has left me a little lacking towards the latter.

I think I see now. You are just applying the project-planning principles that you use as an engineer to other areas of your life.

That is right. I decided that I should embrace my engineer qualities and get them to work for me instead of against me. If creating viewing life as a series of projects and analyzing data helps keep me on track with my life goals, then that is what I should do.

Analyzing data? How does that fit in?

That will have to wait until next time.