LinLog

The goal approacheth: 183.0

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

My weight-loss goal creeps ever closer, even with the loosened summer diet. This morning I weighed in at 183.0. That means only 3 more pounds to go.

It also means it's time for me to go shopping. My pants size is now a 34 waist, down from a 38. That means that nothing I have fits anymore. And they don't just not fit, they kind of look funny. My dress slacks in particular look like "clown pants" according to my wife. (Which is too bad, because I got some of new dress clothes just last fall.) I actually had to go out and buy new clothes so that I could go to my cousin's wedding a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I didn't think of that until the same morning. But that at least meant I got the early-morning sale at J. C. Penny.

I'm also going to have to have my wedding ring resized. I've lost enough weight that it literally slides off my left ring finger. I was wearing it on my right hand for a while, but now my right ring finger is getting too small too. So now I'm starting to put it on the middle finger of my left hand.

The weird thing is that I"ve lost 50 pounds and I still have a lot more fat on my body than I thought I would. I guess that's not surprising, since I'm still overweight according to the BMI charts, but it still feels strange. I mean, those weights always seemed kind of low. After all, many people who are technically "overweight" don't look like they need to lose any weight. But I guess the BMI charts are just biased toward being very lean. It's all a matter of where you draw the line on what's acceptable.

Down to the last 5: 184.6

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

After succesfully forgetting to weigh myself in the morning for several days, I finally managed to get a couple of readings in a row last week. For a while, I had been hovering around 187, but last Friday, I got a consistent reading of 184.6. That puts me at a total loss of 49 pounds and within 5 pounds of my goal of 180.

I've actually been loosening up on the diet lately. Partly it's because it's summer time, which means it's time for ice cream and cooking burgers on the grill. I've been careful not to over-do it, though - only 1 ice cream cone a week and mostly chicken and turkey on the grill.)

The bigger problem is that we've been very busy lately. I think we've been out of town four or five weekends in the last two months, which generally means we eat out. (Plus my cousin's wedding - he got married across town, but we still ate out for that.) Most of the other weekends we've spent most of the day working on the house or in the garden, and after that we often just don't feel like cooking. But so far, it doesn't seem to be a problem. Even when we eat out, I'm trying to choose the healthier foods and stick to sensible portions. (Translation: no, you don't have to eat that whole plate of fries!) At the very least, I'm not seeing any negative effects yet.

I think learning proper portion control has been a big help to me so far. I've learned to try to eat slowly and not force myself to finish an overly large serving. Most of us are used to the gigantic portions they give you at chain restaurants like Applebee's or Chili's, but the truth is that they normally give you enough food to feed two people. It was a big step for me just to realize how much food it takes to fill me up and stop there. Since it typically takes longer for my body to send the "full" message than it does for me to overeat, I've found that eating slowly helps to narrow the gap and keep me to a sane amount.

Desk upgrade

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

The second half of my latest upgrade arrived from NewEgg today. I ordered two more gigabytes of RAM - one for my desktop, one for my laptop.

As a brief aside, the laptop upgrade was much smoother than I expected. I'd never tried upgrading a laptop, so I wasn't sure how hard it would be. Turns out adding more RAM to my Inspiron B120 was actually pretty easy. I just followed the Dell service manual. The process was pretty much "open up the correct panel, then slide in RAM module."

The desktop upgrade arrived just in time, since I was about to disassemble and move the system anyway. That's because I just finished "upgrading" my computer desk.

We've consolidated office space, so Sarah and I are now sharing one large desk. Of course, I still have to finish putting the doors and drawers back in and get some keyboard trays, but it's basically done. I built it out of kitchen cabinets and laminate counter. It's a little higher than a normal desk, but it should serve us well. It will also be a lot sturdier than the pre-fab fiber-board desks its replacing.

Advance your career by losing hope

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

This week I finally decided to take the plunge: I started working on my résumé. That's right! After six years I have finally decided that it's time to get my career moving and so I have officially entered the job market.

Ah, job hunting! It's quite the experience, isn't it? I'd almost forgotten what it was like. There really is nothing like a good job search to make you feel like a useless, incompetent sack of crap!

I don't know about other industries, but this is definitely the case in the IT world. If you've ever looked for a job in software development, you know what I'm talking about. For every reasonable job listing you see, there are twelve that absolutely require a 10 years using laundry-list of excruciatingly specific technologies, strong interpersonal skills, a Mensa membership, and a strong track record of miraculous healing. And that's for an entry-level position. With a typical career path, if you start early, you should be ready for their grunt-work jobs by about the time your kids are graduating from college and moving back in with you.

The listings that have really been killing me, though, are the absurdly specialized ones. Not the ones that require 5 years experience with ASP.NET, C#, Java, Oracle, SQL Server, SAP, Netware, Active Directory, LDAP, UNIX, SONY, Twix, and iPod - they're just asking for the kitchen sink and hoping they get lucky. I'm talking about listings like the one I saw that required advanced training in computer science, a doctorate in medical imaging, and 10 years of experience developing imaging software. Or, perhaps, all those listings for a particular defense contractor that required experience with technologies I had never even heard of. I mean, I couldn't even begin to guess what these abbreviations were supposed to stand for, and I'm pretty up on my technology! When you come across a lot of listings like that at once, it can be a little depressing. "How am I ever going to find a job? I don't even know about grombulating with FR/ZQ5 and Fizzizle Crapulence GammaVY5477 or how to do basic testing of quantum microcircuits using radiation harmonics with frequency-oscillating nano-tubes on a neural net. Every idiot understands that!"

But the real killer for me is location. I'm in the southern tier of New York state, which is not exactly a hotbed of tech startups. I like the area and don't really want to move, but there's practically nothing here in terms of software development. The best possibility I found was a local consulting company 10 minutes form home. However, when I sent them a résumé, I got a message back saying that they were currently unable to add new positions due to the fact that they were going out of business. I've applied for a couple of other semi-local positions, but of all the possibilities I've found, the closest is about 50 miles from my house. Workable, but not a situation I'm crazy about.

I'm now starting to think seriously about relocating. I don't really want to move to the west coast, both because of the cost of living and on general principle, so I'm thinking of looking either downstate (i.e. New York City) or south to the Washington, D.C. or Atlanta metropolitan areas. All three of those seem to have a fair number of positions in software development.

However, I'm faced with something of a moral dilemma. You see, having been born and raised in upstate New York, it is my patriotic duty to hate New York City. But as a New Yorker, it is also my patriotic duty to look down on the South and New Jersey. That leaves me wondering whether I'm forced in to choosing Washington, or whether it counts as "the South" too and I'm just out of luck.

In the end, I guess I'm just not that patriotic. All three of those cities sound good to me. But New Jersey is another story.

On motivation and brain rust

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Things at work have been slow lately. Really slow. The fact is we're severely over-staffed and there just isn't enough work to go around right now. This has left me with an amount of down-time that I find...uncomfortable.

You'd think this might be a good position to be in. After all, it leaves me plenty of time to read up on development practices, the latest technologies, and keep up on my tech blogs. I have spare time to experiment with Ruby on Rails and play with Mono. I can browse through Code Complete or Refactoring at my leisure. What more could a programmer want?

As I've been discovering, this isn't quite as nice in practice as it seemed at first. For starters, there are still the miscellaneous menial tasks that need to be done - software installations, security and configuration changes, and just general support calls. These are excellent for knocking you out of the zone. Furthermore, the constant threat of them makes it a bit harder to concentrate in the first place.

Second, while reading and experimenting to build your skill-set is great, you need the right environment to make it truly profitable. You need some degree of freedom and some goal to work towards. Or at least I do. I find I learn the most when I have something I'm trying to accomplish. I also need periodic breaks to process and assimilate what I'm studying. It just doesn't seem to work as well when my "goal" is to stave off boredom and my breaks are scheduled.

Last, I've found that it's becoming a challenge just to stay sharp at times like this. You see, I need some sense of purpose to stay sharp. I feel like I'm chained in a room for 8 hours a day being forced to do nothing but pour water back and forth from one bucket into another. It feels like my brain is starting to rust.

This is exactly the opposite of how to motivate programmers. We need crave interesting progblems to solve. Or, at the very least, some problems to solve. Playing the point-and-click Windows monkey won't do it and I can only stand to read so many hours a day.

The problem is, the more I try to spend my time improving my knowledge and skills, the more unbearable I find my condition. I feel like I should be "out there" putting what I learn to use, but instead I have to sit at my desk for...no particular purpose. And what's worse, it's sapping my mental and emotional energy. After being stuck in the office all day, trying to keep from going stir-crazy, I feel like I've got nothing left when I get home. It's turning into a vicious cycle.

Have other people been in a situation like this? How do you deal with it? I mean, short of quitting (which I'd do if not for that damn mortgage). Are their any coping strategies to hold me over until I can get out?

Bear fight and gator feeding

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Digital cameras are a great thing. They're easy to use, have a high picture capacity, and you don't have to pay for film. Plus, when you take a weird or interesting picture, it's easy to put it on your blog.

While at the Buffalo Zoo the weekend before last, I managed to capture two things I had never seen before. Here they are for the curious.

The first is a bear fight. On the way out, we witnessed the Grizzly bear and the Kodiak bear play-fighting. They would tackle each other, bite and paw, and chase one another around the habitat. They didn't appear to be hurting each other, just playing like dogs or house cats might. I never knew bears did that, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Still, it was quite the sight.

This second picture is of the alligator feeding. We happened upon the alligator habitat just as the zookeepers were going in to feed it. It seems like the kind of job that should include hazard pay, because they kept having to push the gator's nose back with a stick to discourage it from coming too close.

As for the meal itself, it was somewhat unpleasant: dead rats. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I don't imagine an alligator would do too well on a diet of rice and tofu.

Last week's weigh-in: 192.6

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I'm calling last week's weight 192.6. That puts me down another pound from last week for a grand total of 40.6 pounds to date. Only 12.6 more to hit my goal. Although I may change that goal and just go for "technically no longer overweight."

It's strange how your weight can fluctuate from day to do. When I weighed myself on Thursday morning, the scale read 194.6, which was up a pound from the previous week. When I tried again Thursday night, it was down to 191.0. On Friday, I got 192.0 and later 192.6.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. You can easily gain or lose a pound or two due to (de)hydration, not having gone to the bathroom, having a full stomach, and so forth. I suppose the lesson is simply to average out the readings and not put too much stock in any particular number.

On the blogging surge

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

As you may have noticed, I've severely stepped up my blog posting rate lately. I'm trying get into the habit of posting on a consistent schedule. I'm doing this in an effort to improve my communication skills and prevent brain atrophy.

Writing is an important skill to have, especially for a programmer. There are two reasons for this. First, it makes you look good by comparison, as many programmers are half-literate code junkies who can just barely put a coherent sentence toegether. Second, and more importantly, a lot of the communciation we engage in is over the internet, i.e. written. We thrive on mailing lists, comment boards, e-mail, IRC, and the like. This is especially true in the FOSS world, where you may easily find yourself working closely with someone you will never see face to face.

Given that, it is clearly important that we be able to express our thoughts clearly, succinctly, and without putting the reader to sleep. You develop that ability the same way you learn anything else: practice. And for me, the most convenient way to practice is to blog.

In addition to becoming a better writer, I'm hoping that using a blog as my practice medium will also make me a faster writer. You see, I'm a painfully slow writer. I'm not at all good at coming up with witty, insightful commentary off the top of my head. Instead, I overthink what I'm trying to say, rewrite the same paragraph a dozen times, and eventually spend so much time on a relatively small amount of text that I feel like I've wasted a lot of time and have to rush to get it done. By setting myself a regular schedule of 1 post per business day, I'm hoping that my brain will adapt and get a little quicker on the draw.

And last but not least, it's just nice to have place to hash out whatever I might be thinking along a computing vein. Writing your thoughts down forces you to process them a bit more, to shape them into a point that you can articulate. When it comes to technical topics, particularly related to software development, I don't have a lot of people around to discuss things with, so writing is the most readily available outlet.

I guess we'll see how that all turns out. With any luck, you'll notice this blog getting progressively better in the months to come. If not, then maybe I'll just have to accept that I'm not as smart as I always thought I was. But let's hope it doesn't come to that!

Weighing in at 193.6

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

This weeks official weigh-in result is 193.6 pounds. That's down 1.2 pounds from last week and 39.6 total.

Now that the weather is turning nice, the carb counting is really starting to suck. We've got to watch the pasta salad, buns for burgers and hot dogs, and worst of all, no ice cream. It just doesn't seem the same without the traditional summer food. At least we can cheat a couple of days a month without breaking the diet.

Averaging out to 194.8

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

We'll call this week's weigh-in result 194.8. The scale said 195.8 on Thursday, but 193.8 on Friday, so I'm going to just split the difference this week. That puts me down two more pounds from last week for a grand total of 38.4 pounds to date.

While it's great to be making progress this fast, I'm currently in kind of an uncomfortable spot. See, none of my clothes fit right anymore. I'm basically walking around looking funny all the time. But since I've got another 15 pounds to go, there's no point in buying new clothes, because I'd just have to replace them again in a few months.

Not that I'm complaining. If that's the biggest problem I'm having, then I guess all is going well. Though I do really miss Chinese food....