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minor milestones

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Maybe related... I'm waging my first successful campaign against fat through diet and exercise, and I've been writing some really effective code that's more smart than clever both at home and at work. The former started about two-and-a-half weeks ago and I've lost eleven pounds so far, going from 236 down to 225. I'm pretty sure I won't sustain that rate of loss—my goal is to lose at least two pounds per week and get under 200 by mid October. I've been diligent about working out every weekday, but most of the weight loss can probably be attributed to the great, free iPhone app Lose It!, which tracks every calorie I consume.

One neat side effect of all this dieting business is that I actually enjoy food more, which in turn gets me to appreciate formerly unpalatable "health foods" and makes the "bad foods" that much more awesome and memorable. Example: Maudie's had always struck me as barely passable purveyor of Mexican food. It's always busy, but I assume that's because most Austinites haven't experienced an abundance of really good, authentic Mexican cuisine. Well, I've been to Maudie's exactly once since I started dieting... let me tell you... every morsel I consumed that night is captured in high-def slow-motion in my mind and has a memorable story all its own.

An even better side effect of the diet and exercise has been an overall boost in energy. I've gone from "needing" one or two espresso beverages per day down to (maybe) one cup of coffee per day. That equates to a significant drop in calories, caffeine, and expense. My blood circulation is improving, getting more oxygen to my brain, which makes it work better. Like I said earlier, I've been writing better, stronger, smarter code... and enjoying doing so more. Probably every other night, just for fun I'll drop into my Apple II's built-in mini assembler (a really basic line-by-line assembler... no symbols, labels, equates, or anything) and scratch out some fairly complex logic that does fun stuff, like make sound effects or do fun things with the hi-res graphics pages. In the mini-assembler, most small mistakes usually mean retyping lots of code. Somehow, this is fun to me.

The moral of the story is: It's really late and I hadn't blogged in forever, so I figured... what the hey. (Plus, I was getting sick of looking at that sewing machine in my previous post. [That's right, I just got all meta on your ass.])

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