Diet and Exercise

Back in late July, my doctor informed me that my weight put me in the obese category according to BMI, and that put me at risk for diabetes and heart disease. I don't really trust BMI as a measure of health, since it doesn't take into account such obvious influences as sex or age, and height is reduced to a mere denominator (and I am unusually short). This smart BMI calculator seems more reasonable to me, though I haven't read the research behind it. But I had to admit that my weight was getting up there, and I have a history of diabetes in my family, and I really don't want to be diabetic.

The doctor gave me the option of taking drugs, or trying to lose weight. I opted for the weight loss option, since I’m stubborn that way, and I have boundless—probably misplaced—confidence in my ability to discipline myself.

I've lost twenty pounds since then. Now there's probably nothing more boring than hearing someone talk about their diet and exercise program, but this is my blog, and I wanted a centralized place to point people to when they ask (and I have been asked).

The number one decision I made when I decided to do this was that I wasn’t going to diet and exercise, I was going to change my diet and exercise. This meant that this was permanent, so I wasn’t going to lose weight and stop, I was going to keep losing weight until I stabilized at a new weight, and then, if necessary, change my lifestyle further. It also meant that I was only going to do things that I felt I could live with for the long haul. This meant slower, but hopefully more sustainable, weight loss.

But I wasn’t going from a cold start, either. So let's start with before.

Before

Kristin is a wonderful cook, and I usually eat whatever food she provides. For dinner. For lunch, I'm on my own at work. Usually, I brought a cold cut sandwich and chips, though twice a week I would get food from one of the local restaurants instead—usually a steak bowl with rice, beans, guacamole, sour cream, pico de gallo, and lettuce from a local Mexican place, or a steak kebab with hummus, potatoes, and salad from a local Mediterranean place. I'd also have two, occasionally three, 12 ounce cans of Coke a day, sometimes with chips or pretzels for a snack.

For exercise, I would do one of several seven minute workouts each day, using an Android app called 7, but the app has a lot of workouts aside from the original, and often I did a light version of the exercise. I also used dumbbells, doing a weight workout three times a week in theory, in reality more usually twice a week, performing eight exercises, each with two sets of ten reps, using light/medium/heavy weights of 5/8/10 pounds. Finally, I had a treadmill desk, which I used pretty much every day, walking at a slow pace of 1.5 mph for eight hours a week (1:20 six days a week), and a fast pace of 3 mph for two hours each week (on Saturday)—for a total of 18 miles each week over 10 hours.

I had also recently purchased an Oculus Quest virtual reality headset, and started using one of the high intensity games called Beat Saber as a more intense aerobic exercise.

So I wasn’t totally inactive, but there were ways to improve.

After

I had been getting pretty sick of sandwiches, so I was looking forward to changing things up. My doctor had suggested a Mediterranean diet, in particular replacing grains with legumes for carbs. This translated into a salad with meat (or as I like to think of it, steak on a bed of lettuce) and a side of beans or chickpeas. I reduced my Coke intake to one can a day, and my snack to a single serving of flavored, roasted chickpeas. For caffeine in the afternoon, I would have loose-leaf Chai tea, with milk and sugar (but not a Chai latte from Starbucks or similar, as that has as many calories as a Coke, while I'm aiming for less than half that). When I bought lunch, I would switch to the salad with meat theme for one meal a week. For dinner, Kristin moved to more legumes instead of grains and potatoes; but she didn't drop grains and potatoes, or even desserts, entirely.

For exercise, I wanted to increase the intensity while increasing the time spent exercising as little as possible. So I did a number of things. First, I changed the exercises I was doing in 7 to a custom-built aerobic exercise four times a week (easier on my knees than the default aerobic one), and a custom-built long exercise program three times a week that combines a full-body workout with the stretching that I do before weight training. For weights, the first step was to consistently use them three times a week, and also to go from 2 sets of 10 reps to 3 sets of 8 reps. This was one of the biggest time increases. Then I bought some adjustable dumbbells to which I could add weight plates as needed, and I added two new exercises for which I needed more weight: farmer carries and leg lifts. I gradually increased the amount of weight for my exercises, from 5/8/10 to 10/15/20, while going from 8 to 10 reps, over the course of three months. I’ve recently switched to circuit training, doing sets of different exercises in a row without a rest in between, and then resting before repeating.

Next I changed up how I used my treadmill. Rather than doing all the faster walking on Saturday, I started doing half an hour at 3 mph and an hour at 1.5 mph six days a week, and an hour at 2 mph on Saturday (for a total of 20 miles over 10 hours).

Finally, I made Beat Saber a constant part of my exercise, combining twenty minutes of a more intense difficulty level with my aerobic exercise. I used the heart rate monitor on my smartwatch to make sure I was in the aerobic zone as much as possible.

When I plateaued after losing ten pounds, I made several additional small changes. I dropped the legume side dish and started sticking to the meat on a bed of lettuce lunch every weekday while reducing the meat from four ounces to three ounces. I also increased the speed of my fast-paced walk to 4 mph, turning it into a light jog, using my smartwatch to maintain the aerobic heart rate zone the entire time. Finally, I kept the additional hour on Saturday but reduced it from 2 mph pace to 1.5 mph, reaching a total of 22.5 miles over 10 hours.

My office--with treadmill desk, regular desk, and exercise mat. The desk chair has been moved to make space for VR.

The other side of my office, with my weight bench.

So, in summary:

3-4 times a week

• 7 minute aerobic exercise
• 20 minutes of Beat Saber
• 30 minutes jog at 4 mph
• 1 hour walk at 1.5 mph

3 times a week

• 30 minutes jog at 4 mph
• 15 minutes full body workout and stretching
• 1 hour of weight exercises
• 1 hour walk at 1.5 mph

Since I only jog six times a week, I can drop it once a week, or even skip all the exercise one day a week if I have another commitment, but I'll try to make up any walking so that I hit the same totals of 10 hours and 22.5 miles each week.

You'll notice that this consists of 2-2.75 hours each day, which seems like a lot. How do I get anything else done? One advantage of a treadmill desk is that I'm not just walking or jogging. I can watch television shows or read my Kindle app while jogging, and at a slower walk I can work on Mysterion or even write. While doing my weight exercises or even Beat Saber, I listen to podcasts or audio books. The only time I'm not doing something else is the 7-15 minutes I'm doing a prescribed exercise, where I need to listen to instructions from my phone. The biggest challenge is finishing the more intense parts before dinner. The walk, and even weights, can come later. Fortunately, we tend to eat dinner late—never before seven, and sometimes not until nine.

So far it's worked, but the temptation to cheat just a little is a constant danger, especially now that I've made real progress.

NaNoWriMo

I don't typically do NaNoWriMo, partly because November is a difficult month for me to set aside the time for it (though my wife and I have occasionally tried JaNoWriMo (there are actually a lot of versions of this)). But I decided now was a good time to increase my writing time. I've only been getting about 2.5 hours done each week since the July reading period for Mysterion started. Now that my work there is mostly done, I've bumped my writing per week up to 5 hours for November, making it a priority to write during my walking time. I used to frequently delay writing until I was done walking, surfing the web during the walk instead, but now I try to start writing as soon as I start walking. That has led to some procrastination from starting to walk, however.

Boots

And I'm back to fashion blogging. Actually, it's been a month, so it may be a little surprising that I'm back to blogging at all.

In my ongoing efforts to acquire decent rain gear, I've moved on from coats and hats to boots.  I have waterproof hiking boots, but since they're hiking boots, they don't cover more than my ankles.  That's fine, most of the time, but in Boston, occasionally I have to trek through snow more than a few inches thick.  In addition, the hiking boots aren't that warm (they're designed for summer hiking), and they aren't a lot of protection to my lower pant legs.  So I decided that some tall, waterproof boots would be a great help in my goal of staying warm and dry in cold and wet weather.  After some shopping around, I decided on these.

They're the Muckboots Artic Sport Mid Outdoor Boot.  Mid, as opposed to High, means that they're 12 inches high instead of 15.  Arctic is the model designed for cold weather, specifically -40 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  That sounds like it will work for Boston cold.

One annoyance is that they don't come in half sizes.  Instead, they're supposed to stretch to cover an extra half size.  So men are supposed to round up their size to the next whole number (8.5 to 9, for instance), which suggests that the 9 is actually designed as 8.5, and stretch to 9.

They arrived today, and they're even bigger and clunkier than they look.  Which is fine, since that's what I was after.  They feel a little large, but not too bad.  We'll see what I think once I've had a week to break them in.

Coats

In addition to a hat, I also recently acquired a coat.  Or to put it more accurately, I bought the hat because I had bought the coat.

I had wanted a trench coat for a while, something that would do a better job of keeping the rain off than my current rain jacket, which does a decent job of keeping the rain off my upper body, but my pant legs usually get soaked, no matter how big the umbrella.

Kristin and I at Niagra Falls.  I'm wearing my old rain jacket here.

This became an issue when we were in England.  I had neglected to pack my rain jacket, and it was supposed to rain on the day we were planning to go to Stonehenge and Old Sarum. So the night before we stopped at a Debenhams department store about 15 minutes before it closed to find a rainproof jacket.  I wanted a long overcoat, but in the time we had we couldn't find one that was sufficiently rainproof, so I ended up getting this performance jacket instead:

Kristin and I at Stonehenge. I'm wearing my new jacket and my old hat.

Fortunately, it didn't actually rain that day, so I didn't have to put up with being wet from the thighs down.  I was still glad I had bought the jacket, as it came with a nice, thick fleece linking, so it was considerably warmer than the outerwear I had brought with me.

But when I got back, I decided to take another stab at the coat I wanted, and this time I found it on Amazon, as you can see on the left.  While in the picture, this trench coat looks like it goes down to the knees, even the short fit reaches my calves. I think I'll chalk that up to a benefit of being short, rather than a disadvantage.  It claims to be rain repellent rather than rainproof, but it seems to be good enough for the rain I've faced so far. It also comes with a zip-in liner, though it's not as warm as the one with the performance jacket.  However, the trench coat is cut large, as it's supposed to be worn over a suit, so I can wear the performance jacket's fleece liner under this coat and its liner, and the combination is quite warm.  I selected the color loden mainly because I didn't like the tan color, and while I did like the black, I figured I'd be wearing it a lot while walking in the dark on the Boston streets, and I'd prefer not to be invisible to cars.  Unfortunately, the color I selected cost extra, though I see that it's already $20 less than what I paid a little over a week ago.

The combination of the new coat and the hat was pretty effective at keeping me dry when it rained on Thursday, even without an umbrella (though I was wishing I had worn my waterproof hiking boots). So I've decided that it's a worthwhile purchase. It is, however, quite a production to put on, so I may not wear it so often when it's not raining, when the performance jacket will be sufficient.

Ready for the rain. Or perhaps to investigate crime on the mean streets of Boston, noir-style.

Hats

I recently acquired a new hat.  Now I'm not usually one to accessorize, but I consider hats to be a necessity.  First, because winters in Boston are cold.  And secondly, because my optometrist tells me my eyes are overly sensitive to light, so I like to wear a hat with a large brim.  Now, of course I have a winter hat, but like most such hats, it has no brim.  And I have a wide brim hat that I wear on hikes in the summer, but it is designed with the exact opposite of warmth in mind.

So I recently acquired a new hat, with warmth in mind.  This one: the Tilley TTW2 Tec-Wool hat. It's decently warm, has a brim, and even has earwarmers.  Now, the earwarmers aren't quite as warm as I'd like, but they, and the hat, are wind proof, so they keep my ears from getting too cold.  And the hat looks pretty nice too.

Me in my new hat.

The earwarmers, which look a bit silly, but definitely help.

London Holiday

Kristin and I are in the UK for the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton.  The convention starts tomorrow, and in the meantime, we've been in London doing the tourist thing.  Being who we are, this has meant not Big Ben and the Tower of London, but the Science Museum, the Classics wing of the British Museum, and Verulamium near St. Albans.

We're staying in a hotel room which is very modern, but rather small:

Kristin on her phone in the hotel room

The very narrow bathroom

All the lights in the hotel room appear to be LEDs, from the ceiling lights, to the stars overhead, and the blue highlights and the television accents:

Blue highlights and star-studded ceiling

The television has a nice glow behind it.

And, of course, there's a collection of inputs for the television, in case you want to show something through HDMI, VGA, RCA, or any other connection.

Connections for the television.  I'm using the USB to charge my phone.

I'm afraid that I didn't take any pictures at the Science Museum, which is too bad.  There was a fairly nice exhibit on steam power, with a huge, working steam engine.  I'm sure all the steampunk writers at World Fantasy would enjoy it.

Kristin and I were focused on the Roman exhibits at the British Museum.  I have more pictures than is practical of that part, but here are a few:

Cooking utensils in the ancient world

A body chain, one of the few examples of this Classical type of jewelry

Weapons!

The Portland Vase

I took a lot more pictures, of a lot of different things, mostly for reference in my writings.

We also went to Verulamium, which was one of the big Roman towns in the early years of Britain's induction to the Empire.  They had a pretty nice museum as well.  Much smaller than the British Museum, and very kid friendly with a lot of annoying multimedia presentation, but there were some interesting items, including the reconstruction of a number of rooms to try to show daily life:

Preparing food in a "middle class" kitchen

A door latch--I've been trying to figure out how exactly it worked

A hearth for preparing food

There are also a few excavation sites nearby:

Part of Verulamium's wall

What's left of the theater

A mosaic floor with a hypocaust--an underground heating system

Today, we went to see St. Paul's Cathedral.  They wouldn't let us take pictures inside, but we were able to take some outside:

The front of St. Paul's, distorted since I was using the panorama mode of my phone.

The dome

A picture from the top of the dome,  looking down on the towers in the first picture.  It required climbing a lot of stairs. 

That's all for now.  Tomorrow, we're heading for Brighton and the World Fantasy Convention.

T-shirts

For our anniversary in May, Kristin and I designed matching T-shirts.

They are now available for sale, in an array of styles and colors.

I won't ruin the joke by explaining it, but I will give a hint.

The War Against the Squirrels

My wife has been fighting the most wily and dangerous enemy of her gardening career.  She woke up with a cold on Monday morning, feeling sick and coughing. But that was a minor nuisance compared to the calamity that struck later in the day.  The squirrels had gotten into her raised bed and destroyed much of it, including most of the recently planted seeds and some of the younger plants. Kristin had been using Cayenne pepper flakes to keep the squirrels out, but apparently one of them has developed a taste for it.  She threw the closest thing at hand at it (my cell phone charger) when she saw it in her garden, but by then the damage had been done.

The damage from day two of the great squirrel war. The red is from the now ineffective Cayenne pepper.

Since then, she and the squirrels have been dueling.  She's been trying something different every day, inspired by the dark secrets found in the murky depths of the Internet, or possibly just in her cold-drug-addled brain.  She's tried throwing rocks, she's tried shooting foam discs, she's tried garlic and chicken wire and most recently, ghosts.

Spooky ghosts to frighten squirrels

She's determined to drive the squirrels away, though I worry that she'll make them so accustomed to the spicy, garlicky food and spooky ambiance that they'll never eat at a bland, regular garden again.

Update (10/5/2013): One more photo:

Ghosts from above!

Workbench

I spent most of last night assembling the workbench shown on the left.  It took more time that I expected, but otherwise it went quite smoothly.  The directions clear, all the pieces were clearly labeled with stickers showing part number and which direction they should be oriented, the screws were in little labeled plastic bags, each hole was properly threaded, and, unlike a lot of furniture I've assembled, all the pieces fit together smoothly like they were supposed to. The instructions said that it takes two people to assemble, but I found I only needed my wife's help twice: when we flipped it over after attaching the legs, and when we moved it to its permanent location.  Some tasks, such as putting up the pegboards and hanging the lamp, were harder for one person to do, but not impossible. In the end, the only problem was that it was two screws short.  There weren't quite as many #41 screws as there were supposed to be.  There was a small bag with one extra of every screw, bolt, and washer, but that still left me without one screw.  I was able to assemble it anyway, leaving out a screw where I thought it least mattered, but that bothered me, so picked a few screws up at the hardware store the next day and fastened in the last screw.  This is what it looks like assembled:

New workbench

I got this particular workbench, the Seville Classics UltraHD Lighted Workbench, because it was highly rated on Amazon, despite the fact that UltraHD sounds like something you'd call a smartphone. More importantly, it had everything I was looking for: a work surface, drawers, a pegboard, and a shelf.  It also came with a power strip and a flourescent light, both useful for where I set it up in my basement, which is lacking in both lighting and power outlets.


I also got a stool, so I'd have somewhere to sit while working at the bench.  The stool is also from Seville, though it lacks the fancy smartphone name.

Exercise Helper

I was inspired by this article to start an exercise routine.  I liked the idea of a short, high intensity routine that could include both aerobic and strength training. Of course, I didn't think that I'd be able to do it at full intensity right away, so I decided not to really try.  I'd do as much as I was comfortable with, and stop when it was too much, taking significantly longer breaks between exercises than suggested.  And hopefully move up to the full routine when I was able.

But I didn't want to take too long of a break--for example, however long it would take to look up whatever exercise I was supposed to do next.  For that matter, how was I supposed to manage the timing?  Since it was based on short timed bouts rather than number of exercises (which was part of the appeal), I'd have to keep track of the time, which is a little hard to do while doing push-ups.

I decided the proper response was to write a program.  Since I'd been learning Java this past year, I had a pretty good idea how to write a Java program that would do most of what I wanted--show which exercise to do next, and time both the length of the exercise and the break between them (I wanted longer breaks between the exercise, but I still intended to keep it short).  Of course, it would be even better if my program could tell me what the next exercise was without me having to look at the screen.  So I found a Java-based voice synthesizer, Free TTS, and made that part of my program.  I also incorporated the illustrations from the above article.

The result is Exercise Helper.  It tells you what the next exercise is (speaks it out loud, actually), shows you an image which shows you how to perform the exercise, and then counts down the time to start.  Once you start, it times the duration of the exercise, while counting down out loud by ten second intervals (with a 3, 2, 1, done at the end).  And then it moves on to the next exercise.

Screen shot of Exercise Helper, sans figure.

I used the figures from the article, but since I'm not sure I can repost them here, the screenshot above blanks that part out.

Overall, it's a very useful program for me, though I'd have to do some work on it before it would be helpful for others (including the ability to load and store your own set of exercises).

Dinner at Le Hobbit

Kristin and I spent the last weekend in Quebec city, the capital of the French-speaking province of Quebec, where we saw the sights and went to a lot of nice restaurants.  For the most part, our meals were planned in advance, with dinner at Panache and Pain Beni.  But on Sunday night, we (by which I mean mainly Kristin) decided to walk down Rue Saint-Jean until we found a place that we both liked to eat.  After saying no to a couple of places, we saw a place called Le Hobbit Bistro.  With a name like that we had to check it out.

After looking at the outdoor, chalkboard menu of the specials, Kristin declared it acceptable (as the menu was in French with no English translation), and we decided to eat there.  It was a decidedly better than expected.  The restaurant was mid-price by Quebec standards (meaning it still cost about $100 for two people, admittedly with dessert for one and a glass of wine for the other), but it was also second only to Panache (a top tier restaurant which cost four times as much) in the food.  So I would highly recommend it for anyone in Quebec.  I especially liked the dessert, a Mousse Caramel et Chocolat Noir.

We did ask about the name, and got several different versions, but the one we think is probably true is that back in the 70s, when the place was a bar and artist hangout with live performances and poetry readings, it had a very low ceiling.  That is what earned it the name Le Hobbit.

A Week Later

It's been a week since the bombing attack on the Boston marathon, and if there's one thing you can say about the week, it sure wasn't uneventful.  First there was the bombing itself, on Monday afternoon.  I was working about a mile and a half away, and for a while I wondered if I was going to be able to get home.

On Tuesday, there was an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas.  This is unrelated to the Boston bombing, and as far as anyone knows, accidental, but despite the intentional terror and destruction in Boston, more people were killed and injured, and more property destroyed, in Texas.

It was late Thursday afternoon when the police released the pictures of the two suspects in the Marathon bombing.  That night, I began to hear things about a gunman at MIT.  At first this seemed to be unrelated.  I went to bed knowing that a MIT police officer had been killed, but thinking that it was the result of an armed robbery at a convenience store gone bad.

I woke up on Friday to find the whole city shut down.  The public transportation wasn't running, my work was canceled, and residents were being told to shelter in place.  It seemed that the incident at MIT had turned out to be the bombing suspects after all (though it doesn't seem as though they had anything to do with the convenience store robbery).  After which, they hijacked a car, and fled to Watertown, where they got into a shootout with police, in which they used explosives (early reports said grenades, but I haven't heard confirmation on that). One of the brothers was killed, but one fled on foot, and the police were conducting a door-to-door search.

Shelter in place didn't necessarily mean stay home.  Many people were out and about when the order came down, and were trapped where they were all day.  In addition, people were evacuated from their homes as the police searched, and forced to stay with neighbors and friends. I wasn't in one of the places that received that order, but I couldn't get to work either, so I pretty much stayed home all day.

They finally lifted that order on Friday evening, and then they found the bomber about an hour later, when a vigilant citizen noticed him hiding in the boat in his backyard (leading a few to wonder how helpful that order was in the first place).

The bombers were identified as two Chechens, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  Both were legal immigrants who'd been in the US for years, and Dzokhar is a US citizen, and a student at the University of Massachusetts.  Right now the evidence suggests that they've been becoming increasingly interested in a radical form of Islam for the past couple of years.  It remains to be seen whether they acted independently, or if they had support--whether in material or training--of any known terrorist groups.

I've been reciting this mostly from memory, and mostly because I want to write down my recollection of it as accurately as possible.  Some more information about the case, and where things stand now, can be found at Boston.com.

What is love?

On a writers' forum that I participate in, the question was asked about how to motivate a character to stick with his first love once he becomes famous and successful, and suddenly finds himself surrounded by willing women.  I found this something of an odd question.  True, in real life, many men abandon their first wives once success gives them more opportunities, but I never would have thought it difficult to figure out a motivation to stay.

I've been married for two years, which is not much in the scheme of things, but I can say with some certainty that the reasons I love my wife don't go away the moment another opportunity comes along. So often what we love about someone is in the small things, the quiet moments when nothing is demanded and we can just be together, and it doesn't matter how rich one is or how successful someone's become. How much do they trust one another? How willing are they to share their secret fears and dreams and doubts without worrying about being judged? What inside jokes do they share? How well do they know each other's failures and weaknesses, and accept one another anyway? What do they talk about when they lie in bed together at night, just talking? How do they argue and make-up, and either compromise or agree to disagree? How do they show support for each other, when no one else in the world does? How do they sacrifice for each other, giving up what they want for what the other needs? How do they make each other feel needed and essential? What beliefs do they share, about what's important and what's not and what's right and what's wrong? These are the things that love is made of.

And though it happens a thousand times a day, you would have to be crazy to give up all that to be with someone beautiful but selfish, duplicitous, and shallow.

Which is pretty much what I said in the thread (though it was more directed to the specific question).

Boskone

Kristin and I went to Boskone this weekend, one of the science fiction conventions local to Boston.  It's not as literary as Readercon, or as costume and media centered as Arisia.  However, it is a lot of fun, as it has a good mix of panels, demos (including a lot of sword play), and an art show.  I only ended up going to two panels.  One for Military in Fantasy, and another for Advanced Writing Advice.  The first one wasn't as useful as I had hoped.  I wanted to hear about common military mistakes in fantasy, but they were pretty focused on avoiding deus ex machina, and didn't cover as much other ground as I had hoped.  The Advanced Writing Advice did offer some useful advice, but I don't think there was anything I hadn't heard before.

We went out to dinner with the Brotherhood Without Banners, a fan group for George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice, on Saturday night, and by the time we got back the parties were winding down, so we hung out with the BWB and George Martin himself instead.  I also ran into John Murphy at Boskone, who I know through the Codex Writers' Group, though we didn't have much chance to talk.

Kristin will probably have a much more detailed con report,  but it may be a little while before she finishes it.

New stuff, a lot of work

I managed to acquire quite a bit of new stuff in the past couple of weeks.  So much so, that it's been keeping me from getting work done.

One of those items is a Kindle Fire HD.  I knew I wanted one as soon as it had been announced, as it fixed many of the annoying things about the original.  I received a couple of Amazon Gift Cards for Christmas, and this seemed the perfect use for them. My first impression of the new Fire was that it was sleeker than the old one.  I got the 32 GB 7" version, since I liked the 7" form factor of the original Kindle Fire.  But in comparison to the new one, the old Fire is clunky and boxy.  I'll do a more thorough review later, once I peel myself away from Final Fantasy III for the Kindle long enough to experiment with some of its other capabilities.  Now I just need to figure out what to do with my old Kindle Fire.

The other thing that arrived this week is a desk.  I ordered the Versa Center from VersaTables and spent some time this week putting it together.  I got this desk because I was buying a desk treadmill from Lifespan, and needed a standing desk to use with it.  The Versa Center isn't really a standing desk, but each and every shelf is adjustable to any height, so I was able to make it into a standing desk.

Treadmill and Versa  Center

From the treadmill, I have a good view of the television in my living room, which is hooked up to one of my computers (the one I mostly use for gaming).

The view of the television, and my wireless keyboard.

I really liked the Versa Center's flexibility, but I'm reluctant to recommend it to others.  There are no fixed mount points--all the shelves clamp onto the poles on either side of the desk, and it took two people, a measuring tape, and a level to get the two sides of each shelf lined up. Nor was there any indication of the angle that the components clamp on, so getting them parallel was an iterative process of  eyeballing it, bolting in the shelves and support bars, and then adjusting so you could get the other side bolted in. And even then, I don't think the tolerances were quite right--I still wasn't able to line it up well enough to get all the screws in.  But I think I'm at the point where it's good enough for now.  I can now walk on the treadmill while writing this post on my laptop (I suppose I could use the computer connected to the television, but that's for games).     I haven't quite decided whether I'm comfortable with the distance, or whether it's worth going through the expense and trouble of installing a keyboard arm.

I like having a treadmill desk, but I still miss by old treadmill.  I got rid of it when I moved into my previous apartment.  The old treadmill was significantly bigger, and wouldn't have worked with a desk anyway, as its lowest speed was 2.5 mph, which is too fast to comfortably write.  Right now I'm walking at 1.2 mph, which works for me, and I may pick up the pace a bit more, but I doubt I can comfortably type above 2 mph, and certainly not while running.  But at least I could run on my old treadmill.  The new one only goes up to 4 mph, which is just a light jog.

My old treadmill.

New Year's Resolutions

These are a bit late this year, but I hadn't really come up with them before now.  I'm actually not much of a fan of New Year's Resolutions.  When I decide to do something, I do it, and don't worry about making silly promises to myself.  I'm usually pretty good at disciplining myself that way.  That said, there are a few things I intend to do this year, of various levels of difficulty.  I'll list them in order of easiest to most difficult.

1. Finish my RedundancyChecker program.  Off and on I've been teaching myself Java.  One might think I'd already know such an important and popular language, and if I were a real programmer, rather than an Electrical Engineer who graduated just before Java became popular, that would probably be the case.  But no, I'm just learning Java now.  Of course, I do know C++, which Java was based on, so it's not really that difficult.  In the course of learning it, I've been writing a simple program called RedundancyChecker.  It's purpose is to improve my writing.  I've discovered that I have a tendency to repeat myself in my writing, using the same words and phrases repeatedly.  I usually manage to catch myself in the revision process, but I'm writing this program to give myself some computer assistance.  It searches through an RTF document, finds examples of repeated words and phrases, and highlights them.  Just today, I've got it working in loading and scanning a file, and highlighting the redundancies.  However, it doesn't allow me to edit the RTF and save it.  That's mostly because Java's RTFEditorKit is buggy, and it manages to lose smart quotes in the process of reading the file, so I'd be very reluctant to replace anything I've painstakingly written and formatted with the output from this Java program.  I suspect that I'll be spending more than a little time trying to find a workaround.  Other than that, it's mostly polishing, and adding features such as an editable common word list and adjustable phrase length and proximity parameters.  So this is almost done.
2. Exercise more. When I started this job about a year and a half ago, I had to decide between writing and exercising, because I didn't think I had time for both.  I chose writing.  Now it's time to see if I can put some exercise back in my schedule, preferably by finding a form of exercise I can do while writing.  A treadmill or bicycle desk would be ideal.
3. Write more consistently. I go through phases with this.  I'd like to spend at least an hour every weeknight writing.  Unfortunately, my weeks are often interrupted by things like travel, or visiting with friends, or a late night at work, or our weekly Church small group.  I can't avoid all of them (and probably shouldn't), but my plan to make up for it on the weekends keeps running into difficulties, especially when I'm supposed to make up three nights worth of writing.  But the biggest problem is not the unavoidable interruptions, but the sheer laziness that causes me to skip a night, or slack off and spend only half an hour on writing, or blog instead.  That I can help, and if I can consistently write for an hour three weeknights each week, then making up the two nights I unavoidably missed on Saturday is a lot more reasonable.

Year in Review -- Sort of

I've been letting this blog sit idle over the holidays, while I've been enjoying time with my wife and friends, and a few days off of work.  I'm almost reluctant to break that, but I have a tradition of doing a year in review, and I'm reluctant to break that as well.  So, instead of not doing it entirely, I'm just going to do a lazy and sloppy job of it, and that way I can have it both ways.

The most relevant news for this blog is that I've begun blogging regularly again.  At least twice a week, which is not exactly phenomenal, and I've kind of slacked off during the holidays, but it's better than I've been doing.  In honor of the new blogging, I redesigned the blog.  On the other hand, maybe it was the other way around.

Kristin and I went to a lot of conventions this year: Boskone, Readercon, WorldCon, and World Fantasy.  We also went to visit her brother and his family, her parents and sister, and my family.  All this traveling used up most of my vacation time, so I didn't have enough to travel for the holidays, so it's just been some relaxing  in Boston for us this holiday season.

Also a big story is that my short novel, A Phoenix in Darkness, was finally published at Black Gate.  I'm fond of that story, and I'm glad that John O'Neill wanted it for his magazine, as one of the first stories published in the new online format.  It is an older story, though, and I like to think that I'm a better writer now than when I first wrote it, so there are some places where I wish the prose was more polished and the plotting cleaner and the pace smoother.  But I'm sure that five years from now I'll look at the stories I'm writing now and wish I could revise them, and if I waited for stories to be perfect before they were published, I'd never publish anything.

In other news, I now have a book under contract, meaning that it will be published someday.  Unfortunately, I don't know the release date yet, and the publisher hasn't yet announced it, so I'm keeping details under wraps for now.

I've also begun blogging occasionally at Black Gate.  I'll be doing monthly reviews of self-published books, the first of which should be out soon.

So it's been a busy year for me, and I've had a lot of fun.  I'll be back in a couple of days with my New Year's Resolutions, such as they are.

World Fantasy Convention 2012

The World Fantasy Convention 2012 has wrapped up.  It took place in Toronto, ON, which is within driving distance from Bostn, but it's a pretty long drive.  The convention was a great chance to meet people, old friends and new, and to catch up on what they're doing these days.  The publishing industry in fantasy and science fiction is smaller than most people realize.  This is both a good thing and a bad thing.  It's quite possible to go to conventions, and meet most of the important people in the industry.  But it also tends to be pretty insular, and sometimes tends to look inward rather than outward.  I like to think that we're less insular than some folks, but there's a definite danger of groupthink, especially when it comes to things like politics and religion.  Most of the folks in the industry tend to live on the east or west coast, and tend to absorb the attitudes there, which are usually secular and politically liberal.  The irony is that they then write fantasy, often set in pre-industrial societies, without fully appreciating the sort of cultural and spiritual attitudes that such societies tend to have.  That was one of the topics we discussed in our "The Real World in Fantastic Fiction" panel, which Kristin and I were panelists for.  The moderator was Ian Drury, and we also had Geoff Hart, Kenneth Schneyer, and Christopher Kovacs on the panel.  In addition to the role of religion in most societies, ancient and modern, we also discussed the importance of reading the literature of a society in order to get an idea of how it viewed itself, and of doing research in technical topics such as medicine and engineering, in order to get things straight.  For example, conking someone on the back of the head with a brick does not, usually, knock them unconscious so they revive a short time later.

Of course, I firmly believe in the importance of research.  But I'll also be quick to point out that you can get away with certain tropes (such as knocking someone out via a blow to the head), because they're well accepted.  I've used that one myself, though advisedly.  (It's tried multiple times in my story, and only works once.)  And frankly, research can be exhausting, and you can end up as far away from a usable answer as when you started.  That's why it's important to have beta readers--folks with expert knowledge whom you can show your stories to, and who will get back to you and point out those sorts of problems.  A writing critique group also helps, though it's often the case that they too lack the expertise you need.

Anyway, that's getting rather far afield, since I wanted to talk about the convention as a whole, rather than just a panel.  The bottom line is that it was fun, and I really enjoyed it.

Surviving Sandy

Here in Boston, Hurricane Sandy didn't do too much damage that we could see.  The public transportation stopped running during the second half of Monday, and there was a lot of wind and rain that evening.  But in the end, things were more or less back to normal the next day.  Just a few fallen branches.  We never even lost power at our home or work--although not everyone in the Boston area was so lucky, and I'm not sure even now whether all the power outages have been resolved.  It continued to rain on Tuesday--we had a pretty heavy thunderstorm in the evening--but overall we were pretty lucky.

New York, though, is another story.  There were floods, power outages, fires.  Sandy was everything New York feared it would be, and more.  Continue to keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

Barring any further storm impacts, Kristin and I, and our friend Max Gladstone (whose book, Three Parts Dead, has just come out--Go! Buy!), will be carpooling to Toronto for World Fantasy on Thursday.  Let us know if you'll be there.

The work of writing

I've spent the last weekend working on my writing without actually writing. That was frustrating. I had a story coming out in Black Gate on Sunday, so I needed to review the story for typos and formatting errors, and the occasional plot hole. In addition, I needed to promote my story in various ways: emailing my friends, posting announcements in the online forums I frequent, etc. I also has a lot of stories I was prepping for submission (or resubmission), so I spent  time getting those ready. Finally, I ahad to read and critique a fairly long story for my writing group. Overall, it was a long weekend. All of that work was worthwhile, but I missed just having time to write.

Spam? Phishing?

For the past week, I've received dozens, if not hundreds, of emails purporting to confirm my registration at one online forum or other. Each of them says I've signed up with a different username, and most of them give me the password. The emails are mostly identical enough that I've been able to filter most of them, but not the foreign language ones or the occasional one with different wording.

My first instinct was to suspect phishing, but I think that I've decided that it's spam. I've done Google searches on the forums, and sometimes that turns up nothing. I've only had the courage to visit one of those that does turn up (through the Google search, not the link in the email). The website for the Ocean Air Brokerage (I won't link for fear of viruses) looks legitimate enough, but the forums I've supposedly been given membership in make no sense. Why would the forums of a supposed shipping brokerage have no forums on shipping or customs or regions, but categories such as Sports, Software, and Phone Service? And every single post I've seen appears to be spam.

This leads me to the conclusion that these are spam forums. The only question is whether the spam forums themselves are sending out false registration emails, or whether some would be spammer is using my email address in his contact info. Either way, I have no idea what to do about it.