Month: July 2015

The Fitbit, weekends and temptation — Is busyness the answer?

On Sunday, July 12, 2015

Fitbit Charge I have written here that I am a big fan of the Fitbit exercise/calorie management watch Christian and Kelly bought for me last year. I eat healthier, get more exercise and my weight continues to come down. I have been on it, since I started back, about six weeks now. My problem is that I fall off the wagon on weekends. I actually do quite well on the exercise thing, but when I am left to myself, I go get a snack in the kitchen and Lorena is queen of snacks in the kitchen. I think her fast metabolism and cooking ability are a big problem for me. She can just eat more than I and not gain weight. I am envious of that, but am what I am so need to figure out how to avoid temptation on the weekends.

So, I think maybe what I need to do is stay busier on weekends. That can be a difficult thing because after a week at the office, there is temptation just to lounge about, read books (with my bad habit of eating while I read, that is not a good thing diet-wise) and go out to eat with Lorena. So that was part of the reason I bought the BeagleBone Black yesterday. To get onto a project with a buddy so I am held accountable to finish stuff is something that might help occupy me so I do not eat so much. I have a couple of other technology projects on which I work for previous employers as an advisor, but that does not keep me away from the carbo-loading. Lorena has her garden and her school. I got nothin’! So maybe this will work. We will see.

Betty Blonde #367 – 12/11/2009

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BeagleBone Black with Wifi and a camera

By Dad

On Saturday, July 11, 2015

In Software, Technology

My buddy John from my last job in Prescott and I stay in pretty close touch. Neither of us are anywhere near retirement. He has kids still in school and I think of retirement as working when I want to work rather than actually quitting work. Are skills are complementary and we like to work together, so we decided we ought to do a demo project so that if, someday, we ever have enough money set aside we can consult. There is a good likelihood that will never happen, but it is always fun to take on side projects.

This side project involves a BeagleBone Black single board computer, a camera and a wifi link. We have a couple of great ideas about what to do with it, but want to put a ton of infrastructure in place so we can produce quality work quickly when we decide what we actually want to do. This morning, I bought a BeagleBone Black, a USB Wifi Adapter, and a 64 gigabyte microSD card on Amazon to get started. I already have a webcam we can hook up to it. I am setting up a Linux computer as a temporary server to use to archive our work–temporary because I do not have a whole lot of confidence in the computer nor the hard drive. As we start making some progress we will probably make some other arrangements.

As we make progress, I might describe some of what we are doing here so that we can have a record of what we might contribute as consultants if everything is not already completely obsolete by the time we get to doing that.

Betty Blonde #366 – 12/10/2009

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Lorena’s Wilsonville community garden: July 9, 2015

By Dad

On Thursday, July 9, 2015

In Cooking, House and home

I am putting this up for posterity. Lorena is starting to harvest some pretty amazing vegetables on a daily basis. I can eat a lot, but pretty soon, even the two of us will not be able to keep up. Just wow.
Lorena's Wilsonville community garden July 9, 2015

This marriage thing

By Dad

On Thursday, July 9, 2015

In Christianity, culture, Family, Politics

I have long been of the opinion that the government should not be engaged (no pun intended) in the marriage business. The problem with government meddling in affairs outside of their domain did not begin with the recent Supreme Court overstepping of its constitutional bounds here in the United States. It happened long before that. A guy named Matt Appling in an aptly titled blog post, If You Think the Supreme Court Just “Redefined” Marriage, Take It Up With King Henry the Eighth, really nails the issue. It is ironic that so many people interested in redefining marriage to include something that is not marriage (same sex unions) are calling out the Christian community on the divorce issue. This is something over which the Christian world has fought wars, divided and argued for centuries.

It is right to argue that Christian’s need to get their house in order when it comes to the issue of divorce, but it seem very disingenuous when it is argued by people who treat the institution of marriage (in the true sense of the word) in such a cavalier manner. Christians really need to get this issue right. People both inside the Christian community and out who dishonor marriage through unrepentant fornication, adultery and attempts to redefine it should be viewed with incredulity when they try to argue that Christians are hypocrites with respect to divorce. Some of us are, but some of us, even in our weakness and failure, continue to repent, live repentant lives and fight the good fight.

In the meantime government should get out of the marriage business.

Betty Blonde #365 – 12/09/2009

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PhD Qualification Exam

By Dad

On Wednesday, July 8, 2015

In Education

Christian made a breakthrough in his Information Theory research last night. He has to write a report and prepare a talk, both of which he will deliver to his research sponsor at MIT in Massachusetts later this month. He had a hard problem to solve. For a long time, he felt like there might not be a solution. If that were true, he felt like the report and presentation would have been much more difficult to make, so this was a big relief. My understanding is that this report and presentation will serve as his formal Qualifying Examination which is “designed to test the candidate’s research skills and abilities.” This is an exam given at the end of the first year of studies to “early out” students not capable of work at the PhD level. This is not the infamous Comprehensive Examination he will have to take to demonstrate mastery of his coursework before he starts his dissertation, but it is a big step forward. His presentation is scheduled for July 23.

Betty Blonde #364 – 12/08/2009

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Christian and Kelly on their own

By Dad

On Tuesday, July 7, 2015

In General

Lorena picks Christian up from the train coming back from 2015 Fourth of July in Seattle with Kelly Lorena picked Christian up at the train station yesterday. He had gone up to Seattle to visit Kelly for the Fourth of July weekend. The kids have now been paying their own way and living on their own for a year. I think the transition has been harder for Lorena and I than for the kids. It is also interesting to see them create lives separate from each other. The demographics of the people with whom the associate are completely different.

The funny deal is that, even though Kelly is older than Christian, the difference in age between Kelly and the people in her graduate program is quite a bit greater than the difference in age between Christian and the people with whom he works in his research lab. PhD Marketing students tend to start with a Bachelors degree in Business, then go out and get 3-5 years experience followed by an MBA before they apply to PhD programs. That puts most of the ones starting the program close to age 30. The difference in age between them and Kelly is generally around ten years.

Christian works in an important lab where the professor advises both graduate and undergraduate students. With a few exceptions, the graduate students have gone straight from their undergraduate degree to start a Masters or PhD at around age 23 or 24. The undergraduate students tend to be juniors and seniors so they are usually at least 20 or 21. If Christian had taken the normal trajectory, the upcoming year would be his sophomore year as an undergraduate, so he is only one or two years younger than the undergraduate students and four to six years younger than the graduate students.

When Kelly studied Statistics and Christian studied Math and they all knew the same kids at school, their social situations were pretty similar. Now, with Kelly in a Business program and Christian in an Engineering program at schools over a thousand miles apart, their social situations are very different from each other and they are very much on their own. We never thought about it at the time, but the fact that they would lose both the infrastructure of living at home with Dad and Mom and going to school with each other every day magnified their changes.

We have been very pleasantly surprised that this has been a very positive change for both of them. Of course their are hiccups, but they both do well and enjoyed the chance to get together for a long weekend. Still, they were glad to get back to their own lives when it was over.

Betty Blonde #363 – 12/07/2009

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A leisurely Fourth

By Dad

On Saturday, July 4, 2015

In Family

Young corn from Lorena's garden 2015 Wilsonville Squash, lettuce, onions and a pepper. Lorena's garden Wilsonville 2015

Lorena took a picture of the young corn (on the left) from her garden. We are home alone on this Fourth of July. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah are celebrating their 62^nd wedding anniversary today. We were glad that Aunt Julia and Cousin Amy were able to celebrate it with them. Lorena and I will celebrate the event with them tomorrow. Cousin Merle and Carolyn came to dinner last night and breakfast this morning along with our Favorite Government School Teacher^TM Trisha so we got the chance to wax nostalgic for awhile. It was a great reminder to make time to be with those who value what is truly important. Kelly and Christian are at a big get-together at some lake an hour or so out of Seattle, so Lorena and I have stayed home to work on her school work and talk leisurely walk or two around the neighborhood. I had a big post on mourning the passing of democracy here in America, but have just been enjoying myself and do not have the energy for it until another time.

Betty Blonde #362 – 12/04/2009

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Merle

By Dad

On Friday, July 3, 2015

In General

Christian on train to Seattle June 2015 This is a little bit of a housekeeping post. Christian came up from Tempe a couple of days ago to visit us for the week around the Fourth of July holiday. He bought a really nice Lenovo laptop computer with a 17″ screen with some of the grant money they gave him to attend Arizona State. The computer was great with a super fast processor and a great GPU, but it did not fit into his backpack very well and the trackpad was not really a great one. My computer on the hand had a 14″ screen which is not so great for my old eyes and a much less powerful GPU. Because I only use the laptop infrequently as a laptop–I use it more as a desktop with a separate mouse connected to it via a docking station–we decided to switch. Both of us think we got the better deal. I think that is the way it is supposed to be.

We took Christian to the train station this morning to run up to Seattle to hang out with his sister for some kind of shindig or something. He left just in time to miss a visit from our favorite government school teacher, Trisha. It is a good thing. Some might believe that it is a good thing because we have very little room in our studio apartment, but the real reason it is a good thing is that he will not be here for the bad influence of Lorena’s notorious father, Merle. You would think that the combination of the stellar Trisha and her (very) saintly mother Carolyn would offset the influence of just one guy, but you would only think that if you had never met Merle. I think it was his dear Mother (also very saintly and still driving at age 95) who said that the highest level he might ever aspire to attain would be couth and if he did ever get there, it would be just barely. Pictures to follow. If I can bear it.

Betty Blonde #361 – 12/03/2009

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How I use my Fitbit Charge

By Dad

On Thursday, July 2, 2015

In Health, Technology

The kids bought me a Fitbit Charge watch last December. I had gotten pretty fat (in saying “pretty fat” I am being somewhat gracious toward myself) and had been prescribed a couple of medications for high blood pressure and cholesterol, measurements for both which were borderline. The doctor told me that I could probably get off of at least one of the medications if I just got some exercise and lost some weight.

If you do not know about the Fitbit watches, they are essentially pedometers, some of which have things like altimeters to determine when you climb stairs and heart-rate monitors. They also tell time. The watches connect to the internet through a bluetooth connection to upload the from the watch to a cell phoe or computer that updates a personal website. This is so a person can keep track of how far they have walked or run, how many calories they have burned, etc. My watch, the Charge does not have a heart-rate monitor, but I am thinking about getting on that does as a reward when I lose another 16 pounds.

When the kids gave me the Fitbit Charge, I immediately started using it. I am one of those kinds of guys who likes to measure every little thing. The watch and website provided me a mechanism that made it much faster, easier and more thorough than anything I had done previously (except when I played judo in college and was insanely meticulous). The cell phone app that goes with the Fitbit uses the GPS to track how fast and far I go when I go for my walks–other people use the same app for bicycling and running.

I did pretty well for a couple of weeks, but then everything got sidetracked when I got a new job in Oregon and we had to move across the country from North Carolina. I just quit using the thing. A little over three weeks ago, Kelly came down for a visit to Oregon from Seattle and let me know she was pretty disappointed that I did not use the watch for a couple of reasons–she and Christian made the effort to get it for me and I was really fat. She is gracious that way. So I decided to start using it again.

This time, I have been at it a little less than a month and it appears to be sticking. When I first started, I intended to walk a little at lunch time and then just manage what I ate to not go over a certain level of caloric intake. The software allows the user to chose how fast they want to lose. I have mine set up to help me target a 750 calorie daily deficit. How this works is that I enter all the food I eat and any special workouts I do into the website. That is amazingly easy because about every food you can imagine is already in the system and 99% of the time all I have to do is pick the food and say how much I ate (ounces, pieces, etc.). They have tons of major restaurant menu items in there, too, so if I go to Wendy’s for a salad, it is just a couple button pushes and that food is recorded.

The first week, I lost some weight, but was hungry all the time. It dawned on me that if I walked a little more, I got to eat a little more, so I started walking more. It started out on the treadmill at our gym, but then I decided it might be a good idea to walk to work. That added quite a lot of calories that I could eat. Then, on Saturday, Lorena and I started walking into town in the morning for breakfast, then again in the afternoon for lunch. It took a little while to calibrate the system because it gave me more credit for burning calories than I deserved–I think because I walked under trees a bunch of the time and the GPS struggled to figure out where I was. Now that I have that worked out a little better, I think the watch is providing a pretty accurate accounting of how many calories are going in versus how many are going out.

As I started losing weight, I started walking a little more. Lorena drives me to work in the morning (we only have one car), but then I walk downtown from work most days to meet her for lunch and walk back to work after lunch. The round trip is three miles. Then, after work, I walk the two miles from work to our apartment. So, now, my baseline walk everyday is five miles. I do additional walking around the building and up and down stairs at work. The Fitbit tracks that, too. The graph below shows the amount of walking I have recorded since I started back using the Fitbit a little less than a month ago. I think the 150 miles is a little bit more than I actually walked, but now that I know better how to use the system I think it will be more accurate for the month of July. I expect I am walking between 30-40 miles per week.

The whole system works for me. I am down over 19 pounds from the end of last year when I started using the Fitbit with four months missing in the middle. I am down a little over 9 pounds since I started back using it again a little over three weeks ago. I actually fell off the wagon two of the weekends since my new start or I would be down even more. The thing that helps me most is that I have a way to “pay” for eating more food. A couple of times, I have actually headed down to the gym to workout for an hour so I could afford enough calories to take Lorena out to dinner.

I have a long way to go. I hope to get down to my goal weight toward the end of the year, but I am already feeling a lot better.

Betty Blonde #360 – 12/02/2009

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Rainbow People meet resistance from Lakota activists

By Dad

On Wednesday, July 1, 2015

In General

I got a huge kick out of an article in The Daily Beast titled Lakota Warriors Vow to Crush Dirty Rainbow Hippies. It is a story about a group of nebulously organized “free spirits” who plan to descend on Lakota territory in South Dakota. The real free spirits appear to be the Lakota activists protesting the event. There are some quite colorful descriptions of some of the protests in the article. This quote kind of describes the big picture:

The free spirits are planning to dig toilet trenches and occupy the Black Hills at the height of the Lakota ceremonial season. “I’ve talked to several Rainbow people who I believe try to be decent human beings,” Clark said. “And then there’s a whole messload of them who—pardon my language—are totally freaking whacked.”

Swan and Joelle say it’s particularly disturbing that the Rainbow Family has no leaders, and no one is really accountable. They pointed to reports that one of the group’s hippie pow-wows cost taxpayers $500,000 in law enforcement and forestry management in 2013.

To prevent any waves of destruction, the Forest Service sends incident management teams from Washington, DC to the Rainbow Gathering every year to supplement local law enforcement.

The article describes the drugs, polluting, aggravated battery, murder and aggravated assault that appear to have been features of previous events planned by the Rainbow Family of Living Light. My ideas on the Rainbow People are not dissimilar to those of the Lakota activists:

“We’ve gotten some [Rainbow people] saying you need to come out here and experience the hippie love,” the Lakota activist Clark told The Daily Beast. “Peace, love, we want to be your friend and respect your people. No, we don’t trust you any more than the government—possibly less.”

Betty Blonde #359 – 12/01/2009

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