Category: Health

I hate Sugar

I hate what sugar does to me.

And by sugar, I also mean simple Carbs like Bread and Donuts.  Especially Donuts.

Yet, here I was again.   Friday Donuts showed up in the office.   “I wonder if it tastes just as good?”  I get tired of the mental battle.  I give in.  Chomp.   The chocolate glazed one is sickeningly sweet.  So I eat the sugar raised one instead, that one is almost perfect.    Slug some more coffee after it. 

Here’s what it does for me, if I am to be honest:

  • In about half an hour, I’m sweating.
  • The places where my muscles are tired and worn, like in my forearms – they hurt.  (wheat has this effect on me)
  • The skin on my feet dries up, goes gray.
  • My eyes change how they focus.  I now have to look through a lower part of my progressive lenses to achieve the same focus.
  • My brain wakes up – it gets excited.
    • But, I think it gets excited in an unorganized, random way.
    • Not as a finely Tuned Tool of Tantamount Thinkstruction.
    • It gets hard to hold a single thought down, instead, I start thinking of everything.
      • This is great for project management.  It is bad for coding.
  • 2-4 hours later, my brain crashes.  Intense sleepiness comes over me.  Its hard to think.
    • I can postpone this crash by sacrificing more sugar to the cause.

Under the Hood

Under the hood, here’s what I believe is happening:

  • I’m a Type II diabetic.  This means that while my body pumps out insulin, the insulin doesn’t work quite as well as it would in a normal person, so the sugar is not cleared from my blood quite as fast.
  • Any meal of more than about 25g of carb, depending on GI index of the food, spikes my blood sugar up beyond the point of my insulin being able to handle it.   I’ve clocked it at 165-200 before.  Which isn’t AWFUL, but it is over 140, the “toxic” level for certain types of cells.
  • With my blood sugar high, various other diabetic things happen – dryness, eyes, possible neuropathy (nerves screaming in pain and then dying) (hasn’t happened to me yet, though I occasionally have an isolated twinge, like a needle prick).
  • Eventually, 2-4 hours later, my body finally gets to the point where its clearing up the sugar.   My brain, used to the influx of sugar, senses things drying up, but it can’t switch to an alternate fuel source yet, and so I hit a wall.   Queue the need for a nap.
    • Sad thing is, it seems to want to crash as the blood sugar drops, not as it gets down to a certain level.  I’ve had crashes when my sugar was dropping at about the 130 range.

Even further under the hood, here’s more of what’s happening:

  • Because I pump out so much insulin, and insulin is a signal to the body, two things happen:
    • Insulin signals the body to store the excess sugar as fat.  This seems to happen around the belly for the most part – BEER BELLY!   (I wonder if its because the sugar didn’t get far from the intestines and then immediately got stored, before it could get further away)
    • Insulin prevents the body from burning fat.    So even if I’m starving, and my body needs energy, if my insulin levels are high, my body won’t burn fat; rather it will burn protein, or go into starvation mode. 
      • I measured this for myself several years ago.  By “this” i mean how my body will ignore the sugar that’s floating around.  Right when I first got diagnosed, and we were experimenting with dosages.  I went off my medications, my average blood sugar levels went up, but I was recording everything that I hate.  I averaged 1800 calories a day, ran, AND I gained 5 lbs, in a month.   I should have lost 5 lbs instead.  Calculations ensued – I deduced that my body was running on 1300 calories a day.  And I felt like crap.

And why the heck do I need a donut anyway?    These answers are specific to my weakness:

  • One author puts it as “Labrador Retriever brain”.  My brain is hooked on the sugar.  It LOVES it.  It was designed to love it.   It craves it.  Precioussssss.    Some folks have tons of willpower – I can have willpower, but it comes and goes in spurts, and if there’s something else big going on, that’s where my attention goes and poof! I’ve given in.
  • There’s a social aspect of it.   I want to belong, I want to participate in the customs going on around me.  I don’t want to be left out. 
  • I have memories of emotional happiness associated with some past occasions involving donuts (and bagels and danishes). (and little smoky sausages, and chocolate wafers, and orange juice, and spaghetti, and french fries, and … )

Recent changes in Diet

Lately, I’ve been listening to the Primal Potential podcast, and I read through the Bulletproof Diet book, and I’m trying something:

  • Bulletproof coffee for breakfast.
    • my body is already at a low level of insulin from my overnight fast
    • keep it at a low level of insulin, and give my body energy in the form of good quality fat
    • turns out, my brain is very sharp when running on fat. 
    • This is not a long term replacement for a real meal; just gets me past breakfast to lunch.
    • OMG trying to find an article that isn’t either a) debunking it or b) selling it, is really hard.  Try for yourself. 
  • Limited Carbs for lunch
    • 25-50g or so.
    • Quest bars
    • Hearts of Palm and Quinoa salad from CostCo
    • Trying to find other things that fit this mold.  Trader Joes has lots of little interesting things.  CANNOT do Panda express (wah)
  • Dinner = moderately healthy, but can go awry (pizza!) if the situation calls for it.

This was my plan till the Donuts showed up this morning. 

New Plan: Surrender

My new plan is to surrender to the donut.  Or the cake, or the pop tart.

  • I will take a plate.  This plate might be decorated or beautiful.
  • I will place said item on the plate, with great solemnity.
  • I will place said plate in the refrigerator.  Or perhaps under a non-see-through-lid in my office.
    • I could label it “Mogwai” – its cute, but watch out when you feed it.
  • at 3pm, I WILL CONSUME THE NOM NOMS ON THE PLATE.

Delayed gratification.  Let my body run without large insulin spikes until after lunch, if possible.   After the lunch spike dies down, then subject it to Donut.   Then the subsequent crash doesn’t affect my work-day.

Reserving the right to eat a bite of the donut, and throw the rest in the trash.  That’s a possibility too.  Preferably at 3pm.

Comparing Nutrition Tracking Apps (iOS)

I’ve decided I’m going to track nutrition again.  I tested entering the same day into 4 apps and recorded myself:

Here’s the raw video of all 4 side by side.   Its provided for reference only, I don’t expect you to actually watch it, unless you work for one of the above companies trying to understand what I saw.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05zfzKXJlzA&w=448&h=252&hd=1]
4 Apps, Long and Boring

 

Here’s a close up of just the breakfast bits, for only two apps, trying to compare the same item to the same item:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ7z_74n_GQ&w=448&h=252&hd=1]
2 Apps, Just Breakfast, Almost Watchable

 

Frustrations

These are all my opinions, not statements of fact. 

  • Up!
    • Could not find some restaurant food, so I had to go find something else that might or might not be equivalent.
    • Amazingly wrong values for Orange Juice (45 cal per orange!), and Orange Juice (100 cal per g)
    • While the “just add it and edit the quantity later” seems like a good idea at first, I think there were a lot more touches in the end.
      • One reason why this one had a longer video – I had to go look up caloric values for stuff it couldn’t find, so that I could go back into the app and update things to more reasonable values.  The other apps, I already knew the caloric value I was looking for, so they were spared this embarrassment.
    • Their “slider” for changing quantity took a bunch of fiddling.
    • If you enter food as you eat it, it’s a lot easier, but otherwise, selecting times for meals gets hard.  I like the other apps “Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack” method better. 
  • MyFitnessPal
    • Looked kinda clunky?  (but it worked!)
  • FatSecret
    • I think I was trying to put in 471g of soup, since my scale tells me its 471g, and wow that was annoying to have to scroll gently from 100 to 471.
  • Lose It!
    • Their selection of foods seemed limited, didn’t find what I was looking for.  Its like they’ve tried to reduce complexity of what is available or something?
    • App crashed during data entry, I had to restart it.

Winner

MyFitnessPal gets my “business”.  I do not remember being frustrated trying to enter anything; everything I searched for came up; they had decimal input; and I agreed with the calorie estimates given the first time around.

Starting Running Again

This is at least my third or fourth time picking running back up.   I just got to the spot where I could do a (slow) 5k.     What is my awesome secret sauce?

  1. Heart
  2. Muscle strength
  3. Flexibility
  4. Form
  5. Joy

Heart

Find and read a book  or website about heart zone training.  In general, it goes like this:  There are different heart zones; You need to keep your heart in “Kinda working, but not very hard” zone, aka “I can still hum a song” zone, for 30+ minutes at a time, to exercise it such that it wants to grow and become stronger.

If you go too fast, and you get to the “I can’t really talk at the same time” zone, or even the “breathing heavy” zone, you’ve left the “lets invest in ourselves” zone and entered the “lion is chasing me deal with it now at expense of future” zone.

If you haven’t got the heart developed, as soon as you start running, your HR will spike up to to ridiculous levels, you’ll be panting, you won’t be able to do it for more than 5 minutes, and you’ll do it so sloppy that you’ll injure yourself.

For me, this is walking at 3.4 mph or so, and breaking out into a very minor jog of about 4.2 mph.   Everybody is different. 

Muscle Strength

Running involves a lot of muscles.  There’s an exercise called the Hundred-Up that’s pretty dang simple.  If you can do the Minor for 100, you’re ready to joggishly run.  If you can do the Major for 100 reps, you’re ready to run fast.  And we’re talking good form, not sloppy, when doing them. 

Flexibility

I am already pretty flexible, so I skipped this, but I think it gets a lot of people.   Here’s what happens: If certain muscles / joints don’t have the right range of motion, then the body still gets it done – but it does it with bad form, at the expense of some other muscle that’s not supposed to bear that kind of load.     There’s a dude wrote a book about it:  Ready to Run.    Also has lots of solutions for each of the problems.  Good book.

Form

This is touched on in the Hundred-Up exercises and the Ready to Run book.   You do NOT want to heel strike.  Bad stuff happens.   More written in the book above; for me, running barefoot was my solution – it re-trained me to land differently.  My cadence went up .. from 150bpm to about 180bpm.   So when I’m jogging at 4.2 mph on the treadmill, I look like a video of a waddling penguin sped up 200%.   Maybe.

Joy

Running, for me, is like dancing, or playing the drums.  I love to run with music.   There’s a song, Stompa.  Its way fun to run to.    I have to find my joy in the activity, or it doesn’t stay.

 

So, here I go.. back in the saddle again.. out where my foot is my friend…

A small victory

There’s a lot of change going on in my life… internal change.   A quick summary would be:  CPAP, sleep, goal setting, sticking to a schedule, kid moved out, gym.

Part of the goal setting thing was to not advertise them, so I won’t.. they have to stay personal, private, and accountable to important people.  What I will say is that this is the calendar I’m trying to stick to, with blessings from my partner:

image

The idea at first was to work out after work, as the gym is on the way home.  However, that ran into a few things:

  • I had to take the right Gym clothes with me at the start of the day
  • I had to transition from work to gym clothes and then back out to winter coldness
  • If I was going to bring home take-home, it had to be near the gym
  • I got home all sweaty

So, today, we reversed it.   I brought home takeout first, and then hung out with my darling, and THEN, with her blessing (I’m a little co-dependent at times), I went back out to the gym.. already in my gym clothes.

image It was awesomely wonderful!  I ran PI miles (3.14) .. there were less people there, I could get on the treadmill when I wanted.. I was not on a schedule so I ran an extra 15 minutes or so because I was feeling good.. heck, I was dancing on the treadmill.  Yeah, one of those guys.  Not sorry. 

And then I got home, did a few more messy things involving garbage, then took a shower.. transitioning to “self” time – which I’m spending typing up this blog post.

Life is Good. 

Separate post about picking up running again.   I forget what I’ve posted about already and what I haven’t.

As I sit with an ice pack in my armpit…

image

I saw my masseuse, Travis, today.     We worked on two problem areas that I have:  a) I have lower back pain when standing, and b) I have shoulder pain when I reach for things in front of me – like putting away dishes, or retrieving a glove from the dashboard where I had it heating.   (First snowflake of the season today!)

We worked a lot on my Coracobrachialis muscle – aka “Beer Drinking” muscle.  An audio commentary of the session would have to include things like “[whimpering sounds]” and “[sobbing]”.  I have been forbidden from doing any pull-ups.

I’ve been given a list of muscles to work out before I see him again, in order of priority:

  • Lattimus Dorsi
  • Trapezius
  • Hamstrings
  • IT band stretching

The general idea is this:  Due to years of sitting, I have built up certain muscles over others.  Now that I am standing a lot more, some of my secondary muscles are having to take over for my unequal primary ones. They burn out faster, and thus – pain. 

Time to go read up on ways to lengthen and strengthen the above. 

Standing Around…

imageLong story short, I’ve started trying to stand almost all the time at work.

It all started when I saw some of this show:

There are two free episodes – about 2 hours worth.  It was awesome enough that the Wife and I bought it, and we’ve been consuming it at home, an episode every few days.  Not through it yet.  However, that took me over to his website and Youtube channel:

He has SO MUCH stuff out there, it’s a bit overwhelming.

At the same time, after a lot of asking the wrong people the wrong questions, I finally got in to see a Urologist, who gave me a diagnosis:  Prostatitis.   Possible cause: sitting too much.   Lots of Truckers get it. 

So, I made the decision to stand at work, as much as possible.

In order to do this, I had to learn how to stand:

  • Tighten up the abs.  Like, lightly punch yourself in the stomach. 
  • Screw my feet into the ground so that my toes would go away from my midline – this also tightens up the butt. 
  • Bring everything back to 10%, 20% tightness
  • This is stable position.

I got (had) some equipment to help:

  • Work had already provided me with a geek desk – adjustable height desk.
  • Get a gel standing mat from Bed Bath and Beyond. 
  • Yoga block – to prop my foot up from time to time.
  • Fancy keyboard
  • Tackball
  • Eye level monitors (monitor stand provided by work)

Also some other habits

  • Walk barefoot most of the time.    Luckily, at my work environment, shoes are very optional. 
  • Switch back and forth from right hand mouse to left hand trackball, every few days. 
  • See a good Massage Therapist.  This guy, Travis: http://elementsmassage.com/louisvilleeast/our-therapists/id/5577/travis   knows his stuff.  
    • Side note: a massage with him, for me, usually involves pain-threshold numbers, and lots of muscle names.  One of these days we’ll work through everything – we’ve already visited the scapulae, the tersis major/minor, and currently working on pec minor and some calves and some hip stuff that I can’t remember the name of.
  • Continue to see a good chiropractor

The Result

  • My right hand is no longer numb
  • My lower back no longer hurts when I stand
  • My belt is tighter.  I don’t know how many pounds yet .. too much variability – but I’m definitely 1 belt notch tighter.  Without any other exercise.

Thoughts

Chiropractory vs Massage Therapy vs MobilityWod:

I used to think that Chiropractory by itself was good enough – I’d just have to go back and get a tune up every few months.   What I’m understanding now is that if I have soft tissue problems going on – and my body adapts around those creating other overly used muscles – my body will try to drag my spine out of position.  Once the spine goes out of position, then other muscle problems happen, and .. pretzel.

Now, with a) using my muscles properly – core muscles to provide straightness rather than relying on soft tissue slump;  b) not sitting – see below, and c) a therapist to squish and crush the lactic acid crunchies in my system, for the first time, after a month away from the chiropractor – I didn’t feel like I needed an adjustment.

I went anyway, and I had a beautiful adjustment.  Lots of crackling.  We started working on shoulder and hip adjustments.

Its not perfect yet – I’m doing something wrong for my Lats and my Hip, there’s a spot that keeps forming there.  And my right shoulder.   But it’s a LOT better. 

Standing, Lactic Acid, Warm Up, Walking

After standing all day, the bottoms of my feet can get a bit sore.  And then I go and see the therapist, and he has to squish all this lactic acid out of my system.   Not right.

Turns out, “warm up” and “cool down”:  Think of the Lymphatic system as a network of sponge.  It doesn’t have any motors.. it takes the body moving to start the squishying process that then moves the stuff around.   That’s the purpose of warm up and cool down – to get the lymph moving.  So If I stand for a while, and then go for a 2 mile walk – the first mile, I’m sore.  The second mile, I’m fine! 

I can’t just stand, I have to move.   And move for a while.

Standing vs Sitting Caloric Burn

Supposedly, a person burns 0.7 calories/minute more while standing than when sitting down.   Or, use this handy calculator:  http://www.juststand.org/Tools/CalorieBurnCalculator/tabid/637/language/en-US/Default.aspx

That adds up to around 1700 calories a week for me.  1 pound every 2 weeks.  That seems about right.

Sitting

What is involved in keeping your body straight while you are sitting?  Not that you keep your back straight, usually people slouch anyway.  According to that dude mentioned above, It involves your Quads (front of your thigh) and your Psoas (behind the 6-pack).   They stay on, like, all the time.   And sure enough, I had these really tight quads, and a lot of lower muscle back pain – I’m guessing the lower back strain was to counter the Psoas?

And that’s the other thing – to keep back straight while sitting, its harder than when standing?   I can’t prove any of this.. but, yah, that’s why we slouch when we’re sitting.  And if you slouch all the time, your body says: here, let me help you:  and it stiffens up the back of your neck with fatty tissue…

Yeah.  It’s a bummer.  Better to squat. Smile Or If I’m going to sit, I’m going to sit back and let my back be supported by the chair.

Do NOT walk Duck-Footed

Very much a side thing – as a result of watching @MobilityWod, I now cringe every time I see somebody walk, or run, or bicycle, duck-footed / knees bowed out.   Its pretty bad for you.    Click over to this article (from whence I grabbed the image) for more awesomeness: http://www.crossfitworks.com/archives/4797

In Other News – my Soylent Shipped!     Time to get that project off the shelf I stuck it on.

PS: That was the BEST picture I could find of me standing.   I have a ways to go yet.

Save the Wrists! Ordered a new keyboard / Code Dictation?

My wrists have been numbing more lately.  At my wife’s suggestion, I’ll bring it up with my GP at my appointment next Wednesday.  Meanwhile:

  • Switch to using the trackball with my left hand.
  • Switch keyboards.

This is the keyboard I’ve been using for the last 2 years or so – Microsoft Wireless Comfort Keyboard 5000.   It has some level of curve in it, however, I still have Ulnar Deviation and Pronation when using it.  The keyboard action is very light, and its been good to me for a while.   It is wireless .. less cords to deal with.

image

This is my older, wired, USB keyboard.  Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 v1.0.  I switched back to it, but what I find is that the keys take too much pressure to press.. and my hands are tired.   I couldn’t do it.    The keyboard is also larger, which means I need to stretch my fingers further to press the keys.  However, Ulnar deviation is a bit better.

image

Just for fun, I tried using both at the same time:

image

This worked surprisingly well.  It was fluid, except when I needed to switch to the mouse.   I’m used to my keyboard being a single keyboard, and something about having two keyboards confused me; I didn’t know which hand to move.  I guess I know my “home” position based on the distance between my hands, and if I move one hand, I cannot find home easily without looking. 

I did some research and decided to order this keyboard, it should arrive next week sometime:

 

In the mean time some of the things I can do are:

  • type at a deliberate rate. (not look at keyboard)
  • type with one hand only.   (requires looking at keyboard)
  • I can also just use one finger from each hand.  By doing this the entire hand moves, and ulnar deviation is removed.   It is also quite fast.  (requires looking at keyboard)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLR0Nwh1l6o&w=448&h=252&hd=1]
What did I type?

This is me typing with one hand.

In light of Hanselman’s new app which allows dictation from an iPhone, I wonder if there are any programmer-specific dictation tools?  I have looked at vimspeak, however that mostly addresses the control aspects of using vi.   Think of it: 

public int Add(int a, int b) { return a+b; }

“public int shift A d d paren open int a comma int b paren close curly open return a plus b semi close curly” ?

Other folks have talked about it over here: http://productivity.stackexchange.com/questions/3605/how-can-we-use-dragon-naturallyspeaking-to-code-more-efficiently

The problem is one of lost context.  In programming we are trying to be specific about contexts – usually using parens and curly’s as visual queues – for example, that “int a” and “int b” are parameters of Add.   The solution seems like it would be codifying contexts into spoken word, by adding extra keywords to tell the parser what we are trying to do.  For example:

“function <name>” => starts adding function, puts you in function mode; creates defaults; additional things make sense in this mode:

  • “parameter x”
    • [of type] y
  • “returns [type] ”
  • [visibility] “public” | “private” | “internal”   // keywords can infer that we meant visibility
  • “body”  // go to editing body mode

So theoretically, “function Shift a d d visibility public returns int parameter a of type int parameter b of type int body return a plus b”, or more specifically:

What is said What the code looks like (using underscore to denote cursor)
function object a01() { }
Shift A object A() { }
d d object Add() {  }
visibility object Add()  {  }
public public object Add() {  }
returns public object Add() { }
int public int Add() {  }
parameter public int Add() {  }
a public int Add(object a) { }
of type public int Add(object a) {  }
int public int Add(int a) { }

etc.    Ie, you map the spoke word into meanings that then get applied to the editor.

You could even navigate “into” and “out of” contexts by using clicks and clucks – sounds that are easy to make yet are definitely not letters.   “down” and “up” would apply at the context level – ie, statements, or functions.

It is an interesting problem.  It could be a fun thing to solve.  Any takers?

Time Use May 2014

One of those sanity moments where I look at “what am I doing”, and are my priorities in line. (TL;DR: they are not)

My wife and kid went out of town for a week, so I had the opportunity to schedule myself any way I choose.  I have a comparison of “with wife and kid” and “bacheloring it”:

Wife And Kid  (Monday-Sunday)

image

Bacheloring (Tuesday-Saturday)

image

Ob ser v at io n u s

(observation + obvious; black=both; purple=1; blue=2)

  • My work hours were more scattered when the wife and kid were away
  • Work spills over to the weekend if I can’t get all my hours in during the week.   And that is what happens when sleep intrudes into work; which is what happens when entertainment intrudes into sleep.
  • I had more “white space” – time that I’m not doing anything in particular, just being – when the family was away.
  • I spend a significant amount of time in pink (hanging with wife) – I like this.
  • I spend a significant amount of time in green (entertainment, hobbies) – I like this.
  • I do stay up too late doing hobby stuff and watching netflix (entertainment) – at the expense of squeezing sleep.
  • I spent more time eating when the family was away:
    • Mostly, I was cooking up (measuring) batches of soylent and grilling

Not So Obvious

The timeline is not zoomed in enough to see some of the small stuff:

  • I walked the dogs every day while the family was gone.   But it only took 15 minutes.
  • I didn’t get to the gym while they were away.  That’s because my gym time and dog feeding and peeing time conflicted.
  • I spent a lot more time doing errands – cleaning stuff, fixing stuff – while the family was gone.
  • I did not nap at work while the family was gone.

Soylent: Not So Good News

I bought a week’s supply of PeopleChow 3.01 from Doug, with the intent of living on it while the family was away.  I did two trials, with my glucometer:

Trial #1: 1/3 the batch; 100g carb:

  • before: 89 mm/l
  • 30 minutes after:  138
  • 60 minutes after:  168
  • 120 minutes after:  158

Trial #2:  1/6 the batch, 50g carb:

  • before: 93
  • 30 minutes after:  158

The goal? My goal? is to be under 120 after 2 hours after a meal.   I couldn’t do it – too many carbs.

I tried altering the formula to use less corn flour; the result was unpalatable (puke worthy).  I gave up on it.

But what this did was, I started measuring my blood sugar again.

Me: Not So Good News

I’m a lot less able to withstand a carb load than I used to be able to.   Or so it seems.   Today was 40g of carb in some Indian Lentils:

  • Before: 110
  • 2 hours after, even with a walk:  158

And, I can feel it.  I feel puffy, flabby, out of energy, tired.

The Twin Cycle Hypothesis of Etiology of Type 2 Diabetes

imageI did some reading to see what’s new these days in diabetes stuff.  I came across this article, with this pretty cool picture (I could not find a public link, so this is a screenshot):

In a nutshell, it gives me an answer to “what the heck is going on” – and a glimmer that it gives me is, “loose enough weight, the cycle becomes less worse.”   It focuses on some T2 Diabetics who got gastric bypass surgery and radically altered their body fat content and wham! some of the diabetic cycle vanished.

In the past, I had gotten down to 165, which for me is a BMI of about 22.    I felt a lot better then, I was running, working out, having a blast.    But I did not cease to be diabetic. 

Then I saw this line here:

image

For me a BMI of 19 would be 130 lbs.   That’s 50 lbs less than I am right now.      30 lbs less than what I had aspired to get down to at my best.   I have to get down there, AND STAY DOWN THERE, because I’m pretty sure that the last bits of fat to get used up are going to be the ones which are the most troublesome.   Or, I could continue to be reasonably happy yet declining.

Maybe I didn’t drop enough weight that time?

How Hard should I strive?  After all, I could say I’m an old man.  I’m past my prime.   I’m beyond the life expectancy that humans had in the middle ages…

Bottom Line:  I have a Choice to make

My former sponsor’s favorite word – Choices.  Ah, the bliss of not knowing you have a choice.  

I could make a choice to get healthy again.

Which would mean, I need to put exercise back in my schedule.   And logging food.

Which would mean, something has to go.

What Goes?

  • It won’t be sleep.
  • It won’t be work – at least, not yet.  I’m not independently wealthy yet.
  • It won’t be [all of] hanging with the wife.
  • It won’t be Recovery work.
  • It would have to be entertainment and hobby.   There isn’t anything else to let go of.

I’ve been overdoing it.  My brain gets so tired, I just want to numb out with mindless TV watching.. or, my brain gets so obsessed, I have to solve this problem now! (3d printing, blender, and shapeways – I’m looking at you). 

So, sometime soon, expect that all my 3D printing stuff will come to a stop.  Or, it will be relegated to one experiment per weekend (or some other healthy amount).   A check at the posting queue for this blog – actually, the queue is empty right now.   When I post this post, there are no others in the queue after it.

I guess I’ll write one more post for “Shelving the Hobby” – making a list of the irons I have in the fire, so that I can let them go temporarily.   Or not, I can list them here:

  • I have a solution for Agisoft to Blender to Shapeways which involves decimation down to 500, subsurf, and edge creasing.  I have a color print ordered of that.
  • I have a solution for printing initials cubes without supports; I have to slice it, but basically I print it at a 45 degree angle so that all letters are facing “up” (kinda).   I have not actually done this yet.   I have ordered a small (20cm) cube from Shapeways to see how well their printers do the job.
  • I might be doing some silver jewelry via Shapeways involving people’s initials.

Done.  Shelved, will post pictures when they arrive.

I think I have a date with a gym tomorrow morning.   And if my work hours suffer, well, that’s what Sunday afternoons are for.

Saving Wrists

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My wrists have been hurting lately.. especially the right one.  Wife thinks I have carpel tunnel syndrome, she might be right.   I already have the ergonomic keyboard, and a trackball; I can use a mouse in either hand, with either button configuration.    However, when working with code, there’s definitely a “switch hand to arrow keys” and “switch back” repetitive thing that happens.  (at least for me).  So, this journey to save on keystrokes and wrist movements.

Step 1:  Try Not to Use the Mouse

I started by putting the mouse very far away from me.   This forced me to try to find keyboard shortcuts for most of the things I was trying to do – especially switching windows.  Here are some of the ones I use now;  most of these are not the default keyboard combinations, but rather the secondary keyboard combinations, which I was left with after vsvim got installed.

Shft-Alt-L or Ctrl-Alt-L Solution Explorer
F5 Build + Debug
F6 or Ctrl-Shift-B Build
Ctrl-Alt-O Ouptut Window
Ctrl-R Ctrl-R Resharper Refactor
Alt-~ Navigate to related symbol
Ctrl-K C Show Pending Changes
Ctrl-T, Ctrl-Shift-T Resharper Navigate to Class / File
Alt-\ Go to Member
Ctrl-Alt-F Show File Structure
Alt-E O L Turn off auto-collapsed stuff

I also assumed a layout where I have a bunch of code windows, and all other windows are either shoved over on the right or detached and on another monitor.   No more messing with split windows all over the place.  By using a keyboard shortcut, wherever the window is, it becomes visible.  I don’t hunt around in tabs anymore.

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Step 2: VsVim

History

I first learned vi in 1983, on a Vt100 Terminal emulator connected via a 150 baud modem to the unix server provided by Iowa State University’s Computer Science department.   (I was still in high school, I was visiting my brother who was a graduate student at the time).  There was some kind of vi-tutor program that I went through.    It was also much better than edlin and ed, which were my other options at the time.

Anti-Religious-Statement: I used it religiously till 1990, when learning LISP, I also learned to love emacs.   Yes, I stayed in emacs most of the time, starting shell windows as needed.   

I maintained a proficiency in both vi and emacs till 2001, when I got assimilated by .Net and left my Unix roots behind.

And Now

Having had a history with it, I decided to try vsvim and see how quickly things came back to me.

The first thing I noticed is that every other program I used, whenever I mis typ hhhhcwtyped something, I’d start throwing out gibberish involving hhhjjjjxdw vi movement commands.  And pressing ESC a lot.   I (am still having to) to try to train my eyes to only use vi commands when I saw the flashing block yellow cursor that I configured it to be.

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I also had to un-bind a few things – for example, vi’s Ctrl-R is a lot less useful to me than Resharper’s Ctrl-R Refactorhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh   I did it again.   vi’s Ctrl-R “redo” I could just do :redo instead.

And where am I now?  I still need to think about it a bit..  but, for example, recently I changed some code from being a static Foo.DoSomething() to a IFoo.DoSomething(), and I had to inject the class in a bunch (10+?) of constructors.   The key sequences went something like this. (R# in Red, vsvim command in blue)

ALT-\ ctor ENTER Jump to the constructor in the file (R#)
/) ENTER Search forward for “)” and put cursor there (/ and ? go across lines, fF are in current line only)
i, IFoo foo ESC Insert “, IFoo foo”
F, Go back to the comma
v lllllllllll “ay Enter visual select mode, highlight going right, to buffer A, yank (copy); cursor back at ,
/foo ENTER jump forward to foo
Alt-ENTER ENTER Use R# “insert field for this thingy in the constructor” thingy
Ctrl-T yafvm ENTER Use R# Go to Class, looking for YetAnotherFooViewModel  (most of the common things I work with have a very fast acronym.  For example “BasePortfolioEditorViewModel” is “bpevm”.  I can also use regexp stuff)
Alt-\ ctor ENTER Jump to constructor
/) ENTER Go to closing brace
“aP paste from buffer A before cursor

If this sounds like complete gibberish …  yes it is.  But here’s the thing:

  • I am talking aweZUM s3krit c0dez with my computer!
  • My fingers are not leaving the home position on the keyboard.  Not even for arrow keys.
  • By storing snippets of text into paste buffers (a-z, 0-9, etc), I can avoid typing those things again, which is very useful.
  • If I plan ahead a bit I can save a lot of keystrokes trying to get somewhere in a file.
  • Once I enter insert mode, Its just like normal – can still use arrow keys to move around, shift-arrow to select, etc.

It is geeky, nerdy, experimental, and it might be helping my wrists a bit.   1 week so far, still going okay.

another trick I use:  variable names like “a”, “b”, “c” .. and then I Ctrl-R Ctrl-R rename them to something better later.

I would not recommend trying to learn vi without a vi-tutor type program

Soylent IS [for] People!

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imageI am eagerly awaiting my first batch of Soylent.me.  Turns out I’m not the only person .. coworker Doug is awaiting it as well.  But coworker Doug, being very interested in the subject, went a step further and bought all the ingredients for the most popular DIY.soylent.me recipe:  People Chow 3.0.1 – “Tortilla Perfection”.  He brought some in today.    I had some (a mugful) for brunch.

  • Taste:  very corn-tortilla-ish
  • Texture: A little chalky, about the same as a slim-fast meal replacement thingy from wal-greens,
  • Burpiness:  Yes, I burped.  And I seem to continue to want to burp.
  • Hunger removal:  Yes, definitely removing hunger.   Past hunger, now at the “wow I just had 2 bean burritos from Taco Bell” stage.    from 1 mug. 
  • Wierdness:
    • One of the muscles in my back (leading up the left side of my neck) decided to cramp shortly after consuming the beverage.  Probably unrelated.

I would definitely have more.