Do it!
I was going to work late into the night last night to get myself ready for a feature presentation today. But after about an hour or so, my brain went on strike and all critical thinking functions shut down. That makes it hard to code. So I pushed back the presentation. It was a pretty artificial deadline anyway. I feel bad, but my project manager shrugged it off, so I guess there\'s no sense in beating myself up over it.
I have to work on minimizing my ramp-up/procrastination time between projects. And procrastination in general. You know, I started subscribing to RSS feeds to cut down on the amount of time I waste surfing? The theory being that I was refreshing the pages all the time and there weren\'t any updates, so it was better to only check them when there were. Solid theory, but the problem is Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Treehugger and others update far too often. I can\'t bring myself to unsubscribe, though. Too much good stuff~ (See?!?!). Hm.
I\'ve decided. Come the New Year, I\'m going on a diet. A real one. Not some namby-pamby fake fad diet.
I\'ve got my reasons. For one thing, my mother\'s diabetic. So\'s her mother. So was my father\'s father. It\'s not fun. I don\'t want it. If I can avoid it, that would be a good thing. Also, well, let\'s be honest here... Even after making some progress this year, I\'m still single. I\'m already have enough competitive disadvantages in that particular game (even if they are self-imposed ¬_¬). Improving one\'s outward appearance of physical health increases one\'s perceived genetic superiority, thus making one more attractive to potential mates (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more!). And, in general, I\'d like to be healthier. I\'d like to live long enough to see grandkids. Yeah, I think about stuff like that.
It was Boing Boing that pointed out the Hacker\'s Diet. I\'m sure I\'d come across it before, but I\'d probably dismissed it. I never liked the idea of diets. Mostly because they don\'t seem to work. This makes sense though. For the last little while, I\'ve had it figured that my current diet (the regular, daily kind) is more or less fine; I just need to get out and exercise more if I want to lose weight. This convinced me I\'m wrong (not that I shouldn\'t exercise more). I\'ve started the daily weight monitoring part, and I\'m pretty convinced I can keep the weight off after I\'ve lost it (because my diet is more or less okay). I just have to lose it.
But not quite yet. Starting a diet right before Christmas would be a dumb thing to do. So I\'ll get to that in January. Seriously.
I\'m looking around for a daily exercise program to get started on that. I like his program for all the reasons he lists, but I know enough to know the sit-ups he describes are unsafe. (He bases his program on the old Royal Canadian Air Force (woo!) 5BX program. I\'m sure we did something very similar to that in gym class in elementary school, but they never talked about progression. I\'ve tried to do daily exercises before, but with no real plan, so I never got anywhere. Having a plan and having something to strive for is what makes this compelling, I think).
Poking around for stuff on 5BX, I found this CBC radio clip (all the clips in that series are fascinating). That got me to the ParticipACTION Archive which was nice and nostalgic. I don\'t remember any of the 70s ads (My dad, who used to jog to work every day until he hurt his knee playing softball, said he originally started running because he wanted to beat \"that damn Swede\" ^_^), but I certainly remember the Do it! ones...
But since it would be a fitness program if you didn\'t buy something, Yourself! Fitness looks awesome! :D