For years now I’ve been an amateur bread baker that keeps trying the new and upcoming thing that runs across my computer.  In the 90s I started with a focaccia recipe I found on USENET and Julia Child’s baguette recipe scribbled out of my mom’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  In recent years I’ve picked up no-knead recipes, sourdough recipes and the like.  I’ve also taken to radically changing some recipes with expectations on specific results.  I see others doing the same thing in my groups.   As we move around and try things the question becomes: “What makes a successful bread experiment?”  Obviously if it turns out exactly as you intended that’d be a success but is that really it, or do we sometimes see a success staring right back at us but we don’t know it.

There are lots of write ups and studies which are showing more and more the negative effects on our perpetual stimulation by social media.  This is everything from the negative effects of not giving your brain a rest, negative emotions from the perpetual stream of information, all the way to it being potentially an addiction.  One simple way to get around this is to just uninstall every app, log out of the sites, and be done with it.  That’s not always practical since these ecosystems are often how we tie into events, stay in touch with friends, and are helpful conduits to information we are looking for.  The real problem is not having control of what and when information is presented to us once we enter these ecosystems. This is a byproduct of two features: alerts and newsfeeds.  Eliminating and/or getting control of these is the key to getting control of and crafting your social media experience into being sane again.

Anyone who’s been following along knows that I have hardly been a model of fitness and healthy lifestyle here.  At the same time I’m (hypothetically) trying to be proactive at avoiding health problems that creep up in later years.  It’s not lack of knowledge or following trends but instead a lack of execution.  When it comes to watching loved ones around you that are in the midst of having health problems that are caused by or substantially exacerbated by lifestyle choices that everyone knows are bad what can one do?

While I’ve mostly been absent from writing to the blog, and my fitness routine has only been slightly less absent than that, I have been able to maintain one thing completely dialed in over all this time: fitness tracking (as usual).  With all of that data together I decided to create my first annual review post.   I’d say compared to the average American I had a very normal year.  Unfortunately I don’t want to have the fitness level and longevity of the average American, so while I’m not going to say things were bad they weren’t where I want them to be either.

Being the new year is almost upon us and I’ve spent most of the last year lamenting my lack of progress on health fronts (besides that sweet spot in the summer) I was looking forward to dialing in my lifestyle and diet over the next month and into 2018.  It wasn’t going to be anything more structured than 2017, which may or may not have led to more or less the same results, but I was going to be focusing in on the same core Blue Zones lifestyle elements that I’ve previously highlighted.  It was therefore a bit of a coincidence when I received an e-mail from 23andMe about enrolling in a genetic weight loss study they are doing.

I almost never wait in huge lines for anything.  I camped out once for football tickets in college.  Once.  I also once waited six hours for an iPhone 4 when it first came out.  It was my first smart phone and I had been putting off getting one way too long.  That was it though.  Yet I know people who have waited in ever decreasing lines for each iteration of the iPhone.  The reduced lines are definitely part of the sizzle wearing off and the iPhone being just another smart phone.  Yet even at 8 pm last night there was a line for iPhones outside our local Apple store.  It didn’t wrap around the mall like in the iPhone 4 days but the end of the first day still having a line for an iPhone 8 was pretty telling to me.

On one of my classic computing Facebook Groups there was a post quoting Edsger Dijkstra stating, “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”  It’s actually part of a much larger document where he condemns pretty much every higher order language of the day, IBM, the cliquish nature of the computing industry, and so on. Despite most of it being the equivalent of a Twitter rant, in fact each line is almost made for tweet sized bites, there are some legitimate gems in there; one relevant to this topic being, “The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.”  No, I don’t agree with the concept that starting with BASIC, or any other language, permanently breaks someone forever, but the nature of the tools we use driving our thinking means that it can lead to requiring us to unlearn bad habits.  Yet has someone tried to actually write BASIC, as in the BASIC languages of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, with actual design principles?  Fortunately/unfortunately, I tried a while ago, with some interesting results.

While I’m obviously becoming quite enamored with Kotlin recently, this is like the early dating stage for me.  Everything is great when you first start dating someone but it’s after you’ve been with them for awhile and see their warts, which everything and everyone has, that you finally decide whether it’s the right fit or not.