
Dangerous Prototypes
Whilst Dee and Jules play videogames downstairs, I sit in a beanbag in my makerspace and contemplate the various hardware projects that I would like to complete over the next couple of years.
My “overloading” experiment is over now it’s Friday, and the results are interesting, if not particularly clear-cut. Every day this week I’d intended to:
… as you may recall (or as we call it in the 21st Century, “Google”) or read in my previous post. Of those three, I only managed to stick to the #4HB diet every day; coding after a day staring at Ant build files and finding 40 undisturbed minutes everyday proved too difficult. (I do find it interesting that the only weekly-goal I actually achieved was a modification of existing behaviour rather than a new habit — we all gotta eat. Perhaps that’s the key?). The other goals weren’t an unmitigated disaster, mind you: I did a couple of sessions of French (with Anki) that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, and revisited my 43 Things Android app workspace, although didn’t add any new functionality.
Despite this, I felt brilliantly productive in everything else I touched. I put a particularly long session into work on Thursday and was positively bouncing off the walls with excitement when I got my development workflow running just right. A bunch of names for the geeks: Gerrit & Git, Ivy, Ant and Jenkins — precommit CI builds, code-review gatekeeping, static analysis and code-coverage. Really, all that’s missing is a highly-visible status screen, a promotion of builds workflow and automated deployment to dev, test, regression, staging and finaly production. “Continuous delivery”, baby!! Our bedroom is looking good, thanks to Dee, and I’ve installed XBMC on the little media centre in the wall AND built a MythTV server out in the lab.
I monitored my weight every morning at the same time this week too, and noticed zero change. Our scales measure weight and attempts to guesstimate body-composition using electrical resistance — not accurate, but accurate enough for monitoring if you’re consistent — and neither my weight or body-fat content changed any more than can be attributed to “noise”. Today my body-weight is just slightly up from Monday’s figure, unsurprising after the quantity of food I devoured for yesterday’s “1 day-off gluttony” (as recommended by the Four Hour Body, no cheating). Considering the quality of yesterday’s diet — pancakes, bacon, maple-syrup, a Dairy Bell icecream, 6 chicken nuggets, Doritos, a glass of champagne three of rum — I would also expect my weight to creep up for a few days this week (but hopefully plummet after that). We’ll see.
So this week I’m going to slightly shift my overloading goals:
Whilst Dee and Jules play videogames downstairs, I sit in a beanbag in my makerspace and contemplate the various hardware projects that I would like to complete over the next couple of years.
I guess I should update the ‘blog?1 Not an easy thing to do these days, since even finding the time to do something as self-indulgent as public journaling probably just means there’s something else I could be doing instead, but maybe it’s an experiment I would like to continue?
It’s 8am on the first day of the month, and despite the usual late night, I’ve been up for hours. Jules has been an early riser for years now, and it has had the effect of training me to wake up at 6am each morning — for no good reason, since he’s pretty independent in the morning these days — and so here I am.