Thursday, October 14, 2010

Public Goals Revisited

Some time ago, I wrote about my hope that stating some goals in public might assist me in achieving them. In particular, I mentioned a desire to shed 10 kg in 100 days and invited people to keep on my back about it.

As it happened, this wasn’t interesting for many people and just one friend did remind me and ask me how I was going at suitable intervals. I’m very grateful for that. The sad thing is that it doesn’t seem to have worked for me. The 100 days ended at the start of this month and my weight is unchanged. To be specific, the day I started it was 78.8 kg and it was 78.8 kg this morning. In between, it has fluctuated between 76.7 and 80.0 kg. I think it’s fair to describe that as “no change”.

So what’s next? I still wish to lose that weight, but it is clear that I will need to adopt a better strategy to accomplish it. While I was away in Sydney recently, I managed to get in some decently long walks and thought I might be able to make a specific time for walking every day back at home. I have now been getting up at 5:00 every morning and immediately going for a brisk one hour walk. It is too soon yet for that that have made any impact—as the scales make clear. However, I am hopeful that, by doing this walk regularly, I might make some progress.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Gmail Makes Another Step

I’ve whined previously about gmail’s “conversation view”, claiming that it’s too broken to use for non-trivial email. Recently, I was pleased to discover that Google have finally—albeit reluctantly—acceded to the requests of thousands of users who don’t want it. It can now be turned off. I have turned it off for me and my wife and we both prefer it to the old gmail way.

Of course, gmail is still broken in that the non-conversation view is less useful than what was provided a dozen or more years back by software like exmh or mutt. But at least we can avoid Google’s peculiarly inept idea of email threading. There is still room for improvement, but I’m finding the low level of maintenance of gmail to be a compelling reason to stick with it. For now.