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.

Where Now?

As I write this, we still don’t have an election result—although I imagine that will change some time today. I have no idea where the country will go once the result is settled, but today I’m thinking of my own immediate future.

I’m about to have a few days off with my sweetie, partly to do some family duties, but chiefly to have a break from our routine. Most of the vague big ideas that I had for 2010 have borne only minimal fruit, so I’m hoping that this time of recharging my batteries will allow me to see what I really want to do in the last third of this year.

Programming Languages

People who know me will be aware that I've been exploring the suitability of various programming languages for some software that I want to work on. Abetted by my ADHD/Aspie brain, this has been a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into a world of weirdness. As the weeks go by, my collection of potential languages has grown much faster than my ability to do any of the evaluation that I was planning.

For the record, the list now consists of x86 Assembly Language, C, Python, Lua, Scheme/Racket, Common Lisp, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell and Javascript (in no particular order). And, if Clojure is involved, that would also mean learning Java—something I have assiduously avoided for the last 15 years. The more I add to this crazy pile, the more sure I am that I must be missing the perfect answer, even though the sane bits of my mind know that there is no perfect answer. Of course, the longer I amuse myself in this pseudo-analysis, the longer I am safe from having to put any work in on any of the real projects on my list.

It would be nice to be able to say that this insight has freed me from analysis paralysis and that I'm just going to start on something. After all, I am good at telling other people that any decision is better than no decision and that even a wrong decision can be easily fixed once it's clear that it was wrong. I'm less capable of listening to my own good advice. However, it has occurred to me that I could just decide on one step right here and now. So, for no reason other than that it's the language I know least about, I'm going to do some work with Clojure over the next week or two to see if it's a real candidate or not. The others can wait.

Public Goals

That title has nothing to do with football, just to get that out of the way. I have seen many people in the business of helping the rest of us to sort our lives out who advocate setting goals and committing to them in public as a way of focussing attention on the pursuit of those goals.

I've avoided that for most of my life, but today I'm going to dip a toe in the water and declare a goal of shedding some weight. Forty years ago, I weighed a little under 60 kg. Now I weigh a little under 80 kg. I have added the weight in teensy increments over the whole forty years, at the rate of about half a kilogram per year, and have hardly noticed it happening. But that's heavier than seems healthy for a boy of my build and height, so I have a plan to reduce it.

I have no illusions of getting back to the trim 58 kg of twenty-year-old me. But it seems feasible to aim for 70 kg. To make this concrete, my goal is to lose 10 kg in the next 100 days. If anybody wants to hold my feet to the fire over this, make a note in your diary and we'll see how I go.

I plan to announce some other goals here over the next few weeks, but I also have plans to talk about software before long, so maybe I can combine the two.