Day: 10 February 2021

The Story of Me Getting off My Bum For a While

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Prior to COVID-19 and working from home all the time I was semi-active. If I went to the office the amount of walking between home, the train, the office and back again (along with lunch or whatever else i did) was close to my exercise and move goals on my Apple Watch. If I went to Sainsbury’s or something on the way home I would go over my goal with room to spare. That’s not to say I was extremely active. I would force myself to get up and walk around at the office when my watch beeped every hour telling me that it was time to stand up. Even then I knew I needed to do more.

Then the lockdown happened in March and I worked from home all the time. Things deteriorated from there. I bought a bike in April hoping that I would use it to ride around. I did for a while. It just was not every day. I have loved riding bikes since I was a kid and I still do enjoy it. What I keep remembering is as much as I like bike riding since i do not like riding in every weather condition it is not something I will do everyday. I am glad I got the bike. It is just not what is going to be my daily exercise.

Over the summer and early fall I cannot recall. I decided that I would go for coffee every day. I figured that would force a walk. I was actually pretty good at doing that most day’s. It would give me a lot of the exercise I needed. It just wasn’t enough. I tried to walk more however I had an issue with walking that I wont go into detail on.

I needed something more and I knew it. My sister and one of my good friends said I should buy a Peleton Bike or Treadmill. When I stopped laughing I realised they were serious. My sister and my brother in law swear by their Peleton. M and my experience with exercise equipment is they take up a lot of space. We had an elliptical machine in our apartment in New York. I do not know how many times I used it. It was probably less than two dozen in the 4 Years we owned it. We were lucky that the local fire department needed one and they came and took away for us and were happy to do it. Funny story about that was the Firemen offered to bring the kids out to the fire truck and let of them climb around it as a thanks. They showed up with a pickup for the elliptical and the firetruck with the lights on. The girls were petrified and did not go anywhere near it. I thought it was cool though.

Besides the space a bike or treadmill takes up I am not up for paying nearly £1,750 or more for a piece of equipment and then £35 a month in subscriptions for the service. I never went to a gym other than the one in my building because I didn’t want to pay money for a plan that I would not use. That is a story on its own that I may write about

In September 2020 when Apple announced their Apple One bundles and Fitness+ I thought it sounds interesting and moved on to other news. When it launched in early December there were many reviews on some of the tech sites I read. So I read one review. Then I read a few more. If the service came out a year earlier I would have totally ignored it. It is launched at probably the perfect time for me. I need something easy. I needed something with a low barrier to entry. I didn’t want to spend a ridiculous amount of money per month. Fitness+ offered all of that from me. Sidenote, a low barrier for entry I am talking about me personally. I already had an Apple Watch. I already own an Apple TV and an iPad. That means I can do the workouts with nothing more than the Apple Fitness+ service. With homepods in the house instead of echoes (i will likely write about that in another post) we switched from spotify to Apple music family plan. With our iCloud plan it was cheaper to add the top end Apple One bundle for Fitness+ than just adding Fitness+ for me. By doing this we got Arcade, TV+, News+ and M got to use the services too instead of just me. It seemed well worth the price

I signed up for the Apple One trial. With the new trial account and a yoga mat I borrowed from one of the girls I was doing a work out in the home office or living room. The girls even joined in with me. I did a yoga every day of my holiday. I turned that into doing 30 minutes of work out every day since mid December with the exception (as of this writing) for one day in January.

I am hoping this is a habit I will adopt. And setting aside 30 minutes a day and I can do the work out literally feet from my desk. The beginner courses are perfect for me. For the first week I did the 10 and 20 minute beginner course. Then I would do a 10 minute wind down that was really a lot of stretching that I needed anyway. I have since moved on to 20 and 30 minute regular yoga classes.

M is even getting in on the action. Since i got the Apple One bundle she can use it too. I have been trying to get her to use my Series III Apple Watch. I had spare since I upgraded to a series 5. It wasn’t worth selling so I kept it and was just using it at night. She wanted something for when she did bike rides. She never took it. With me trying Fitness+ she seemed eager to give it a go. At the time of this writing we are competing in a seven day activity challenge. It is too close to call so I will not trash talk.

I am hoping this is not one of those things that in a few months I will look back and go yeah that was something I did. I am hoping that the habit will take it has such a low barrier to start doing every day.

The Story of My December 2020 Book Reviews

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I have a bunch of posts to publish however after writing my post about reading wanted to write about what i had been reading over the past year. At this rate not sure if i will cover everything I read since January 2020 however I started a monthly recap from December onwards. I have December & January written now. This is my December post. Hoping to post January sometime this month in addition to some other stuff.

In December 2020 I finished two books and started a third. I finished one productivity, non-fiction and one science-fiction.

The first book I finished was tribal leadership. It was a fascinating book about the psychology of groups of people, a.k.a. tribes and how they organise. A lot of what the authors said resonated with me. I think because what they call a stage four tribe encompasses a lot of the trates and characteristics we have been aspiring for in devops culture. I think it’s hard for me to realise that even though I’ve been trying a lot I still gravitate between stage III and stage IV sometimes. According to the book the use of I versus we is partly the distinction. The good thing was even before reading this book I have tried to move towards the we your the group versus the individual. Not sure who recommended it however I think it was someone at work. Since finishing it I have been recommending it to others especially since we been talking a lot about dev ops culture at work.

The next book I read after tribal leadership was a bit of a change of pace. That was deliberate. I am trying not to read the same type of book back to back. I am also trying not to read too many books in the series straight through to give myself a break. The next book I read was Revelation space. I already read Chasm CIty. That was technically the 2nd book in the universe written by Alastair Reynolds. I was worried since there were mixed reviews about the audio performance on audible for Revelation space. After listening to the book I can understand what people were complaining about however it was by no means as bad as described or making it difficult to read/listen to the book. The story was pretty good and having read Chasm City did not ruin Revelation space. I have read that it shouldn’t prior to reading Chasm City so I was pleased that that was true. Clocking in around 20 hours to listen to it was pretty long but not the longest I have read. The plot was slow going at some points however they brought things together pretty nicely. Based on how much I enjoyed Revelation Space I will listen to the next book in the series. I am just going to take a slight break and change gears a bit first.

I finished Revelation space right after Christmas. I started on the next book straight away however I did not get to finish it until after the New Year. That means I will talk about it in my January reviews.

My Story of Reading Again Thanks to Audiobooks

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Growing up I loved to read. As an adult I still enjoy reading however I have done much less of it over time. Looking back I don’t see one single reason why I stopped reading as much as I used to. When I was single I still read. It may not have been as much as in High School or College let’s say, however I did it. When I got married there was even less reading. I think the reasons then were that there was less time to sit and focus on a book. Especially when I would get into a good book and stay up very very late to read. Not something I could do with small children and feel good in the morning. Funny enough it is something my wife has done.

I have been maintaining a pretty big list of things I want to read. In the past two or three years I have started reading a bit more than I had been in the presiding 8-10 years. Interestingly as I started reading more I found it difficult to physically do it. I turned to e-books more and increase the font size. Around the same time turns out I needed progressive lenses. Small type was never my friend however it became more of an enemy in recent history.

I have known about audiobooks for ages. As a kid we even had a free tape recorder for books on tape because of my vision challenges. Back then I just decided to read instead of listen. Until very recently I think my parents had the take recorder they got for free from some service As an adult I have heard many people talk positively of audiobooks however I never really paid it munch attention.

For several years I have known I need to avoid the news. I went back to my blog archive and apparently I have been avoiding watching the news since at least 2005. I have been trying to actively avoid reading it completely since the summer of 2018. Every productivity and mindfulness person that I have read talks about how the news is not good if it doesn’t make you happy. At the same time I continue to read about how using social media is bad for you. I have gone off and on for a while not reading the news. I will go a few months and then fall back into old habits. Less so with social media. I have all but cut out Facebook and don’t really use many other ones.

Earlier this year, around January I decided that one way to help me cut out looking at mainstream news would be to read more long form books. I think the inspiration to try audiobooks instead of a regular book on my phone or tablet was that I was commuting on the tube and listening would be much easier. With that in mind I signed up for trial subscription with Audible.

Since signing up from Audible the amount of books I have read this year is more than the last 5 to 10 combined. Listening to books has been very transformative for me. I have not even wanted to read mainstream news as much and I am engrossed in books for 8 to 10 or 20 hours per book. I did relapse to the news after the US election through Christmas. At the time I am editing this post I am back to actively avoiding the news.

I have read so many interesting books that I would like to write brief reviews for some of the stuff I have read. It has been a mix of Sci-Fi, Fiction, & Non-fiction. I started almost about a year ago so I have a lot to catch up on.