Fitness Tools, Spring 2012

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I are always looking for ways to stay active. Also, as spring starts to get underway, loosing some of the “lay under a blanket and eat comfort food” weight factors into out goals.

Heather got a tip from a coworker about My Fitness Pall and has whole hardheartedly started using it. I can’t necessarily explain what it has that other food-tracking sites don’t except to say that it perfectly fits what she was looking for. One feature I haven’t seen in the tools I played with last spring is that it automatically adds your workouts into your daily caloric budget, so your food log takes into account that you spent an hour on the treadmill.

Now that we have gone most of a month using the site to track both eating and cardio workouts we have learned a few things.

  • I need a lot more calories than Heather
  • Having more detailed information really allowed us to make small changes that had a big impact
  • Heather is happier if she gets a workout in, if for no other reason than to increase her caloric budget a little
  • We didn’t realize how many little flaws there were in our generic “try to eat healthy” approach we had

On the first point; it has been a sometimes frustrating transition as meal planning gets a lot more complicated when you have to account for different needs. We have managed fairly well, but it’s been an adjustment.

An easy example of changes we made is breakfast. With the realization that I should probably be eating more, and knowing the whole “it’s better to eat a big breakfast” thing, I more or less doubled the size of the breakfast I eat. It’s been surprising to not have the constant feeling of hunger generally have transitioning into a fitness kick like I am on right now.

Along with the daily workouts, Heather has started working out in the mornings without me. The fact that I am not a morning person hasn’t helped our prior workout plans, and making that change seems to leave everyone happier. (I have been told repeatedly that I am not very nice before 7am… can’t explain it, but it must be true)

Things we didn’t know were quite so bad: Bread, pasta, potatoes. I sort of thought we had that under control by switching to whole wheat. Turns out those guys are surprisingly calorie dense. It isn’t that we don’t eat them now, it’s just that we have to be honest about how fast that stuff adds up. Unexpected good news? Bacon isn’t really that bad! I brought back Saturday morning bacon, and have really enjoyed the discovery 🙂

 

My only disappointment with My Fitness Pall is that they don’t really do anything with strength training. I started out the year with the resolution that I would get two days of strength training in every week. The site does allow you to record things you do, but with no feedback, it almost felt like they were discouraging you from doing it.

About that time, my sister mentioned a site called Fitocracy. It’s a site that does two things: publishes your workouts, and gives points for doing things, with levels, badges, and achievements. The latter half of that pair is very video game inspired, but that happens to be something that I can get into.

I wasn’t sure how much I would get into it, but after two weeks, it has already motivated me to take my strength training beyond what I could do at home (push-ups, lunges, sit-ups) and into lifting actual weights again.

Hopefully this all translates into some great results. I guess we will know in a few months!

-Jordan

 

Small tangent that I wanted to mention, but didn’t really fit above: I used a food-tracking website in conjunction with the cardio kickboxing thing we did last year. It didn’t provide any guidance as to how many calories I should be eating, and my ‘coach’ (a well meaning volunteer) didn’t really ether. Long story short, apparently doing an hour of high-intensity workout on 1400 calories a day doesn’t actually produce good long term results when your my size. (for reference, even without a workout, MFP figures I can eat 2100 a day and still loose weight)

 

Radio Flyer Project

Posted on by Jordan

We have had a wagon buried in the garage for nearly a year now. It was “broken” but I hadn’t taken the time to figure out what it’s problem was.

With the influx of nice weather we have had over the past few days I took the opportunity to dive into the project. The wagon felt really wobbly and clearly had some problems. Initially it looked as though the only issue was four flat tires, and some loose screws.

In the process of resolving those issues it became clear the wagon had bigger issues:

What isn’t clearly shown in the picture is that the bracket holding the rear axle leans slightly towards the front wheels. What is pretty obvious in the picture is that the wagon has been braced and drilled for something else to be attached between that rear axle and the middle of the wagon.

My initial plan involved a 2×4 shaved to the proper angle, some glue, and a big U-bolt. When I was wondering around my local hardware store looking for a U-bolt I found some angle iron intended to be used in building shelving, and realized I could produce something far stronger:

This also meant I needed to buy a hack saw… although, my being always somewhat budget focused meant I got a really cheap one… all the same, what you see in the picture is cut, drilled, bolted, and painted to match the rest of the undercarriage. Not too shabby, and it was fun to actually use my new bench and vice!

On to installation:

Notice any problems? I may have been too optimistic about the reach of those bolts, so back to the hardware store…

Now for a brief tangent, that I feel sort of torn about. I think it’s great that my local mega hardware store stocks things like loose bolts and the like. The problem comes when you need to check out. The poor people manning the register simply aren’t used to dealing with it. I spent over five minutes to check out with $0.50 worth of fasteners. It tried the patience a little.

Ok, so back in the garage with some longer bolts:

Maybe I went a little long this time… at least I didn’t need to make yet another trip to the store.

After putting the wagon back on it’s wheels, I was happy to find that it was really solid. Now the only real concern was the ugly stain on the bed.

Soap and water wasn’t as effective as I had hoped, but it still managed to fade the stain substantially. Makes me wish the factory had put a real sealant down so that things couldn’t soak into the wood grain. Having done what I could, I put the fences back on and it was looking pretty good!

You may be thinking, “but what are they going to do with a wagon?” Well friend, as luck would have it, right before I sat down to write this, Heather arrived home from the store to demonstrate:

Getting a load of groceries up to the third floor isn’t the easiest thing in the word, but the combination of a wagon and the elevator works out pretty well.

(Alternative answer: “What can’t you do with a great wagon like this!?” )

-Jordan

Bowling In Nebraska

Posted on by Jordan

This kind of got lost in my campaign to redo the front page… lost but not forgotten about.

Heather and I traveled to Kearney Nebraska to watch my brother compete in a Special Olympics bowling event.

The trip started in Des Moines with a little rain. By the time we were 30 minutes down the road, it was snow, but the snow wasn’t sticking and the weather before we left indicated we should drive through it and be in the clear within another 30 minutes. What didn’t show up in the weather report I read, was the second wave of snow that caught us about 40 miles out of Omaha.

It made for easily the worst winter driving Heather and I have seen as a couple. Even with bad conditions, careful deliberate driving was working ok. What wasn’t working ok was the minority of drivers who were not content to stay in a line and use the narrow set of tire tracks that were open. Apparently getting where they were going 2 minutes faster was worth risking lives for.

Once we made it into Omaha, it really was smooth sailing, and we got all the way to Kearney without indecent.

The next morning we had a quick breakfast and headed over to the bowling alley. The most noteworthy thing we found as we came in was that they were not letting the public down onto the lane-level area at all, meaning the kind of wide hallway landing thing behind the lanes was really crowded. Lucky for us, my parent’s and aunt and uncle were already there, and had a spot staked out.

It was great to get to see my family, and it goes without saying I suppose, that Andrew was ecstatic to have us there for the event. After the hellos we found ourselves with plenty of time to chat as the event was a little lethargic getting started. Andrew headed up to his lane and everything looked all set, and then the PA system fired up and we discovered there were lots of announcements before we could get started.

After quite a bit of milling around, the bowling began. Andrew, as it turns out, is actually a pretty good bowler. His only downfall is that he isn’t actually that interested in winning when there are other interesting things going on. In three games, he pretty consistently bowled well every-other frame, meaning the strikes and spares he was getting weren’t having the compounding effect one would hope for.

The on again off again trend held for nearly all of Andrews games, leaving the last frame of the last game as a notable exception. Andrew bowled three strikes in a row! It was a fantastic finish to a morning of bowling.

We headed on to McCook to spend a little time with my parents. Have I mentioned that Heather and I like board games? We got our second chance to teach new players how to play the game St Petersburg, and I would say did a little better at teaching it. We also got in a round of Ticket To Ride. When not engaging in board games, we did get to enjoy some great weather in McCook (a place that seems to always have much warmer weather than we left in Des Moines), and eat at a great local pizza place.

The pizza place is noteworthy I suppose just for the pizza, but the more memorable thing is that it has a view of the switch yard. The yard was busy putting together a train while we ate. Andrew was perhaps 100 times more expressive about the event than I was, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t also thing it was a great thing to get to watch them push rail cars around while we ate. 🙂

On the drive home, we managed to make connections with some of Heather’s friends from college, missed connections with my sister, and then met up with a good friend of mine from high school before eventually making it back to Des Moines.

All in all, it was a very productive few days!

-Jordan

More Website News

Posted on by Jordan

So… I discovered Monday that my nifty little HTML5 solution to doing a slideshow on the front page had one minor problem.

It doesn’t work on Internet Explorer 7 and older. Then I started watching the logs and quite a few page views were coming in showing MS:IE7 making me feel kind of guilty for having gone live with that.

For good or for bad, I don’t have a great way to test older browsers when I am not at work… so the fix I just deployed may not work as well as I think it should…. Assuming it works though there is at least a static image while I try to pound out an AJAX solution with more legacy support.

-Jordan

The Front Page Is Live!

Posted on by Jordan

As previously mentioned, we have a new front page!

Note: I the following while waiting on sign-off on the image set being used. What I didn’t know at the time was that the slide show has a nasty image load delay related hiccup, and that my “just drop in files” slide show plan only works if the image is exactly 800 / 600 px. Other than that though, WHOOHOO IT’S LIVE 🙂

Initially I was planning to build the look from scratch, but I quickly realized that things like picking colors are not my strong suit. Also I wanted to get onto poking at some sort of scripting so I fell back to the go-to “hack up a free template” option I have used in the past. I am pretty happy with the resulting look.

As for the scripting, you may be thinking “it’s just a slide show, I have seen those before.”  Yes, I am sure you have, but I built this one from scratch! It only has one transition, and I think I may be causing the javascript engine to work a little harder than other implementations do. On the other hand, I can just dump images into a folder on the server and they will instantly be included in the slideshow.

My initial plan for the slide show was going to be some sort of AJAX + JQuery thing, but directly drawing to the canvas sounded more interesting. The downside I suppose is that this probably doesn’t work at all on IE6.

The end result though, is that we have a new front page, it isn’t as ugly as the one I did last year, and because it features pictures Heather is about 500% happier with it than the old one.

 

-Jordan

Development Note

Posted on by Jordan

Putting the finishing touches on the front page overhaul, and felt like I needed to make this explicit:

When you are looking for javascript documentation, Google is often going to point you to w3Schools or any number of other almost useful sites. I think those sites must put more energy into being ranked in Google than having useful information.

The place you should go, and I mean the only place, is the Mozilla Developer Network. I wish I had figured that out months ago, but at least I finally have a good reference for the javascript api (and they call out things like best-practices too!).

Anyway, I think things will be ready to push live later today, so that’s pretty exciting! **crosses fingers**

-Jordan