Geek Fitness

It used to be that after a tough day at work I'd sit on the couch and play some Halo or slaughter a few hundred undead in Diablo II. A few years and two years later, I'm finding that going to the gym is what relaxes me now.

Astounding, isn't it? Today was a rough day, mostly because of a mistake I made that I should of caught. It wasn't an end-of-the-world sort of mistake, but it was aggravating. Because Sue and I were juggling our schedules so she could go to yoga, I had to skip the gym after work, but the itch was still there, made worse by a frustrated state of mind. So when Sue got back, I headed down to the gym and worked out for about 40 minutes.

I made it to the gym two days in a row. Excellent. This time around it was the treadmill on intervals for 25 minutes. I also walked my commute today, for another 20-25 odd minutes of exercise. On the downside, I had coffee and a brownie for lunch, but you have to pick your battles.

After a dismal week in which I only made it to the gym one day out of seven, I'm redoubling my efforts to do better this week. I'm shooting to get to the gym five days this week, partly to make up for last week, partly because vacation's coming up and I need to get in as much exercise as I can before gorging on beer and steak at GenCon, and partly because I bought my first pair of waist 36 jeans in 10 years ... and I'm hyper-motivated.

It's been a crazy summer, with a major project that threatens to consume all my working hours, and myriad home improvement headaches around the house that have been eating at my free time (thus the lack of posts around here last week).

I'm not sure how healthy it is, but Slashfood has a post up about a new energy drink called "Nerd". Could be just the thing for those geek dads trying to stay awake after a long night with a crying baby. Me? I think I'll just stick with my caffeinated duo of Cosmic Cup coffee and Mountain Dew.

This post at Lifehack about stand-up desks caught my eye. I've found myself working this way at home recently -- we have a jelly cupboard in our library that's about the perfect height for me, and since it's in the middle of our first-floor is the perfect place to check e-mail or work on a project and still keep an eye on the kids.

For the first time in years -- actually, probably a decade -- I weigh less than 200 lbs. I wish I could say some great feat of willpower brought me to this point, but it was more likely the nasty hacking cough and sinus infection that I've been fighting for the last two-to-three weeks that did the trick. As I've written before, I almost always lose weight when I'm sick as my appetite evaporates, and I've already upticked a few pounds from 195.

Hopefully I'll never have to worry about this, but older geeks out there might. A recent study of 100 people with pacemakers determined that iPods can generate electrical interference that can cause implantable pacemakers to malfunction, recording erroneous data and even stopping all together in one case.

It's been a tough two weeks, with a lot of long hours at work, which caused me to fall back on my old bad habits ... namely skipping lunch (or rather, eating at my desk) and not exercising. The excuses are legion -- working too late, exhausted from wrangling the kids into bed, tired from a day of trying to do too much, etc. -- but all have managed to throw me off my game. Having two kids doesn't help -- they add a burst of exhausting confusion to the end of the day, and 12 hours spent with the kids can make Sue as stressed as me.

I want a Google bike helmet.