another

I finished another revision on the thesis, incorporating another round of feedback.  It took three weeks.  The biggest timesink: changing one word that is in the title, as it appears throughout the thesis.  Again, very anti-climactic.

I was more excited to go to the gym after emailing it out.

On The Four Hour Body Diet

I have a bad habit.  When I'm in a relationship, I tend to gain weight and get lethargic.

Or rather, I used to have this bad habit.  A couple years ago, I started started reading about everything i ate regularly and realized how much I really don't know.  And the same with exercise.  While I was far healthier than many people on both fronts (diet and exercise), I'm probably an order of magnitude better off now than I was a couple years ago.  All through a lot of 1) slowly reading and 2) slowly changing things.  

This is about diet.  Exercise is for another day.  Slow change is for a third day.

I have been reading Tim Ferris' "The Four Hour Body", and after reading the section on dieting, I realized it was pretty close to how I was already eating.  The key difference is that he advocates 1) cutting carbs like bread/cereal/pasta/rice/etc out and dairy like cheese/milk 2) having a binge day, once a week, where anything goes.  So I made these two changes out of curiosity.

I'm not advocating this or describing it here, but wanted to make some observations.  

Three days after I started it, my girlfriend told me I lost weight.  

Now i really haven't lost weight, but I have been losing body fat, because i'm still weight training on a fairly regular basis.  Here's my observations on the diet:

1) No milk in coffee is hard.  I ignore this every other day.

2) I energy crashed the first two weeks.  I then moved my anything-goes day from Saturday (when I'm usually with my girlfriend, and well, this isn't her diet) to Friday (when I'm at work with easy access to a lot of free/cheap high calorie food.  

3) I've fallen into the habit of stocking up on things I have cravings for and then eat them all on friday.  Even if i don't want to.  Just to get rid of the craving.  

4) Overdoing Friday has gotten rid of the energy crash

5) Making sure I had everything i craved during the week and making a point to eat it all in a single day is making me dislike these things--i.e. i have no temptation to eat them for the next week.

5) On weight training days, I still have pasta (whole wheat), milk, and something with sugar, and I usually eat potatoes with breakfast to keep sustained workout recovery going.  

6) When someone brings homemade bakery to work, I indulge.  Out of respect, yeah, that's it.

Today is friday.  On the menu:  two eggs--over easy, bacon, sausage, potatoes (breakfast), a quart of chocolate almond milk, an odwalla juice, a chicken sandwich with fries (lunch), half a container of trader joes chocolate covered peanut butter cups, bread and cheese, two bananas, a deep dish pepperoni pizza (dinner), a ben and jerry's ice cream pint, and a cupcake.  A rough estimate is 6-7k.  Because, well, you can't just have a bowl of ben and jerry's...

I don't even want to know how many calories that is, but it's less than I've had the last couple Fridays, and 

1) I'm still losing body fat.

2) I have far more consistent energy (physical and mental) from day to day.

3) My junk food cravings are dropping to almost nothing.  

I kind of dread fridays now, because I'm starting to dislike a lot of things I used to try (unsuccessfully) not to eat.  I'd consider dropping the friday thing, except for the fact that it avoids my having an energy crash.  

For the record, exercise levels during the month I've done this have been 10k running, one hour cross training, two p90x strength training workouts, 2-3 p90x abs workouts, and 3-4 hours of other outdoor things like hiking or kayaking, per week. 

Through the Edge to Nevada

Metablogging and Achirality

I have started a number of blog entries and left them unfinished.  There was a massive run of a lot of things, including, but not limited to, finishing the thesis (very anticlimactic, and that's all I have to say about that), a trip to O-Hi-O to visit family and friends, a well--needed vacation to the southern Caribbean (I might talk about that later), and returning to work.  I'm writing this entry for solely meta-blogging reasons, to kick start some real writing back off again.  It's been a while.  

On another note, chiral groups preserve handedness, while achiral groups do not.

resurrect

In the ongoing narrative of complaining-about-the-thesis-on-my-blog, I finished writing the thesis about two weeks ago.  Then I started making some new figures, which ran over by a few days, and American Bird Day took over before it got wrapped up.  

While visiting a state that is round on both ends and high in the middle, the cold air has been quite refreshing.  Not much work has been done on this trip, but I realized the way of holiday life can be summed up, shampoo-bottle-style, as "visit.  talk.  eat.  repeat."  After a week here, I really miss getting work done.

No Magsafe for You!!!

The furball is obsessed with unplugging the magsafe cord from my laptop.  She has unplugged it about 10 times in the last half hour.  In other news, two-year old figures just got updated to have better notation.  Exciting, huh?

241 Addendum 2

Another thought: Something tells that next near will be very different.  Moving this aside will free up a lot of energy, thought, and irritation.

For example, writing these blog posts is about 1000% more efficient as adding new details to a thesis that has an audience of four people.  Because this is creative and fun and that is not.  Another that is, but that's a story for another time and place.  

Back to that coffee…

241 Addendum

Back to sucking up a lot of time:  250 pages of tenth draft rewriting is really inefficient.  I'm realizing that I'm spending about 80% of my time reminding myself to concentrate and only 20% of my time actually writing or making new figure or new examples or whatever it needs to be that is going into this.

I'm going to go break all my rules and make some coffee after 5pm, so get today's work cranked out, since I gave myself a deadline.

241

I have not written anything substantial here in a while.  I have two entries going, that have been in progress for weeks, but the never ending thesis has been taking up a lot of time.  Or, I should admit, sucking up a lot of time.  

Rewriting material that I've rewritten about ten times before is exceedingly mind-numbing.  Especially when it's about 200 pages of such material.  But I'm now revising the final three chapters, which are revised from the papers they're associated with.  Two of those papers have had about about ten drafts (with the eleventh drafts next up after turning in the thesis versions).  The hardest part is that the mental concentration to stay focused on something exceedingly boring drains a lot of creativity out of the work.  It would be much more fun if this were a first writeup, but so it goes.  

There's two upsides. 

Overall, the whole document was outlined in less than a week and then put together in first draft form in about six weeks.  That was more fun.  The revisions will come to about three months of work.  There will be two more rounds of revisions after this, but they'll be significantly shorter.  Overall about 4 months of work (the first draft was done part-time).  

And the quality of this will be the highest of all the write-ups.  Even the eleventieth-ninth drafts of the papers that get submitted to siggraph 2089 will still be constrained by page length, so some things will just be hard to follow.  The thesis has the freedom to be arbitrarily clear.  

I may or might start writing a bunch of nonsense here to keep writing momentum going for the next couple weeks, which is the final stretch.  I planned some travel for Thanksgiving, so that's the ultimate deadline, as I'm not taking this with me.  If only these things had real deadlines.

And I'm not proofreading this entry today.

And you an track the page length on facebook.  Yeah, that's what those numbers I've been posting all year are all about.

TI Thesisdesystem

Fast paced day.  Wake, breakfast, exercise, planning, out the door, reading Dr. Silex's Lovecraft collection on the way to Treasure Island.  Thesis distraction--I mean music festival--day one.  Very electronic.  Highlights:  Phantogram (they were fun), !!! (also fun, I'm into playful music these days), Kruder and Dorfmeister (amazing electronic set), deadmau5 (a lot of fun to dance to, and an awesome stage show), and LCD Soundsystem.  The latter was probably my turning point for going, especially since they're hanging up the hat, and I haven't caught them live before, using silly excuses like working on my thesis.  A very enthusiastic crowd--it made me very aware of how much Toronto music fans stand around, watch, and do nothing, for the most part.  A short, but very good, set.  Long trip home, dinner, and off to make today's requisite thesis "result" before bed.  A "result," for the coming week, is a single motion, analyzed using four different algorithms and making all the figures and videos that go along with that motion and those four algorithms.  Tonight is running.  The current top rule in the get-it-done game I'm playing with myself is that a new example has to be finished every day until they're done.  There's a lot more than I thought I would need for it to be solid, but so it goes.  I'll probably get a fourth paper out of it now.