Axodys 10C Edition

My weight has been on a steady upward trajectory since last fall when I cut back on my bike commuting and took a month off from running while I focused on completing a big garden shed project in our backyard. I got back to running, but at a fairly typical reduced rate during the winter and my eating habits weren't particularly good either. Between those two factors it wasn't enough to change the trend so as of right now my weight is higher than it's been in a long time, possibly even a decade. I've started working on my weight during Lent before, but it's been a few years. It was clear to me that this year I'm going to have get back to monitoring my food intake and increasing my exercise output.
I also started phasing out my beer consumption at the beginning of February with the idea that I would completely abstain during Lent and for perhaps longer.

To monitor my food consumption this time around I decided to try a new iOS app called Calory. It has a very clean interface and offers excellent HealthKit integration and no gross ads in the the free version (unlike MyFitnessPal). I think I'm going to spring for the $16 year long subscription price because it's a good deal and a solid product. It took me a little while to figure out how to incorporate calories burned into the days calorie tracking, but it was a simple toggle in settings and automatically pulls the Healthkit record that my workout app iSmoothRun uses.

I've been using iSmoothRun to track my runs and bike rides for a long time and am generally a fan, although since moving to my iPhone 11 I haven't been able to get it to work properly with my Pebble 2HR smartwatch. This was a bummer, but not unreasonable, I got the watch for a deep discount ~$40 and over three years worth of good use after the company was sold to Fitbit. The HealthKit support in iSmoothRun just works, but indoor runs or bike rides have always been a problem since you can't put the GPS to work. On my first attempt at an indoor ride last night I made the mistake of thinking it would do some basic calorie estimation for me, but I think that it needs heart rate data that my watch can no longer provide. I had to go back and do some futzing to get the correct data into Healthkit and accessible to Calory, but I was satisfied with the outcome once I figured things out.

Overall I'm excited to get back to doing more bike riding again. My running has felt pretty uninspired for a few months¹, but my fitness is okay and I'm hoping to get my weight down to the low 180s again in time for Bloomsday. I don't have any expectations of running a very good time by my standards², but I think a time in the 54 minute range is doable if the next ten weeks of training go well and I'm able to reverse my weight trends.

1. I think it will improve as I shed some extra baggage and the weather starts to come around.

2. My best is a 47:26 in 2012 at age 38.

Spent a couple hours frustrating hours trying to repair a broken Enter key¹ on a third party iPad keyboard tonight. The iPad in question is predominantly used by my older kids and for whatever reason they didn't let me know when the key came off the scissor mechanism. Instead they continued to use it with the key floating freely on top of the switch, until at some point it fell out and became lost. Needless to say I was irate to discover this by accident at the end of the day while looking over my son's shoulder while he played a game. My kids are hard on computers and have broken laptop keys before² so it wasn't a surprise that they had broken the keyboard, but the fact that they hadn't let me know and compounded the situation by losing the key in question before I could attempt to fix it really set me off.

Nobody wanted to take the blame³ and so loss of computer privileges for all three until the key was found was my immediate reaction. Everybody went to bed angry, and I stayed up and started looking for the key. Luckily, I had a pretty good idea of where to find it and after about a half hour's worth of disgusting work dredging the crumbs, garbage, and debris from the crevices of the kids' favorite brown chair in our TV area⁴ I found the key.

I then spent the next hour and half trying to get the key clicked back in place. Even though I haven't had the usual age related issues with fine print and detail vision afflict me yet⁵ seeing what was going on with the key and scissor mechanism was challenging in the low light of my office. There was a lot of flashlight and phone juggling happening as I fruitlessly tried to get the key to snap into place. Eventually I started taking off a few other keys to make sure that everything was correctly in place with the the scissor mechanism I was working on, to confirm that nothing was broken, but I was still kind of stumped.

It was only after I realized that the Caps Lock key on the keyboard was identical to the Enter key that I was finally able to partially fix things. It turns out that the scissor mechanism under the Enter key was missing two tiny tabs that were supposed to click into the key and hold it in place. Bizarrely there was no evidence that they had ever been there and broken off- the scissor mechanism was smooth on both sides (and it seems highly unlikely that they would both break). The obvious solution was to cannibalize the Caps Lock key mechanism and use it for the Enter key going forward so that's what I did.

1. It should really be labelled Return in my opinion, but whatever!

2. No way they're ever getting a Mac with a butterfly key mechanism!

3. Also not unusual, but an ongoing source of frustration with my kids.

4. With a brief equally gross intermission between sides of the chair that I spent searching under the cushions of the sofa in that area.

5. Knock on wood!

It's been like a week and half, so kind of hilarious that it took me this long to realize, but apparently Dave Winer blocked me on Twitter because I voiced my opposition to one of his Democratic Presidential Candidate faves Amy Klobuchar. Here's what I tweeted after he tweeted an article calling her the thinking moderate's electability candidate:

Treats her staff like crap. Highest turnover in the senate during her time in office. Hard no.

And apparently that's what got me blocked. Amazing. I've been following one of those former staffers on Twitter for a few years now, had friendly exchanges about random life things outside politics, and trust their expressed experiences and assessment completely. The high staffing turnover is public information.

In the last week or so Dave's assessment of the debates and presidential race has diverged pretty sharply from my take. Bernie Sanders has taken the lead and he's in a full on Bernie panic. I didn't like Bernie 4 years ago. I thought he was too old then and too much of an outsider to get anything accomplished if elected. Personally I prefer Elizabeth Warren and I loved the way she went right after Bloomberg in the most recent debates. But I think it's pretty clear that a lot of people like Bernie, he has a lot momentum right now, and I absolutely think he's as viable a candidate to defeat Trump as there is.

But Dave is all in on Amy Klobuchar and electability narratives, and this tweet of his from today is a real gem:

Smartest move is this imho.

1. Sanders, Warren, Biden, Bloomberg, withdraw.

2. In favor of this ticket: Klobuchar + Buttigieg.

Before South Carolina. Make a sacrifice, compromise, do it for our country.

No brokered convention. We start the campaign against Trump now.

There were a lot of likes, and a lot of dissenting replies, but SlickMagnum's tweet made me laugh the most.

I started taking advantage of our ESPN+ subscription before our Richland game last Saturday and downloaded some 30 for 30 basketball documentaries to watch during the trip down to the Tri-Cities. Last Saturday I watched Survive and Advance, the documentary about Jimmy Valvano and the North Carolina State Wolfpack's improbable national championship in 1983. That's probably the single best one, but I felt like I needed to change it up for the next trip so yesterday I watched The Guru of Go, the documentary about Paul Westhead, Loyola Marymount, and Hank Gathers. I stopped watching after the part where Gathers died on the court which is sort of weird because it gets really inspirational shortly after that point¹, but I had started the drive with a couple NBA Rookie documentaries, and was ready for a break.

The game itself ended up being straight out of Survive and Advance,a close, back and forth showdown the whole game. We trailed 18-20 after the first quarter, but used some 3/4 court pressure to take control in the second and went into the half up 7. Walla Walla came out firing on all cylinders in the second half and immediately closed the gap to within a basket with some steals and clutching shooting. The fourth quarter was tight the whole way and the Blue Devils had a two point lead with just over a minute to go. Then Zach Fleming hit a super clutch 3 to put us up 1, and we were able to get a stop followed by a McCoy Spink layup at the basket. Then we fouled, they missed the front end of the resulting 1-1, we rebounded, ran the clock down and missed the layup that could have iced the game. With 14 seconds left they came down and tried to get up a three, but were unable to get an open look as time expired.

Now we get a rematch with Chiawana in Kennewick's Toyota Center on Friday at 5:45 pm after they dispatched Mead 84-69 in yesterday's other game.

1. But then again, I've seen this before so I know how it goes. I did find it kind of horrifying that nobody started immediately giving him chest compressions- they literally circled around and attended to him without really doing anything. Based on some additional articles, I think he did have a pulse initially, but they just didn't react with the urgency we do now. I think his case directly informs modern practices- today all athletic personnel would immediately assume a heart issue, start chest compressions, and have a portable AED available on the floor in seconds.