The @SaneLater folder in my Gmail account bulges with links to pages, or the text of pages saved via Email This, that I thought interesting enough to read later but not crucial to read now.
I trolled through the emails tonight looking for ideas on something to post. I deleted some recent emails related to research on a project only recently finished. I deleted some things because the time has passed and I'm no longer interested. I left a couple for me to rediscover later, if and when I want to.
When I started my SaneBox subscription and saw the numbers of undealt-with emails climbing in that @SaneLater folder, I started to stress about it. Surely I need to keep on top of these things? If I committed to receiving them and reading, then surely I needed to do something about them? I prided myself on running a tight ship and staying on top of these little dust devils before they became whirlwinds. I would stay up late reading, processing, giving each item its due.
But at some point I gave myself permission to leave them alone. And to not stress about them. Let them pile up. Will I be docked a letter grade for not keeping a pristine email inbox? Will this come up in my semi-annual performance review? I think not. The important emails get taken care of, the others will rest and compost and I may eventually turn the heap to find something of interest. It's OK if I don't. I have plenty of other demands on my time that are more urgent. Naps are more urgent than email.
One of the many things I learned from David Burns'Feeling Good was the ways we drive ourselves bananas with our thinking. He identified a long list of "cognitive distortions" and the ones that chimed with me related to all-or-nothing thinking, magnification, and disqualifying the positive.
Keeping my inbox at zero fueled my stress reactions: if I had even one or two emails in that box, I had failed (all-or-nothing). But, no. That's blowing a minuscule situation out of proportion (magnification) and ignoring all the emails I did process (disqualifying the positive).
The coaches I'm working with, and the mind/spirit path I'm following now, help me see -- sometimes -- that things in life are not light switches marked on or off, black or white, false or true. They're more like sliders moving along a spectrum, sometimes this, sometimes that.
Having a clean and neat inbox is admirable. It shows I'm good at handling only the commitments I have time to process, that I am on top of things, that I have good routines and habits to build on to achieve higher things.
Well, not there yet. I have given myself permission to take the slow road.
I weighed 211.0 lbs. a couple days ago, way over the control line.
So I did a 22-hour or so fast. I had last eaten about 8pm the day before, so I did not eat again till after 7pm the day after.
By the next day, my weight had dropped a pretty remarkable 2.5 pounds – almost a pound and half below the control line.
I could drive myself crazy trying to figure out why my weight was up so much and why it went down so fast. Doesn’t really matter. What matters is having tools and techniques I can use to smooth out the curve.
Pilon’s book goes in depth on the research behind fasting (the bibliography is long and looks thorough) and his recommendations.
His plan is simple: fast for 22–24 hours one or two days a week. That’s it. Make sure you’re sleeping through 8 of those hours. So what happens is you wind up skipping two meals -- either breakfast/lunch or lunch/supper -- on those days, You’ll still eat every day, but you’ll also get the benefits of a 20+ hour fast. There are more specifics in his book.
And what do you on the days you don’t fast? Pilon wrote an excellent blog post on Eating Responsibly that I love for its directness and simplicity.
My view is that we’ve all had our turn being kids, which means we’ve had our turn eating like kids.
We’ve had our ice-cream birthday parties and our stomach aches from eating too much candy at the movies.
We’re adults now. Time to eat like it…
Eating responsibly, he says, is how you eat when your plan falls apart and the world is offering a platter of brownies with no parents around to stop you scarfing them up.
I’m the adult here. Time to eat like one.
I’d link to the direct order page for ESE, which may be cheaper than the Kindle book, but unfortunately it’s a long sales page with clipart, misspellings, and generally embarrassing design and presentation. Pilon offers up great information and I value his opinions, but I can’t stand his marketing/promotion choices that I have to filter out to get to the good stuff. So I can’t recommend wading through that page. ↩
I install a consistent set of bookmarklets across all the browsers I use at work and home. (Except for iOS; haven’t figured out how to install them in Safari.)
The most useful one on a daily basis is for Google Site Search. From the Bookmarks bar, click the bookmarklet – I’ve renamed mine to “GSS” to save space – and then enter a search term. The bookmarklet fires off a Google search for that term on the site you’re browsing.
You could do the same thing by entering in Google “site:brownstudy.info batman,” for example, but simply clicking ”GSS" while I’m at the site is quicker and more useful.
Scroll down this page of Google bookmarklets for the Google Site Search Bookmarklet. Drag it to your bookmarks folder or, preferably, the Links or Bookmarks bar.
You will thank me later.
Update: Dang it! I didn't use the site search on my own blog. If I had, I would have discovered this 2012 post on the same topic.
Flixable is a search engine for Netflix-specific streaming video. It features a more open design that lets the page elements breathe, and offers a pleasing way to browse what movies are debuting and leaving.
Fixable’s search function isn’t necessarily better than Netflix’s native search function; it just presents its results in a prettier package. That package would be more useful if I could hover my cursor over a movie and have its star rating, summary, etc. presented in a float-over box, as Netflix does.
On a different plane of reality – functionally and visually – is Instant Watcher.
Instant Watcher used to exist as a very handy iOS app back in the day; its online incarnation explodes onto your browser all manner of content, tools, pictures, keywords, and faceted search functions, all at the same time. When the page opens, my eye is so besieged I don’t know where to look.
But what Instant Watcher lacks in loveliness, it makes up for with sheer brawn.
For one thing, you can search Netflix (the default) or Amazon individually for streaming videos. If you subscribe to one service but not the other, this is useful (particularly for Amazon; its has no functional search and discovery tools to aid users).
As busy as the results page is (do we really need all of those genre checkboxes? and that sidebar?), it offers a lot of power. Clear the “Amazon Non-Prime” checkbox, for example, to show the Prime-only items. Now, I quickly see that Netflix has the live-action Batman movies for streaming, while Amazon Prime carries the wonderful ’90s animated series.
The Amazon Non-Prime selections include a miscellany, such as the 1940s movie serial, the 1960s TV show, and even what appear to be customer videos reviewing Batman-related products. I mean, what?? You get more results with Non-Prime, but also a lot of junk.
But even more so Amazon. According to the site, Netflix offers 6,933 titles. That’s a lot, but it’s spread over a fair number of genres and so somewhat easy to grasp.
But there are 112,625 Amazon titles, with Prime alone holding 46,628. Holy crap. Does the world even need this many things to watch as we, to quote Peter Cook, "sink giggling into the sea"? Nevertheless, if you want to find a needle in these haystacks, then Instant Watcher is the way to do it.
I ran a manual Time Machine backup on Sunday – about 16GB – and it ran without a hitch. No error messages, no stopping. Progress, of a sort, though I have no idea why it suddenly decided to start working again. (Note that I have granted this unholy amalgam of silicon and software independence and agency. I am in its power.)
I have set the iMac to back up to Backblaze every night. I use the Amphetamine app to keep the iMac awake for 10 hours after I go to bed. As of today, about 24,000+ files and 441MB of data still to be uploaded.
I have not plugged in and installed the external drive yet. But there is no hurry. With up-to-date Time Machine and Crashplan backups, and the Backblaze experiment going well, I feel reasonably secure. Creating an additional local backup has a lower priority right now.
I feel more urgency to step away from this computer for a while, rest up, and let it do its thing.
Plus, Liz got her first smartphone, an iPhone 7, yesterday.
I’m not quite sure what has been driving the modernization of our household tech. Maybe because we hit hard limits with the old tech and updates were long overdue. Maybe because we have the money and time at this moment to acquire and absorb them into our routines and work lives.
I am not inquiring too deeply into the question. I’m sure the time we spend getting these tools working for us will repay us someday. Waves are cresting, so we’re riding the waves. The tides will ebb soon enough and, if our history is anything to go by, we’ll spend next to nothing on tech for the rest of the year.
Still, since I’m the household’s sysadmin and Head of Technical Support, I now have to up my game. iPhone and iCloud and iEverything can quickly become overwhelming conceptual mindspaces since I have only a patchy understanding of how they are all wired together.
Liz already had a long-beloved iPad Mini 4 that she did not need my help with, both because I never had an iPad until recently – so she was her own tech support for it – and because she hardly ever synched it via iTunes on our iMac.
I had advised that we both wait on upgrading to iOS 11. Apple has had such ill luck with the updates that I did not want to deal with any possible technial snafus, particularly before our Christmas trip.
But there was a selfish reason too: I did not want to deal with the mental overhead of learning the ins and outs of a new OS. Along with all the other new tech I've acquired, my mind is rather a muddle. What do I need to stay on top of next?
Liz’s purchase of her iPhone yesterday changed that delicate balance of competency. It arrived with iOS 11. Having to mentally flip between iOS 11 on the phone and iOS 10 on her iPad would be confusing.
So I’m upgrading all our devices to iOS 11 today, and then we will both settle in to watch the Lynda.com videos on iPhone and iOS 11 basics, iCloud, and other iTopics.
My goal? To have two Heads of Technical Support in the house.
Liz bought her first smartphone today, an iPhone 7. The Apple customer support person we spoke to was great and she passed along this really clever tip.
The iPhone or iPad is on the table and you're eating a sandwich and you need all your fingers to hold the messy thing together and your phone buzzes and you need to open it but it requires a fingerprint and your thumbs are too occupied keeping the damn sandwich from falling apart to deal with that.
But if you have added your pinky fingerprints to the Touch ID, then you can hold on the sandwich and use either pinky to unlock the phone.
I don't use my pinkies much, but I would certainly miss them if they weren't there.
Yesterday, I weighed 210.2, about a pound under my control line. This morning, I weighed 211.8, about a pound above my control line.
I could attribute the increase to a bigger than usual lunch, a supper of starchy leftovers, trying to lose weight in the winter is a mug's game, the dates I snacked on in the afternoon (if grapes=candy, then dates=chocolate caramels), a week of consistently poor sleep, or 104 other variables.
No matter the cause, I have to take the scale’s report as truth and act accordingly.
Mark Forster, when he devised his version of the No S diet, defined a set of rules for such occasions. Every day he was over the line, he added a rule. Every day he was on the line, he kept the same rules. Every day he was below the line, he relaxed a rule.
It’s an eminently sensible plan.
I started defining my own set of rules, ranking them by severity, etc. but decided to go easy on myself. I have my own toolkit of techniques; as I mark my weight on the graph, I’m already calculating which ones I will deploy that day.
The techniques are a mix of the following, in no particular order, and as the day allows:
No snacking
No sweets, though an apple or clementine is allowed
Water, coffee, and herbal tea only (no ciders, no diet sodas)
Extra laps around the parking lot at work, or a workout at home
Skipping one or two meals
Start eating at 4pm and stop eating by 8 pm
Today, I had 3 meals (cold boiled potatoes at lunch), small portions, no snacks, and walked the parking lot at work. I did have a cider.
If my weight is still over the line tomorrow, then I will aim to have my large meal about midday. I’m scheduled for a workout, so that will help burn some calories. For the rest of the day: eat less, move more.
Although trying to lose weight during winter is like pushing a car out of a ditch.
Update, 1/27/2018: I weighed 209.8 this morning, a little less than a pound under my control line. Success! The goal today is to eat sensibly, have a workout, and continue to stay on or under the line.
I already have Pocket, which as of today reminds me that I have 1,459 unread web pages. Isn’t that enough? Apparently not for me.
Still, I also am not a tech reporter who needs (or feels he needs) to stay on top of a raft of news sites, blogs, Twitter feeds, and the like.
Perhaps the best advice I got on maanging RSS feeds was from Michael Leddy, who suggested dropping them all. Instead, when you want to or have the time, simply open up the sites in your browser and read as much as you want until you feel caught up. There are only so many inboxes one needs to check in life.
Still, there are a few sites I follow (some belonging to friends) that post infrequently and I do not want to miss them. I wanted to avoid investing time and effort in learning an RSS reader that worked across my Mac and iDevices for only a few feeds.
What works best for me is Blogtrottr, a web service that lets me receive RSS content via email.
I assume we know how to manage our email. Why learn a new app? Skim or read the emailed posts as I have time and then delete or archive them in Gmail, as needed.
Blogtrottr has paid tiers of service, but I find the ad-supported free tier works fine for me.