September 2020 weight loss report: Down 1.4 pounds

While this month’s weight loss was more modest than August (1.4 pounds vs. 2.0 pounds), it marks a couple of important milestones:

  • For the majority of the month my wight was classified as Normal rather than Overweight as I hung around the 170 pound mark
  • I dipped below 170 pounds twice. That’s two times more than most of the year.
  • I am now lower in weight than I was on January 1st, also known as the Before Times

The last one is especially noteworthy. After switching up my weight loss plan about six weeks ago, I have for the first time ended a month at a weight lower than I started at this year. This bodes well for the future.

I remained donut-free.

Going forward, I may ease up on the official snack-free reports. On the one hand, it keeps me honest. On the other, it’s not exciting stuff to read, even for me. I can’t imagine another person or some scraping bot suffering through these every day. I’ll either do the updates elsewhere (“Dear Diary…”) or switch to a lower frequency for updates like once a week.

I am encouraged by these efforts and shall continue to work on getting closer to the thinner (but not Stephen King Thinner) version of me.

The stats:

September 1: 171.8 pounds
September 30: 170.4 pounds (down 1.4 pounds)

Year to date: From 171.8 to 170.4 pounds (down 1.4 pounds)

And the body fat:

September 1: 22.6% (38.9 pounds of fat)
September 30: 22.4% (38.1 pounds of fat) down 0.7 pounds)

Snack-free, Day 29 of 30: Snacks, free

Here is today’s cheatin’ list:

  • The dregs of the trail mix. Gone now, so they shall tempt me no more
  • A slice of toast with raspberry jam
  • A few crackers

Other than that, I behaved and did my post-work exercise again.

I was up slightly this morning, to 170.1 pounds, so my time spent below 170 was again confined to one brief but glorious day. I will predict that for tomorrow, the last day of the month, I will be up again slightly, but will be delighted and pleasantly surprised if I dip below 170 again.

Walk 17: Come undone

Not me, my shoelaces. In what may be a record, both shoelaces came untied multiple times. The right lace came untied about five times. By the end I think it was openly mocking me, just jerking me around because it could. “Getting up a nice head of steam? How would you like to stop and have to tie me up yet again? Haha, there you go. I promise to stay tied for twenty seconds this time. And by twenty I mean five.”

I was a bit slower on the way out, but made up for it on the return, ending with the exact same pace as yesterday, even though it was warmer still–24ºC, which is kind of crazy for late September–and sweating was copious. I felt weird at the start of the trail, as if I was weak from not eating or something (I had toast and jam in the mid-afternoon), but it seemed to clear up as I pressed on, and though the running part started a bit slow, I did find my pace, albeit with copious shoelace interruptions.

I’m not sure what to do about the shoelaces yet. Clearly I am doing something wrong in tying them, but we’ll see if I can magic them into place or just get new laces or maybe run barefoot or something.

Anyway, it was still good to get out and despite the summer-like weather, there were fewer people out and aboot, which was nice (he says, swearing he is not anti-social).

Stats:

Walk 17
Average pace: 7:39/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 7.54 km
Time: 57:58
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 24ºC
Humidity: 55%
Wind: light
BPM: 122
Weight: 170.1 pounds
Total distance to date: 129.87 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8

Walk 16: Warmer with big dogs

I set out after work today, which is somewhat rare for a Monday, but it was sunny and warm and I wasn’t going to pass it up.

There weren’t as many people out, though a number did have some large dogs off-leash. At one point one of these large dogs was coincidentally trotting alongside me as I ran. I didn’t like this, so I turned my head and told the owner to leash it. She called the dog back, but I didn’t see what happened next. Hopefully the dog magically changed into a cat.

I felt about the same as yesterday and performance-wise was also about the same. Weird! As a special bonus, I had no untied shoelaces and didn’t have to empty my tiny bladder even once. In all, a welcome start to a fit week.

Stats:

Walk 16
Average pace: 7:39/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 7.54 km
Time: 57:41
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 22ºC
Humidity: 53%
Wind: light
BPM: 124
Weight: 169.7 pounds
Total distance to date: 122.33 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8

Walk 15: Surprisingly spry

I headed out again a bit later than normal, though earlier than yesterday and once more the trail had people on it, but it was generally OK. The off-leash dogs behaved themselves, at least.

It was sunny and warmer, which would normally be nicer, but it made me feel a bit dope as I started the running part around the 4K mark. Then a shoelace came untied. Then I had to pee. I was concerned that someone might come across me today on the side trail that I use as a toilet (I swear it’s not as bad as it sounds). I’m not sure what I would do if that happened. Stopping mid-pee seems worse than not stopping, so I’d probably pivot slightly away so my back was more to them.

But I digress, this has never happened.

The odor of spray paint was in the air as I approached the overpass and I noticed two guys up near a pillar working on a cartoon dog in a suit. It was kind of cute, as one would expect. I’ll take a picture next time.

The run part started slow, but I warmed up and after that kept up a fairly torrid pace, with the second km coming in at 5:25/km, my fastest pace in quite awhile. As a bonus I didn’t feel like I was killing myself to achieve it.

I continued to run most of the way home and in the final block a guy ahead of me was smoking a joint, offering a new variation on the runner’s high.

I hate the smell of pot, for what it’s worth. Bleah.

Anyway, it was a good outing and I hope to have a similar one after work tomorrow.

Stats:

Walk 15
Average pace: 7:26/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 7.61 km
Time: 56:36
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 17ºC
Humidity: 62%
Wind: light
BPM: 130
Weight: 170.8 pounds
Total distance to date: 114.79 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8

Party like it’s 1994

I found my 1994 driver’s license. It recalls that all-too brief era when I both had hair and a beard with no gray hair in it. The hair and beard are both pretty much gone now, but their memory lives on in this tiny, blurry photo in which you can still clearly see that I look half-asleep for some reason. I remember the blue hoodie like an old friend.

(I attempted to clean up the image a bit in Affinity Photo–it actually looks a good bit better now, believe it or not.)

Bad Design: Conan Exiles keybinds

Conan Exiles is a survival/crafting game that is sort of like an MMO, with servers, private and public, in which you create a barbarian (complete with endowment if you like) and go forth into the desert and jungle terrain, building, hunting and gathering. You can even craft a wheel of death. It’s very pretty and there is always satisfaction in making stuff.

But the UI is not great. The crafting part of it tries to be so helpful it actually confused me, because it includes a non-interactive “demo” of the crafting UI next to the actual crafting UI and I tried interacting with both until I realized that only one worked. Sure, I was being a bit of a noob, but at the same time it’s a cluttered mess.

But the worst part are the keybindings.

You can rebind most keys to your liking, which is good. Way back in 2001 I switched from the classic WASD layout to the default used in the game Tribes 2, ESDF. You can argue over which is better, but WASD is still the default for moving around, and so it is in Conan Exiles. I changed it to ESDF and called it good.

Then I discovered that when you open a box or container, there are certain shortcut keys to do things, like Loot the selected object or Loot All to take everything.

The Loot All key is set to F by default. You see the problem here. If I looked into a box filled with a dozen items and then stepped to the right, I would grab everything as I shifted slightly over. I did this a few times before wondering why my barbarian was becoming spontaneously over-encumbered.

I went into the keybindings to change this and, oddly, could not find a key for Loot All. Because there isn’t one.

I could not believe there was no way to re-bind the key, so I hit the internet and DuckDuckGo led me to a Steam Community Forum post that gave me the info I needed–buried deep within the game’s subfolders is an input.ini file, and you can manually edit it to change these otherwise un-bindable keys. The Loot All key looks like this. I set mine to P for Please Don’t Loot All Anymore:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/589323104271073284/759643990000926720/unknown.png

This is bad design for two reasons:

  1. Burying some of the keybindings in an ini file that must be edited manually
  2. Allowing the player to re-bind a key to one that can only be changed through the method described above

The Solution: Add another section to keybindings, titled Containers or something to that effect, and allow players to easily change these keys–and when you use a key that is already bound to something, tell the player and then unbind it if they confirm the new binding.

Any other way is barbaric.

Snack-free, Day 26 of 30: Nuts to me

It was a good day for cheating. I mean, good in the sense that there was no cheating, save for another small serving of trail mix. I even had pizza and saved some for leftovers.

And I exercised today, with running and all that.

I was up yet again, though (scream emoji here), but only by 0.1 pounds (eyeroll emoji here), to 171.6 pounds. I’m hoping to resume the downward trend in weight tomorrow, but am not predicting it.

Walk 14: Old man running

Today was somewhat interesting. I did not head out for my walk/run until about 4 p.m., which is on the late side for the weekend. As a result there were more people out and aboot and at first I was annoyed, then I realized it wasn’t a big deal and by the time I was running everything else melted away, as it should.

This was my second walk/run since my birthday and if you told me at age 20 that I would be running regularly at age 56 I would have laughed politely at your attempt to make a joke. But here I am, feeling totally smug and superior to the 20 year old version of me that was just starting to develop a belly that would expand and hang around for the next 22 years.

Conditions were similar to the last outing, though the wind was back to normal. I wasn’t sure how peppy I’d feel running but I turned in two km with a pace of 5:35/km for each, which is pretty good. Although I can still feel the left heel a bit, it has faded to where it’s not really registering, nor do I think it is keeping me from running as I normally would. This is also pretty good.

It started to sprinkle just a tiny bit on the last stretch when I was walking back home, and in a way I was disappointed to not experience a little shower, if only to feel manly or something for exercising regardless of the weather.

The running part meant my pace dropped from 7:50/km to 7:35/km, a nice improvement. Pretty good, one might say. I’ll try to get out again tomorrow. The forecast looks not bad at all, but we are entering the time where the weather can get a bit tricksy (observe today’s temperature and note that two weeks ago it was 30ºC.

Stats:

Walk 14
Average pace: 7:35/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 7.53 km
Time: 57:11
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 14ºC
Humidity: 77%
Wind: light
BPM: 129
Weight: 171.6 pounds
Total distance to date: 107.18 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8

WordPad: The little program time (or at least I) forgot

UPDATE, September 5, 2023: Three years later and "I suppose someone out there uses it or Microsoft would have turfed it by now" comes back to haunt me, like a slightly annoying ghost. Microsoft has announced that WordPad is being deprecated and will be removed from Windows in some unspecified future update. Story here: For the first time in 40 years, Windows will ship without built-in word processor

WordPad has been part of Windows since forever, or at least a very long time, and given its name, it seems like it’s been meant for people who need something like Notepad, but fancier, and who are unable or unwilling to buy Microsoft Word (or Office).

I have never been once of those people because I’ve had some version of Word dating back to Word 6.0, which came out in 1993. I’ve only opened WordPad out of curiosity over the years and only opened it today when I saw someone on a forum mention that it’s still included in Windows 10–and it is!

I suppose someone out there uses it or Microsoft would have turfed it by now, like they tried to do with Paint, until they discovered that people actually used Paint or at least had unhealthy, possibly nostalgic attachment to it. I have no such attachment to WordPad, but perhaps I should find its presence reassuring, should I let my subscription lapse and find myself with the urge to draft a letter in Comic Sans.