Small, probably random, improvement over yesterday. I had a terrible lunch (A&W) but did well on my dinner. After work I went to the grocery store near the hotel where I was teaching and bought a whole bunch of healthy stuff for the drive home. I over-ate, but it was all good fruits and meat.
Today could be hard again and I will be overnight in Toronto so no update tomorrow.
But technically a little higher since I’m actually using a digital scale in lbs and calculating kgs, and tester day I rounded up and today I rounded down. Small difference, but still.
Train food was good: I avoided the bread and the desserts. Today my challenge is being on the road in my car and being tired. Almost always leads to bad food choices.
Yesterday I ate pretty well: one small cheat, but otherwise all good for low sugar and processed white stuff. I had a 1cm wise sliver of pumpkin pie at Bahai Feast last night. I cycled to and from school despite cold rain.
Day 2 will be challenging due to travelling on the train to work in Toronto. I like their olive bread but will have to decline it.
As I mentioned last night, today is my starting point for cleaning up my diet and losing a bit of weight. I guessed that I was 106kg, but actually I’m 105.1kg.
I plan on posting a brief update here every day barring travel or other reasons for a lack of measurement.
On Thursday evening (Oct. 11) I went to Barrie to give a talk. I was invited by Krista Birkbeck to speak to the Agile North meetup. I’ve been committed to this talk for a loooong time, but I wasn’t sure what to speak about until the night before. On Thursday morning I quickly put together a presentation on Agile Leadership – Luck, Love and Truthfulness (the link goes to my staff page at berteig.com where I have listed recent presentations and their decks in pdf format). I really appreciate everyone who attended. There were about 12 people including Krista and the discussion and interaction was fantastic. One of the most interesting questions that was discussed was “can you choose to love someone?” One of my own realizations was the inverse of the idea from “Skin In The Game” by Taleb: if you try your hand at something enough times, you will eventually “succeed”, and that includes leadership, agile coaching, etc. as long as trying doesn’t also have a chance of being removed from the game (being killed or blacklisted). I look forward to sharing the presentation again sometime in the future. Here’s a pic that Krista took at the session:
If you are interested in more of the content of the talk, you can always buy my book: “I Am Not A Great Leader – A Short Primer on Leading to Real Agility” which again you can find on my berteig.com profile page.
I’ve been eating badly. So, time to smarten up. I’m going to work on eating more veggies and fruits (any would be good, but hopefully quite a lot), and removing most of the sugar and processed white things from my diet. I’m not going to do it super-strict, but my intention is that most days I will be on-track. I would like to lose between 7 and 10 kilos (I’m about 106kg right now). Continuing to cycle regularly should help, but at some point the weather will get bad enough that I’ll have to replace that with something else… hopefully swimming on campus. I’m hoping to lose this weight by mid-December. So two months. I’ll track progress here. Tomorrow I will weigh myself in the morning and provide daily updates here.
Finally, here is my updated personal Kanban board. Main differences include that I’ve finished publishing Jerry’s book and I added my food/weight project.
Today we had my mom Valerie and stepdad Rob over for Thanksgiving dinner. Justice, though not eating, sat with us so it was the whole family. It’s been a few years since we’ve done that. It was a really good meal. Mom and Rob brought pumpkin pies and a nice salad. Melanie made the turkey, stuffing and peas. I made two versions of mashed potatoes and the gravy. It was a huge meal and it was delicious!!! We didn’t think to take any photos, unfortunately. It was a hot day so the house was very warm – we’ve turned off the AC for the winter. Even now at near midnight I’m sweating sitting in the basement which is normally quite cool. The combination of a hot day with a looooong oven session for the turkey is probably why it’s so hot. We had a very nice visit. I’m thankful for my beautiful family.
Recently Rob posted something provocative on Facebook about sex ethics. I found the discussion to be interesting, informative and quite insightful on the part of almost everyone who participated. I’m grateful to all my friends and their diverse views.
Over this weekend, I’ve completed work on an insta-project: to create a fender for my road bike so that I can ride it in wet weather. I used my Solidoodle 2 (ancient) 3d printer. here are some photos and some files if anyone wants to work on making their own. You can click on the photos to see the full-size photograph if you want to see the details.
The construction is fairly simple: there are five pieces glued together. From left to right in the photo I have called these pieces “Tail”, “Extender” x2, “Adapter” and “Anchor”. Here are the OpenSCAD files that show the design of each piece:
Here is the latest on my kanban board. Note: the only thing that has changed ( not good ) is the new project I did which is in the done column.
Last night I was up until 4:30am finishing my homework for my class today. It’s the second assignment and had just 5 questions. The last question really kicked my butt for a while; it took me 8 hours on its own. The question was:
Prove that a finite ring R cannot have characteristic zero. (Hint: Begin by showing that for each element x ϵR, there must exist some positive integer kxsuch that kxx = 0R.)
I did manage to solve it, but it took a lot of tries. Basically, I ended up using a kind of proof by nested contradiction. I won’t share the details here, but after class this morning, I went to see the prof and asked him about my work (after handing it in). My logic was sound, but there was a simpler proof available which he explained. It’s actually kinda cool. The class, Math 3020 Introduction to Abstract Algebra, is all that I hoped it would be: challenging, interesting, and totally devoid of practical application! Also, I don’t have to do any computing… just reasoning and creativity. I don’t have to deal with numbers (much) – it’s much more like programming than bookkeeping. I’ve also learned to use LibreOffice Formula Editor (Math) and I love it! Yesterday I learned how to add my own custom symbols (I added a star and a not-congruent symbol).
Verity’s bicycle got stolen today. That’s a real bummer. This weekend I have to get her a new bike. It was a nice bike from MEC that cost about 800 bucks. I gotta file a police report and see about insurance cause losing that much is not cool. Also, I have to get a better lock for her next bike! I only have a short video clip of her riding it when we first got it back in April (so it was still pretty new too!) Bike thieves stealing from students are the worst. I would be okay with such thieves being dismembered. I had a beautiful bike stolen from me in my university days. It was (maybe?) a Trek 420 that I got in the very early 1990’s – probably 90 or 91. I’ll have to dig through my stuff to see if I can find photos of it somewhere…
Yesterday, Sunday, I went cycling with Verity again. She needed to get a new sketchbook at Curry’s. And today I rode to the Mountain Equipment Co-op to pick up my road bike and leave my mountain bike for tune-ups. My road bike is like new and a dream to ride. It’s an old Specialized Allez Elite from the late 90’s. It has an aluminum frame and beautifully thin racing tires. It’s pretty light (although nowadays you can get a lot lighter) and stiff and quick. I put new pedals on it that work well with me wearing runners with soft soles. I’m going to ride it to school tomorrow.
At the Mountain Equipment Co-op, on of the people helping me with my bikes was a guy named Michael. Turns out his kids also go to the Waldorf school where Ocean attends. We chatted a bit about that – I’ll definitely be seeing him around!
It’s a little belated (I mean to post these on Saturdays or Sundays), but here’s an update of the personal Kanban board. Not too much has changed but the pottery class is now in progress. I’m actually a bit over my WIP limit so I have to try finish a couple things this week. Haifa and I are going to do a couple days of driving practice and then she will schedule her mock test and real road test! I’d really like to get Jerry’s book out the door this month too.
