Lots of Monkeys

I am sitting in a Starbuck’s enjoying a breakfast sandwich and a dirty chai, and as of this writing, I have already spent 12 hours at Disneyland, and I am still pretty tired, as I have that three hour time differential to deal with.

I highly recommend Disneyland at some point. At some point, Tomorrowland rides got a sort of steampunk makeover, and I was able to watch one of the last showings of Captain EO, which was the Francis Ford Coppolla, George Lucas and (wait for it) Michael Jackson 3d movie slash music video collaboration.

The theater also has external lighting that matches the on screen action and the floor actually thumps in time to the beat of the music and for explosions.

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I’ve been playing a lot of Ingress lately. One Sunday, I walked 15 miles. A little more than half a marathon, and I felt fine. Which was great.

What was not so great, (or really great) was a realization I had upon checking my pedometer.  If I kept up my current pace of walking, I would flip it.

That is, there would not be enough digital number spaces on the pedometer before the reset date of 99 days had passed.

So, being me, I decided that the solution to a non existent problem was more technology. So I purchased a FitBit with some amazon credits that I had laying around. With all of the credits, it ended up being around $50 so I felt like it was an acceptable risk. I had done some reading, but what ended up selling it was the achievement system.

FitBit actually sends me updates when I reach certain milestones, such as 20,000 steps in a day or beating my previous record of climbing stairs. So the achievement system was a big selling point for me. It was just enough gamification that I could feel like I’m competing against myself. If work had achievements, I would probably get way more productive. I can’t imagine the achievement titles, though.

That and consistently higher ratings and reviews on various sites, even when compared to the Nike Fuel Band and the Jawbone Up.

My current peeve with it is the lack of support for the Nexus 4. I’ve been reading that it has to do with the lack of Bluetooth Low Power support. I don’t care as long as they manage to fix it in the near future. Right now, I’m just impatient to see how well or how badly I’m doing during the day. I’m trying to alleviate that by walking home for lunch, and syncing there, but I may have to end up seeing if it’s possible to get another wireless sync dongle and then keep one at work. I did bring in the dongle and it worked, although I’d really prefer it if they managed to get the wireless sync working via low energy bluetooth.

Right now the issue is that the Nexus 4 has a chip capable of synching up with the fitbit, but the bluetooth stack in the current version of Android does not. Which is frustrating, but I suppose it will be an issue that is hopefully resolved sooner rather than later. There is a lot of technology coming down the pike that looks like it would be fun to integrate, like the Pebble smart watch and such.

But back to the fitbit.

A lot of you know that I have a CPAP, and for years I’ve been suffering from Sleep Apnea, although I’ve only been treating it over the past year. The fitbit also has a really comfortable wristband that can hold the fitbit against my wrist. From there, it tracks my movements and then makes an analysis based on my movement how well I slept that night. It’s another tool in my arsenal that I can use to track my sleep.

I love metrics, but I hate the work involved to track them, so any opportunity to automate the process is welcome.

So, with the wireless dongle, the fitbit transmits the daily information over to my computer. From there, it heads up to the fitbit.com site, where it creates the dashboard. The dashboard is where my data is presented to me in an executive summary format. Graphs, percentages, and an “on track” meter for caloric intake.

It’s also telling that I bought the fitbit instead of you know, resetting the pedometer every couple of days or so.

I’m trying to develop some new habits. Good ones, for those of you playing the home game.

This past month, I was committed to non consumption. Basically, no new clothes, no new gadgets, no video games, no board games, no frivolous purchases.

Surprisingly, I did not pass away as I had initially feared. Instead, I was left with a surprisingly small credit card bill to pay off at the end of the month. I was even able to use the previous month’s paycheck to pay it off. Which meant that I had the full value of the current month’s paycheck.

It was a good feeling.

Whenever I had the urge to purchase something, I would put it off, or put it on a wishlist, or write it down. Now that the month is over, I’m finding that I only still want to buy two things, instead of all of the things that I wrote down. Strangely, one of those things is another black jacket, which may seem to indicate some sort of black jacket problem that I may have. The other thing is a blender.

And not even a crazy $500 blender either. Like a respectable glass jar Oster that I can make smoothies in.
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