Going down...

Ok - diet plan is on for a good start. I got some scales, which kindly placed me much closer to 19 stone than 20, and then got a little more serious on exercise. Three to five times a week is the plan, with cycling into work and the gym offering the best chances for exercise.

So far I am hovering just under 19 stone, but hoping to see that continue to drop slowly. It's easy to get disheartened - weight loss of more than 2lbs a week is quite unsustainable so not likely to happen. Need to keep vigilant on bad foods and getting to the gym (always tricky to fit in around work) especially as winter rolls in...

[EDIT] ---> Come celebrate in voyeuristic web2.0 style by tracking my fitness and weight loss at Traineo (click the button in the sidebar, or click here).

My name is Ben

My name is Ben, I am 30 years old and I live in London near Tower Bridge and work for UBS investment bank in the IT section. I take these facts pretty much for granted, although a 20 year old me would of been fascinated to hear them.

Today I am sick. Which means in between the napping, I have a day off. Not a "day off" like the weekend where I can go out and do stuff, but a day out of the often fast moving stream of life. Indeed the weekends, whilst fun and fulfilling, are rarely "days off" nowadays.

I often wonder why I am doing the things I do. I don't recall choosing them. Well, maybe I chose between X and Y or this and that, but I never sat down and said to myself - gosh, it's a big world of stuff, what would you like to do in it ? I rarely picked holiday destinations, often led by convention or friends ideas. My set of job interviews were somewhat dictated by the pushiest head hunters.

I guess what I feeling today is I don't spend enough, or any, time on these questions. It's not like my lack of decisiveness has led me into a corner - indeed, most of my choices were based on "which life direction leaves me with the greatest number of choices still open". But this thinking may of prevented me from following a hidden passion or interest I really hadn't considered for myself. And later in life, where commitments are more prevalent such as house buying, career progression and settling down, decisions can be made harder by this attitude of keeping options open.

My name is Ben and I am 30 years old. My options are open. It's time for me to start thinking about using them, rather than simply keeping them open. I currently live in London, currently near Tower Bridge and current work for UBS investment bank. All these could or could not change; but they can if I want and so can I, as I choose to, when I choose to. And realising this should not be scary, but totally awesome :)

Spoon are great and so is Italy and so am I

Joyful is I, for today my pre-ordered Spoon album entitled "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" arrived. For those unacquainted with them, Spoon are a superb band, probably one of my favourite of any genre. Catchy chords and tunes, a great singer (Britt Daniels), many different sounds in each album - like the Eels or Blur perhaps - and solid song writing skills add up to a several superb albums, the latest of which might be the greatest. Don't take my word for it though, go listen for yourself.

Just came back from a long weekend in Italy, seeing the Palio horse race. Photos should find themselves onto Smugmug once I've found a spare minute - not likely to be too soon though as this coming weekend sees me off to Wales for more partying and boys-weekend away fun. It's combined with some hardcore outdoor walking too, so net the health might not suffer to much...

Finally today was my financial exam. Felt like I did quite well, but no results yet. Hopefully an e-mail later today will supply that. I guess the last exams I did were many years ago, and I've always had a certain expectation to not just pass but to pass them well. So fingers crossed for 95%+ then :)

[BREAKING NEWS] I got 93% - which I am still pretty bloody happy with :)

Reflection is my real word of the day

Feel like a lot of change and projects are flowing around in my life at the moment, and wanted to take a few minutes to capture where I am at with each. And also mark any progress on them, once I can stop spending ALL my spare time on facebook - if your not signed up then your rapidly becoming part of the minority, as even technophobic friends appear there every day. It's becoming big. It may even become an e-mail killer for some groups. Come see. Anyway, on with the life projects:

Project #1: Lose weight

Well, this is going to be a big one if I am to ultimately aim for the "recommended" weight of around 15 stone. So step 1 is... lose weight ! By which I mean just track SOME weight being lost over the next few weeks, ensuring I've got SOME healthy habits in place to achieve that. I am also keeping a track of everything I eat and drink to help spot where things are going badly in my diet - it also works as a source of guilt as I fill it in as well ! I also have an upcoming 3.5 mile run I am training for, which helps toward the "keeping active" part required for any weight loss program. Ran 5km in the gym last night - very knackering but rewarding !

Project #2: Write

Nothing as grand as writing a novel, but I do enjoy writing, if not for the reflection it brings, as well as a chance to try out words from my word-of-the-day update, which I quite like, although I wouldn't go as far to say that I venerate it. This is ticking along nicely - I have this blog, and another Java / software blog I am trying to keep writing too. Finding this other blog is left as an exercise for the reader for now :)

Project #3: Code

Should be easy - it's my job. But there is coding and then there is Coding. Depending on the role, some task only allow a limited use of coding skills - indeed banking is often a job where the bulk of the work is business analysis and the actual coding can take second place. So I continue to have my side-project of "virtual vampire", and other opportunities are floating out there too. Haven't done much coding on VV for a while though... bad Ben :(

Project #4: Finances

An ongoing project now nearing some degree of completion. This was basically the thought that in general if I want more financial stability, I can either spend time working harder to earn more money, but equally I could spend time managing the money I do have better. The recommendation here has to be Money Saving Expert, a neutral website by Martin Lewis for managing your money better. So I have moved any spare coins into ISAs, better savings accounts and soon will move to a new current account paying twice as much interest as the old one. All these little things add up, and will help me build up a nice nest egg to throw at a mortgage when I am ready for such a thing. Also tracking my spending using some software is good for the guilt mirror effect (similar to Project #1 !).

Project #5: Learn

Did a training course recently at work on some basics of finance that had been long overdue in my career. With the test looming next week, I am discovering the joy of proper learning again. I equally enjoyed learning Spanish over a year ago, and want to keep that feeling going. Getting some basic Greek in my head could help for a trip to Greece this year. Professional certification courses also help with strengthening my CV and developer skills. Guess I need to think more about this one - first things first, I've got a finance test to revise for :)

So that's my life, split in project form. Of course it's not that clear cut in reality, but it's the beginning of a set of goals. Reflection is good for nailing down the "why" behind a lot of what I am doing, and this "why" should help me hammer out some life goals. And these don't have to be active goals as such, even passive goals can help with making decisions, which is basically where I see my weakness. In ways I've drifted a long time without firm goals, and that's a shame, as I think everything is much brighter and more interesting when you've got something to work towards.

Did I mention facebook ? Join us ;)

A lot of large projects on the go

Having gotten home at 4:40pm after a financial derivatives training course, I really thought I was going to make good headway on virtual vampire. It's now 10:15pm and I've just cleared my plate !

Eating up that time in fairness was cooking a nice dinner, doing the homework for the course and a big gym session. I am trying to get fit for a number of reasons - firstly there is a 5.8km run coming up in July (the chase challenge) and I would like to be able run it in around 35-40 minutes. Secondly was a warning for a friend of mine that 30-45 years old is "heart attack alley" so really not the time to be neglecting exercise, and finally a had a health test last year that reported all was fine except for two things; firstly my anerobic / lung capacity was a little sub-par and secondly I am medically obese.

A little shocked that I was in this category, I looked at the statistics, and anyone with a BMI (Body mass index) of over 30 is obese. His chart was nice enough to have an extra "obese II" category for BMI in excess of 35, which I am far from, but being in any of the bright red areas doesn't strike me as a good thing long term. I am used to having a weight around 18 1/2 stone (118kg) for much of my adult life, but to drop to the (still orange coloured) overweight section I would need to drop to 17 1/2 stone (111kg). So I was a little shocked to find that using two different sets of scales, both confirmed my current weight to be 20 stone (127kg) putting me at BMI 34... nearly obese II.

Ok, so it's early days with the gym - around 8-10 weeks so far I think - and coming into Summer there should hopefully be some seasonal weight drop to help me along. But I think I am going to need to look at the little things more harshly now, and look at other opportunities for exercise to supplement the gym sessions.

Right - might get 30 mins on virtual vampire now. As long as each day I work towards goals (gym, writing the blog, software projects) then it shouldn't get me down, because I know what I'm working towards and I know it's things I enjoy and want to improve. It's a lot of investment of time, but cutting out the distractions of life (computer games, idle TV) and working more efficiently at work should all give me the time I need to fit it all in.

Introducing... virtual vampire !

Recently I have been unsettled in my work and much of this was due to not having indulged in some good quality coding for quite a while. So I am intending to join the open source on line community with my own application - virtual vampire !

This tool will be primarily an exercise in building a complete system, with a decent front end and expandable modules, for running one of the sides in a board game - Fury of Dracula. The idea stemmed for another effort by someone where he had written an AI to randomly move for the hidden moves of Dracula in the game, and the player could then ask the system if Dracula was in the areas he was exploring or not.

It almost might be harder to play against a random opponent than a human who you can second guess. However, I intend to initially write a random movement AI for the game, then expand it into a more logical style opponent, looking 2-3 moves ahead like a rudimentary chess computer might. In this case, assigning probabilities to various choices and acting on that information, but still slightly randomly, to prevent an opponent second guessing the computers reactions. It may be possible to take this one step further and assign the AI various attributes (such as cowardly, aggressive or overly bold) to create a different flavour of play style each game - allowing a human player to pick up on this play style and counter play accordingly.

In any case, it's a work in (slow) progress, and all current hosted on the google code website