Nick Bradbury

Ten Tips for Fatbloggers

I found out about the fatblogger movement through Jason Calacanis's blog a while ago, and figured I'd finally join the fray.

Eight years ago I weighed in at a whopping 225 pounds, but I dropped 65 pounds after I became a father (after all, I wanted to be able to keep up with the little demons).  My weight has fluctuated a little since then, but overall I've kept it off, and I sure feel better (a lot better) than I did when I was that fat dude at the computer surrounded by pizza boxes.

So, here I go with ten tips for fatbloggers, based on lessons I've learned and mistakes I've made since deciding to become a healthy geek:

1. Do strength training.  Too many people stick with cardio and never touch the weights.  Yes, you do need cardio - after all, it burns calories and exercises your heart.  But strength training raises your basal metabolism, enabling your body to burn more calories every minute of every day.  It also strengthens your bones, decreases your blood pressure, and makes you look better as well.
2. Skip the energy bars.  Take a look at the label on your favorite energy bar, then compare it to the label on your favorite candy bar.  Look similar?  That's because many so-called "energy bars" amount to little more than candy bars with added protein.  Of course, a post-workout snack is essential, but you'd do better eating something like a chicken sandwich instead of grabbing a bar.
3. Forget perfection.  Every gym has them: those perfect-body specimens that people either envy or drool over.  But unless you're planning to be on the cover of some fitness magazine, don't emulate these people.  They spend way too much time exercising, and often have unhealthy eating disorders.  Everyone wants to look good, but if your goal is to feel good as well, forget trying to get a perfect body and focus on getting a better body instead.
4. Try yoga.  Some guys think yoga isn't a "manly" way to exercise, and I have to confess I used to think that, too.  But I tried yoga after a friend recommended it to me, and it kicked my butt.  Yoga is a great way to build strength, increase flexibility and improve your balance.  And it also helps calm your mind - perfect after a hard day of work.
5. Join a group.  Have a tough time committing to regular exercise?  Try joining a group, like a local running or biking club.  I joined a marathon training group, and our regular runs helped keep me on track and made me less prone to unhealthy eating and drinking (ever try to go on a long run after a night on the town?  not fun.)
6. Exercise with your kids.  This one is hard for me, because I work at home and use exercise as a way to get out of the house.  But it's important for your kids to see you being healthy, so if possible, let them exercise with you - or use them as exercise props.  When my kids were younger, I'd do bicep curls with them and let them sit on my back while I did push-ups.  They thought it was great fun, and it was also a great workout for me.
7. Don't forget the core.  Lifting weights and pounding the treadmill is a good start, but don't forget to exercise your core.  Strong core muscles improve your posture, and can help prevent back pain.  If you're a runner, regularly doing core exercises will improve your form and make you less prone to injury due to fatigue.
8. Work with a trainer.  Hiring a personal trainer may seem like a yuppie indulgence, but if you're new to exercise, it's worth investing in several sessions with a trainer just to learn the correct form for various exercises.   Improper form often leads to injury, which defeats the purpose of working out in the first place.  Plus, a trainer can teach you all sorts of exercises you've never heard of.
9. Always warm up.  If you're pushed for time, you're probably tempted to jump right into your workout without warming up.  Don't do it!  Your muscles won't be ready for the hard stuff unless you first spend a few minutes stretching or doing light exercise. 
10. Take a break.  If you've been exercising regularly for a long time and find your motivation lagging, there's nothing wrong with taking a few weeks off.  Exercise isn't supposed to be an addiction - it's supposed to be a fun way to look and feel better.   If it stops being fun, it won't kill you to give it up for a little while.  You may even find that you perform better when you return.
11. Bonus tip: give yourself an excuse to indulge (as long as you do it infrequently).  I usually eat healthy and take care of myself when I'm at home, but I give it up when I travel.  Whenever I visit my co-workers at NewsGator, I eat bad hotel food and participate in four-hour-long "happy hours" while I'm there.  When I return home, it's back to being healthy again.  In some weird way, I find it easier to eat healthy when I know I can indulge every now and then.

Fact Checking (My Ass)

Several years ago, Ken Layne famously warned the media that on the Internet, "we can fact-check your ass." Sadly, many bloggers could use some fact-checking, too:

• A few days ago Valleywag claimed that the recent 365 Main datacenter outage was due to a drunk employee - a claim they've since retracted.
• Last week Robert Scoble posted erroneous statements about FeedBurner and the RSS Advisory Board. Robert soon updated his post to correct his misstatements about FeedBurner.
• Read/WriteWeb's recent claim that "Desktop RSS Readers are (Nearly) Dead" included incorrect assumptions about feed statistics, neglected to consider behind-the-firewall Enterprise customers who can't use web-based RSS readers, and was based on a survey whose audience is far more likely to use a web-based reader to start with.
• And of course, Engadget's claim a few months back that Apple was delaying the next version of Mac OS X caused Apple stock to plunge. This claim, too, was later corrected.

Now, I should make it clear that I respect Scoble, Read/WriteWeb and Engadget - I list the posts above solely because they're high-profile examples of poor fact-checking, not because I dislike these blogs. There are many more examples, and I'm sure I've made my share of mistakes, too. But when a blog with a large audience makes a false claim, the potential for harm is great enough that fact-checking should be more of a priority.

Many of us in the geekosphere have a low opinion of the "mainstream media," but we bloggers suffer from the same faults that we saddle the MSM with. We shoot from the hip without checking our sources, do little research to back up our claims, create sensationalistic titles for our posts, and generally do everything that the MSM does to increase readership.

Now that blogs have clout, perhaps we should spend a little more time fact-checking our own asses before we post?

Users = Customers

Josh Bernoff has a great post asking developers to stop referring to people as "users:"

"I will think of people who use technology as people, customers, and friends. I won't use them, and they won't use me."

I know it sounds trivial, but I've also wrestled with what to call people who use my software.  Out of habit I'll often refer to them as "users," but I've been trying to use the word "customers" instead.  Something about the word "users" implies a certain lack of power, whereas "customers" have clout.  And it helps developers to remember that their customers are in charge.

iNewsGator

I just returned from a short vacation and discovered that Rex Hammock beat me to the news that NewsGator has released a free RSS reader for the iPhone.  If you'd like to try it out, just stop by:

http://m.newsgator.com/

Because this is a NewsGator creation, your feeds and unread items will be synchronized across all of our applications (including FeedDemon).

PS: Our iPhone reader looks great even if you're using a mobile device other than the iPhone.

Conserving Your Limited Attention

I couldn't agree more with Jeremy Zawodny:

"I see too many people I know getting caught up in the breathless hype and forgetting to think about whether the latest shiny new thing really matters in the grand scheme of things. Sooner or later the treadmill is going to tire you out..."

When I hear someone complaining about all the feeds competing for their attention, I have to wonder why they don't just unsubscribe from most of them. Are their aggregators not helping them find the feeds they're paying the least attention to so they can figure out which ones to unsubscribe from? I regularly weed out the feeds that I don't spend any time with, so catching up with my unread posts every morning doesn't turn into an all-day affair.

In my case, part of my "feed weeding" involves getting rid of a bunch of single-topic feeds, then subscribing to one feed that points out the interesting articles in those feeds. Scoble's link blog, for example, saves me from subscribing to a ton of tech-related feeds. In this situation, Scoble assumes the position of an editor (and I do the same thing with my link blog).

In fact, I could easily get rid of 90% of my feeds if I could find better editors on topics other than technology. Syndication lends itself to the rise of sites that point out the interesting stuff to us, so I'll wager we'll see more editors and fewer over-subscribed feed readers over the next few years.

Web 2.0: What Are We Building?

Back in 2004, I asked:

"What are we actually building here?  A lot of people in my profession wear rose-colored glasses and believe we're helping to make information free to the world, but some of the early proponents of television believed the same thing.  Are we really just building the next version of TV, one even more powerful because it knows your name and shopping habits?"

I thought I was being cynical then, but now I'm not so sure.  Google continues to carve out a huge share of the Internet advertising market, in large part by figuring out what we're paying attention to. The quality of the content doesn't really matter to them - only the number of eyeballs they can advertise to does.  Sounds a lot like commercial TV, doesn't it?

So far, has the Web been better than TV, or just more targeted?  And is it really worth giving up so much privacy in order to get it?

Culture of Complexity

My presentation last week about software simplicity reminded me of how far we are from simplifying our world through technology. I'm constantly turned off by technology because it serves to complicate rather than simplify our lives.

I can't count the number of times I've wanted to assault the gadgets I use because they're such a hassle to manage - and I'm a techie, so I'm supposed to know how to deal with them all. God help the rest of the population!

For example:

• My computer is way too complicated and unreliable
• My home entertainment center is almost as hard to manage and configure as a PC (I'm the only one in my family who knows how to use it)
• My cell phone is a usability nightmare (that's why I was excited by the iPhone)
• My digital camera has far too many options that I'll never use
• Even my lowly digital watch stumps me with its assortment of buttons

And on, and on, and on. The more technology we add to our lives, the more complicated our lives become. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't those of us in the tech world be working harder (a lot harder) to make our stuff simpler to use?

Really Simple Shareware

I'll be in Denver later this week for the annual Shareware Industry Conference, and this year I'm giving an hour-long presentation titled "Simplicity Ain't So Simple."  The presentation is based upon a six-part series that ran in this blog last year:

• Part I: Decide What to Hide
• Part II: Stop Showing Off
• Part III: Don't Add Features You Can't Support
• Part IV: The Blessed Curse of Power Users
• Part V: Combine Features
• Part VI: Simple = Secure

I doubt my presentation will fill an entire hour, so if you plan to be there, please come with a few questions or comments!

Nose Candy

I told this horrible little story to my children recently, and they enjoyed it so much that I figured I'd share it here.

My parents took us on a lot of long car rides when I was kid, presumably as punishment (for both them and us).  I remember how incredibly boring these trips were - I couldn't read without getting sick, and my parents would never subject themselves to the kind of music I wanted to listen to, so it was hour after hour of just sitting there watching stuff go by.

On one particularly dull trip, I brought along a little box of green "DynaMints" (these were mint candies, similar to Tic-Tacs).  For reasons that escape me now, I began to wonder what would happen if I inserted one of these mints into the nose of my sleeping older brother.  I knew I shouldn't do it, but my scientific curiosity got the better of me, so I gently placed one in his left nostril.

Unfortunately, in his sleep he apparently decided that the little mint was something escaping from his nostril, so with a loud "SNORK" he sniffed it straight up his nose and out of sight.

This, of course, woke him up.  With eyes bugging out, he let out a terrified yell over the intense mint flavor now shooting up his nasal cavity.  To make matters worse, the green candy coating was leaking out. 

He had no idea what was going on.  I, on the other hand, knew exactly what was happening, but I was laughing waayyyy too hard to explain it to him (after all, what could be funnier to a kid than seeing his older brother screaming while green goo dripped out his nose?).  After the hysterical laughter subsided, I told him what I had done.  I don't remember now, but he probably gave me the pummeling of my life over it (but it was worth it).

Every now and then I remind my brother of the famous DynaMint experiment, and the look in his eyes says he hasn't really forgiven me for it.  Perhaps my strange reaction to mints is some sort of guilty response?

Hulk Foot

The other day I was having a great run through my neighborhood - I got into "the zone" right away and stayed there.  Unfortunately, I zoned out so much that I didn't notice a chunk of rock in the road until I stepped on it, causing my foot to twist so hard that the outside of my ankle hit the road.

By the time I limped home, my ankle had swollen up like a gluttonous tick, and my foot had become a rainbow of zombie-like green and purple shades.  Upon seeing my colorful new injury, my kids named me "Hulk Foot."

I had it examined the next day, and the doctor kept saying "uh-oh" as he pressed various places on my ankle.  Here's a note to any physician reading this post: don't ever say "uh-oh" when you're examining someone.  Doing so makes the patient sweat more than necessary.

Anyway, long story short, I have a high ankle sprain, which apparently is much worse that a "normal" sprain.  Looks like I won't be running for several weeks!