Some savings are not worth it

I'm particularly partial to Vanilla Lattes, there is no finer way to bring coffee in my opinion.

A Starbuck's Vanilla Latte

Of course, Vanilla Lattes are not particular conducive to diets - something which I'm on since my recent health assessment. A Starbucks Grande Vanilla Latte clocks in at 250 calories. So I decided to be good and try a Skinny Vanilla Latte, total 120 calories, from my local Starbucks.

OMG - it was awful :-( It had a sort of metallic after taste to it, and it did not evoke that feeling of deep satisfaction that a proper latte should. It was a struggle to finish it, and I seriously considered just leaving it. I, a man who has been accused of inhaling Lattes. I don't in any way think this was the fault of the barista who made it, there are just somethings you shouldn't do. And making a Latte with non-fat milk and sugar-free syrup is definitely one of them!

So today I went and got a normal Starbuck's Grande Vanilla Latte. It was as nectar. Admittedly nectar that comes with a 250 calorie price tag, more than double that of the Skinny version, but it is soooooo worth it. If I have to sacrifice 130 calories from elsewhere in my daily calorie intake, or simply take to having have coffee every other day, then that is a sacrifice I will gladly make.

Some sacrifices are just not worth it.

Pimping your (data)self

Health Assessment

Just been for a health assessment. It was an interesting experience for a number of reasons, so I'll probably do a separate entry on it, but I came away with two goals. 

1. Cut done on the amount caffeine I'm consuming.
2. Lose weight.

The first was a surprise as I don't drink much coffee. If I drink any at all it's limited to one cup a day. I do have a weakness for Vanilla Lattes, which is one of the finest drinks ever invented. However more than one cup a day makes me buzz a bit too much. However I do drink quite a lot of tea and a certain amount of coke, both of which have caffeine as well - though generally not as much as coffee. That one's quite easy to fix. Cut out the coke, and change some of the tea to decaf tea. I'm trying to limit it to 2 cups of caffeinated tea a day now and use de-caffeinated tea for the other cups.

Edit: 3 days after I published this the BBC had a piece on their website about "Coffee Addiction: Do people consume too much caffeine" - it seems I'm not alone :-) 

The second, sadly was not a surprise. I've known for a while that the waist size on the trousers was going up. However it was gently but clearly pointed out that the amount of extra weight I'm carrying constitutes a health risk. Normal Body Mass Index (BMI) should be 18.5-25, mine's currently 35. 

Ouch. So time to lose some weight.

Losing weight

Contrary to popular belief, losing weight is not difficult and does not require any fancy diets or gizmo's.

If "Number of calories consumed per day" < "Number of calories expended per day", you will lose weight. Fact! In fact you can't not lose weight if you follow that simple rule.

How you achieve that happy state of affairs is, of course, the interesting part.

Counting calories

I do it by counting calories. You just very carefully monitor everything you eat and drink, and make sure you stay under a daily limit. I've done it before now and it's been very successful - until I put the weight back on of course (but that's another lifestyle issue).

Previously I used an app from Vidaone on my (then) Windows phone. They had ported this to the iPhone, but it's since disappeared from the UK AppStore which makes me think it's not being supported anymore. It is available in the US store apparently so I could be wrong about this. But anyway it's not available for me to use in the UK.

A bit of a digging suggested that www.myfitnesspal.com offered an iPhone/iPad app that did much the same thing with some nice extra's like automatic linking to the weight info from my Withings scales. Nifty things, Withing scales. They weight you, calculate your BMI and Fat percentage and then upload it to the internet automatically but privately using Wi-Fi. You just access the results by browser or iPhone or Android at your connivence.

And MyFitnessPal is free.

The cynic in me immediately says why is it free? The answer is of course DATA. In return for providing you with a place to store you meals/weights etc, hosting a very big database of food calorific values, and making it incredibly easy for you to enter what you eat into your food diary (the barcode scanning works very well), they get incredibly detailed info on your eating habits, exercise habits and how it is affecting your weight. This is a goldmine for the food industry and others, and I mean do mean GOLDMINE.

Once you realise this you just have to ask yourself, am I willing to trade this information for what is actually a very good app. Hence the title, pimping your (data)self. In this case, for me, I think it is. 

This is just one of many examples on what is happening in our modern life with the data in our lives. Companies are now willing to trade, what are actually really good services, not for money but for data.

You just need to make sure that what you are getting back in return is worth it from your perspective.

Final Warning

Do not assume they will be looking at this data in isolation - if these guys have any kind of intelligence they will be taking this data and combining it with all the other data that is out on the net and wringing every drop of info they can out of it.

You have told they where you live - they could start combining this with the locations of all the fast food outlets in the world. Is there a correlation between that and overweight people? What would health  insurance companies or governments pay for that kind of info?

Big Data / Data Science crops up in the damnedest places doesn't it :-)

Christmas Crashes and Other Tales

Another year, other Christmas. Technically it was even a White Christmas ... technically? Well it didn't actually snow on the day, but there was still plenty of white stuff still on the ground from earlier in the week.

A Christmas Dog Walk!

However it wasn't all tinsel, turkey and presents - with an absolutely immaculate sensing of timing our AV File Server (Audio Visual) decided to crash on Christmas morning. Well it didn't so much crash as die ... completely, utterly and irretrievably. I was adding some extra storage to it and this required a reboot. Everything was going smooth and by the numbers, until the server didn't restart after the reboot. Some fairly rapid and frenzied diagnoses later it was determined that its motherboard was completely kaput. For those in the know, not even beep codes. Ho hum.

Open heart surgrey on a mini-ITX server

 If it was mid-year you could get a replacement motherboard next day, however given it's Christmas and half the country is buried in snow, the earliest we can get a replacement here is Thursday :-(

For once I can feel fairly smug at this point as all the data was backuped before I started and anyway it sits on an external storage array - a Drobo (www.drobo.com).

The Drobo temporarilty sat on a desk

So the Drobo was moved from the rack to a temporary home on the office desk and hooked up to one of the desktop machines. This was renamed and re-IPed so, like Clark Kent emerging from a phone box, it's now masquerading as the AV server. Serenity, films, photos and music, has been restored to the household.

So the moral of this Christmas Tale? - Always backup your data!  This was just an annoying inconvenience for us, which ate a bit of time. It could have been much, much worse; the data on this server is all our digital photos (~50,000), music and various home movies. A thousand, thousand memories. I know you never think it will happen to you, but one day it will. PCs break, disks corrupt, CDs and DVDs fade. Remember, data isn't real until it exists in at least two places, so always, ALWAYS, have a backup.

So a final thought for Christmas - where does the rise of the mobile phone and the subsequent demise of the phone box leave Superman? Caught short and exposed? Don't let your data be ;-)

Merry Christmas!

Organic Veg

A couple of months ago we got a flyer through the door advertising Abel & Cole Organic Veg. This piqued our interest so we had a dig around on the internet for organic veg suppliers who delivered to your door. We turned up two suppliers in the UK who could deliver in our area. Abel & Cole and Riverford. We did some more research, forums and the such like, and this suggested that Riverford would be the better option. Riverford use local farms to grow a lot of their produce so the veg doesn't have to travel too far before it reaches your table. Abel & Cole seem to source everything from Covent Garden so things can end up doing a lot of miles.

Ordering from Riverford could not be simpler. You just logon to their website www.riverford.co.uk and select the boxes that you would like. Boxes? Yes, Riverford base their ordering system around selections of fruit and veg that come in boxes. You simply choose the boxes that match your circumstances and each week a selection of veg arrive on your doorstep. The contents vary each week depending on what is available and what's in season. There are boxes for couples, boxes for families, boxes of fruit, boxes of without potatoes, you name it, there's a box for it ... well, in terms of vegetables anyway :-)

Small Veg box from Riverford

We've been doing this for a couple of months now and so far it has all worked very well. Every Tuesday a box of veg and a box of fruit magically appear in the back garden - the Riverford guys are great at understanding obscure instructions about where to leave your veg so it is protected from the vagaries of the British weather.

The changing contents of the boxes is a surprising benefit, you find yourself trying vegetables you've never dreamed of or even heard of before. The quality has been absolutely astounding. Everything is very fresh and wonderfully tasty. In fact that has been the biggest thing for us.

The taste. 

We've all become so used to the homogenised, standardised fair that the supermarkets serve, with guaranteed conformity and shelf life that often spans weeks, that we've forgotten what vegetables should taste like. We've pretty much stopped using gravy in our house. Previously it was used to drown the tasteless veg, now our veg tastes so good we don't need it. Jugs of gravy are being left untouched on the table as for the first time in years we taste proper, wholesome, tasty veg.

There are a few things to watch. You need to plan your use of the vegetables more carefully. These tasty delicacies may not last as long as the supermarket fare your used to. Our forefathers were well used to this and to be honest once your back in the swing of it, it's no great chore. I do wonder if this is the source of some of the complaints you see on the web about organic veg.

And watch the grapes - they just don't last in our house. Delivered on Tuesday and gone by Wednesday, normally accompanied by comments of the guilty parties denying having eaten any of them.

www.riverford.co.uk