69th & 70th weigh-in

69th 222.0 lb

70th 221.5 lb

I did a Golds Gym corporate wellness fitness test yesterday and here were my stats:

Flexibility test: 15 in (ranking: Average, 20 is Excellent)
Three minute stair step test: 84 beats per minute (ranking: Good, <81 is Excellent)
One minute push up test: 41 (ranking: Good, >45 is Excellent)

Today I ran 3.55 miles in 30 minutes, it kicked my butt.

68th Tuesday weigh-in

223.0 lb

Back up a bit from 221.0 lb. I have made a personal commitment to a 12 week body for life program, my free day is Tuesday. I have been successful on the body for life plan in the past, having lost 60lbs, my goal is to lose 6% bodyfat (17% bodyfat). I'll post some pictures at the end of the 12 weeks as well.

I plan to eat 5-6 meals a day six days a week, and have a free-day once a week. I plan to weigh in each Tuesday to track my progress on weight-loss. I will also take some pictures as well periodically during the 3 month program. Thanks in advance for your support.

Coping with requirement descoping

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I am in the middle of a frantic ATG code push. The QA cycle (as usual) was a painfully short 2 days. Since the project is pretty large and was months in development, many areas of the UI were changed. Some of the changes were accepted by the QA and business team, but other changes were found to be too wonky to rollout live to thousands of agents. It was inevitable that the business side would request à la carte features from the overal design implemented to roll live (due to the short qa and hard deadline). Problems arise when removing (descoping) a rejected UI change which breaks other features because of dependencies.

I was able to deliever a rapid turnaround on descoping large functional sections of a code push. I did this by keeping a record of each file that was add/changed/removed for the project as well as correlated which business requirement(s) were the motivation behind the file's change.

Traceability saved the day.

I have not been as diciplined in the past with keeping track of changes for a project, let along keeping record of how the changes correlate to the busines requirements. Now, having done this, it is something that has helped me in the following specific ways:

1. fulfill all the documented requirements of the project,
2. quickly descope rejected code,
3. rapidly find and fix bugs found against requirements,
4. perform code reviews and explain the moving parts quickly,
5. provide detailed rollout plans for the changes,
6. merge in other changes into the project with ease

Not every project may be large enough to require record keeping like this. Keeping track of this stuff is boring but the benefits of doing it really make it worth the effort for me. (Just like documenting my knowledge has.)

67th Tuesday weigh-in

221.0 lb

Down 3 lbs. Worked out the whole week and was careful my food. A very good week for me.

66th Tuesday weigh-in

224.0 lb

Up 1.0 and I blame the deep dish pizza at Gino's East in downtown Chicago. At least I exercised at the hotel gym while I was on the road. By the way, traveling while sick really sucks. The best food I ate in the windy city was the deep dish pizza at Gino's followed by fantastic burger at Rock Bottom. I really hated the ribs at Weber Grill or whatever that place was called... I like moist sweet ribs but these were much too dry, spicy and tough, that didn't prevent me from eating them all anyway for some reason...

FourGablesGuy's Best Practice tip #1478: Don't use email clients to store your knowledge

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you were to lose all your email messages today, how high of a disaster would that be for you:

• as an employee or
  
• personally?
  

Scale where 1 is "no big deal" and 10 being "I am ruined, RUINED!!!"

If I am tempted to save an email after I have read it, I stop and think:
"Why do I want to save this? "
"Oh, it is because I will/might need this info again later."
"Well, if that is the case, it should then be put in a secure place or made into a blog post, forum post, document, etc.. on a knowledge site."

I don't always put important learned information in a blog post or in a secure archive, and sometimes I am searching my email for something that I didn't put in a place I could easily find later... However, I think the more consistently I avoid storing knowledge in my email box (either in folders, sent items, trash, etc..) the better off I will be. It takes some time up front to move knowledge to the place it belongs but it takes even more time to scour your email folders for the one bit of info out of your email-haystack when you need later. If I do have to search and find information in my email, then I always move that data into a better place, because the fact I needed the information twice indicates I will need it yet again.

In my opinion we should treat email as an ephemeral messaging tool, not as a personal knowledge compendium. So until Google Wave gets broad adoption, email is like a sticky note on your desk, neither should be used to preserve important knowledge.

Addendum: Email is a bad choice, but some do survive using it as a knowledge base tool. However, the absolute worst place to maintain important knowledge would be your IM chat history. IM chat toools are great and I use them to ask and answer questions, but I kick myself when I am looking through old chat history for a nugget of information to reuse that I neglected to preserve better. I also am frustrated when managers/coworkers repeatedly ask me questions in chat that I have answered weeks or months previously. I am trying to establish the habit to put the answers I give/receive in IM chat on a wiki or (maybe an email..) or somewhere more permanent so that I can refer back to the more stable place later. IM chat is a double-edged sword, it is fast and convenient in the short term, but you can be hurt long term by failing to capture knowledge from your chat sessions.

Awesome Personal Finance Tool

I have been using an online personal finance software program for about 5 years now and love it. The tool is called Mvelopes and was started by a company in Draper, UT (Finicity). The CEO is Steven Smith last time I checked. The biggest reason I have continued to use Mvelopes is because I am lazy. I don't ever want to manually enter in receipts. I don't want to keep a log book of checks I write either. Mvelopes takes away 99% of the effort required to keep track of your family spending because the software crawls your online banks, credit cards, mortgages, 401Ks, auto loans, student loans, etc.. and digests the transactions from them presenting all of them in a consolidated simple interface. I don't have to do anything but setup my accounts in Mvelopes and login once or twice a month to reconcile spending to my budget goals (or the buckets I have setup for types of spending.)

If you are looking for a tool that can help you plan and coordinate your spending, reconcile purchases so you can always pay off your card balances and always have money for the charges and checks you and your spouse make, Mvelopes is it. You can use if from any computer, Linux, Windows or Mac (you just need a browser with Adobe flash extension.) I would recommend getting coaching sessions as well to help you get the most from the tool. Mvelopes does provide free online chat support as well.

If you use the software consistently, then it will pay for itself 10 times over time.

I think another similar web-based tool exists called Mint but I have never tried that one to know how it compares.