Trevis Rothwell's Weblog

Just when everything seemed to be going pretty smoothly, I was surprised. According to the scales, I gained one pound since last week. I’ve been continuing to stay within my allowed points, and overall eating healthier even. I really don’t know what I did wrong.

On the plus side (not as in, plus more weight, that is), it’s continually easier to eat the proper amount of food each day. The first few weeks I was still very used to eating probably at least twice what I should have been, and it was hard to adjust. Now I routinely feel sufficiently full after eating the appropriate amount.

So I suppose now I should really focus more on getting exercise in throughout the week. With the eating reasonably under control, more exercise may be what I need to do in order to continue losing weight…

My third week didn’t offer many new things learned; kept moving along at my point level, and lost a little over two pounds.

This past week I was on vacation, eating out multiple times a day, including some sweetened soda (3 points per can), a Big Mac (without sauce, 11 points), fried mozzarella (5 points per piece, estimated), and some of the best pizza I have ever had (7 points per slice, estimated).

Even with these foods, I did not go over my daily point allowance, as I also did a fair bit of walking during the trip, providing about twenty “activity points”. I thought perhaps I would break even on the scales, or maybe even go over a little bit, but hey, it’s a vacation, and I enjoyed the food.

To my surprise, I still lost nearly three pounds, bringing my grand total lost so far up to just over fifteen.

I was converting an avionics subsystem from Ada to C. It was a client application that had to talk to an Ada server, sending and receiving rather huge chunks of data, large, deeply nested, intricate structure types. The C structure type had to match the Ada type exactly, or else it wouldn’t work.

I got it working fine on our desktop simulation, but running on the actual hardware it was consistently off. After extensive testing, I realized that it was a bug in the compiler for the target hardware, such that a very particular type of structure (something like, {int, char, float}) was being packed incorrectly, resulting in a 2-byte pad that shouldn’t be there. If I reordered the structure elements, it was fine, but that particular grouping and order refused to work correctly.

It was GCC, so we could fix the compiler ourselves, right? Not very practically, as, for avionics systems the compiler has to be thoroughly qualified for avionics use, and changes equal requalification. I “fixed” it by storing the float as an array of characters, converting it to and from a real float type as we needed to use the data value.

Trivial, perhaps, but I was very excited to resolve the problem, after spending days barking up wrong trees. One usually expects that the problem is not in the compiler…

These new eating habits are continually becoming easier for me, though not every day has been a breeze. Today, for instance, I found myself having several snacks that I probably didn’t really need… low in points, but still unnecessary.

Earlier in the week, I took a bag of baby carrots with me to work. According to the Weight Watchers guide, ten of these carrots counts for zero points, so I ate ten of them and continued with my work. Later, I found myself mindlessly eating more carrots. Granted, a few extra baby carrots isn’t going to be detrimental to my weight loss goals, but it made me realize how easily I can eat available food without even thinking about it.

Results for the week? Lost five more pounds… ten total, so far.

This has, on the whole, been a good week. The first couple of days were the most difficult, but as I began to learn what kinds of food would be most nutritional and filling without exceeding my point allowances, I started to settle in to some new patterns.

The two most interesting things that I learned over the week: much of the food I had been eating was inordinately high in calories and fat, and, relatively simple changes in what I eat can make a huge difference toward eating healthier. As an example of the latter, if you are eating fast food, asking for a salad or a baked potato instead of french fries, and getting water or unsweetened tea to drink instead of a soda can significantly reduce your caloric intake. It may take some getting used to, but I suspect you’ll find (as I did) that the healthier options taste great too.

My biggest challenge had to do with eating between meals. At my desk job, I routinely start feeling hungry (either for real or in my imagination) at various points throughout the day. My normal course of action was to eat something. Now, monitoring and limiting my eating habits, I was forced to consider other options. I can still eat something, but have been finding and choosing healthier snacks. Also, I may be able to curb the hunger without eating, perhaps by drinking some water or going for a walk.

These new ways of eating are still not quite second nature to me, but I believe that I’m off to a good start. I feel healthier than I did last week, and according to the scales, I’ve lost about five pounds.

Currently listening to the recent Karen Blixt album, Mad Hope. This is a very nice blending of traditional jazz concepts with a more modern sound and hipper arrangements.

Highlights include original lyrics for the often-overlooked Paul Desmond tune “Take Ten”, performed as duet here… “7th Heaven”, a surprisingly-flowing adventure in 7/4 time… “Faith Baby Faith” with only vocal, drums, and bass (the latter played by Abraham Laboriel).

As I approach my sixth year of spending all day sitting at a desk doing avionics engineering, it’s hard not to notice that I have put on a little weight. My eating habits are not drastically different than they were in the past, but since walking around the college campus and lifting eighty pounds of computer tapes is no longer built into my regular life, I have become very physically inactive.

As a general rule, if you do not use at least as many calories as you consume, you will gain weight. The obvious solution in my case is to become more active, and indeed, I have been purposefully increasing my physical exercise. But I want to be even more proactive than that, and ensure that I am not unwittingly consuming far more calories than I really should be. Thus, tonight I signed up with Weight Watchers.

During check-in, I was surprised to see that I had put on even more weight than I realized. (I guess that explains the huge pants I’ve been wearing…) Thankfully, they did not make newcomers like me stand up in front of the class and say “hi, I’m Trevis, and I’m obese” or something like that.

The Weight Watchers program measures daily food intake using a system of points, rather than strictly measuring calories: points are determined using a function of calories, fat, and dietary fiber present in the food. Each program participant must calculate the maximum number of points they can eat each day based on a variety of criteria; my daily point intake value came out to be 47. They also encourage eating a range of different foods: grains, fruits, vegetables, proteins, etc… basically, the food pyramid we forgot about from elementary school.

I can’t say that I am looking forward to counting everything I eat, but being on a regular program with weekly advice and encouragement should help me on my journey back to my normal pants, and more importantly, to being healthier overall.

As a college student, I selected computer science as my major course of study, as it seemed most useful to my post-graduation professional plans. But I did then and do now greatly enjoy studying computer science on my own; I don’t need the structure and motivation provided by a formal classroom setting in order to persuade myself to learn more about software engineering and algorithms.

So of what value is a college education to someone who is motivated to learn on their own? Everyone is different, but in retrospect, I for one greatly appreciate the breadth of study required by the college curriculum.

I not only enjoy studying computer science on my own; I also enjoy studying a variety of other topics. But I tend to hyper-focus on often very specific topics and study them in-depth. I might, for example, study United States history at the expense of ignoring all other history; more narrowly, I might study the period of the founding of the United States at the expense of ignoring all other periods of United States history.

This is not necessarily a bad trait; I reckon it’s better to be studious about a few particular topics than not at all. But in college I was required to take a certain number of classes that met particular criteria, and accordingly ended up studying topics that I had not previously considered: Russian history, early 20th century United States culture, jazz history, and geology, to name a few.

All of these topics are interesting, but not all are really my cup of tea. I might never study these topics to any significant way again, but my knowledge in these areas has been greatly expanded through the coursework. Even within jazz, which I do enjoy listening to, I found myself listening to periods and genre of jazz that I had previously ignored: I don’t particularly like listening to Jelly Roll Morton, but I have better appreciation for his contributions to jazz, and can listen to his recordings with more understanding of what he was doing at the time.

Will any of this knowledge help me to get a better job? Probably not. My major studies of computer science — those things I likely would have learned anyway — were the part of my college education that helped me get work. But all of the other things I learned helped to make life more interesting, and I feel better about myself for having learned them.

In August 2008, I applied to the Apple iPhone Developer Program under the name of my software consulting company. I went weeks without hearing back from Apple, but finally got a request to send them, via fax, proof of my company’s legal existence, such as the company name registration. I got that faxed to them within a few days.

Several weeks after that, I received a voicemail message from someone at Apple concerning my application, with instructions to call back at a certain phone number. I dialed that number many times over a period of weeks, but it was constantly busy.

At the recommendation of a friendly stranger on the internet, I wrote my initial application off as lost in never-never land, created a new account at apple.com and applied again, this time as an individual developer rather than a company. My application was immediately approved.

The several months I spent waiting for my application process to go through I opted to not use for learning the iPhone SDK and getting my first application ready, because if I never got into the developer program I wouldn’t be able to distribute my software and didn’t want to waste the time. So now that I was accepted into the program, I had a nice learning curve ahead of me.

I dabbled in several application ideas, mostly getting nowhere. Finally, to help motivate myself by getting something accomplished, I remembered one of the first Java applets I wrote some eleven years earlier: the Almond Emulator! This was a little program that I cooked up to introduce myself to Java GUI development, inspired by a magnet advertising the Almond Board of California which arrived in the mail for reasons not sufficiently investigated.

Armed with stock photography from iStockPhoto.com, I assembled an iPhone version of this nearly useless utility. My original plan was to release it to the Apple iTunes store for free, but given the plethora of similarly useless programs that were making a good bit of money, I ultimately listed it for sale at the lowest possible amount (99 cents, in United States currency). The program provides marginal value, but people pay more than 99 cents for things like clown noses and cans of spring-loaded snakes, and I figured that my program was in the same general category.

Less than four business days after submitting it to the iTunes store, the program was approved and available for purchase, and started selling immediately. One kind user even gave the program a five-star review, stating that it’s humorous, but “not worth the money.”

One of the principles of good business is to offer your product at a fair price. I have other more useful iPhone applications in the queue that I quite solidly intend to sell for money, but in this case I accepted this reviewer’s constructive criticism and changed the Almond Emulator to be a free download.

So I am now a real, live iPhone developer. As far as I am aware, this may well be the easiest way for a programmer to put a software product out in the marketplace and get payment in exchange for their work.

A few weeks ago, I happened upon the iPhone game Ben Stein: It’s Trivial. You might recognize Ben from his trivia game show Win Ben Stein’s Money, or from his work in personal finance education, or from his recent documentary film Expelled, or from one of the many other various things he has done in life. I played the game for a while, and found it quite enjoyable, but was especially delighted to see on the game’s website that the first 100 people to send in proof of finishing the game would get an certificate of completion signed by Mr. Stein.

“That’d be awesome to hang on my office wall,” I thought, and spent about twelve hours over the following week finishing the game. A few days later I received notification that I made it into the first 100, being “inducted into the Hall of Stein.”

Shortly after I finished the game, Jennifer borrowed my iPhone on several occasions and also made it into the Hall of Stein. As of this writing, there are only eight others on the list, so there’s plenty of opportunity for more!

For the Boston leg of our trip, we actually stayed across the Charles River in Cambridge, at the Residence Inn near Kendall Square. This hotel was not as fancy and exquisite as our hotel in Washington, but the staff were more friendly, and our room — a “studio suite” — was much larger for about the same price.

While the hotel breakfast buffet in Washington cost $20, the buffet at this hotel was free. Not quite as fancy, but very edible, and, well, free.

Upon learning that we were on our honeymoon, the hotel staff surprised us with a gift bag, including Residence Inn-branded slippers and a coffee cup.

An outstanding public aquarium in its own right, the New England Aquarium in Boston was especially impressive compared to the National Aquarium in DC.

Several varieties of penguins, a group of seals, a special display with thousands of jellyfish, and a four-story central tank full of spectacular ocean life were some of the highlights of this fine aquatic exhibit. Located on a harbor near the Atlantic Ocean, the aquarium also offers whale-watching boat rides. $20 per person was certainly more expensive than the National Aquarium, but far more worth the price.

After touring the aquarium, we sat on a bench near Quincy Market and watched children playing in a water fountain. This part of the city, just blocks away from the infamous Freedom Trail and government buildings where so much early United States history played out, seemed very safe and very clean.

We bought some groceries at the 7-11 shop on the corner, and took the MBTA back to Kendall Square.

Not surprisingly, you cannot simply waltz into the White House whenever they please; you have to schedule a tour through the congressman of your choice. Six months in advance, I had scheduled a tour of the White House through the office of Senator Chuck Grassley.

After sending personal information for a background check to the senator’s office, I received a set of instructions for where to go for the tour, along with a lengthy list of items we were not allowed to bring with us, including: bags, purses, food, beverages, hair brushes, hand lotions, pens, knitting needles, guns, ammunition, fireworks, martial arts weapons, knives, or cameras. I didn’t care so much about not bringing in fireworks, but I really wanted to take some photographs. Oh well.

Our tour was scheduled for 9:30am, and we arrived at the White House visitor gate slightly after 9:00am. We were quickly searched and admitted, and walked into what turned out to be a self-guided, self-paced tour of about seven rooms on the ground and first floors of the building. While it might feel like a museum, it is important to realize that these “public” areas are actually functional parts of the presidential home, temporarily open to visitors.

There were many curious pieces of art on display, including the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington that was saved from British invasion by Dolley Madison, George Healy’s infamous painting of Abraham Lincoln, and, one of my personal favorite paintings, Jacob Lawrence’s The Builders.

It is humbling to stand in the White House and realize you are in the home of some of the greatest people in United States history. We finished our tour just before 9:30am, our scheduled start time.

Our time in Washington ended much too quickly for me, but our trip was only half over. On Saturday morning we boarded the Amtrak to Boston.

Neither of us had ridden on a real passenger train before. It was roomier than an airplane, but a very similar travel experience. The train station in Washington — Union Station — was exquisite, though it seemed that many of the stations we passed through were not exactly in the best parts of their respective towns.

Passing through New York City was perhaps the most interesting. I had never been there before, save the inside of an airport, and was amazed at the sheer size of the city. It struck me as both majestic and run-down at the same time, and I could only imagine what variety of life and culture thrives in our nation’s great melting pot.

While we were traveling roughly along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, we weren’t quite close enough to see the ocean for much of the journey. We did manage a brief view while we were in Connecticut, complete with a boat-filled marina and lighthouses.

We got a couple of hamburgers and cans of ginger ale from the dining car. It seems that ginger ale is a popular beverage in the Northeast, far more than in the Midwest anyway. And evidently Schweppe’s Ginger Ale is more highly esteemed than Canada Dry, as the dining car clerk only had one can of Schweppe’s left, which he charged us for, but gave us a can of Canada Dry for free…

We arrived safely at the Boston Back Bay station, and were greeted by not one but two Dunkin’ Donut shops within the building. Several taxis were parked outside waiting for travelers; we got inside one and took a ride to our hotel in Cambridge.