white noise

How many hours a day do you sit? 8? 10? All of them? I thought about this question a few weeks ago and I decided I was very close to the latter. It certainly wasn’t always the case. Back in college I walked, walked, walked. Sometimes rode a bike. And fairly often went for a run a few miles around campus. In the ten or so years to follow, I slowed down some, but as a teacher I still spent most of my work days on my feet, all day, pacing around the classroom, or rushing through airports. Over the past couple years I’ve moved into full-time web monkey, and I’m literally paid to sit on my rear…all day. I don’t even walk to conference rooms anymore, because all our meetings are handled online. I tend to work about 9 or 10 hours a day. That’s a lot of ass time. What’s worse is that now that the construction in the basement is finished, I can look forward to sitting even more at home. Watching TV, movies, playing games, working on web projects, etc. It just happens that most of my pastimes involve sitting, too.

I bring this up because usually this time of year I trim back on my diet, and drop some pounds before going into the holiday gorge-fest. This year I trimmed back as usual, and nothing was happening. Na da. And I realized that inactivity is killing me. My already limping metabolism, has now reached a point where it can only be measured on a geologic time scale, and no amount of caloric control is going to have a big effect.

I’ve never been a big fan of having an exercise schedule. I do actually enjoy some activities that don’t involve sitting, but once you schedule these things it has always seemed like a second (or third?) job instead of recreation. The other factor has always been just a matter of time. I may not make the best use of every minute, but there are never enough hours in the day for want I want to do. A constant reminder of this is the dusty music equipment I haven’t fired up in ages.

None the less, I decided it was time for action, literally. Starting, oh, I guess 5 or 6 weeks ago now, I began spending about an hour working out five nights a week. None of this ramping up from 10 minutes twice a week stuff. I had to quit being lazy cold turkey. Generally my hour consists of 45 minutes on the elliptical finished up with 15 minutes of free weights.

Forget the before and after pictures. I’ll be just watching the scale and the resultant change in BMI. I started this little forey with a BMI of 32.7, which is squarely in the “obese” classification. I’m not really trying to get into the “normal” range; the last time I got down that low was before college and D says I had a distinct bobblehead look to me. Shouldn’t dudes with big heads get a modified BMI chart?

Anyway, besides getting out of the dreaded “o”-zone I don’t have a specific BMI goal; it’s just a measure of improvement I can watch over time, and maybe post occasionally. Generally, I don’t like blog entries about weight loss and diet – they tend to come off all uninteresting and self-absorbed (as if a blog is anything but). But there also a certain kick in the pants you get once your actions are public.

I just got back from Chicago where I attended the technical sausage-fest that is Adobe’s users conference, MAX. Some 4000 code monkies and graphic design zealots descended there to see the latest technologies and mingle over a lot of free beer. Yeah, that’s right, if Adobe spares no expense on one thing, it’s the open bar. For several hours, every night, free beer and wine. The cost must be staggering.

But back to the technology. You can certainly tell this is the Macromedia MAX conference from days past, only adapted to their new corporate parent. The products covered are all traditional Macromedia products (Flash, Flex, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, etc.) with only an occasion mention of Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. Even the Adobe CEO made only a brief appearnence and left the bulk of the emceeing to the former Macromedia figurehead, and current Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch.

There was a good mix of sessions, ranging from the all-attendee general sessions of keynote speeches and product coming attractions, to smaller focused presentations and hands-on workshops, to very small discussion groups. The best sessions I saw included ColdFusion security (e.g. how hackers will attack your stuff 101) and an introduction to AIR, Adobe’s new desktop runtime. Some of the less technical talks were great, too, like presentations about building an experience for a user, not just an app. – thoughts that may make their way into future blog entries.

There was also a wide range in users, from gurus to newbies, which makes for a good mix of ego-inflating and humbling conversations depending on whom you ran into. It was also cool catching some of the Adobe product managers (like for Flash, After Effects, and ColdFusion) for one-on-one talks. But one of the most intriguing conversations I had was with a couple guys from from the design house Big Spaceship. They were at the conference winning an award for their amazing HBO Voyeur project. It was really interesting to hear about how HBO approached them for the project, how they worked with the HBO film crews, and other technical details of the Flash build. Most impressive was how it involved (at most!) 3 people on their end and lasted 3 months, from bid to delivery. It’s hearing and seeing things like this that make me want to throw in my boring corporate towel, and move to New York.

Oh nevermind, I think there’s a SQL Server database calling my name…