Shan’s Weekly Roundup

January 3-9, 2010

This week was a little bit rough. I spent New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day feeling sick, with headaches and sore muscles, and then seemed to get better on Monday and Tuesday, but the headaches persisted. I wasn’t sleeping well, and finally decided on Wednesday to take a sick day and sleep all day. This was a good decision; it allowed my body the time it needed to recover from whatever had been ailing me.

Work
Work is going okay. Right now they have me working on modifications to an existing system. It is written in what I consider to be a very old style of PHP, and to me it feels very spaghetti-like. I’m used to using frameworks now, and having scripts included and required all over the place seems really… amateurish to me. It probably executes a little faster than if it were built with a framework, but you know what else would make the scripts run faster? Database indexes. There were a grand total of three indexes on the database tables when I arrived.

One of the first things I worked on when I arrived last month was making a particular report faster. What I found was that to draw a table with about six columns and about 300 rows, the script was hitting the database over 1000 times. When I was done, I’d added a number of database indexes and decreased the number of hits on the database to less than 15 queries. Sure, those queries took longer than the original ones, but the overall effect was a serious speedup in the script.

Developing in Windows for IE8 makes my soul die a little bit more each day.

Fitness
I didn’t make it to the gym at all this week. This is bad. I wanted to go Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights after work for group ex classes. Because of the persistent headaches, every night I opted out of going. I did stay on track with eating, though. I went to Wal-Mart and purchased the cutest little food scale, and I’m already finding it helps me really understand how much of something I am eating. I am down about five pounds from my baseline weight (measured on Dec. 28), so that’s great. I’m attributing most of that to holiday overeating than to anything I’ve done this week, though. Hopefully I can lose one or two pounds a week. From everything I’ve read and everyone I’ve talked to, that is a reasonable expectation for healthy weight loss.

Stay on the Weight Watchers plan so far hasn’t been that bad. Some of it doesn’t make sense. For instance, a can of Coke is 3 points, and a Nature Valley granola bar is 4 points. That doesn’t make sense. Coke is definitely worse for me than a granola bar. Regardless of the occasional instance of points weirdness, I think the act of keeping track of what I’m eating is actually what’s making the difference, not what system I’m participating in. I’m using the Weight Watchers online tool, and it’s quite well built. From a UI perspective, there are a few things I would like to change. I wonder if there’s a way to contribute suggestions to their IT department. Going to look into that.

Adventures
I haven’t really gone on any real adventures yet this week. Today I am going to hang out with Kat and Courtney. We’re going shoe shopping. I’m not seriously excited about the shoe shopping, but the hanging out I am excited about. We always have a good time when we hang out, and that is great.

Overall, it was a good week. I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend, hanging with my friends today and Alan tomorrow. Will be good.