I left Vancouver some 7 years ago (I can't believe that it's been that long) and flew across the ocean to pursue a masters in Japan. One thing led to another and it seems that I am still here. I would tell my friends in Japan that the only other place in the world where people had a longer life span was the place were I was from. Everyone was healthy. In the summers, people would bike, job and roller blade and we have a wonderful selection of food to try out. I would say that west coast food is up there, so long as you know the right places. When I was back home, I knew those places.
No, it didn't have to be super posh, but if it was a small funky little outfit that knew what to knew. I made a point of knowing about it. Ever since I was young, good food was important to me. If it was good, I wanted to eat it and know how to make it.
I don't think of myself as getting older, but if you were to compare me 5 years ago and now, there is a difference. 5 years ago, even people the same age as I wouldn't be able to keep up with me. I still have my spurts of energy, but a good time to me now is sitting down with a few good friends having a good conversation or going out for a long jog or reading a good book on something is something that I enjoy. I still do know a lot of people and I meet a lot too, but there are too few that I would consider wanting to spend quality time with, but that is for another story. I'm here to talk about getting older and with that, a slowing metabolism.
The nice thing about Facebook is that it's useful to keep up with people and the one thing that I've noticed about friends back in Canada is that many old friends have put on significant weight. Compared to what I see in Japan, where people are generally thin, many of my friends have simply gotten bigger. I still would like to boast Vancouver as the most healthy city in the world, some how, right now I can't bring myself to do that. This isn't a new topic. It's been well documented. Jamie Oliver does a good job of talking about it.
About 2 years ago, I started actively tracking my weight, wanting to bring down body fat and increase the amount of muscle mass on my body. I can tell you, it is a hard feat to accomplish. Though many of my friends say that I do look like that I've lost weight, my body has changed enough that my old clothing doesn't fit me anymore and I've become much more sensitive about clothing fit when buying new clothes.
Knowing how to eat healthy isn't hard
One thing that I've learned from this project is of what my dietary requirements are and how a variety of foods fit in to accomplishing that goal. I look at food differently now compared to before. Before it was a matter of buying whatever I felt like, now it has become more about "strategic eating" instead of "dieting" and I am glad for it.
What I have learned from this process is that the average person knows too little about food and nutrition; our health is suffering too much from this lack of education. Do you know what your daily caloric requirements are? If you are trying to grow muscle, do you know how much protein you should be taking? If you're trying to gain muscle and lose fast, do you know what kinds of foods should you be eating and avoiding?
I've made charts and gone through plenty of nutritional data on different foods to figure out what to eat and avoid. I know how many calories and fat is in a bag of potato chips, that cola is bad and I've gotten to the point that I've given up drinking much juice for water. I've reduced the frequency of times I eat deep fried and fatty foods and I am conscious about how food is flavored. I avoid excessive butter and oil. I also avoid creamy sauces. But I still have them from time to time.
I know herbs, vinegar and lemon are great and healthy ways of seasoning foods. I also know how to pick flavorful cheeses over processed ones knowing that I'll use less in quantity and make something just as delicious. I also am aware of how chain restaurants and lunch sets have been increasing the amount of cheap carbohydrates to fill people up and cutting down vegetables and meats because those ingredients are more expensive. I avoid some lunch sets because there is too much rice.
But the problem is that too few people understand this. The older we get, the more our metabolism slows down and with the lack of understanding the average person has about dietary requirements, the fatter and unhealither they'll get.
It is unfortunate, I've already seen a person get sent to the hospital because of poor nutrition. The man is 60 but his idea of a good meal is deep fried chicken. There is more to food than strong flavoring, because if that is all that you do know, you will miss out on the more subtle nuanced flavors.
How good is your sense of taste?
I can tell the difference between a good bag of rice and a normal one. The same goes for vegetables. If you've lived in Vancouver, you'll know what good corn from Abbortsford tastes like, much in the same way I know what good vegetables from the countryside in Japan tastes like.
The average person doesn't understand this, unfortunately. There's too much sugar in candies, too much salt and other flavoring in the usual cooking, but if you know your ingredients, you'll know what is good food. I've been to the seafood markets and some of the best food in Japan and even as a foreigner, I know of the existence of the good stuff and can tell the difference between the regular.
There is a lot of food out there cooked to crap. There's also a lot of hidden flavor hidden stuck to the pan that many people unwittingly wash away. The point is to know how to bring out the best flavors with minimal additives and to few of us understand this. Most of us are addicted to the processed artificial strong flavors in foods produced by companies looking to turn a profit. They really don't care about your health and you as a consumer need to be educated enough to be able to walk away from this faustian bargain.But too few people know about what good food is all about and that to me is unfortunate.
An ounce of prevention...
Is plenty worth more than me pounding some sense in to your head. Too many people die prematurely because of dietary issues. Much of America is obese and more friends in Vancouver are getting fatter as they age. It's sad really. I've already seen one relative in Japan get hospitalized in Japan because of poor nutrition. Less and less people in Japan know how to cook and I believe that health will deteriorate in the next few generations. Men generally don't know how to cook and there is a growing population of girls that don't know how either, especially in the cities.
Perhaps I sound like a nag, reiterating that too few people understand food, but I really mean it. People don't understand. The price of good foods are getting expensive and cheap unhealthy foods are becoming more prevalent. But there is an upside to all this, the more you learn about food the more conscious about the good stuff you'll be. You'll eat more delicious foods, become healthier and look better as a result of it. I guarantee it.
But if you're looking for more nobler reasons; it's a great tool to impress the opposite sex.
Nuff said. I have some vodka-kiwi-honey punch to drink.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Sunday, July 01, 2012
Task lists, notes and tickets
Since jumping into the world of back-end IT support for office and financial systems, I've found it interesting that in the IT world that issues/incidents/requests are tracked using a ticketing system. When something needs to get done, a ticket is generated and passed around the appropriate groups/departments and then a person is then assigned to complete the task.
In theory, it looks like a queued system of tasks and a pool of processors (people) working away to keep the queue empty-- a programming esque way of dealing with tasks. Unfortunately, theory and reality diverge in this case.
The particular IT department I work in has the server guys and application/data guys in different teams (and this is still a gross simplification). There are divisions with business analysts and programmers as well... long story short, with many different departments (even located in different regions) things "naturally" take a long time to complete.
When something simple takes 4~6 days to complete:
Since starting the new job, one of the biggest pain in the rear is keeping track of open issues. The longer it takes for an open issue to get done, the more open issues that one needs to keep track of. The process of getting folder access permission between 2 groups and then automatically sending data to folders would generally be as simple task as all you would need to do is setup a share and then allow people with certain class access to the folder.
The problem in this case, a formal e-mail needs to be sent out to get permission to grant access, then the request needs to be forwarded to the network team where they'll setup the access and then another group needs to be contacted to setup the daily file transfer process. Since each step is dependent on each other, it can take easily 3~4 days if everything goes well. If there are problems along the way or if the request is a little exotic, things can end up taking longer.
Suppose next that requests come in at 4 per day and the turn around time for a single request is 4 days. At any one point, you'll have 16 open requests to deal with on a given day since it takes time to have each case resolved.
When I was working as a researcher, each person might only have 3~4 projects on the go at the most over a 2~3 month period. The number of open projects/tasks that one needs to keep in mind is very different.
I've since started keeping daily logs of what I've been doing to keep up with everything I've been doing and even that has it's limitations.
The perfect todo list is a holy grail:
Traditional task lists are very primitive devices, but it has been the backbone of semi-structured human being since forever. Either you keep a list of things that needs to be done or you don't and do whatever you feel like. As much as I value unstructured time, keeping a list of things that needs to be done, or even things that I want to get done and executing on them is equally important.
If you've heard that taking notes or jotting down ideas down in a notebook is good for you, the most important thing about keeping track of ideas is that you're hashing out a list of things that you've thought about and want to do.
I value the paraphrased words of Richard Hamming when he said that "you'll travel much further if your steps are planned rather than taking a random walk." The difference in distance travelled is quadratic (and this assumes that you get to the furthest point of your random walk and *stay* there).
Humans are bad at context switching:
The human mind works in a similar way to computers when it comes to context switching (a fancy word for changing tasks). In generally, when a context switch occurs, what was loaded in the CPU get swapped out and the state of the new task gets loaded in and the processed. This is great when the state and knowledge of the task in progress can be accurately stored. For the case of computers, this works fairly decently, for humans, unfortunately, this isn't the case.
The easiest way of mitigating performance hits for context switching in humans is quite simple: reduce the amount of data that needs to be swapped out so that the "loading" and "unloading" of information into the mind is reduced. People serving specialized functions is the obvious reason why many people are given "jobs."
I believe that there are 2 ways of improve one's ability to context switch. The first is to work on a set of inter-related tasks (ie a project) such that you're not need to remember and forget information when you do a new task. The second is to create a "remembering" infrastructure that allows you to store information about a task the last time that you left it.
Assistants:
Powerful people had assistants, whether they were secretaries or otherwise. The point of having assistants is to create an infrastructure where information was automatically catalogued, packaged and available on demand. We are starting to see some great work going in that direction with platforms such as Evernote. As a note taking platform, it is fairly useful, but there needs to be a better link between the gathering of information and correlating that into actionable tasks and the management of those tasks.
I've been reading on and off on productivity and task management, it is an interesting field.
In theory, it looks like a queued system of tasks and a pool of processors (people) working away to keep the queue empty-- a programming esque way of dealing with tasks. Unfortunately, theory and reality diverge in this case.
The particular IT department I work in has the server guys and application/data guys in different teams (and this is still a gross simplification). There are divisions with business analysts and programmers as well... long story short, with many different departments (even located in different regions) things "naturally" take a long time to complete.
When something simple takes 4~6 days to complete:
Since starting the new job, one of the biggest pain in the rear is keeping track of open issues. The longer it takes for an open issue to get done, the more open issues that one needs to keep track of. The process of getting folder access permission between 2 groups and then automatically sending data to folders would generally be as simple task as all you would need to do is setup a share and then allow people with certain class access to the folder.
The problem in this case, a formal e-mail needs to be sent out to get permission to grant access, then the request needs to be forwarded to the network team where they'll setup the access and then another group needs to be contacted to setup the daily file transfer process. Since each step is dependent on each other, it can take easily 3~4 days if everything goes well. If there are problems along the way or if the request is a little exotic, things can end up taking longer.
Suppose next that requests come in at 4 per day and the turn around time for a single request is 4 days. At any one point, you'll have 16 open requests to deal with on a given day since it takes time to have each case resolved.
When I was working as a researcher, each person might only have 3~4 projects on the go at the most over a 2~3 month period. The number of open projects/tasks that one needs to keep in mind is very different.
I've since started keeping daily logs of what I've been doing to keep up with everything I've been doing and even that has it's limitations.
The perfect todo list is a holy grail:
Traditional task lists are very primitive devices, but it has been the backbone of semi-structured human being since forever. Either you keep a list of things that needs to be done or you don't and do whatever you feel like. As much as I value unstructured time, keeping a list of things that needs to be done, or even things that I want to get done and executing on them is equally important.
If you've heard that taking notes or jotting down ideas down in a notebook is good for you, the most important thing about keeping track of ideas is that you're hashing out a list of things that you've thought about and want to do.
I value the paraphrased words of Richard Hamming when he said that "you'll travel much further if your steps are planned rather than taking a random walk." The difference in distance travelled is quadratic (and this assumes that you get to the furthest point of your random walk and *stay* there).
Humans are bad at context switching:
The human mind works in a similar way to computers when it comes to context switching (a fancy word for changing tasks). In generally, when a context switch occurs, what was loaded in the CPU get swapped out and the state of the new task gets loaded in and the processed. This is great when the state and knowledge of the task in progress can be accurately stored. For the case of computers, this works fairly decently, for humans, unfortunately, this isn't the case.
The easiest way of mitigating performance hits for context switching in humans is quite simple: reduce the amount of data that needs to be swapped out so that the "loading" and "unloading" of information into the mind is reduced. People serving specialized functions is the obvious reason why many people are given "jobs."
I believe that there are 2 ways of improve one's ability to context switch. The first is to work on a set of inter-related tasks (ie a project) such that you're not need to remember and forget information when you do a new task. The second is to create a "remembering" infrastructure that allows you to store information about a task the last time that you left it.
Assistants:
Powerful people had assistants, whether they were secretaries or otherwise. The point of having assistants is to create an infrastructure where information was automatically catalogued, packaged and available on demand. We are starting to see some great work going in that direction with platforms such as Evernote. As a note taking platform, it is fairly useful, but there needs to be a better link between the gathering of information and correlating that into actionable tasks and the management of those tasks.
I've been reading on and off on productivity and task management, it is an interesting field.
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