Adventures in Tech

I stumbled upon an old article from the Harvard Business Review about the making of a corporate athlete . The title lured me in; it is always flattering to compare corporate leaders to professional athletes that are admired by the masses. The thesis of the article is that performance demands on today's corporate leaders rival those on professional athletes, and while the latter get all the training and recovery and support they can before and after competing, corporate leaders do not. In fact leaders are required to perform under stress 24/7 year round with no time to recover or unwind. The article argues that unwinding and recovery are crucial for peak performance.  The article lists four dimensions of capacity that the leader needs to worry about: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual capacities. By strengthening each of these capacities, the corporate leader can draw on the separate strengths, and manage to handle work pressure, and performance demands. The article l...

I am fairly disappointed in the quality of the Fitbit flex bands. After a couple of months of moderate use, the bands developed deep cracks and finally broke. There are a lot of accounts online and on Facebook from Fitbit users who have experienced similar issues, so the problem is widespread and not isolated. What makes matters worse, is that after ordering and getting a replacement band from Fitbit, a rash developed on my skin. I did not experience a rash with the prior band color, and my guess is that the material is different from the original one I had. Now I have two choices, either get another replacement band with the original color, and hope that it does not cause a rash, or give up on the Fitbit completely, and wait for some of the newer health tracking technologies around the corner. An iWatch perhaps?

Many years ago I bought a pedometer to help me count the number of steps that I take on a daily basis. The idea was to walk at least ten thousand steps every day to balance the modern sedentary lifestyle, caused by sitting on a chair almost all day long, both at work and at home. The pedometer was great for a while, showing how far I was from the ideal number of steps, and making me compete with myself every day to increase the number of steps I take. Because it was bulky and inconvenient to carry in my pocket, when I finally hit the goal of ten thousand steps I stopped carrying it along. And of course the number of steps declined back to where it was before the pedometer, and I did not think anything of it. This year the flu season has not been kind to me. Between a hectic work schedule and a kid at daycare, I have been hit by some cold or flu variant every couple of weeks. My wife attributed the low immunity to a lack of physical activity, and she started looking for a way to help...

Over the weekend I watched "Fat, sick, and nearly dead", a documentary on Netflix about how a sick and overweight Australian regained his health by following a strict juice diet for about 6 months augmented by moderate exercise. The documentary tracks his progress over the 6 months period, as he travels throughout the US from coast to coast, talking to people about the health benefits of the juice diet, and showing them how it affected his health. The documentary also shows how toward the end of his diet, he started evangelizing it, and helping other people reverse their heavily medicated health problems by following a similar diet and moderate exercise. The documentary was very well made, and the author is quite likable. It was also very educational about the types of foods people consume, and the nutrients they get out of them: micro-nutrients--those that come from plant sources, and macro-nutrients--those that come from animal sources. The documentary's thesis is th...

At work I always enjoy chatting with our lead designer, who is also a strongman, and competes in strongman competitions. In addition to talking about design, I love to pick his brain about how to become more healthy and fit, and he is very generous with his advice and the lessons learned during his training. One day I noticed that he is filling a huge one gallon bottle of water, and I could not resist to ask why. He explained that he needs to drink more than a gallon of water everyday, and that without measuring how much water he consumed, at the end of the day he's not sure if he hit his goal or not. I was intrigued, and decided to see how much water I drank everyday, even though I had no intention of matching his consumption. I bought a 1 liter bottle of water, and set to drink 3 liters of water a day, as the  Mayo Clinic recommends . To my surprise I discovered that I am no where near the recommended quantity, even after factoring in the incidental drinks I consume everyday...

Documentaries about food and health are almost always controversial, especially if they include a view on dieting and weight loss. They end up espousing a myopic view of how to lose weight and be healthy, and lose the viewer who is a long time skeptic after seeing a lot of fad diets come and go. The documentary "Hungry for Change" was a pleasant change. It focused on giving out balanced information on how the US as a nation has a high percentage of obese individuals, despite all the health awareness, and diets in circulations. The premise of the documentary is that we have strayed from eating the foods our bodies evolved with through million of years to consuming highly processed foods, and if we change that by eating less processed foods, we'd have a better health. The documentary starts with some eye-opening highlights: Supermarket foods are engineered to have a long shelf life, to be appealing and addictive, and be not fulfilling so that we buy more The proto...