Blake on Stuff

No, this isn’t a DDR post, but it’s close.

During my regular blast through Lifehacker posts a few weeks ago, this post called Burn 600 Calories a Day Typing (source) caught my eye. Long story short, Jonathan Fields built a fancy keyboard for his treadmill and he walks slowly all morning long. Very cool idea!

Then, I saw a comment in the Lifehacker post about somebody who rides his recumbent bike while playing XBox. That tripped a familiar synapse in my brain that makes me start buying things and waste time that I don’t have (watch this space for lots more like this one).

See, I have very low willpower when it comes to exercise. I’ve tried various different inspirational techniques, but none ever stick (as has everybody I assume). But… could playing XBox while exercising distract my mind so much that it forgets it is exercising (what I’m calling the Critical Distraction Point)? Through the first two weeks of this experiment, the answer is a solid Yes.

My Setup

If you are inspired enough to try this out, you’ll need a stationary recumbent bike. The reason is that with a recumbent bike only your legs move and your upper body is stable. I bought this one from Amazon for just over $200 (and free shipping since I have Prime). Here’s a mini-review, Good: It’s super quiet and perfect for my use. The LCD display is low (physically) so it doesn’t obstruct straight-ahead viewing. Bad: The LCD and programs are certainly not gym quality, but I don’t really plan to use those anyway. Here are some pics of my setup:

With a bit of side turning you can do a bit of laptop work. Hard to have a laptop in front of you without hitting your knees. BTW, that’s the multi-tasking Dave laptop stand from IKEA also mentioned on Lifehacker (source and IKEA link) (yes, I’m easily influenced).

As you can see, the LCD is not why you’d buy this. It does count time well though which is all I need.

Summary

If you’re looking for a great way to trick yourself into exercising (and who isn’t!) I highly recommend this method. Until I burn out on it in a few weeks of course.

Tags: exercise ikea dave lifehacker xbox

Hello, World!  My name is Blake and I want to share things with you.  No, not those kinds of things.  Nice things.  Like knowledge.  I consider myself an accidental learner which means I stumble though information at various levels of efficiency and absorb stuff as I go.  That results in a lot of breadth without a lot of depth which is due to a bit of ADD and is sometimes a dangerous thing.

Professionally, I am employed by a company named TopCoder.  You might know them from their algorithm programming competitions (if you know C#, VB.NET, C++, or Java, I highly recommend them — super fun).  My work is on the software side of things.  We build enterprise software for customers using competitions through our member base.  I’m a project manager (sometimes architect) and have various responsibilities including launching some exciting and lucrative software design and development competitions.  I won’t talk about that much in this blog but comment if you are interested.

For fun, I’m mostly a nerd.  I do the normal geek stuff - read a lot of blogs, write a bunch of code (.NET mostly), and read a lot of books.  I also play some golf (not as much as I’d like) and watch some sports (again, not as much as I’d like). 

So, expect tech, sports, possibly a bit of politics, and whatever else is on my mind.

Welcome!