Archives for July 2014

A bit fit

July 23, 2014 by Jen

A few years ago I started running. A few months after that I stopped. However, during this process I was using Runkeeper to track how far I ran and I continued to use it after the running finished but I only tracked my walks and of course it wasn’t indicative of how far I walked each day.

I wanted to use a pedometer to track how far I walk each day so a couple of months ago I bought a Fitbit. On Shai’s advice I bought the Fitbit One.

My goal is to walk 10,000 steps per day and my morning walks only cover just over a third of that quota so I have to fit more in during the day. I suppose I could get up earlier and walk for longer. I know the dog would love me for that and maybe when it’s a bit warmer I’ll set the alarm for ten minutes earlier and just do it. I know excuses excuses.

The Fitbit One also tracks your sleep and I seem to average around 7 – 7.5 hours per night. That’s not too bad. I did wonder if wearing the Fitbit to bed those first few nights contributed to bad sleeps? I’ve found the wriststrap I put on to put the Fitbit in comes off during the night sometimes so I wonder how effective the sleep tracking component is.

But that aside, the steps tracking is great. I forgot to wear it to work the other day and as I’d had a few walks during the day and climbed lots of stairs I added that in manually based on a similar day. I pretty much wear it all the time and it’s become a competition with myself to see if I can reach the 10,000 steps per day. I think it’s equivalent of just over an hour of walking briskly but it’s amazing how much housework and supermarket shopping can bump up your steps.

I haven’t friended anyone in the Fitbit community and I may or may not but I’m good at being in competition with myself. If for some reason I don’t walk in the morning because it’s raining then I wonder how I’ll make up the steps I missed during the day.

Walking has great benefits and I’ve seen first hand the effects of not exercising enough. Mum doesn’t get much exercise and she’s been plagued with knee and hip problems and she’s overweight. I’ve vowed that I don’t want to be not as mobile as I get older and as running is off the table then walking it is. I do Pilates once a week for strengthening too and that’s made a difference I’m sure.

I chatted to a colleague recently and he’s been getting up at 6am before work each morning to walk for 6kms and he does more on the weekends. I asked if he’d noticed benefits and he said he’d lost 14kg since February when he started. He said he’d changed his diet a bit but for the most part, walking has helped with his weight loss.

Michael Moore has written about why he walks and it’s a great read. He doesn’t walk to lose weight, he walks to feel good. And it’s true. I know it helps clear my head and even getting up early to walk the dog before work helps wake me up and gives me a really good start to the day.

Do you get out walking? How does it make you feel?

A trip down memory lane

July 22, 2014 by Jen

My son and I love watching movies together and now he’s a bit older there are more options. We watched the first Mission Impossible film recently. It was made in 1996 – nearly 20 years ago.

During part of the film, Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hawke, sits down at his laptop and opens a web browser – Netscape. Netscape was pre Firefox and even Internet Explorer I think. Mosaic and Netscape were two of the first web browsers I remember around that time – mid 1990s.

He also searched for information via Listservs – electronic mailing lists. You could join a listserv on a topic of interest and get emails, either individual or digests, from other members of that listserv. It was a very early social media. When I was at uni, I remember studying a Melrose Place listserv as an ethnographic study for a subject I was doing. I loved being able to combine my interests of television, writing and technology. And people were really passionate about Melrose Place which made reading their posts to the Melrose Place listserv very fascinating. You could watch it in a city pub on a Tuesday night along with the other Melrose Place tragics.

It was also around this time that I taught myself HTML so I could create webpages. There were no WYSIWYG software packages around then so if you wanted to create a webpage you had to know HTML. I’m glad I did because knowing the code serves me well now when I need to tidy things up a bit. I could see that web content had the potential to be massive. And while web content has expanded so have web technologies. Using a hand-held device was something that was done in science fiction, not for real.

Web content marketing or web content strategy wasn’t a twinkle in anyone’s eye yet. My workplace at the time created a website for the organisation and it was very internally focused and it was a long scrolling page with no graphics. It couldn’t link off to different services we offered in more depth because other areas hadn’t jumped on board yet. I lobbied to get our department a website and after a while it eventually happened. I created the site, a graphic designer did some graphics and an editor helped shape the words. Each page was standalone so if a header or footer changed you had to do it on all the pages. Luckily there weren’t many pages.

We had no web guidelines or standards so it was do what you want pretty much. The IT department owned the website and its content and it stayed like this for a number of years until marketing took it over the web content side of things. Since then I’ve been in both departments in different organisations where web content is managed.

Now updating web content is a heck of a lot easier – although it depends on what content management system is being used. One I’m using at the moment is outdated and not supported any more so some things take a long time to do.

What’s still lacking in many cases is a focus on content. If I had a dollar for every time someone in a meeting mentioned how a website could look over focusing on content in detail, I could retire now. Yes, it takes time to get content together, to shape it and put it together in a meaningful way, but that’s why people visit websites, for the content.

Have a look at Coke’s website in the 1990s (above).

Remember how many websites used to tell us how best to view them? Remember how many screens – and we’re talking desktops here – had screen resolutions of 800 x 600?

Coca-cola refreshed their website late last year to be more of a storytelling device rather than a corporate website. In fact they said that “Content is king and the corporate website is dead“.

Their new website is certainly much more engaging than the earlier efforts and the refresh involved asking their audience what they liked, and checking metrics about what was being viewed and shared.

I’d like to know how it’s faring now and what they are doing with it moving forward. It’s certainly come a long way, just like the Mission Impossible films. Comparing the first to the last Mission Impossible films – 15 years difference between them – you can see how far technology and special effects have advanced.

What do you remember from earlier web creation days that you’re glad has changed?

Walking near work

July 15, 2014 by Jen

There’s some great walking trails near where I work so we went for a drive recently to check it out. I managed to drag the teen and the dog along – not that the dog needed much persuading.

I think he enjoyed himself, and so did the lad – so much so that he’s keen to go back. When it suits him that is.

I do have quite the stubborn child. He’s always been stubborn and I know these teen years are going to be testing times for me as a parent.

I’ve given up nagging him every day about tidying his room. As he tells me, when I’m asking him to do something, it’s just blah blah blah to him. He now has to put his clothes away, I won’t go in there when the room’s messy and I can’t even get to his drawers. That seems to be working, and the last couple of weekends when I’ve given him a list of jobs including tidying his room, it’s been done.

I’d let the dog accompany him to bed but I managed to put a stop to that last night when I said that if he continued this practice that he’d be in charge of changing and washing his sheets. Dog hair sticks to flannelette sheets and there’s a doggy smell that lingers a bit when the dog’s been on his bed. I prefer bedrooms to be a no-go dog zone.

Took the dog to a dog training session the other day. Very interesting. That will be a separate post. This adopting a rescue dog has been quite the eye opener.

Outdoor laser skirmish

July 6, 2014 by Jen

What’s a boy want to do for his 13th birthday? Why, shoot at his friends of course. When researching places to do it you’ve got your indoor laser skirmish places but he wasn’t too keen on doing that. He enjoys it when he does do it, however.

He was keen on ice skating but our local ice skating rink was very prescriptive on the times they do parties and the times didn’t suit us. I’m glad. The noise at an ice skating rink is pretty loud.

Searching the web lead us to outdoor laser skirmish, and surprise surprise, 11-12 year old boys are their main demographic.

Invites were done and sent out and I did the usual stress of thinking nobody, or few, people would come because it was a little bit of a drive and who knows what the weather would be doing that day?

There was a storm the preceding night and the day was grey and wet but the party went on nonetheless. It did rain a few times but only small showers – so nothing to deter 20 excited boys (ten in our group and ten in another birthday party group). They were even rolling down the hill so would have got wet from the ground anyway.

If you’re looking for outdoor laser skirmish in Adelaide, this one’s up in the hills near Picadilly – 2 World’s Collide.

The host, Chris, was really good with a group of very excited boys who love to backchat and he explained the rules matter of factly and with a great sense of humour.

Before too long the boys were unleashed into two teams with their weapons ready to shoot shoot shoot.

I remember back when JJ was a baby, that there were going to be no guns, no shooting. There’s no getting around that, it’s in the boy DNA I think.

They spent about 40 minutes on the first game, then there was another game. The guns are wired so that they score hits.

But most of all it’s really fun.

They all really enjoyed it and it’s gone down as the best birthday party ever.

There aren’t any close-by facilities to feed the hungry troops afterwards so I managed to feed and water them from the boot of my car. Like a pack of seagulls they were.

The birthday cake went down a treat and I forgot to have some at the actual birthday but managed some later.