My new Diet with Crate Watchers!!

Because I don't want to incur their wrath of "Crate Watchers" (please substitute the word crate with the word weight), and because I want to make this stuff available to other people, certain names have been changed to protect the guilty. That might be me, or not.

My wife, Allison, has dabbled in this pay-as-you-go club with some good results, and I have decided to semi-formally join her this time as a mooch. The nice part is that there is a lot of information about the ins and outs of Crate Watchers, so much that you don't really need to become a member to enjoy some of its benefits. The big thing you give up is the meetings, but I'm not so hot on them at the moment because of my work schedule.

The plan that Allison is on takes into account your activity level and weight to come up with an optimal number of food points to eat on any given day, and then you also get 35 "Flex Points" to distribute as you wish throughout the week. While she gets to use the online tools offered by Crate Watchers, I had to come up with something different. Being a big fan of Gmail and Google Docs, I brainstormed a way to effectively track most of the same things.

To begin with, because I don't know anything about Crate Watchers points calculation, I have to save my meal ingredients to process later. This is accomplished via SMS from my phone at mealtime. I send a message like this:

"Dinner: 3 cups macaroni & cheese, 11.5 oz mountain dew."

The message is sent to my Gmail inbox, but with the added alias "+ww". There is a filter that catches all of this email, stars and removes it from the inbox, and waits for my perusal.

The next step is the tracking spreadsheet. If I think I might not get around to processing the information soon, I'll copy my meal email into a comment for the corresponding meal on the spreadsheet. This spreadsheet compiles each day's meal points, along with activity points (in case you happen to be doing anything besides sitting during the day), and keeps track of overages that count against your Flex Points. Another page of the spreadsheet contains my weight tables, logged every week, and charted to show most total weght lost (and gained), and highest week-to-week loss. Still another page has the magic Points Calculator. I was able to put the same equation into an Excel spreadsheet so that I could put it on my phone. I'm determined to figure out enough Java to make a mini-app for my phone, which would be easier to run than modifying the Excel spreadsheet on this phone.

The timing for starting this program was actually a little strange, but made it easy for me to jump in. I was a week into a rather rigorous time at work, where I've been working swing shift, and doing LOTS of physical labor, which has helped immensely in that I didn't really have to worry about eating too much. You may be wondering what paltry bit of physical labor that could have been, given what a slack job I've been known to have. The computers I work on are not small, and the latest ones are almost too big for our oversize lab benches. They weigh in at just about 250lbs empty. I get my activity points from hauling them around the lab on a lift (I have to push/pull/steer/load/unload manually), setting them upright so they can be reconfigured, and packing them into crates for shipment (hence CRATE Watchers). The full crates weigh in at 390lbs, and I get to pull them across 60 yards of carpet between the lab and our storage areas. Needless to say, I've been wearing shorts to work the last few weeks.

As somebody who has struggled to get to a reasonable weight, and as someone living with people in the same situation, I hope that anyone needing the same help can take heart and maybe take a new look at their possibilities. If you would like to learn more about the tools I'm using, or the official tools for that matter, drop me a line. I'm not an expert at weight loss, but I'm pretty good at figuring out methods to keep folks interested in what they are doing.

Good Luck!!

Quick Notes from Work

Here's what I attempted to post yesterday morning, but was unsuccessful in that I was not able to access blogger:

Having completed almost everything needed for the next phase of of work to begin, tensions are running high at work right now.  I can't really explain it (without giving too much away) to most people other than to say this is a server's version of sea trials for the first of a new kind of ship.  We are doing everything we can to break it, and verify the longevity of the design in that process.  For this particular phase, we have just let the vessel into the water for the first time

The majority of my role has been to prepare our lab for for a few different versions of the ship to be tested.  We have set up many, many test stations for teams of many disciplines to work their magic and hopefully identify any problems before they would make it into the hands of our customers.

The bad part about all of this is that I've been working longer hours and so have had less face time with the family.  The part that might be good is that I have been being introduced as the lead technician for our lab (something that has been in question for quite a while).  I'm hoping that waiting around these many years might yield my second promotion.  It has only been about 8 years and 9 managers (okay, one of them got counted twice) since my first one.

Many people ask what I do for a living.  My usual answer is to laugh and say "Pretty much whatever I want," but the truth is that I usually have so much to do that I can afford to pick and choose the tasks I do.  There are many different disciplines at Intel, some that may not seem at first to have anything to do with what you might think we would have any need for, but Intel is not only sneaky that way, but they want to make the most of any opportunity that might come up.

Here are some of the things I do:

1. General clean-up and organization of the lab.
2. Specific organization of the lab (labeling and tracking items/locations of interest).  I have attempted for a LONG TIME to implement a PDA/server based scheme of asset tracking that has a lot of fans, but I've never been able to get enough traction from my "team" of managers for various reasons (usually too many fires to put out) to actually put it into play on a wider scale.
3. Rework Middle Man.  I used to do rework (solder/desolder of boards & components), but have been given a decent supply of folks who ONLY do rework to do that for me.  When an engineer comes along with a need for rework, but lacks the specific skills to "dumb down" the instructions so that somebody can comprehend the work without performing a Vulcan Mind Meld with said engineer, that's where I come in.  I can usually see well enough into the clouds to see what work is needed, and then I can use what talent I have to manipulate the board design tools to make pretty pictures to allow any monkey that can weild a soldering iron to do the work properly.  I'm REALLY good at this for two reasons: As a rework technician, I hated having to hold a piece of paper up to the light X-Ray style to see the work needed in the right orientation (when you look at a picture of the bottom of a board, it is backwards because you are actually looking through the top to see it), and I have lots of experience using the board design tools (because I've been on a few board design teams).
4. Plumber.  Maybe that sounds funny, but I am a plumber of sorts.  In the Navy I was introduced to chilled water loops and water cooling for electronics.  At Intel, I get to use the same priciples to control the temperature of all kinds of chips.  And because so many others have tried and failed at this, I am now The Man.
5. Firefighter.  Not in the conventional sense, but in the sense of taking on big "high priority" jobs that need to be handled with a minimum of hand-off time.  My depth and breadth of experience seems to have made me a prime target to throw into the fire.
   
6. Researching and entering purchase requests.  When one of our engineers or our "lab manager" needed something, I used to be able to actually make purchases on my own, but because we now have a dedicated team for purchasing, I only have to go so far as to find out how much something (or things) cost, which really means I'm a half step away from completeing the purchase, then I send a request to my manager, who likes to find some reason to change the request.  After my manager approves, I get to copy and paste the request into a tracking tool that helps our purchasing team to do their job.  Hopefully, we end up getting the right stuff.
7. General Consultant.  As I've done almost everything there is to do around our labs, there are a lot of people who use me as a handy reference when they are wanting to make improvements.  I've made a number of suggestions to make our thermal tools safer and more efficient, suggesting design improvements as well as offering other advice.

So as you can see, I have options every day.  The trick lies in not getting too fed up with any one of them.

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