With regard to my current quest to lose 41.5 pounds in weight (see my earlier blogs
#209401139 and #210101761), I just received an email from a reader as follows:
Hi Max, being a techie, I assume you're using the weight measuring techniques in "The Hacker's Diet"?
www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html
It suggests that you use a running average to smooth out daily weight ups and downs (d'uh why didn't I think of that?!!?).
The book's a fun read, but you may want to just glance at the "Moving averages" section and then download and play with the excel spreadsheets:
www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/comptools.html
Truth to tell, I'd never heard of this, but I immediately bounced over to the link above to discover more. The "Hacker's Diet" really is both amusing and interesting. It was written by uber-geek John Walker, who is the founder of one of world's biggest software companies – Autodesk.
In 1987, not yet forty years old, John was rich beyond his wildest dreams; he had a wonderful house on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a beautiful wife to share it with, and the time and money to do anything his heart desired. (This sounds just like my own life story, except that I didn't found a successful software company and I don't have any money or free time – bummer!)
The only fly in the ointment was that John was overweight and in dreadful shape. He decided to turn this picture around and – being a techno-geek's techno-geek – he attacked is as he would an engineering problem. The result was the "Hacker's Diet", the whole book being freely available to anyone who is interested at the link provided above...
Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me – Clive "Max" Maxfield – at max@techbites.com). And, of course, if you haven't already done so, don't forget to Sign Up for our weekly Programmable Logic DesignLine Newsletter.
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