Stoke of Midnight 2015…2016?

Stroke of Midnight

For the past few New Year Eve’s, my family and I stayed home. Our main reason is to stay off the roads both for the safety from strangers and also so we can partake more in the celebratory ale. For the last four years, we started in a new tradition on New Year’s Eve with an all day family gaming event. It’s a day where we make a huge pile of board and card games to play throughout the day. We try to see how many games we can get through. I think this year ended up being slower than other years.

Our first year of this tradition was ruined by my work and an all day escalated issue. At the time I was an on-call management style person for a large data center. To make a long story short, my evening started off with me trying to place last minute storage units of computers on a commercial airline. The flight continued without the parts but I lost a good 8 hours of my holiday.

The next year we decided to step up our game and introduce Nerdy the Elf to the mix. (AKA Nerd Y. Elf) Basically, he is one of Santa’s little slave helpers who goes around hooking up nerd based families in their nerd type traditions on NYE. (See a pattern going on here?) Nerdy likes to leave games at our house for us to play. So far he (or she) brought us Munchkin and Qwirkle. This year was another great add to our night. Nerdy brought us Exploding Kittens. This was a fun Russian Roulette style card game. Easy to learn, easy to play. Nerdy also leaves us a letter. This year’s letter made reference to HoHo the Naughty Elf. That got a good chuckle from my oldest son who is familiar to the Comedy Bang Bang podcast I got him hooked on.

This year we started off playing a few hands of Gin Rummy with our new Princess Bride playing cards which came from our Lootcrate subscription. My wife and I saved up a few months of Lootcrate deliveries and came up with a great advent calendar of toys for them. We had a few items leftover for Christmas Day and this was one of them. I forget the rest of the order but we only ended up getting through Gin Rummy, Exploding Kittens, Munchkin Legends, The Office DVD Game, Ticket to Ride, Chopper Strike*, and Apples to Apples.

*Chopper Strike was actually the first game my sons and I played in the morning as a warm up. Chopper Strike is a 1976 strategy game that the kids got from a past school teacher.)

We usually get through more games but we broke a few times for food. I think we ate too much which slowed us down. We all had trouble keeping our eyes open for the last 30 minutes of 2015. Shortly after the countdown it was lights out.

We still have a pile of games to play this weekend in our traditional first few days of the new year playing all the games we didn’t get to in the past year.

Attempting 2016 Resolutions Again

I think I skipped last year with a resolution post for 2015. I think I failed my 2014 so miserably that I thought doing one for 2015 was a waste of time. Also, a reminder of what a year of failure I had. Well, even though I did not have a list, I would of failed at it. I think last year was very unmotivating to me. I tried to escape this year with minimal effort and I’m sure it showed from time to time.

I say it every year, but this year is going to be different. I hope. Every thing needs to be reviewed and looked upon in a new light. This is my last full year before I turn 40. I’m halfway through a life and have a lot of work ahead of me.

I started looking over older lists and realized I had either recurring items or just items I never accomplished so just carried it over from year to year. These recycled items are:

Ongoing Issues With My Fitness Apps and Devices

With the boom of mobile devices and wearable tech, the fitness industry seems to be growing under this love the world has for technology. We love our phones and it shows by how close we keep them to our sides at all times. I would say 90% of my day (awake and asleep), I am no more than 25 feet from my phone. Of course, most of that time it sits on my office desk or on my nightstand charging at night. However, it is still an arm’s reach away. Even when I am at the gym at my local YMCA, I keep the phone on a window ledge. (It needs to be close enough so my bluetooth Motorola Buds can play my Spotify playlists.) Add a heavy dose of infatuation with our mobiles and stir in a double dash of social sharing issues and the need to unlock achievements and you end up with a recipe for showing the world that I am fitter than you and I have the stats and stickers to prove it.

There are hundreds of health and fitness apps currently on the Google Play store. Most of them are cheap knock offs or apps with training guides that are laced with microtransactions to unlock new workouts. However, there are a few great apps out there to help you track your progress and compare stats over the course of your journey to a healthier you. I’ve tried a few of these apps and love them to a point. I’ve run into a few issues between some apps and how they interact with each other that kind of spoiled my attempt to track everything. Things were going okay when I was just using my phone and a mobile app to track distance run/biked or my computer to log workouts. Then I decided to step it up a notch and bought a Garmin device. This is when things started to go downhill but I don’t think my Garmin is to blame.

Prior to this year, I was using Endomondo. However, my employer’s work and live healthy initiative did not include this fitness app as one of the allowed fitness trackers. I decided to go with MapMyFitness due to its partnership with Under Armour. (My sister designs for them so I place my loyalty in them at the moment.) Overall it is a great app and the UI is easy to use and it has lots of activities to choose from. I was also pairing it with MyFitnessPal another UA affiliation) to track my nutrition.  These apps worked great together. They both tracked my calories and showed my net calories based on my activity level. It also showed me how many calories I could eat each day if I wanted to lose x amount of weight per week. I was very diligent about tracking my nutrition for a couple of months in MyFitnessPal. I slowly stopped once I ran into two major issues in MapMyFitness.

Back in April, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 10. It is a GPS watch and even though it is thier base model, I love using it for walking, running, and riding. I was able to sync my watch with MapMyFitness and import my workout data and maps from Garmin to MapMyFitness. This is when I started noticing some issues. The first issue was my watch automatically tracks every activity as running. Once I sync my watch with my PC, I can modify the activity and other details of my workout. This is fine and the Garmin portal is excellent and very simplified for anyone to use. However, the modified data never updates on the fitness tracker and keeps everything as a run. (MapMyFitness pulls the data immediately after the watch syncs to my PC.) The second issue I was noticing with MapMyFitness was anything I imported from the Garmin watch or added on my phone app was shared with all my friends and sent them push notifications. The problem is I have all settings set as private. When I log events on the PC, they stay private. The mobile app, not so much. I’ve reset the settings and reinstalled the app. Nothing changes. I was annoying my friends with all the activities I was adding per day. I added everything because I needed so many hours per month for work and the more calories I tracked the more I knew I could eat. I did try adding multiple workouts on to one entry (which is allowed in MapMyFitness) but if I did that it would not take the calorie total and remove it from MyFitnessPal’s nutrition diary. I tried hitting up MapMyFitness support but they were little to no help. I could not find other users on the forums that had a similar issue.

Frustrated, I stopped tracking everything. I unlinked all apps from each other. I still use my Garmin watch throughout the week but I keep all the data in their own portal. I only log other activities in MapMyFitness at a bare minimum and only do it on the PC. I make sure I log enough hours for my work bonus and then stop. Luckily, I already hit my year bonus and can stop. It’s a shame, I would love to see the overall picture of things I do between running, biking, soccer, yoga, disc golf, gym, etc. I might go back into experimenting with Endomondo again and see if it plays nice with everything. I would also like to try other fitness devices from Garmin like a fenix 3) and others but do not have the funding to just sample the arsenal of devices that flooded the market over the last 2 years.

I will probably do some reviews of these apps and definitely my watch in the near future. They all work great on their own and deserve to be tried by all. Especially if you are highly interested and motivated in exercising. I love seeing all that data, looking at maps, and comparing the numbers. I do like to share some of my longer runs and rides on social media. I’m not that fast, so its not a full on gloating technique but it is very close to it. We should all be proud of our achievements no matter how big or small.

Maybe I am trying to track too much across to many apps. Maybe having the control and being very granular does not always work out. Maybe I just need to simplify things. Maybe I shouldn’t care about net calories based off my activity. I am curious to hear how others track their healthy lifestyle via technology. Do you have a single app that satisfies diet and exercise? Comment below.