Skip to main content

Take a Walk

Steven Feuerstein (https://twitter.com/stevefeuerstein) just tweeted this:

Which in turn, inspired me to quickly write this post.

The combination of being in IT and working from home leads to lots of hours logged in some sort of chair, whether its in my home office, at a customer site or a coffee shop.  You don't need to be a doctor to realize that this is not particularly healthy behavior.

So for the past few months, I've incorporated something new into my daily routine: taking a walk.  It doesn't sound like much, and quite honestly, it really isn't.  But, I wish that I had started this years ago, because the benefits of it are huge.

First of all, it's nice to get outside during the day, especially when it's actually nice out.  Nothing can quite compare to it, no matter how many pixels they squeeze into a tablet.  Sometimes I just walk at a leisurely pace, other times I run.  I'm not training for any specific race, nor do I feel compelled to share my statistics over social media.  I just do what I want when I can.

Second of all, it gives me some time to either listen to a podcast, music or to just think.  I've really grown to like the podcasts that the folks at TWiT (http://www.twit.tv) produce, with This Week in Tech being one of my favorites.  Listening to something that interests you makes the time go by so much quicker, that you may even be tempted to extend your distance to accommodate the extra content.

In fact, listening to them really puts me in a creative and inspired mood, which helps explain the third benefit: background processing.  I don't know much about neuroscience, but I do know a little bit how my brain works.  If I'm struggling with a difficult problem, I've learned over time that the best thing that I can do is to literally walk away from it.  Going on a walk or run or even a drive allows my brain to "background process" that problem while I focus on other things.  The "A-Ha!" moment that I have is my brain's way of alerting me once the problem has been solved.   Corny, I know, but that's how it works for me.

And lastly - and probably most importantly - I've been able to drop a few pounds because of my walks (combined with better eating habits).  I do use RunKeeper to log my walks and track my weight, because numbers simply don't lie.  It also serves as a source of inspiration if I can beat a personal record or cross a weight milestone.

Comments

Byte64 said…
Excellent advice, I agree, I've been doing the same in the last months.

Cheers
Flavio
Unknown said…
Awesome Blog. Nice posts. Good Quality. And the message in this post is very nice. I also do walk 2 to 3 miles every day form the last 1 year. Thanks for this awesome blog.

-Pulkit

Popular posts from this blog

Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma...

Manipulating Images with the... Database?

A recent thread on the OTN HTML DB Forum asked about how to determine the width & height of an image stored as a BLOB in an Oracle table. I mentioned in that thread that I have some code to manipulate an image stored in a BLOB column. This is particularly useful if you’re going to let users upload images, and you want to re-size them to display as a thumbnail. Thanks to Oracle interMedia , it is trivial to manipulate the width, height, and other attributes of images stored in an Oracle table. I’ve created a sample application here which demonstrates Oracle interMedia and HTML DB in action. Feel free to have a look. You can download this application from HTML DB Studio as well. Basically, this application allows you to upload images and perform an operation on the image as it is inserted into the PHOTO_CATALOG table. There are two places where some PL/SQL code is required: an After Submit process on page 2, and a procedure to display the images. Here is the PL/SQL for the After...

Refreshing PL/SQL Regions in APEX

If you've been using APEX long enough, you've probably used a PL/SQL Region to render some sort of HTML that the APEX built-in components simply can't handle. Perhaps a complex chart or region that has a lot of custom content and/or layout. While best practices may be to use an APEX component, or if not, build a plugin, we all know that sometimes reality doesn't give us that kind of time or flexibility. While the PL/SQL Region is quite powerful, it still lacks a key feature: the ability to be refreshed by a Dynamic Action. This is true even in APEX 5. Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that only requires a small change to your code: change your procedure to a function and call it from a Classic Report region. In changing your procedure to a function, you'll likely only need to make one type of change: converting and htp.prn calls to instead populate and return a variable at the end of the function. Most, if not all of the rest of the code can rem...