Monthly Archives: March 2019


Target Met

Its March 29th 2019 and I am really happy to have hit my initial weight target after my 800 Kcal/per day plus loads of exercise especially my Choi Kwang Do training. My use of Nutracheck on my iPhone to track everything, my Nokia/Withings Wifi connected scales tracking weight and body composition, my Hykso punch trackers keeping my punch power tracking and my Apple Watch keeping the rest of the activity recorded and my heart rates all logged. In addition I have been eating many of the same things I have always eaten and having little impact on the cooking I need to do for the family. All there to get me to 94.8Kg down from 120Kg at Christmas.

Now I switch to 5:2 – 2700Kcal 5 days a week and 600KCal on two other days, plus the constant exercise. Another interesting experiment in the journey.

I have been really interested in seeing and feeling my speed and power increase in my Choi training and the image below shows the increase in contact speed in general over the last few weeks. I had stepped up training before my 2nd Dan Black belt a while back but this is even more significant as my mass is decreasing and Force = Mass * Acceleration. The indicative impact speeds have gone up due to more to the speed than to the application of weight. Here the total across both my hard pressing PACE drills (2min,1min, 30sec, 15 sec) and my general training and experiments in tweaking technique sees the total average impact speed over the year rising. So it’s gone from 9.5Mph to just over 11Mph. The leap Jan to Feb was higher too.

The individual sessions here below on days right to left and timed top to bottom as the full on impact drill (with kicks too that are not tracked) show a general overall increase balancing number of punches and speed. The last bottom right session dropped a little but that is something to work on next time. The last 15 seconds are at max heart rate when already worn out from the previous sessions. It was still 25 punches (plus some kicks) making contact in 15 seconds.

Having all this tech is awesome 🙂 Lots of IoT measurements to tweak. Now with a new Apple Watch (series 4) I bought to celebrate I will get even more accurate data too on the rest of the moderate exercise and impact on heart rate etc.

Looking forward to a bit more food during the day on 5:2, it seems an awful lot to eat now!

A decade of Feeding Edge – 10 Years? Really?

In February 2009, after 20 years at IBM, I left. It is one of those sliding doors moments (or I should say Russian Doll given the latest Netflix sensation) where I took a particular path which led me straight to creating Feeding Edge. It is now a full 10 years, an entire decade since that moment. Which is utterly amazing to think as its 1/3 of my 30 year career so far that I have had this site and written and shared what I see and feel in emerging tech.

This 0xA or 0b1010 number of years has for the most part been full of unusual, interesting and rewarding (intellectually more than financially) experiences. It is coming up to 3 years of being an analyst at 451 Research, which seems to have flown too. It is always fun to do an intro where we share our various experiences to people as I get to throw in kids TV shows, sci fi novels and virtual hospitals, as well as the 20 year IBM career and being officially a metaverse evangelist in the previous wave of VR and AR.

On of the really cool things for me is that I have had all things virtual as a consistent part of my work and play for a very long time. The Second Life and Eightbar movement from 06-09 was a follow on from work in at the start of the century and that in turn was influenced by my engagement with games back in the late 70’s. Thinking about it I go to experience the rise of the video game, as a gamer from my formative years, plus as I started work in 1990 it was the beginning of the web (which celebrates 30 years this year). All the wonderful tech and experiences still seem fresh to me, and I still get a buzz out of helping people come to terms with the new without, I hope, being too world weary about it all.

This year, again, I was at MWC in Barcelona and I was really pleased to be able to be able to take part in the analyst event as part of the release of the Hololens2. So give or take a few days this was the 10th anniversary of this metaverse evangelist striking out on his own and I got you see this kit in action for real.

MWC 2019
Hololens 2 – Fresh out the box

There could not really have been a better present, and I thought of of all the things I wrote in Reconfigure and Cont3xt as I experienced the various demos. It was personally enthralling. So I can still be a Fan Boi 🙂

There are so many other cool things happening such a mass of fantastic gaming experiences too. Going back to those early days of asteroid and space invaders and now we have Read Dead Redemption 2 et al. It’s utterly wonderful. Of course not everyone does this stuff, many people are still worried about new tech or any tech. That is a shame because there is so much to be learned and gained from it.

I am still finding that being able to measure heart rate, weight, food intake etc. is working really well as a motivator for my massive weight loss program. Just for the record I am now down to 36 in trousers from 42 inch in 8 weeks. Down from 120Kg to 98kg. Oh, and punching harder and faster according to my punch trackers and my Choi Kwang Do training 🙂

Punching test post workout
After a hard workout I tracked doing one of each of out main punches, 12-16 mph impact 🙂 very happy not wasting away !

I have no idea what the next decade may bring, but with a wonderful family with me, good health and fitness, a couple of novels ready to be a Netflix series and eternal optimism it should be a blast.

May the multiverses keep on being fun whichever route I take. Thanks for reading 🙂

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