Rob's Feed of Life, Music and Geek

Rob is a musician and a geek. Visit the MySpace page below to hear what he sounds like.

Day 40: Lost Half a Stone!

I still haven't read much of that book about the South Beach Diet, so I haven't yet settled on my eventual diet plan. As I expected though, even just cutting out the really obvious stuff (Irn-Bru, sweets, cake, etc) has helped me lose some weight. My weight when I started was about 21 stone and 9 pounds, it's now about 21 stone and 2 pounds.

So I've lost half a stone so far - which is roughly the weight of a newborn baby. Not the weight of me when I was born of course - I was a fat baby: 10 pounds and 2 ounces - my poor mother!

I've decided to add a graph of my fatness to the sidebar btw - been coding it tonight and will put it online tomorrow.

Day 34/35: Sleep? Not so much.

Last week was pretty wacky for me sleep-wise: slept on average about 3 hours a night. Finally caught up last night (Sunday night) with a massive 10 hours (haven't had that in months). Which was awesome for work - was actually completely awake for once and able to fully function. Naturally, the night after has gone completely tits-up - it's 4.14 am on Tuesday morning (I'm still thinking of it as Monday night, but I'm kidding myself). Got to get up for work in under 4 hours.

While my sleep may have been a mess, last week was otherwise pretty productive. I pulled an all-nighter on Saturday so that I could (almost) finish off a project I've been working on recently. It's a new venture with a couple of guys from Edinburgh, offering headphone tours of the city that you can download as MP3s. I'll post up a link here once it's finally finished (will be within the week I think - just a couple of last things to sort out before launch). I've been unbelievably crap time-wise during the whole project, but it looks pretty good now - and has been great practice for my web design skills etc. It's also nice to not be horribly constricted by pre-existing applications that slow down everything I do and make my life a nightmare. Compared to that kind of nonsense, building from the ground-up is a complete pleasure.

Since I can't sleep, I've just been working out how I next want to rearrange my bedroom - think I'll do it this weekend. I rearrange my bedroom every couple of months or so - more for the process than the result. It's odd, but I bloody love it.

Anyway, I feel braindead. Hopefully, it'll encourage sleep.

Day 26: The Persistence of Procrastination: Who Will Win in a Fight Between Me & Me?

Yo.

Time for a blog amnesty (right word?) . If I don't start updating this blog again right now I probably never will. I'm a procrastinating mofo, no doubt about it.
In my life, I've never had to struggle with anything truly horrific - war, famine, or poverty. Don't get me wrong, I've been through a few "Damn, I've only got a tenner to last me a fortnight" situations - but it doesn't compare to what many other people have to face. The only thing that I truly have to battle with is myself - my inability to pull my shit together, to do what I've said I'll do, to focus on whatever the hell I actually want from my life.
A professional musician I met earlier this year said that often the biggest obstacle for a musician is themself: accepting less than perfect, and getting the job done. I can confidently say that I'm the biggest obstacle in all aspects of my life: I'm the fucking enemy!
Procrastination is a convenient dictionary-accessible term for describing the part of me responsible for the latest lack of blogging. And after reading about other peoples' battles with procrastination I've come to realise that I'm always going to be this way - so I have to find a way to work with this flaw, to work with it rather than against it. I've decided two things about this blog:
  • I'm not going to blog everyday - if nothing of value of happened on a given day it won't (and shouldn't) get a post. I'll aim to post a few days a week - assuming that a few things of value happen each week (confident?).
  • Chances are that every few months or so I will fail for a week or two. Note to self: deal with it.
Despite the fact that my blog was lifeless recently, life in the real world continued - so here are some recent events, updates etc:
  • Alan and Sam got married. Their wedding was epic - the combination of an amazing location (Neidpath Castle, Peebles) and beautifully photogenic family on both sides led to a perfect-edging-on-surreal vibe. Besides being slamming fit, both families are some of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. Alan & Sam had asked me to play one of my songs in the castle after the service (while they signed the papers) so I played Four By Four - a song I wrote about Alan years ago. Thankfully, I managed to not cock it up! The whole day was amazing - if I ever manage to settle down I'd love to be able to celebrate my marriage that way. Also - they said that they were going to do most of the celebrations again once Jamie gets out of the hospital, so they get double value out of the wedding dress!
  • I got all four of my wisdom teeth pulled out! So I was off work last week - worked from home the second half of the week. The holes where my teeth formerly were on the bottom half still hurt a bit. I've been taking ibuprofen & paracetemol since I had them taken out - and at this rate I'll still be taking them for the next week at least. On balance though, I think the teeth were causing more pain while they were still in.
  • I decided not to move out of my current flat. I had been planning to move into a new flat with Jim (who I play music with) and Alex (my little bro). I'd be paying a bit more if I moved out - and with the current financial stuff going on everywhere I think it'd be better to save any money I can as a backup plan.
  • I've been pretty crap about food this past week or so - not eaten anything truly unforgivable (no Irn Bru for example), but I had ice cream a few times - it's classic teeth-recovery food! On the basis that I reckon most popular diets actually work as long as you commit - I've decided that I'm going to try the South Beach diet. I know it sounds fad-tastic, but it seems to show good results for many, without being quite as ridiculous as Atkins. I'll write more about it once the book arrives and I've had a good read.