Daily weigh-ins—they really work!

One habit that I've maintained for about 6 years now is keeping a daily weight chart. Every day, I weigh myself, and put a check on a graph that has a weight range of 10 pounds.

This is a teensy, tiny little habit. It takes me about 4 seconds a day, and most of that is the time my digital scale takes to boot up. But it's been amazingly successful for me. I've maintained my weight within the same range (actually, within about 5 pounds) ever since I started the chart. I started the chart originally to lose weight after childbirth, along with counting calories. And then I just kept on going with it after I lost the weight.

I know some people feel that weighing yourself weekly or even less is the best thing to do. They believe that daily weighing just distracts you, and potentially makes you discouraged.

I disagree. I think daily weighing focuses you, and gives you that daily feedback that makes you think twice before you overindulge. It reminds me of when I first got a digital camera. Being able to instantly see the picture I took improved my photography skills tremendously. The feedback of weighing yourself daily is the same - perhaps not quite as instant, but within 24 hours of less, you will get a number that tells you, roughly, how you're doing.

How to buy books for less on Amazon

In general, I don't buy that many books - I get them from our excellent King County library system. However, once I've gotten a book more than a few times from the library, I'll buy it.

When buying books, I look first for used books on Amazon.com. I've had nothing but good experiences doing this, and frequently, when a book is not in high demand, I can get it for very little.

There's definitely a few tricks that you can use to get a better price, though. For instance, recently (July 2010) I wanted to buy the book 401 ways to get your kids to work at home. Looking for this title on Amazon, the used copies were 11.89. Not all that cheap, considering it's a paperback, and shipping is not included.

However, this was not the only copy of the book out there! Older editions may go for much cheaper, but you need to know to look for them. Sometimes, like for this book, there's a tiny little box that shows all the formats available. In the case of this book, there was a paperback edition from 1981 that was going for $.01! Just $4.00 (plus shipping of $3.99, which is where the seller actually makes some money). That's the edition I had gotten from the library anyway.

Other ways of finding these older, but still almost (or actually) identical editions are by searching on the author's name, and not just the title. Sometimes different and cheaper editions will show up there as well.

Just a few more clicks and you may be spending drastically less on the same book!

My Remember The Milk tip was a winner!

Remember the Milk is my to-do tracking tool - I've used it ever since I replaced my Palm Treo with an Android. I just found out that my Remember the Milk tip on using the advanced search operators in Remember the Milk was a winner of the Tips and Tricks Tuesday. I won another year on my pro level account. Cool!

I just saw some info about a new to-do application called EpicWin. It combines task functionality with a role playing game. I'm not a gamer, but it'll be interesting to see how this works out.

I hope Remember the Milk is investigating some functionality similar to this. Not necessarily a game, but it would be awesome if Remember the Milk could incorporate - I don't know exactly how - some kind of social networking. Something that, for instance, would inspire me to keep on track with my tasks and goals. I had a friend with whom I would check up weekly, we'd chose our 3 goals for the week, and check how we did on the previous weeks goals. A simple thing like this was amazingly effective in getting me going on tasks.

Switching from the Palm Treo to Nexus One/Google - Continued

Count me as totally sold on the Nexus One/Google combo. It's not even so much the Nexus One, though I'm fairly happy with that. It's just the productivity improvements that come from never having to sync, and having my personal workspace (mail, contacts, docs/memos, calendar, tasks) available everywhere I am, no mater which computer I'm on.

But it sure was a big transition. A quick review:

1. Contacts - still using Google Contacts, still fairly happy with it. Actually dialing phone numbers on my Nexus One is more of a hassle than it was on my Treo - many more keystrokes/screen swipes. Also, I can't search the contact notes on the Nexus One, although I can search when using Google Contacts directly.

2. Calendar - using Google Calendar, quite happy with it. I almost missed a dentist appointment yesterday - don't know what happened, did I just not hear the alarm or what? But overall it's good.

3. Tasks/ToDos - I started out wanting to use Google tasks, but it didn't have enough features, so I'm with Remember The Milk (pro membership - I think it was $25/year) and loving it. Before switching I had in my mind the features that the Palm had for todos, and wanted exactly what they had - and frankly, doing that takes more manipulation in the Nexus One. But I've switched to using some of the newer features that RememberTheMilk has, that the Palm system doesn't - basically Tags and Smart Lists and it's really cool. You can basically organize them any way you can dream up - you're not just stuck with 1 category per task. Also - I've started using voice recognition a lot on the Nexus One, and it rocks. Tip - talk directly into the microphone on the bottom of the phone.

4. Memos/Notes/Docs - this was a real pain, and continues to be a thorn in my side. I started out trying to do things in Gmail, using drafts that have a label of Notes. However, this is really clunky and cumbersome. So, now I'm using Google Docs, and using Gdocs to access them on the Nexus One. At first I was really excited about Gdocs - it seemed like the perfect solution - but there appear to be a lot of bugs and syncing problems. Hopefully the problems will be fixed, or maybe Google will come up with an app.

Nexus One voice recognition is pretty good!

I've been using the Google Nexus One now for about a week. Last night I stayed up late, reading through the users guide online, and read up on voice recognition. It works pretty well! I've started to use it to jot down tasks in Remember The Milk and it can really beat typing in terms of speed. It's been quite accurate when I speak slowly and clearly - though the note I made to write up this particular blog entry got garbled. But that was the first one to be completely wrong - most of the previous ones went in correctly.

I have not been happy at all with text entry - it's just REALLY tedious and slow to get it typed in correctly - so I'm excited to have another option.

Switching from the Palm Treo to Nexus One/Google

I'm making the switch to the cloud. After 13 years (since November 1997) of uninterrupted and relatively happy Palm usage, I'm making the switch to the Nexus One and Google accounts. This is a really big deal for me - I've been thinking about it for months now. Originally I was thinking about switching to the iPhone, but when my husband got a free Nexus One (he decided to stick with his iPhone), I decided to try that out.

Like I said, I've been quite happy with my Palm Treo for long time. But it really seems like the Palm is a dead end. Pretty much all the new apps are being written for the iPhone and Android. So, I'm converting.

This is probably not the best time to be writing up an account of the switch, since I'm particularly frustrated by a formatting problem in Gmail. I'll update later if there's interest.

1. Contacts - Moving the contacts over to Google contacts was a breeze. In my Palm desktop (version 6.2.2) I selected all the contacts, clicked on File, Export vCard, exported everything out, and them in Google contacts, imported them into a new group I created. One issue was - if you have an equal sign (=) in the notes, everything after it doesn't come in. Once I figured that out, I just did a search for the equal signs, and deleted them. I didn't have groups in the Palm contacts that I cared to keep, so I just imported all into one group. If I had, it would have been easy to just export a group at a time, and them import into a corresponding Google contacts group.

One thing that I wasn't happy with in Google Contacts is that you're only able to search in the notes of a contact on the web interface, and not on the contact application on the Nexus One. That's not good for me, because I do those searches all the time. I would put a keyword in the notes - for instance, "tennis". Then on the Palm, whenever I wanted a tennis partner, I just searched for the word tennis, and all my tennis partners showed up. I'm going to miss that feature.

2. Calendar - Moving the calendar over to Google calendar wasn't too bad either. I ended up using CompanionLink for Google. It looks like it's designed to continuously sync up between the Palm and Google, but I just used it for a one time sync. I would have paid for it, too, because from what I read the other options are not that easy, but there was a 14 day trial, and I just needed a one time load. From a relatively quick overview, it looks like events imported fine. I should probably review it a little more.

Oh, great. I just looked at one of my events, and I'm not able to edit it in the Gmail calendar interface - it just says "loading" and then never loads. Sheesh.

Okay. Shut down the browser and restarted, and it works.

3. Tasks/ToDos - I was hoping I'd be able to use Google tasks, but it's not full-featured enough - there's no offline application for it. I checked out a few other apps, but ended up using Remember the Milk. It's taking quite a bit of adjusting - after all, I'm been in the Palm environment for 13 years - but so far, things are going reasonably well. I paid for premium support, and have had quick responses to my questions (a day or so).

To import tasks, you email a list of tasks to your own personal email account. It loses the notes, and groupings, but at least it gets them in there. If you had a lot of tasks and were serious about keeping groups ("lists" in Remember the Milk), you could import in batches, and then move them over to the group that you want. I put the notes for those tasks that had them in manually.

By the way - notes are really strange in Remember the Milk. You have to add them manually - there's not automatically a notes field. Plus, you can add multiple notes. I have no idea why they did it this way - I can't think of any advantage over just having one note field that shows up like a regular field.

4. Memos/Notes - I checked out EverNote (I think it's beta on the Android, it hung a lot) and a few others, but at the moment I'm using Gmail drafts, organized with labels, for my memos. I'm frustated right now with a major problem - it seems that whatever I copy and paste into a new draft on the Gmail web interface, it looks great there, but when I look at it on the Nexus One Gmail app, it's just a big blob of text, with no line feeds. Impossible to read or work with. So, either this gets fixed or I need to find another solution.

(Update - it needs to be in rich text format. That shows up fine on the Nexus One for me, plain text does NOT. If you have a link above your email that says "rich formatting", then you're probably currently in plain text format, and should click on it to get into rich text format.)

I've made a commitment to the Nexus One now - or at the very least, to cloud computing. But there's a lot that I find a little frustrating. For instance, I'm a heavy user of the main Palm apps - tasks, memos, calendar, contacts. To get to them on my palm Treo is a matter of seconds and a few clicks. To get where I need to go on the Nexus One takes me a lot longer - lots more clicks and slides.

Typing on the virtual keyboard is much slower and more error prone than typing on my palm Treo.

Overall - I'm excited to make the move, and I look forward to trying out all the applications. Hopefully the current frustrations are just a bump on the road.