Back to Facebook

Well, the month is over. I did it, going a full month without looking at my Facebook account.

Something like 80+ notifications and 2 IMs. No, I didn't look at all of the notifications, but they are serving as a guideline as to what people to remove from my feed. I won't unfriend anyone over it, I just don't like getting notifications for constant sharing of other content, and that is all that some people on Facebook seem to do.

I am also going to remove notifications from a couple of groups I am a member of. I did just fine without them and can do without them constantly in my feed. I will stay with them, but will set it so that I will have to go to them instead of having them fed to me.

I think that stepping away from Facebook has been good to me and may do it again when I find myself checking it when I wake up. I have better things online to look at that that. I am using a couple of news feeds and I like being in better touch with the world without the inherent "echo chamber" effect of Facebook, but by using chosen feeds such as Reuters, I can get a more un-biased view of the world.

I suggest that anyone who reads Facebook for more than an hour a day take time off of it every so often.
Learn something new, get new information sources, work on a blog.
You don't have to take a whole month off as I did, but it wouldn't  hurt. A week is a good length of time for your first break, long enough to be distracted from it, and you won't be bogged down with catching up when you get back.

I'm Not Really Missing it Much.

Well, I am now more than halfway through my "Month Without Facebook."

It was a bit of an adjustment at first. My job is primarily waiting for something to happen. I monitor operators signing in on one day, I wait for problems to come to me on another, and the remainder I just wait for emergencies.
I have a hard time figuring out how to keep busy. Facebook was filling that gap for years. Eventually I was just spending my time there, reading posts from friends, joining special interest groups, playing silly games.

Reading posts from friends is what I am missing most. I am looking forward to returning to Facebook for pretty much that only.

The SIGs are kind of nice. Most of them were hobby oriented, and they would incite me to spend money. The others invariably ended up politically oriented and served too much as an echo chamber. I learned nothing from them and the information presented was not always useful.

The silly games are self explanatory. I still play Angry Birds, as it was pretty much the only one I played anyway. Years ago I played Mafia Wars and Farmville, but I grew bored with them and it became tedious to play them for no return.

As I said, I do miss posts by my friends. The SIGs, I can get from Reddit, but I haven't gone there but maybe once since the beginning of the month. I am able to save up money for a large purchase in the sometime future, but I have no pressure to spend it. News I now get from Reuters.com or News.Google.com. Reuters is one of the leading neutral news sources, no opinion, and little bias. Just the facts. Google is more of an aggregate, taking news from other sources that you have to decide on for yourself.

As for a place to vent my opinions, that's what this blog is for. I intend to continue create content for it, even if nobody ever reads it. I have ads, but I won't be concerned if nothing ever comes from them either.

It is about getting other stuff done now.

Well, the first day without Facebook has come and gone. I'm not experiencing any withdrawal symptoms, yet.
Last night, being hiatus for the shows I watch, I spent my extra time on a walk to the store and back, about 1.5 miles, followed by reading for an hour or so with a chorus of explosions in the background. We live close enough to the Nisqually reservation that there are constantly fireworks going off for the week before Independence day. It's OK really though, we are used the the howitzer shelling on a regular basis from the army base. The house gets a regular rattling and the cats don't panic.
To get my info fix this morning, I hit up news.google.com. I ended up at the New York Times for a morning briefing. Not too bad, more info, less opinion.
An important tool for finding neutral news sources is www.allgeneralizationsarefalse.com which provides "The Chart":

Select chart to get the full size image.

The NYT briefing was long enough to peruse during my breakfast oatmeal and I was able to get out the door quickly for my commute. The only drawback of the NYT site is that they, like most papers, have a paywall after so many reads per month. This is easily circumvented by using "Incognito Mode" in your browser. Or you could just give in and pay for it. It's only $10 a month.

Returning to the chart above; in my opinion, most news sources in the top half, yellow and green boxes, are great sources as long as you know the bias of the source. Orange and red boxes are purely entertainment and should be treated as such.

Well, that's enough of my ramblings for today. I am supposed to be working after all.

Where did this come from?

Ok, I know it has been a while, but here goes.

Today's posting:

Today is day one of a month long challenge to NOT use Facebook, therefore this post, as I want to document things anyway.

I woke up, picked up my phone, and instead of going to the Facebook feeding trough, I hit all three of my email inboxes and took care of the 200 or so unread e-mails. Mostly just select all, go through and look at the senders, deselect ones I want to check, and delete the remainder.

I did my morning weigh in. Great news, still loosing weight! On June 12th I decided that I needed to loose weight. So on that day I started. My initial weigh in was 351.8 lbs. I am 6'2" but that isn't tall enough for this weight, I cannot get any taller, so I must loose the weight instead. Since the 12th I have upgraded my scale to a connected one, it wasn't necessary, but I like the better information such as BMI and fat percentage that it provides. Since the start of this, I have lost 15.9 pounds. I am not kidding myself, I have more than 130 to go until I am no longer considered obese, but it's a great start for 3 weeks into it. I am doing this by watching calories more than anything else, I am increasing my steps per day, but I am still pretty sedentary on work days. One side benefit I am seeing already, besides less strain on my shirt buttons, is that my blood sugar is down from 130 in the morning to 90. It is amazing, when you are trying to count ALL calories, how some simple changes can make a huge difference. But that's enough of that.

Here is the scale I am using. I had my doubts, as I didn't want to have other people's measurements interfering with my logging, but the phone only logs the information when the app is open to a user profile, so any number of users can use it, each with their own profile. The scale reports back a number of items besides just weight. It will give you BMI, body fat percentage, water percentage, muscle mass, etc. For me the important ones are weight, BMI and body fat percentage. I am charting them on a spreadsheet and like seeing the trend on my graphs. From the information the scale provides, I have the spreadsheet determine my ideal goal weight, one with only 22% body fat, and projecting a completion date based on my past week's loss rate. I have an intermediate goal weight, which was just a number picked from the air of 100 lbs less than when I started, or 250 lbs.
Here is my goal date graph.

I didn't expect it to stay as good as earlier weeks, but it's really nice to see a future with healthier numbers.