Living in the Future

Tag: Reflection

  • How to Turn the Page (on Life)

    How to Turn the Page (on Life)

    I’m not sure there is a wrong way.

    This week, I learned that I will be entering a new chapter in my life. For those of you who are following me on social media, you will probably already be aware that I found out that my contract at NSERC, where I’ve been working for the last 11 months or so, will be ending come October 9th. That means that as of right now, I have a little over one week left to find work to replace that job.

    Obviously, there are a number of negative ways I could choose to look at this. It would probably be very easy to sit back and let the bad news occupy my mind and bring down my mood. But I’m not going to do that. I’ve been here before. Since I left school in 2011, I’ve been unemployed 3 times, the longest time for 6 months (most of that by choice). The work I’ve done since I left school only vaguely relates to the work I am doing since I finished my degree.

    Mostly, the reason I’m not worrying about new ventures is that things are going REALLY well in my life overall. Despite this looming potential unemployment, my life is mostly looking way up, which is something I’m really happy about. I just got married to the girl of my friggen dreams, I’ve lost almost 20 pounds since the beginning of July, I’ve got a large number of very satisfying hobby projects, and I have an amazing network of friends who have been incredibly supportive of everything I do.

    I was very briefly hesitant to talk about my soon-to-be unemployment as publicly as I have, but in the many years since I basically became an open book to the world socially, my life has only gotten way better. And the reaction and help I’ve gotten from friends, colleagues, family and many other people is really quite touching. Once you tweet your weight to the world, directing them to a website where anybody can see what you’ve weighed for the last 30 days, there’s really no reason to keep anything too secret.

    Oddly (though maybe I shouldn’t be surprised), the main question I get when people want to help me look for a job is “What kind of work are you looking for?”. I think this is a weird question mainly because I don’t really think too much about it. I want to work, I want to make a living and I want to do something I love. I really like media (video, audio and writing), the internet, technology, and science. I’m getting to the point where work I do in those fields can be put on my resume as real experience, something I definitely didn’t see happening just a couple of years ago.

    I’ve talked before about how wonderful if would be if Canada instituted a basic income for its citizens, because more than anything what I want to be able to do is to be creative. I want to share my experiences and knowledge with people who want to learn and try new things. I want to open minds. I’ve been thinking for a very long time about doing a big project where I get to do things like this on a regular basis, but for that today I really do need a day job where I make enough to support what I’d like to do for the other big part of my life.

    However, even considering all of this, the biggest priority for me, and the reason why I’m so keen to get a new job as soon as possible, is that I want to start a family. I’m not in a rush to do that, but I do want to start sooner rather than later. And, seeing as how my wife and I are responsible and financially prudent, we’d rather wait until there are two sources of secure income in our lives before moving forward with that. And that is the most frustrating part of all of this. I just want to express my ideas and thoughts in a positive, constructive way and make the world a better place, and pass those traits along to the next generation of humans. But first, I need someone to take a chance on me.

    It’s worth it.

    If you know of any job openings or places that might be hiring, especially those looking for young people who are ready to learn and looking to make a difference in the world, please let me know. You can send me email at [email protected].

  • What’s my weight again?

    What’s my weight again?

    Future Chat is on hiatus this week, while Mike schmoozes with Disney characters in Orlando, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to announce this week!

    I’ve decided to take my health changes even more seriously, and give you real-time (daily) access to how my health changes are impacting my weight. I’ve never done anything like this before, and it might go terribly, but here we go…

    Click through the image (or here) to get straight to the live version!

    I’ve created a special page so if you’re interested in my weight loss progress, you can follow along. Feel free to leave best wishes, or heckle me if I eat way too much on a given weekend. Go check it out!

    It’s a big week for me and my friends, Ottawhat is launching a brand new initiative! We’re calling it Ottawhat News, and it involves us taking a look at the lighter side of news in and around Ottawa. I really hope you like it, and you can learn more here. You can also check out the first story, by our own Keegan On, below:

    Deer Shot in Greenbelt, Refuses to Cooperate with Police

    Also, don’t miss the new episode of Ottawhat:

    Ottawhat? 70 – Jessica Heuther (Ottawa Geek Market)
    This week on the show, we spoke to Jessica Heuther from Ottawa Geek Market. She told us all about the event, going on during October 3rd and 4th at the Nepean Sportsplex. Jessica also works with Carnival Diablo, Canada’s only* carnival sideshow…
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  • The “Honeymoon” Phase of #JuliaRoberts2015

    The “Honeymoon” Phase of #JuliaRoberts2015

    Getting married has honestly been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. The idea of committing ones-self to only one other person for the rest of your life seems like the kind of thing that would be terrifying, but so far I have been completely fine with it.

    “The One Where They Got Married” #juliaroberts2015
    Posted by Jacquie Watkins on Saturday, July 25, 2015

    Even though the day-to-day events of Julia’s and my life since we got married are basically unchanged (finalizing wedding stuff obviously notwithstanding), everything feels very different. Getting home and seeing Julia’s beautiful, smiling face is that much nicer, going and running errands as she recovers from her excellent party on Saturday feels like no effort at all. I know we’re still fully in the “honeymoon” phase of the marriage, but I think we are both acutely aware of the fact that this is going to take work. More importantly, Julia and I should easily be able to put aside our minor squabbles and disagreements, and focus on what really matters, our life together and our mutual happiness.

    We are still fully entrenched in post-wedding business, like writing thank yous to everybody who was SO generous this past week, with their time and with their love, and our friends and family have proven to us just how much they care about our future together. I can’t wait to get started!

    At what point do we change #JuliaRoberts2015 to #JuliaRobertsForever?

  • Bliss (The Aftermath of #JuliaRoberts2015)

    Bliss (The Aftermath of #JuliaRoberts2015)

    Wow. There is nothing like a wedding to make a guy feel loved. I have about a billion thoughts and feelings going through my head right now, and I need about 4 more hours of sleep than I got last night, but it has all been so incredibly worth it.

    I’m going to need several weeks or even months to process this past weekend, and to sort out all the thank yous, acknowledgements, and hugs that my friends, family and everybody else deserve for helping to make Saturday the best day I’ve had, ever. This won’t be the last thing I write on the matter, and today it won’t even be very long. Due to the incredible depth of my distraction in the last week, my work has been somewhat neglected, so I’ll be focusing hard on making sure everything I need to do is complete before going on the honeymoon next week.

    I just want to say I am so very grateful to everybody in my life for the incredible amount of support, friendship, love and kindness I’ve received in the last week. I will never forget the way I felt and still feel; I have a blessed life.

    Pictures are just starting to trickle in, you can check out Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to see what people have been putting up. I’m just so excited to see what adventures will come next for Julia and myself!

    A photo posted by Brian (BL) (@mystical_wizard) on Jul 25, 2015 at 11:23am PDT
  • Weight Loss (How I Am Breaking The Pattern)

    Weight Loss (How I Am Breaking The Pattern)

    One of my favourite things to do is open up and talk about things that are going on in my life. If you want to hear about me in more detail, I convinced my co-hosts on Ottawhat? to let me talk about myself for an hour this week (listen here).

    But that’s not what today is about. Today, I want to tell you what’s been going on with my weight in the last month or so. You can see all the past stuff I’ve written about Soylent here, but this isn’t really about Soylent either. This is all about my weight, and health.

    Trust me, I was too small.

    For the majority of my adult life, I have weighed between 230 and 250 pounds. Most health experts will tell you that for my height, that makes me about 50-70 pounds overweight. This puts me just a smidge past overweight, and into “obese” territory. For almost a year, when I tore my ACL in 2010-11 and couldn’t do any real physical activity, my weight actually dropped down as far as 190 pounds, and I honestly looked like a skeleton. That is my “healthy” weight, so I know that I can’t depend on a measure like BMI (which doesn’t take density or body structure into account) to measure my health. Buoyancy is dependent on density, and I would drown if I tried to float, so I know I’m pretty dense.

    All of that being said, in the last few weeks, I have been cycling to and from work about 70% of the time, and I have also not been taking a lunch. Instead, I have been having one serving of Soylent around 12:15 PM every day, in addition to breakfast and whatever I eat in the evening. The result of this is a pretty drastic drop in my weight since the second week of July, as you can see here.

    The last month of weight measurements.

    Luckily for me, since I first bought a WiFi-connected scale in February 2014, my weight has been a known quantity as long as I stand on it every day. What I saw from the last 18 months is that what I had been “doing” to lose weight, wasn’t doing much. Even Soylent and cycling, as you can see from the graph above (starting at the end of June), weren’t really having any effect on my weight.

    The thing that finally started me down the path you see on the right side of the graph is a pretty simple change, that is, using this graph. I am currently using the measurements from my scale, and feeding them into the graph described here. It keeps a moving average of the last 10 days (so 9 days ago is weighted at 0.1 in the average, 4 days ago is weighted 0.6, etc., and today is weighted as 1). What this means, as described if you read the article above, is that if you have an off day or eat a whole pizza, it doesn’t completely ruin your weight trend, because you will still have a string of good days before it that are factored in to your weight.
    What I’ve been trying to do with this information is keep the blue line up there below the red line. That makes weight loss incredibly simple, and it means that I can in theory eat whatever I want on a given day, just that I have to be healthy overall. As you can see, I went to a birthday party last weekend where I ate a little bit too much. Where that would normally be a huge discouragement, with this data available, I can see that as long as I put work in to make up for it, everything will be fine.
    This was a really good, too big meal, from 2012.
    What all of this really comes down to is that to lose weight, I have had to limit what I eat. I don’t necessarily need to eat healthy foods, but that definitely helps. Even more than losing weight though, this has come from a desire to be healthier. I know that I just plain eat too much food. At home, I have a lot more control over what I eat, and that really helps, but restaurants are becoming a bigger and bigger pain to eat at. The problem that I end up having is: the portions restaurants give you is WAY too big. Any restaurant worth its salt (heh) will know that the economics of food mean that they will make more money if they give you bigger portions. As meals (and servings) get bigger, you can charge more for them, and the only downside is that it’s WAY too much food for any one person in one sitting.
    What I have to get into the mindset of doing is mentally setting aside some of the food on my plate when I’m at a restaurant, and knowing ahead of time that I actively shouldn’t be eating all of the food I’m given. At the moment, I treat the food on my plate at restaurants as a goal, even though I stop being hungry very early in the meal. I think, if I can keep up these measurements and motivations, and actually change my restaurant habits, I can keep this up and get to a weight where I feel a little better about myself and feel healthy all the time, as opposed to feeling like I should eat a salad more often (because salads are the worst).
    That being said, as a work food replacement, Soylent has been unbelievable. It’s all I’m eating at work these days, and it’s been filling enough that I don’t need to eat any snacks before lunch, and I don’t feel starved biking home if I only have one small portion in the morning. Although I still don’t love the sucralose taste.
  • SoundCloud, Writing, and #Taylorette1989 heats up. (Unwind Media; May 7-13)

    SoundCloud, Writing, and #Taylorette1989 heats up. (Unwind Media; May 7-13)

    This week we made a couple of substantial changes on Unwind Media, most notably we’re making the transition to hosting audio files on SoundCloud, as opposed to Archive.org. I’m pretty excited for that, and I even wrote a little bit about some of the neat tricks I am using now to get those files to work with podcast clients and on the podcast website while keeping the setup simple.

    I also wrote a little more for MobileSyrup, rather than linking to all of them, you can find those stories by using a custom Google Search (for ‘site:mobilesyrup.com “Rob Attrell” ‘)one of the hosts on Unwind Media and my cousin, +Mike Attrell, came up with to find things I’ve written.

    In other news, #Taylorette1989 is entering its next phase, as +Taylor Swift begins her world tour and gets ready to launch her latest music video. Look for more on that in the next week! As well, there’s a new episode of Feedback coming before the end of the week, so that means a fun conversation, AND 2 more cover tunes from Damien and BL in the next week or so! Stay tuned!

    Ottawhat? #51 – Mark Holst (Ottawa Academy of Martial Arts)
    On Ottawhat this week, we met former UFC fighter and Ottawa native Mark “Boots” Holst. He spoke to us about his experiences in the ring, teaching the new…
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    Future Chat #57 – What’s Slow About a Bear
    In this episode, Tesla goes gangbusters, it’s zeppelins vs. dirigibles, and trucks are driving themselves in Nevada. Get excited, because we’ll be deliver…
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  • I’m A Professional Writer? (Unwind Media; April 30 – May 6)

    I’m A Professional Writer? (Unwind Media; April 30 – May 6)

    Some huge news on Unwind Media this week; I got a new job! I’ve officially begun writing for a Canadian technology blog called MobileSyrup, and I’m having so much fun with it! I’m writing for them mostly during the evening and on weekends, starting off pretty slowly. I’ve wanted to write on a professional level for quite some time, and I’m really excited to get the opportunity!

    I discuss it a little on Future Chat this week (see below), and you can read my work from the last week here, here and most recently here. Ottawhat? this week was also a lot of fun, we interviewed Lilly Tran, a young woman who writes closed captioning for a cable TV porn station. I definitely did not know that was a thing, and we all learned a lot!

    Ottawhat? #50 – Lilly Tran
    In this episode, we spoke with Lilly Tran, a closed-captioner for adult films. We discussed some of the weird things Lilly’s heard around her relatively normal office…
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    Future Chat #56 – We Don’t Need A Biologist
    This week, Rob gets a new job, we discuss Microsoft’s Build conference (much to Nick’s chagrin), Tesla’s big new battery, and how a woolly mammoth burger…
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  • This Week in Podcasts (March 30 – April 6)

    This Week in Podcasts (March 30 – April 6)

    One more week and +Future Chat is back with Season 2! To hold you over, +Mike Attrell and I talked a little about some of what we’ve been thinking about in the tech world in the last year. Wearable tech, cloud storage and advertising were all under scrutiny from us.

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    Fake It #7 – Like A Big Horse Pill (with Mike Attrell)
    This week, I talk to my cousin Mike Attrell once again, catching up on our digital lives and discussing things we’d like to have on our wrists, advertising as TV moves online, and how we approach our lives online, both storing things, and making and keeping friends.
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    Ottawhat? Podcast #46 – Natalie Stewart (Camp Quality)
    This week, we sat down with Natalie Stewart, an elementary school teacher and Camp Quality volunteer coordinator. She discussed her career as a teacher and some of the differences between teaching various grade levels.
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  • Brand Loyalty

    Brand Loyalty

    Millions of man-hours on the internet are lost every day to petty fights about PC vs. Mac, Android vs. iOS, or Starbucks vs. Tim Hortons (not a coffee drinker, but I assume). Most people I talk to in real life just have what products they have, and if asked might lean slightly towards that side. However, on the Internet, everybody is a dog and people’s opinions relating to personal choices in brand seem to be a lot more intense.

    I was in the Apple Store yesterday, as I often am, looking at the fancy new MacBook trackpad that clicks without actually physically moving. If you haven’t tried it, you really should, but be aware your mind will be blown. This got me thinking once again about brand loyalty, and whether it actually works the way companies think it does.

    TL;DR This is about technology, but I also talk about meat. If you don’t care about tech, scroll to the picture of meat.

    I’ve written a good many years ago about choosing to spend a little more money on things that are really important to me, and technology happens to be one of those things (but it’s not the only thing, as I’ll get to). I’ve had my fair share of terrible laptops and computers that were underpowered, cheap, flimsy and overwhelmingly inadequate. I believe it was about the 2nd laptop I bought that was a $400 clunker from Acer that came with a printer. I was young and in university, and I wasn’t willing to invest in a more powerful laptop, thinking that it couldn’t possibly make that much of a difference.

    When that Acer laptop stopped working about a year after I got it (after having been sent in for repairs once already), I decided that I wasn’t going to buy cheap laptops any more. Most people, when met with this kind of issue, might think that I would swear off Acer laptops, but the 4th laptop I bought was also an Acer, it just wasn’t cheap. What I learned from my experiences with laptops is that quality is what you are paying for. My current laptop, which if you’re playing at home is apparently my 5th laptop, is a MacBook Air, and I absolutely love it. It has been my most expensive laptop to date, but it is easily the one that has given me the most value overall, and is absolutely worth it.

    Companies often try to buy your love with incentives, rewards programs and the like designed to keep you coming back, and they are very successful, but those programs don’t necessarily mean people like your product or service. It could just mean that it works for them right now, and it’s not worth it to go somewhere else for your needs right now. It certainly doesn’t mean your company has its customers hooked. People are going to do what works for them, all you can do is try not to screw it up.

    When it comes to cell phones (and tablets), I’m the guy who always wants to be on the latest technology. I use every part of the phone to almost its maximum potential, and though some portion of my gadget-lust is marketing-driven, I also do see a lot of the benefits in the year-over-year updates provided, and often wish for features and upgrades well before they show up in the real world. I have tried Android phones, but for me personally, their shortcomings are more numerous than those in the current iteration of the iPhone. I have definitely also tried CHEAP Android phones, and that is an experience that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. What I value in this space is having a phone that can keep up with me, and one that will keep getting better, even if it means spending a few hundred dollars a year on a cell phone (barring upcoming major life expenses, obviously).

    Mmmmmmm…smoked meat.

    Brand loyalty, to me, isn’t as important as loyalty to myself and to my needs and desires. If I have a bad experience with a given brand, I can’t equate that to never wanting to deal with that company again, I will evolve and learn from specific things wrong with the product, and attempt to not make the same mistakes again.

    Before I go, here is a more relate-able example of the reverse brand loyalty I’m talking about in action. Picture a delicious smoked meat/Reuben sandwich for a moment. I have had my share of terrible meat sandwiches, but I have had a few that REALLY stand out as unbelievable experiences in my mind. One of my favourite smoked meat sandwiches came from Montreal (which is not a surprise from people who’ve been there and tried them), but I find that most pubs/bars in Ottawa simply get much lower quality meat than places known for their smoked meat. This has caused me to not trust smoked meat or Reuben sandwiches in Ottawa, even though I LOVE them so so much. Unless I know a restaurant has a good meat sandwich, I will not order one here. The same can be said of steak at a pub (I’m sure you have had a good experience with a pub steak at one point, but don’t kid yourself into thinking it is common). I do not recommend steak at a pub, having eaten $30 steak I can assure you it is worth much more than 3 $10 pub steaks.

    And now I’ve written more about meat than I ever thought I would today.

  • 3 Things That Happened This Week (& Social News)

    3 Things That Happened This Week (& Social News)

    Since Future Chat is still on haitus until April, we only had one show last week, but it was a really great episode of Ottawhat with Waubgeshig Rice from CBC Ottawa! This week proper, I chatted with Nick about my experiences on Universal Time (aka GMT) and how living 4 hours in the future is making my life better in some pretty interesting ways, and confuses everyone around me. We also sat down with Jantine Van Kregten from Ottawa Tourism on Ottawhat to learn how our city encourages people to visit, and helps them out once they’re here. Interesting stuff and a great interview!

    We also underwent a nice set of changes at unwindmedia.com, it’s a lot easier to follow and subscribe to shows as they have their own landing pages with show info now. We also added a couple of Twitter accounts and Facebook pages for East Meets West (@_emwFM/East Meets West) and Feedback (@_FeedbackFM/Feedback) this week (we also moved Future Chat’s Twitter account to @_FutureChatFM), you can follow or like those to keep up with news for those shows specifically.

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    East Meets West #6 – Objectively, Edmonton Is Worse
    This week, daylight savings woes, Nick’s massive Canadian Election blog oeuvre, and faux punditry among the Conservative elite. Should Alberta collect sales tax? We think so!
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    Ottawhat? Podcast #45 – Jantine Van Kregten
    In this episode, we talked to Jantine Van Kregten, the incredibly knowledgable director of communications at Ottawa Tourism.

    Ottawhat? Podcast #44 – Waubgeshig Rice
    In this episode, we sat down with Waubgeshig Rice. He’s a video journalist working for the CBC in Ottawa, he’s published a book of short stories and last year put out a novel called Legacy.
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