I haven’t had much to crow about my recent 10ks: after my second go-round with COVID¹, I was never able to match 11/26/2023’s PR of 41:10.8. Today’s was 41:29.6.

My Most Recent 10Ks, descending

My 10k PR

Today’s 10k

As I observed in my post from 12/4, I was not as fast as my PR, but I was close, with a stroke rate below 30. Lowering my stroke rate has been a goal of mine.

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¹ Once again, mercifully mild, with no long-lasting symptoms

Inspired by Episode 496 of Upgrade, “40th Anniversary of the Mac Draft,” I got to thinking about my favorite Mac. I’ve had a solid run of Macs:

• Color Classic (my first)
• Performa 630 CD
• PowerBook G3 333 Lombard
• PowerMac G4
• Titanium PowerBook G4
• Aluminum PowerBook G4
• PowerMac G5
• MacBook (the “Blackbook”)
• MacBook Air
• 2013 MacBook Pro 13”
• 2015 MacBook (the MacBook Adorable)
• 2019 MacBook Pro 16”
• 2021 MacBook Pro 13” (which is my current laptop)
• 2019 Mac mini (intel)
• 2021 Mac mini (first generation M1)
• Mac Studio (first generation)

That’s a lot of Macs!

If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the MacBook Air. It was my first Mac with an SSD, and I absolutely loved it. I only stopped using it because my son needed something to play Minecraft on; I was not in the market for a replacement. The 13” Pro I replaced it with was superior, technically, but I didn’t really need the extra power and the Air was just the right size for everything I needed it for.

The PowerMac G4 was my first pro desktop and holds a special place in my heart; I was in grad school and while I did have the PowerBook Lombard at the time, I didn’t use it unless I was out and about because the G4 was a screamer. I installed Mac OS X, as it was called back then, on both, and only the G4 ran it usably. I gamed a lot on this machine, especially Oni. I have never actively disliked any of my Macs.

The 16” MacBook Pro is the last of my Intel Macs that still sees some usage, but I don’t care for Intel Macs compared to either of my Apple Silicon Macs for reasons of power efficiency; the 16”’s fans fire up a lot and the battery gets nuked fast. And it’s really big.

The MacBook Adorable was (still is, it runs just fine) amazingly portable and I used to carry it around pinched between my index finger and thumb. I would probably go for a 12” M2 or M3 Mac of that size if I work were springing for a new Mac and I needed to replace this 13” M1, which is a great machine but heavy for my needs. I currently covet a 13” M2 Air in Space Black the most, but I’m not due for one any time soon. I suspect an Air will be my next Mac. But who knows.

The Studio, named “Anthem” (I name my Macs after Rush songs) is a fantastic machine, overkill for my use case, but it’s an amazing machine.

But that first Air? Ahh. Fond memories.

Next post: the Color Class, my first Mac.

I wrote about the filet mignon at Drift in Reboboth Beach back in the fall, and the perfect doneness found me swearing to cook mine a bit lower the next go round. We grabbed a three-pack of filet at an ACME yesterday, and true to my word, I left it in the Anova at 124 instead of 128 for an hour before finishing it on the jet engine method I use to grill off a sous vide cut. (I cribbed this move from Alton Brown, albeit a variation of his innovation.)

Filet Mignon

This was one of the best dishes I’ve done, a perfect medium rare, very little “gray line,” as Aaron calls it. I used to fret about overdoing filet, but sous vide neatly solves that problem.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Ciprianni Bellini: this is a premade Bellini, the storied cocktail from Harry’s Bar in Venice. This is sweet for my tastes, but I’ve never had a proper Bellini.¹
2. Phô: The three of us were dining last night and remarked how long it had been since we’d had phô. Aaron and I were into the traditional Vietnamese soup for a while. We found ourselves today at Phô Cali in nearby English Creek. I got the P1 with several proteins: brisket, steak, tendon, tripe, and meatballs. So good.
3. NotePlan: I test-drove this notes+todo app last week for the duration of the free trial. It’s a Mac-only app that helps you orgnanize your to-do list using both project notes and daily journal pages, all connected intimately with your calendar. NotePlan offers support for tags and other metadata (including due dates), and relies on Markdown. Also works on the iPhone and iPad. I could easily replace my notes and to do managers with NotePlan. I’m an inveterate switch of apps and systems, which is a bad habit I’m keen to break. Sometimes.

Cipriani Bellini

Phô

NotePlan

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¹I traveled to Venice once but never went to Harry’s.

I found this script online back in 2018 and it still works in Sonoma. Fire it using LaunchBar, natch.

tell application "System Events"
    tell appearance preferences
        set dark mode to not dark mode
    end tell
end tell

It will switch to dark mode and back again, somehow.

Here’s this week’s list of things to try out. I took a couple of weeks off for the holidays:

1. Fuji in Haddonfield: We dined here tonight (and many times before) for my son’s brithday, my dad’s birthday, and Joey’s girlfriend’s. It was excellent as always. I can’t avoid the crispy salmon skin roll every time.
2. Bellview Winery: Bellview Winery has been open for something like 20 years. They did our wedding favor splits back in 2003. I went recently for a celebration of life and had two glasses of their rosé. I was smitten and talked up coming back to Rhonda many times. Our Cape May jaunt ignited a renewed interest in checking it out, which we have several times since.
3. Tabby: One of my favorite keyboard shortcuts on Chromium-based browsers is shift-command-a (on Mac) and shift-control-a (Windows) to search open browser tabs. This makes finding open tabs much easier than scanning horizontally across the toolbar when you have a lot open. Tabby is a tab manager for the Mac that exposes and allows you to search your open browser tabs across browsers. Pretty killer and infrastructure for me.

Fuji in Haddonfield, NJ

Bellview Winery Rosé

Tabby for Mac

I described a bit how I’ve lost some weight rowing and changing my diet here on Uncorrected. I keep close track of this by weighing myself every morning and appending the data to a CSV file via an action in Drafts. The resulting data file made it easy to ballpark how much I’d lost overall, and analyze some patterns (Monday mornings after three-day weekends=a bit of weight gain, for example). But I wondered about the larger data set and what I might learn from some analysis in Excel. So I fed the sheet into Excel and ran a pivot table.

Takeaways:

• Quarter 2 in 2023 was my greatest loss on record (28.5 lbs), with the most lost occurring in May. This puzzled me at first, but the reason is that I got a new rower for Rhonda to use. It had the newer PM5 computer on it, which synced with my iPhone over bluetooth using Concept 3’s ErgData app. As you can see below, I didn’t log the most meters of all of the months after which I started tracking the data using the PM5, but I moved from using the PM3 on my older rower and tracking the data manually to getting more competitive with myself. I did track data before this, but I used a Drafts action to write to a text file. I was not as concerned with my standings when I was using Apple Fitness+, only getting in a 20 or 30-minute workout with Josh or Ana. I would like to look more closely at my output prior to moving to the PM5 in the future.

• Closing in on losing 80 pounds, I’m starting to plateau. And while that causes me a twinge of panic, obviously you have to stop somewhere. I have to stop somewhere. Considering I was hoping to just move down a pant size, (I’ve moved down to a size 30 from a 38, when the 38s were cut generously), I should be just fine with that.

So what’s next?

Maintenance, I guess. I have considered cutting a day of rowing out of the schedule (I generally do six days a week). I have a hunch that I will be able to break some new goals if I rested more in between rowing sessions. I have also been thinking about adding some strength training back into the routine, if my left shoulder will cooperate (probably just bench presses). I can do up to 10 pull-ups now, which is 10 more than I could do a year ago. I don’t want to get bored and I don’t want to get frustrated if I’m not setting PRs. I even find myself getting anxious before attempting a PR now. I have a good idea of what I need to do to lose weight were I to gain some back, but I still fret.

It’s a crazy ride, this life. This goofy mind of mine.

Def gonna row tomorrow though 😉.

In a study of people taking tirzepatide, people who were switched to a placebo gained back 14% of the 25.5% of their lost body weight (the placebo group continued to receive coaching). It’s not necessarily unexpected, though:

“If a patient wants to go off the medicine, we’ll try. But we also say what the results are — so far, it seems like most people are going to gain weight back,” Dr. Jay said. “And that’s not your fault. That’s because obesity is a disease, and this medicine is helping to address it.”

How Much Weight Comes Back After You Stop Using a Weight-Loss Drug?