Sunday Fireside [05/04/2020]

Today was my first cheat day since February.
56 days after I actually started to be really strict with my diet and activity, I sat down to eat BBQ wings and chips, capped off with some Easter Eggs. Now as I sit here to type, I feel a little unwell (too many wings) and my heart rate at a million miles an hour.
Thanks chocolate, for basically putting my blood pump into panic mode.

Tonight, we’re going to have pasta and real cheese sauce along with some other treats. A sort of celebration, before I get strict about my diet and activity again. Easter Sunday is my next scheduled cheat day for the foreseeable future.
And this foreseeable future extends for about another 8 weeks.
What are we celebrating, you may ask? Well for one, I have reached and exceeded almost all of my goals. With the remaining one being the stupidly stubborn body fat percentage!

So, it’s safe to say, I am feeling rather good. Minus the chocolate that is now running through my veins and making me think I am having a minor heart attack. Seriously! My heart rate is hovering around 116 just sitting here!

While I am down in weight, my BMI is sitting at 19.2 and my body fat percentage is hovering around the 10.6 mark. This tells me I have one more big push in order to get under 10% body fat and get my BMI around the 18 mark.

But why am I doing this? Why am I sacrificing all the delicious things, and the beer and the chocolate and the eating whatever, whenever?
Simple – I want to be better.
I want control over my body, instead of letting my body have control over me.
I want to prove to myself the extent of my willpower.
I want to see my abs for the first time in my life.
And I want to not be fat, or unfit. Even though I am still a bit of both…

Right.
That was my weight update. Which no one was asking for…
What else do I normally write about here?

Ah! Computers! I like computers. And I like mine!

Recently, I have been getting the itch for a computer upgrade. This normally happens once every 4 years or so, and would you believe me if I told you that next year will be 4 years since I got my current machine! I mean the first photos I ever took of it was with my Windows Phone! That says something…

Upgrading has played a lot on my mind recently, helped in no part by the announcement of the Xbox Series X, and some of my requirements – not changing per say – but becoming a little more refined. Certain things that were “extreme” when I first built the beast back in 2017, are now mainstream. Certain things that cost me an arm and a leg to be on the bleeding edge are now ho-hum and found in laptops.
Laptops, of all things!

In other words, tech has moved on and now I need to play the leapfrog game to get ahead. What is interesting to me is that by leapfrogging, I am not going to get a massive performance improvement, like one would have in the past. In fact, performance may only go up by single or double digits percentwise. So why upgrade then?

As I said – certain requirements have changed. For example, I want great audio, and while on-board sound has gotten to the point of being really good, it’s not the great I aspire to. This means I must go for an external AMP/DAC to really drive the speakers I have. All the AMP/DACs are USB-A or (even worse) USB-B currently…
Where is the USB-C? Where is the Thunderbolt?
This means I wait. I wait until the company that makes the AMP/DAC I want to get, updates it to USB-C.
And if you’re interested – this is the one I want to get.

The idea of upgrading my computer has excited me again, also due in part to the triumphant return of AMD as a proper option for high-end desktops. I find myself thinking about a lot of little things I didn’t think about during the build of my 2017 machine, and that excites me. It means my 2017 build was a particularly good base, and not a “throw money at it” computer upgrade. It also means I don’t have to think about the decisions I made with 2017, which clears up a lot of mental energy.

I am still debating if it will be a complete greenfield, or if it will be a retrofit update.

We’ll just have to see what comes along in the next 12 months… But what I have settled on is not so much the parts, but the tech.
For example, multiple M.2 drives are now possible – something that wasn’t even on the roadmap when I bought my system. RGB has its place (in a teenage boy’s bedroom computer) so we’ll be stripping that back even further than it is now – essentially only having the green RTX logo of the graphics card visible. Dual graphics cards are dead, so no need to worry about those… As you can see, it’s now a lot of little things to think about. But it is good. I have the time – I am only scheduling to upgrade in 2021.

Apart from that, New Zealand has entered and survived it’s first full week of lockdown. Only three more to go, or about 70%.
And to be honest, I am enjoying it. Being forced to hang out at home, work from home, has made making eating easier in terms of diet, has made workouts fun again, and one of the best things about it – I can get up off my chair during work hours and go steal a kiss from Simone. Going back into the office again is going to be hard when I can’t stand up and tell her any one of my random thoughts that just popped into my head. I’ll then be expected to remember them! What a schlep…

I’ll have to write about this lockdown at some point, as for us, it’s been rather good. We have been extremely blessed that it has been so easy for us.

My next project I am eyeing up – which I’ll do after our podcast finished the April Achievement Challenge – is to play and write about No Man’s Sky. I was inspired when Jeremy did it on his blog, and I think it’s the perfect game for it. Seriously, go read it and tell me it doesn’t make you want to do the same!

For now, I’ll say adieu, and hope to be back to write about a lot more stuff in the coming week as it is bound to be a calm one.

Look after yourself. And each other.