New Routine Update

The first week of my system for quitting caffeine has passed. It has gone very well and this morning while I enjoy my hot water and honey (no lemon because I forgot to buy them at the store) I am not missing the second dose of caffeine at all. In fact hot water and honey is quite good and I can see why people like honey in their tea. One more week with a mug of a coffee and then coffee will no longer be a part of my daily life.

Pangea Arcade

If you ever enjoyed Asteroids, Centipede, or Missile Command you really must download the Pangea Arcade demo. Their version of Asteroids is called Nucleus and it is really cool! I was never particularly good at Centipede but Firefall looks nicely done. Missile Command is near and dear to my heart because my first attempt at becoming an indie developer was Incoming! for the Newton. Pangea’s Warheads is an interesting new twist on an old classic.

Pure Ihnatko

Ihnatko: Harsh Words for Windows (originally from Daring Fireball) won’t illuminate your life at all but it might be worth a chuckle. I’ve always loved his writing style and sense of humor.

Introducing…

Tuesday I hit a major milestone for the new application I’ve been working on feverishly for the past few months. It was such a great feeling to see all the effort come together and “just work” like any true Mac application should. Suddenly it was real instead of just a collection of classes and NIB files and just as suddenly the internal development name wasn’t enough anymore. A good name is an important aspect of a successful application but it doesn’t necessarily have to convey the exact purpose of the application. What it needs to do is stand apart from other product names and be easy for people to associate with the functionality you are providing. I don’t find the process of discovering such a name to be easy but I am very happy with the result. So without further ado, the name of my new application is Anzan.

Is your curiosity piqued? Here are a couple more tidbits…

• Anzan is there when you need it and unobtrusive when you don’t
• Anzan will change the way you do something, especially in groups

A New Routine

This morning as I was beginning my second mug of coffee it finally struck me that I really don’t enjoy drinking it. I’ve been consuming coffee since my second year of college, which probably makes me a bit of a late bloomer, but the fact remains that 17 years is a lot of coffee through the gut. I’ve known for quite a while that coffee isn’t good for me. I take a Prilosec OTC pill every morning because I have acid reflux and yet I continue to drink two mugs (not cups, mugs) of coffee each day. (Coffee is one of the catalysts for acid reflux.) If simply knowing that something was bad for you or those around was enough to get people to stop engaging in certain behaviors we’d live in a very different world. Sometimes you’ve just got to come to it on your own.

My father smoked a pipe during my entire childhood. Smoking wasn’t unusual in the 70s and I never really thought anything about it. My younger sister did though and she tried to get him to quit but it never worked. The story goes that one day he was cleaning out his pipe and some liquid residue in the stem dripped onto his hand and so disgusted him that he quit right then and there. Even if we permit my dad some artistic license it was still something he came to on his own and once he had he was empowered and in control.

I won’t say that coffee so disgusts me that I’m going to quit cold turkey. I know what I feel like on a day without it. (And what I’m like to be around.) Instead I’m going to use a phased approach that is a slight modification of one I found via a Google search. Three weeks from now I won’t be drinking coffee every morning and in four weeks I won’t be having caffeine in the morning. Here’s the plan:

• Week one: 1 mug of coffee (around 8oz), 1 mug of green tea
• Week two: 1 mug of coffee, 1 mug of hot water with honey and lemon
• Week three: 1 mug of green tea, 1 mug of hot water with honey and lemon
• Week four: 2 mugs of hot water with honey and lemon

Whether I continue to have the hot water mixture after that is up to me, there is something to be said for a warm mug of something in the morning. This doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy coffee now and again but it does mean I won’t be a slave to it. The motions of my new morning routine might not be that different, but I bet I’ll feel a lot better.

As an aside, I have long been bothered by the unsustainable nature of coffee. While we do buy organic coffee from a local roaster it is still getting shipped here. It is also quite a pricey habit. We go through a pound of beans a week at $13.95 per pound. Cha-ching.