Recovering from Grad School, One Step at a Time

Recovering from Graduate School includes reversing the sedentary lifestyle.  After a couple years of working during the day at a “sit at the computer and type, type, type” style job following by evenings of “sit at the computer and type, type, type”, it can be hard to get back into a more active lifestyle.

This weekend I picked up a pedometer to help chart my progress away from the desk chair.  It seems very accurate, and very disappointing.  It works fine; I seem to be the problem.  Using the somewhat trendy “10,000 steps a day” principle as a guide, I found myself at about 2,000 steps half way through the work day.  At that rate I’ll need to circle the office three times in an imitation of a person with obsessive compulsive disorder any time I think about going to the printer or walking over to ask someone a question just to get close to the 5 miles 10,000 steps will roughly equal.

A quick Google search shows that the advocates of 10,000 steps also advocate starting with a week of normal behavior just to lay down a baseline.  Then they suggest trying to increase your daily average by 500 steps each week until you get to averaging 10,000 steps a day.

If the afternoon goes like the morning did, I’ll add another 2K.  If I can persuade the new puppy at our house to go for a walk (she’s young and still very shy about leaving the yard- a good trait in a suburban dog, bad for me tacking miles on the pedometer) that’d be another easy 2K.  But then I’d still be 4K short.  I thought finding supporting documentation for a research paper was hard; finding a way to burn a couple extra miles of shoe leather each day will be an entirely different kind of challenge.

Diametric Opposition, Cable Cuts, and Consulting Clings

It has been a while since I’ve written any blog posts, here or elsewhere.  In that time I’ve found there are two ends of the not-writing spectrum.  On one end you have “having nothing to say”, on the other you have “too much to say, I don’t have the time or energy to write it all”.  In spite of being diametrically opposed to one another, those two have the ability to gang up together and grab “nobody cares anyway” and to go on a trip to procrastination city for the day.  And the next day.  And the day after that.  You get the idea.

So here’s an abridged version of what missed out on.  The transition from grad student to ordinary citizen seems to be complete.  Several of the household projects that were put on hold pending completion of school have been started and completed.  A few unexpected projects have also been muddled through, ranging from a mysterious cable modem outage and a not so mysterious cable and telephone cable cut (unrelated events) to a deep and dark foray into spinal cord tumors and dog euthanasia (sadly, related events).

What to do with Where’s Adams iPod has not been firmed up.  So in the absence of a good purpose and topic, the original purpose will have to suffice; enumerating and documenting the places Adam’s iPod could have gone had I won it, with occasional tangents on how things learned during the process of getting an MBA are being applied in Real Live Corporate America.

On that note, an update on consulting.  The assignment I got at a time when I was heading into the home stretch on my MBA and everyone else was midway between thanksgiving and Christmas lingers on.  An assignment I had expected to last into April of this year still has its claws in me and at this point won’t relent until after the fryer grease has been heated for cheese curds at the State Fair at the end of August.  A funny thing about software consulting; on the surface it looks like if you are good at it you can save your client money.  If you’re really good at it, to the casual observer it would appear they are so happy about the money they saved that they don’t want you to leave, resulting in them spending more money.  Of course, the truth is that people work in companies and sometimes they like you and want you to stay around and help with other projects rather than go through the head hunting process that pervades contract IT services.