A life hack to increase my daily steps

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What are some life hacks that you practice?
View all responses

I found that doing an average of 10k steps, counted as a weekly average, is good for me. My goal is 8k on a work day and 15k on a weekend day. But that’s a lot of steps, and it is quite challenging to fit them in the schedule. I do about 1000 steps per 10 minutes of walking, which means 8k is about 1 hour and 10 minutes of time I need entirely for myself.

So, my trick is that I use the budget for regular activities to do steps.

For example, going to the shared office space takes 30 min. Using the shortest route, I can walk for 5 min, wait for a bus for about 5 min, and then and ride the bus for 20. Or I can walk for 35 min, wait for a more frequent bus, and ride it for 5, for a total of ~42. The second route is about 12 min slower, but I make 3500 steps, using 15 min of my commute time for walking. I also do some loops while waiting for the bus to arrive a few hundred extra steps. By doing this, most of my daily steps come from the budget for getting to work and back.

This kills multiple birds with one stone. I see many cats and get enough photos to keep the cat section of my blog well supplied, and the cat section keeps my blog alive on days with nothing good to say.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Valkyr is a young warrior, living on the Gaea space station. Gaea is a small rock, turned habitable by four battleships, embedded with it. It’s populated by the last surviving human soldiers, after Earth was destroyed by an invading alien force. Valkyr is a human tank, genetically modified breed that can crush the aliens with bare hands. However, she’s also a woman and the station is ruled by a patriarchal dictator who isn’t interested in letting women be warriors.

This is the surface-level promise, made by the book in the beginning. It sounds like Ender’s Game, sets the expectation that Valkyr will somehow prove herself and then tank the aliens. But the book isn’t that and is more like Cloud Atlas. The setting is good, the world building solid, except for one major plot hole. It doesn’t become clear if the aliens are strong or weak. Parts of the book indicate they’re extremely OP, so OP that they didn’t need to attack Earth at all. Parts of the book indicate that they’re weak and humans could easily overpower them.

Apart from this inconsistency between the different chapters, the book was enjoyable and I gave it 5/5 on Goodreads. It might be a bit illogical but it is interesting and the characters are complex and good.

PS. This is my first book review this month. Last three books didn’t meet the bar.

Use my AI emails

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I get marketing emails from OpenAI. The message is clear – AI is going to replace us all but it won’t ever replace the email marketing. How else are we going to convert the users who use something else and are not subscribed?

I checked my inbox. This was not the first product announcement I received but it was the first that looks like a pure marketing email, created by a human email marketer. I hope there’s a real person behind it, not a bot, trained on the junk mail folder.

This is a major improvement to the cluttered product announcements from before, that looked as a conspiracy theory, posted on Reddit.