Another Year – New Me!
So today I thought I'd update this blog. Looks like I haven't posted in almost a year... oops. In my defence it's been a very busy year on a personal level and things are showing no sign of letting up.
In the last year technology has become more integral to my daily life, and has helped me to achieve a goal of getting to a healthy weight again. As most people are aware the key to weight loss is to have a deficit of calories, ideally by reducing your intake and exercising. Without some way of recording this information I would have failed so I decided to find something to help me keep track
MyFitnessPal is a free tool for recording this information. When registering with the site you enter your height, weight and information about your lifestyle then you can set your goal (to put on, maintain or lose weight) which in turn sets out your daily calorie allowance. You then record the food that you eat and any exercise that you do. There are plenty of entries for food and exercise already loaded into the community sourced database and you can add any that don't exist.
Mobile apps are available for iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry which makes the daily use of the site much easier - simply scan bar-codes of the food that you eat and it will search the database for you. Being able to record my calorie consumption and exercise wherever I am has been the number one catalyst in helping me lose over 40lbs during 2011 and will continue to be part of my daily routine for 2012 - although with a higher daily calorie allowance now I've reached my goal.
So how will technology help me achieve my goals in 2012 - well I'll keep y0u updated 
Recent thoughts
OK so its not new news as such but there have been a few announcements / launches recently that have caught my attention, and besides this site didn't exist when they we're announced anyway!
T-Mobile G1
The T-Mobile G1 has now gone on sale here in the UK. The platform itself has so much potential and I can see that the platform will really begin to develop now there is a device out there on the market. There was some speculation that due to the open source nature of the platform it wouldn't be possible to lock it to a particular provider like the networks would like -in fact it is reported that T-Mobile will allow you to unlock the device after 90 days provided your account is in good order.
Of course somebody has already found a way of unlocking the phone. What is of interest is that while the software platform is open source it appears that the hardware is not. The HTC handset will only accept signed firmware - giving T-Mobile/HTC control over the operating system of thiindos handset. Being a bit pessimistic I could see there being a program released allowing users to unlock the phone and then T-Mobile finding a way to block that via a firmware update - much in the same way that Apple does with the iPhone. I guess only time will tell on that.
Still I expect that in the next 6 months to a year there will be quite a few developments on the android front...
Windows 7
Microsoft have given us the first view of the new Windows 7 - many people are expecting the release date to be brought forward which would effectively send the signal that Microsoft are giving up on vista. Others are saying that it will be to Vista what Windows 98 was to Windows 95. They've taken some ideas from other sources - such as turning the task bar into a kind of OS X type doc and multi-touch functionality. But what I really want to know is does it perform better than Vista does in a domain environment?
Many people I know that have evaluated Vista for use in a domain have given up and gone back to XP, for some reason in our environments it seems to run incredibly slow which given the fact that we expect many users to be able to log on to any PC for a defined amount of time is a real deal breaker. Still if the performance improvements make it through to the final build we could be using Windows 7 in the future - after all somethings got to take over from XP!
Well that's the end of my first post, any thoughts, comments or suggestions please leave them below!