I’ve had some good thoughts about living rising up over the last few days, and a good one this evening after getting home from work. I’ll get onto those in a minute.

Over the last 6 months I’ve been trying to get over an eating habit I’ve had since July last year. When I was living in up Newcastle UK I was renting a place. I fell into the habit of eating pizza and garlic bread every single night, almost without fail. My favorite garlic bread was the tear and share from Tesco’s which I’d have to myself as a starter, then the finest range pizza from Tesco’s. I managed to still lose weight because of the amazing amount of exercise I was doing, but can you imagine how much more I’d have lost without those calories! Never mind…

A few months ago, I decided that it would be great if it were possible to get rid of ‘unwanted activities’ in my life. These are difficult ones to remove because they are so enjoyable, but counteract the work done towards another goal. This results in little gain towards the main goal resulting in dissatisfaction. I don’t know if I could call it ‘Stringing Out’ activities and ‘Stringing In’ replacement ones.

I weighed up all the positives of giving up, such as not spending between £6-£8 every night on pizza and garlic bread, getting back 30 min of my life after work by not going to the supermarket to buy it, and losing a little more weight by not taking in all those calories.

I have now managed to get my pizza eating down to just Saturday nights, and without the garlic bread. This has only been happening for about 3 weeks now. I also string in a session at the gym every night just on cardio and stick to eating chicken.

Tonight, I came up with a new idea towards thinking positive out of the blue, and that is that you should be permanently happy, because you are in control of your thoughts, words, and what you do every single waking moment of your life. With that in mind, this idea may help you put aside thoughts about events that are dragging you down, and replace them with a something you’d rather be thinking about or doing.

I also had an amazing idea to help me get my product to market quicker about 1 hour ago. A few weeks ago I made a decision to get quotes for tooling a particular major part of my V2O Digital Shower product, the plastic bezel which houses a 7” custom screen. It requires a complicated plastic moulding tool with what they call side actions. This means that the tool itself has moving parts making it expensive, about £27,000.

Tonight, I decided that if the bezel was made in two relatively simple moulded pieces rather than a single complicated piece, which were then glued together during assembly, the tool would be massively cheaper since there would be no side actions, no moving parts, and I could go for what’s called ‘soft tooling’ where it is made from aluminium rather than steel. This has made me enormously happy.

This is the first entry into my blog that I've set up. A lot has happened over the last month, but I'll put the thoughts and description of those events into a 'Recollection' section that I'll create at some point.

This weekend has been very productive in terms of exercise especially. I've managed to continue going to the gym every single day, just doing exercise bike, treadmill and 4kg dumbells. I've been going every day now since Tuesday before last, and I'm trying to make sure I keep going every single night. Its just for cardio to lose the last 10kgs of fat.

I've spent a lot of time trying to get to grips with Android programming as well. I run my own company called Touchtile and I'm in the last stages of finishing my pre-production prototype product ready for sale in a few months. This last phase is the creation of the Touchtile UI which runs on my product, the V2O Digital Shower. Finishing this product has also been one hell of a task, and I've also put stringtheory to work on that aspect to help me string in work slots on my own product. I also work full time during the day as an electronic engineer on contract to fund all the development, so the extra framework of stringtheory has helped.

So, I've been learning Android for almost 2 weeks now and have managed to draw shapes and move them around on the screen of my product. This weekend I've been trying to get a background image on the screen as well. It has really screwed with my head, but finally managed it this evening. Most examples of coding this on the internet seem to over complicate it so it has been quite hard to pick apart what is really required. In the end I made a mental leap and implemented what I though should be correct, and after stumbling a little it worked. All the work over the weekend helped to get me to the point where I could make sense of the basics, so no effort was really wasted.

Unfortunately, due the fact that I no longer drink since the 23rd January 2017, I could not calm my mind down after getting that background image working with alcohol. So I've since been to Weatherspoons for an alcohol free Erdinger and a portion of chicken strips and chips :-) very bad for my diet, but the edge is definitely off. That's my little celebration. I should finish the bulk of the new UI by the end of play next weekend.

Apart from that I had a fantastic breakfast at Bill's restaurant in Bury st Edmunds on Saturday morning with my mate Mick. I highly recommend it, its a great restaurant with great service. I've recently made it a habit to have breakfasts on the weekends in Bury since its such a nice town.

Also caught up with some other friends and their family in Bury today (This is becoming a quite a habit) and went to Giraff. Had a beef burito and some great conversation with my friends.

Almost forgot, I strung in a session on my own exercise bike here at home after I cracked the background image coding problem. Managed 15 minutes, which not only boosted me mentally, also subsidised my meal at Spoons. Hey, gotta be done :-)

Back to day job tomorrow, should sleep well. Made some good progress on some important issues this weekend.