“How about CRON Academy?”

…Suggests J, seeing as my day job is making ‘Poker Academy’. Hmm. Or even sillier, “CRONies CRON Academy”.

I spent a few more hours twidling my unnameable software together today. I think I spent more time writing TODO’s in the code than writing actual code. By far, the hardest thing so far has been properly defining the scope of the program. Without a good idea of the intended scope, it is hard to design things without painting myself into a corner, as far as future development is concerned. The main problem is the trade-off between a simple, elegant tool that does a core job really really well, and being comprehensive. The USDA food database for instance, has about 120 different nutrients in it’s database. I probably only know what half of them are. Do I just chuck it all in and end up with a huge unweildy program with 120 nutrients for every food? Or do I make some executive decisions and edit it down to the handful of vitamins, minerals, and other compounds that I think are important to track. This would be easier if I had a better grasp of the biochemistry involved. I am by far, in favour of keeping it as simple as possible, but don’t want to miss anything that is important.

By this afternoon I decided the best thing to do was to just write the code with as generic a notion of a ‘nutrient’ as possible, and have it handle dynamically the nutrient lists and classifications, so that I can fairly easily change things in the future. Of course this adds a lot of extra work up front, but should pay dividends down the road.

Currently working on the food editor which will allow editing and creation of new food items in the database. It’s grunt work, but has to be done at some point.

Made my awesome cream o’ veggies soup today: Potato, Carrot, Cauliflower, Asparagus, Kale, Spinach, Onion, Garlic, Milk, Spices. Ate my last mega muffin for breakfast. If I feel energetic maybe I’ll whip up a new batch tomorrow. I sure like them enough to keep them as a staple.

In recent weeks I’ve really managed to reduce my eating out, so my food has been much more controlled. I probably only eat out about two meals a week now, and with those I try to find things I lack in my regular diet, such as fish. Where for the last few years I had eaten out a fast food lunch for well over 90% of the time, I now bring a lunch every day save fridays, when it is customary for all at BioTools to go out to a restaurant for lunch. I weighed in at 164 pounds this morning. Back to coding.