Gym Guilt

I cancelled my gym membership yesterday and I feel terribly guilty about it! If you were standing right here in front of me, I’d tell you how oversubscribed the gym was, how it was filled with groups of teenagers hogging machines for ages, how the place was unusable at any convenient time unless you went past 10pm.

But that’s not why my daughter and I stopped going and have now cancelled our membership. It’s because it just became too hard and we lost motivation.

And that’s the last thing I need. Not to gain muscle as I could care less. And certainly not to lose weight. Over the last 8ish years I’ve lost 33.7kg / 74.3 lbs / 5.3 stone. I’ve gone from size 38 trousers down to 34 and from XXL shirts down to just Large. If BMI’s are really any indication of health, I’ve gone from “obese”, down through simply “overweight” range, and I’m within touching distance (8k) of what it thinks is a healthy weight. That’s mostly down to just improving my eating habits.

The main reason I need the gym, is what I’ve touched on before. At 51, I feel my health slipping away a lot. I have no energy. Things hurt that shouldn’t. And I’m getting the occasional brief moments of dizziness from silly actions like walking up stairs or carrying heavy stuff, and I feel some just basic exercise might hold that off.

No idea what I’m gonna do now though. Exercise at home could be an option but that comes with it’s own motivational issues. There IS a new gym opening that’s a bit more expensive, and is “contract”, so it might be a bit less packed. I’ll gonna think about it over the next few days, see what my daughter plans to do, and make a decision.

Interesting Posts Read

  • Digital Decluttering - Topical! Because of link-rot and websites that vanish, I’ve been keeping an archive of internet things I want to keep for nearly 20 years now - which I’ll surely be sued for someday no doubt - but I’ve got decades (gigabytes) of photos and old MP3 files that I really need to clean up. I should make a plan.

Druid / Charity Stuff

At The Druid Network this week I leaned in hard to make some progress in building a new members-only forum with Discourse. I’ve had it installed in a containerised environment in AWS for ages, but over the last week I’ve:

  • Updated it.
  • Stripped it all out, wiped all the data, and reinstalled it with each piece (Postgresql, Redis, etc) protected by passwords.
  • Enabled SSL/TLS Encryption.
  • Got the email working via AWS SES - which is what the rest of our charity systems currently use. This reminds me that I’ve never really discussed the thorny topic of email with my fellow trustees. There’s no large email service provider that isn’t without ethical issues. Google. Microsoft. Amazon. All a bit evil in one way or another.
  • Searched for and tested a few themes, and enabled a dark/light button.
  • Had a play with creating a public category within the overall private forum. This didn’t go so well.

With some luck and motivation, I’ll invite some of the other charity trustees to play with it in the next few weeks. This whole thing is just a proof of concept so it might not end up being used. Makes a great technical challenge though.

Speaking of Email

I’m getting closer to going back to running my own mail server with Docker Mailserver.

It’s … complicated in this day and age:

Speaking of Docker

It seemed to be a day for cancelling things as I also downgraded my Docker subscription. A few days ago they announced an 80% price jump without any compelling added value. That’ll put me back on their free plan once my current subscription expires in May 2025.

Thing is, I wanted to support them and I was happy to do so when they moved from a totally free service to a paid model several years back. But, whether from greed or desperation, they’re losing the plot!

There is no service they offer that you can’t get for free elsewhere so, I’ll just use their free service for now, and start making the slow move to newer workflows, and new places to store my Docker images in future.

Note: This has no effect on my TDN work or how I run my own tech stacks. Docker on a server is a different beast than Docker as I use on my laptop. My subscription only really affects how I locally develop things on the Macbook.