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Newsletter – July 14, 2009 –Weight Loss and Leaf Blowers

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Vacation Blues

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This newsletter is finally here. Despite my best intentions the holiday spirit took over. We got home at the weekend to be greeted by a stack of “things that need to be attended to urgently”. Ah well – back to reality.

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Weight Loss

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This may seem an odd thing to be writing about, as I am not in the weight loss business, but it’s an interesting lesson for me about the effects on your weight while on holidays.

Like many people I have a perpetual problem in keeping my weight within reasonable bounds, despite believing that my diet is ok and I do get enough exercise.

I fully expected that being on holiday for three weeks I would gain some 3 to 6 pounds due to reduced levels of exercise and lots more eating and drinking.

In fact, I came back at exactly the same weight as I was before the holiday. Given that we were in Southern Spain, where it’s hot, and I was drinking much more alcohol than normal (possibly double or even triple) – mostly in the form of cold beer, I am amazed.

I thought about the exercise I had done. Well I had a walk on the beach most mornings. The only other exercise was walking between flat and pool, flat and beach and flat and restaurants – all contained within a very small area. In total this would be less exercise than I do at home.

The only other factor is eating. I guess because of the heat I was eating lighter meals than at home, mostly seafood and salad, with the occasional paella, and less meat than usual.

This was no hardship as I love the food in Spain, and the quality of the fresh fruit, veg and seafood is amazing. So if that kind of diet can have effects like this, I will try to keep it up at home, to see what effect it may have over the longer term.

The world’s most pointless invention?

Allow me one more observation from my holiday and then I’ll shut up about it.

Where I was staying there are a lot of resorts in one place, most of them with nice gardens. Of course this means that for 2 to 3 days a week at least there are gardeners mowing grass and trimming hedges.

I noticed that almost all of them carried leaf blowers – you know those funny hand held machines that blow leaves and other bits about. You can’t help but notice because of the extreme noise these machines make. It’s like a 747 taking off near you!

The gardeners carry these things to clear the paths of grass cuttings etc. I watched a couple of them. In the Spanish heat they use these things with shirts, gloves, and ear and eye protection. Apart from the noise, the dust they kick up in that dry dusty atmosphere is amazing.

The crazy thing is – it seemed to take them just as long to sweep a path as it would be to do it with a broom – and no special equipment and noise, and no heavy noisy smelly machine to lug about!

So I’ve decided that leaf blowers have to be a candidate for the title “world’s most pointless invention”.

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So much to know

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I think I’ve rambled on a bit as I am still in holiday mood, but next week we will have a look at what kinds of things you need to know to count yourself an IT professional.

There is now such a vast repository of knowledge in IT that you can’t possibly know everything about everything. It would take too many lifetimes – and encroach onto your holiday time!

So how do professionals cope? Most of them, whether consciously or subconsciously, actually make selections about which bits of knowledge are useful to them. So how do you do this?

You can wander along your career path, picking up bits of knowledge as you need them, or you can take a more proactive and targeted approach.

That targeted approach is much of what Jack’s Guides is all about. Some knowledge is much more valuable than other kinds of knowledge, and some are easier to acquire than others. We’ll discuss it further next week.

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For our full list of publications see our websites at www.jacksguides.com

Previous newsletters.

In response to several requests, we have published many of our older newsletters. You can find them at http://www.jacksguides.com/news.html

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This newsletter is published by Kevin Ramsey for Jack's Guides.

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I hope you've enjoyed this issue of our newsletter.

Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions

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Enjoy and prosper in your chosen career.

Till the next issue.

Kevin Ramsey

Founder of Jack's Guides