The title is, I think, a useful adage for someone who’s been very fit in the past attempting to get themselves back into shape after a while spent being sedentary. The problem is that if you’re already aware of how to exercise and have the skills and know what going at a good healthy pace (I’m assuming you’re a runner here) feels like, it’s very, very easy indeed to go out and overdo it.

For one thing – you are much heavier. I spent a lot of time today walking around with my 21-month-old daughter in a sling (she’s teething and has been pretty unwell, poor thing) and it was rather unsettling to realise that the weight of her plus the sling – 12kg – is almost exactly the amount of weight I want to lose. Now bear in mind that walking becomes much harder and your feet get a lot heavier if you stick 12kg on your torso. That’s a lot of extra weight for out-of-shape muscles and joints to support, and a lot more impact for feet and legs to absorb. Trying to run as if you’re 75-77kg when you’re 85kg is going to put you in a world of misery and injury pretty quickly, as I’ve found too many times already.

Secondly, if you know what a “comfortable” pace feels like you’re likely to aim for that (in my case, I like cruising somewhere just under 5 minutes/km in training) because on past experience it feels right and makes the times on your watch look right. Bad idea! You just can’t do that – it has to be what’s euphemistically termed “slow recovery pace” for a good long while until your muscles and legs are used to it, and until you’ve dropped a few kilos and can have more confidence about starting to push the boat out a bit. My calf muscles are still killing me from Saturday night’s run, and that’s not surprising – but the bad thing about muscle pain that persists for too long is that it will destroy any attempt to get serious pretty quickly, as it’s just too sore to get out most nights.

At this point someone usually mentions that it’s easiest to just go to a gym. I’ve tried. I’ve tried gyms, and I hate them. I really can’t stand the places. Miserable caverns full of miserable-looking people crucifying themselves on miserable machines like something out of Metropolis, nobody (except maybe the weight training loonies) looking as if they really want to be there. I can run for maybe 20-25 minutes on a gym treadmill, 30 if I really push it out, but after about 15 minutes I just want to claw my eyes out. It’s so incredibly dull, and incredibly stuffy, and it’s not outdoors. I’d rather be out running badly in the rain than running well on a treadmill any day. Part of the joy of being a runner is being out in the open – particularly crisp winter nights, in my experience. Without that, it’s just pointless labour. So no, please. No gyms.

So what does this leave me with? Well, in all honesty, it tells me that at least until I’m down a few kilograms I shouldn’t be trying to run hard. I don’t think there’s actually much long-term benefit in running at all right now except the psychological benefit (which is significant). I’m going to try and stick with a fairly heavily calorie-restricted diet for the time being, combined with plenty of walking and activity to help things along (and provide some more wiggle room in the calorie budget for beer and curry). There’s a lot of pride-swallowing happening here. My previous maxim was that provided you’re exercising hard enough you don’t have to worry about food – but the problem with that is that over a certain weight and under a certain level of fitness you just can’t exercise hard enough to not worry about food without injuring yourself and giving up, thus perpetuating the vicious circle of slothfulness.

If you’re really interested in watching, you can try tracking my Fitbit, not that there’s much data there so far as I only got it this afternoon. If you enjoy being competitive about random physiological metrics, you’re welcome to add me as a friend.

I made a momentous decision a couple of days ago, and started logging food and counting calories. The immediate impetus for this was the rather horrifying discovery that I now weigh over 87kg, when I should really be in the low-to-mid 70s if I’m at all in a fit condtion. I felt like 87kg as well – heavy and sluggish. When you can’t comfortably pull your feet up to trim your toenails because there’s so much lard in the way, that’s a problem.

First, though, some background. I was never one for sport at school. Last to be picked for football (and therefore put in goal), pretty bad at everything, never enjoyed tennis or badminton or the other individual sports my secondary school offered. I enjoyed walking (up mountains sometimes), but school didn’t offer that. After leaving university the opportunities for mountaineering weren’t really there, so I kind of gently and slowly inflated over the years until I decided to try running, at the age of 32. I can still remember huffing and puffing my way around 3.2 kilometres of Kingston streets in just under half an hour. After a while, though, it turned out I wasn’t that bad at it, and my speeds and distances went up while the weight fell off quite rapidly. I even got serious enough to start doing sprint reps up the short hill next to my block of flats to work out my maximum heart rate (about 210, which is oddly fast for my age). I’m mildly asthmatic but when my lungs are working they’re extremely strong (to the extent that when doctors stick me on the end of a spirometer their usual reaction to the numbers is “You’re.. uh.. asthmatic?”). In turn this means I’m actually quite well suited for endurance sport, something which I didn’t find out at all when I was at school and being made to play football in the rain.

It was all good fun, I ran races, I did a couple of marathons (3:38 was the faster one), a bunch of 10ks (42:30ish) and so on, I climbed slowly up the rankings in my classification, but then circumstances intervened and it all fell to bits. Since then I’ve been trying regularly to get myself back into form, and the same always happens – I’ll get to a certain point where things are starting to come together and I’m building up a base, then the whole thing will fall apart due to some minor crisis – an injury, for instance, or getting sick. The last time this happened was early this year, and to my eternal shame I ended up transferring my entry in the Zürich marathon to a colleague because I knew there was no way I’d be in a good condition to do it justice. There are few things more depressing than that.

Why worry, though? Everyone knows it’s really hard to stay fit and healthy when you’ve got a newborn baby, then a toddler needing constant attention, ruining your sleep, and bringing back every bug that’s going from nursery and obligingly passing it on to you. And beer and curry are tasty, after all. Live a little, eh? There’ll be time enough in the future to get back into shape.

But now – 87.4kg. I don’t think I’ve ever weighed more. If I didn’t care about it that would be fine, but being out of condition and heavy makes me miserable, from the T-shirts that don’t fit, to the belly, to the sore feet if I walk too far. So, time to do something, hopefully once and for all.

I went for my first run since January earlier today. It was lousy, but it’s a start. More importantly, though, I’ve moved away from the attitude I always had before that “If you put the training in, don’t worry about the calories”. In my case that simply isn’t true – during my initial run of successful running I was keeping a close eye on what I ate (having an M&S Simply Food around the corner which sold various tasty salads turned out to be a godsend), but in subsequent attempts to get back into condition I’ve not done that.

So this time I’m keeping a food log. It’s rather ambitiously suggested 1470kcal daily net as an acceptable intake if I’m going to lose weight at a reasonable rate. The first few days have gone okay, and it works quite well for me as I’m stubborn and simply won’t, say, give up beer and curry because they contain lots of calories. I can still have the beer and curry, I just have to not have something else or make sure I get a good run in to make up for it. Fundamentalism (“Oh no, I can’t possibly eat that tasty thing!”) has never worked well for me, so replacing it with bargaining makes sense.

What’s most amazing me is just how many calories some foods contain. I can now understand why students live on instant noodles – there’s no cheaper way to get hold of 460 calories. Those little chocolates in the basket at work? 50 calories each. Eat 4 and that’s 200kcal. Eat 4 twice a day, like I was probably doing, and that’s 400kcal. My usual triple-shot grande latte from Starbucks? 220 kcal, more than a seventh of my recommended daily intake for a reasonable rate of weight loss. Worst of all, I’m pretty sure that for the time being I shouldn’t eat more than one chocolate digestive per day. 78 kcal? Oy.

Anyway, it’s a good incentive to do the work to get the weight off. Once the weight’s dropped to something sane and I’ve got myself back into doing longer runs, the chocolate digestives and curry will be far less restricted. And that’s the kind of bribery I need.

Okay, that’s one incentive. The stronger incentive is wanting to cross the finish line of some major race in a reasonably respectable time. And as far as that is concerned, well, we’ll see.

It’s coming up on the fourth anniversary of our move to Switzerland, which means I’ve had plenty of time to see how the place functions. I’ve watched the democratic process here unfold a number of times, both in parliamentary elections and in numerous local and national referendums.

Switzerland has an unusual democracy in that it makes heavy use of public referendums to decide major questions or to challenge laws which the various parliaments (local, canton and federal) have passed. It’s even possible to change the federal constitution if you can get enough signatures for a popular initiative, which is then put to a binding referendum. This works in many ways for good (Switzerland finally joining the UN) or for, well, if not the evil but the stupid (the national embarrassment of amending the constitution to forbid the building of minarets), but in a way that’s what you get – raw democracy, with sometimes raw results. What it does mean is that major financial outlays (a new motorway, for instance) are likely to end up being put to the vote, meaning that the people have an almost unique degree of influence in how their taxes are spent.

Unless, of course, they’re foreigners. And in Switzerland, you stay foreign for a very long time. Born here to foreign parents? You can’t even start to apply for a red passport until you’re at least 11. Moved here from overseas? 12 years, minimum, more if you were foolish enough to move to a different town. That’s way longer than most countries, although I don’t think any country anyone would want to become a citizenship of really has the “open door policy” for citizenship the right would like you to think they have.

Sure, Swiss citizenship is one of the good ones, although on an international level it doesn’t really grant you much which an EU passport doesn’t get you – visa-free travel to many countries rolls the EU and Switzerland up into one. As with all countries, the Swiss are right to be at least a little careful who they hand passports out to. The problem is, though, that this doesn’t sit well with direct democracy and representation.

In the UK, a constituency MP is the MP for everyone who lives in their constituency, not just for people who can vote for them. Foreign residents of the UK can and do seek the assistance of their MPs with problems. In Switzerland, the culture of writing to legislators doesn’t really exist except in extremis, and besides, there are very few full-time politicians (even most federal parliamentarians are part-timers). The country’s main political dialogue takes place around the campaigning and voting process in the several-times-a-year referendum bundles that Swiss citizens vote on.

So where does this leave the foreign resident – even one who has been in Switzerland for years? It leaves them more disenfranchised than they would be as an immigrant elsewhere, far more. In the UK whether you’re a citizen or not only really matters once every few years, but in Switzerland it matters all the time. A foreign resident’s Swiss friends and colleagues are able to vote on matters both policy-related and fiscal which directly affect them, but they themselves have no voice despite paying exactly the same (in some cases, even a bit more) tax. Moreover, some Swiss people don’t like foreigners to even talk about politics – I’ve seen it made very clear in the past that some people considered politics here to be a a “none of your business” thing for foreign residents, as if by talking about it we might accidentally overstep our place in society and possibly influence a Swiss voter’s opinion. In short, if you’re a foreigner, even one who’s been here a decade, your views do not count, even when it’s your tax money that’s being spent and your neighbourhood that’s being directly affected by the decisions which are being made.

The huge, all-engrossing irony in all of this is the obsession with “integration” for people wishing to become part of Swiss society. It’s drummed into us by posters on the streets (really), it’s listed (rightly, I must say) as a key requirement for any form of Swiss citizenship application. But “integration” in this case means a willingness to know your place, and a willingness to nod quietly and keep paying your contribution to the not inconsiderable amount of the canton of Zürich’s revenues that come from foreign taxpayers without complaining.

True integration is not about knowing when to say “Grüezi Mitenand” rather than just plain “Grüezi”, it’s about participation in national life and being a part of society. In Switzerland, more than anyone else, participation in the democratic process is a cornerstone of national life. It’s a defining characteristic of what it means to be Swiss (well, what it means to be Swiss and male – thanks in part to direct democracy, women did not have the vote here at the federal level until the 1970s, and it was over 20 years later that the last canton was reluctantly forced to allow women to vote). As with any country, politics is essentially the big, constantly-churning national conversation. By denying foreigners the right to participate in that conversation in any way whatsoever foreigners are denied the ability to learn about and become a fully participating member of society, which directly damages the aim of “integration” which should be the cornerstone of any sane immigration policy.

Switzerland’s a great country with a lot to offer foreign residents, and it has a century-long history of immigration which has helped the country transform itself from an agriculture-and-banking country to one of the finest industrial economies on the planet. However, the commitment it demands from those immigrants has always far outstripped the degree of commitment it’s been able to offer in return, and the societal divide that makes it very clear that foreigners are second-class residents on all too regular a basis can sometimes be very hard to live with.

(I still like it here, though, not least because writing this slightly uncomplimentary blog post about one aspect of life here is unlikely to get my residence permit revoked.)

So iOS 6 is out, and being the long-term dutiful Apple user that I am I’ve updated my iPhone 4s and my iPad. I haven’t had time to look at much of it yet – but even a quick glance is enough to tell me that the new Maps app is a big, big mistake and has been launched before there was enough data coverage available to make it a better user experience than what was there before.

Here’s how my neck of the woods, the northern end of Zürich, looks in iOS 6:

And here’s how it looked in the old, tired iOS 5 Maps app:

Here are the headlines, from a quick poke around:

• Searching for “Mountain View” offered me two Mountain Views, one in Hawaii and the other in Arkansas, but no sign of the well-known one in California. A search for “Mountain View, CA” worked, though. So inconsistent it’s painful.
• In city centres and other places with dense data, building outlines and so on the new maps look good, but places like the area around our apartment look very sparse – it’s missing the minor pedestrian-only roads around the buildings, for starters, which are essential to finding your way to the right building. There is way too much blank, beige space where there is stuff in real life. Railway lines and other important orientation points are only vaguely defined and only appear at high zoom levels.
• Worse, and this is a possible deal-breaker for some people, it doesn’t show bus and tram stops. Railway stations are shown, but not local transport. This might be okay in Cupertino where only hobos and junkies take the bus anyway, but it’s not okay in cities like Zürich where public transport predominates. It’s a little better in San Francisco where it shows Muni and BART – but it doesn’t tell you anything about the services at that station, just that there’s a station, so it’s no better than a little “station” marker on a paper map.
• An even worse sin is that it doesn’t even mark the edge of built-up areas. Everything is the same uniform beige background. Some woods are marked, but an entire large wood nearby is missing, rendered also into the beige of doom.
• On the other hand, the rendering is pretty in areas where the data’s dense enough to show it off, and the 3D maps are.. well, pretty yet relatively pointless.

How the hell does this happen without someone screaming “Stop! This sucks! Don’t launch this until we can provide a user experience that’s at least as good as what the existing app delivers!”?

I call it “the San Francisco effect”. Have you ever seen a demo of a mapping application or service that looked at anything beyond what a major city looks like? And how many times was that major city either New York or San Francisco, with maybe a token inclusion of the area of London around the Houses of Parliament?

New York is in there because Manhattan’s incredibly dense and has a famous skyline. San Francisco, on the other hand, is more often the standard demo target for these things for the same reason that your cat is the standard test target for your new camera – it’s what comes to hand. It’s the nearest city to Silicon Valley, and people want to make their local neighbourhood look good. The demo is never of El Paso, Texas, or Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, or Winterthur, Switzerland. It’s just assumed – presumably by the executives who get shown these demos as well as by the public – that everywhere else will look that pretty.

Unfortunately, that’s just not good enough. I’m guessing all the iPhones and iPads in the Apple Store on Bahnhofstrasse will have been magically updated to iOS 6 overnight. The mapping app is always something prospective buyers want to see. And people look up their house. They don’t look up San Francisco or New York, especially outside the US, they’ll look up a street in Niederglatt or Warwick. And if all they see is a sparse and incomplete road network and lots of blank space inbetween…

… then well, I foresee some awkward conversations for Apple Store salespeople round here. And there are plenty of other vendors with better mapping apps on their handsets willing to show them just how much better it is. And until executives start to think of global impact when making decisions like this rather than just looking at how pretty the area near their favourite restaurant in San Francisco looks, they’re going to lose customers.

Apparently (at least given how many of my co-workers asked me about it this morning) I have a bit of a reputation as an Apple fanboy. Well, okay… I certainly use Apple stuff, but I’m anything but an unquestioning fanboy. Or so I like to think. But anyway, here’s my quick take on the iPhone 5. After all, every other blog on the planet has a post like this, so if I didn’t I’d feel left out.

• It’s bigger but not as huge as the really big screen phones out there like the Galaxy Note (which incidentally I used for a few months earlier this year). This means you can still hold it in your hand comfortably, which the usability and “how it feels” obsessives at Apple wouldn’t have any other way. I’m not sure this is as huge a deal as all that – it might well just be a token response to the trend to larger displays in general in smartphones. Wait and see, I guess – what app developers make of it is what will  make the difference if there is any. It’ll be good to have an extra row of icons in the app chooser, though. Basically, though, had Apple not made the screen bigger they’d have lost market share as other phones now look much shinier in the display department compared to an iPhone 4.
• No, there isn’t NFC. This continues to make sense to me, as very few people are using NFC for anything substantial outside a small number of retailers in the USA and  what you can do it isn’t really standardised yet. At the moment, like the infra-red link ports on my old Palm Pilot, it’s a solution looking for a problem.
• The major improvements are tech improvements, not visible feature improvements. Things like the multiple microphones for better audio, faster processor, faster GPU, 802.11n at 5GHz as well as 2.4GHz, fitting a camera which looks pretty good into such a thin body, the wideband call audio thing (where supported by carriers), LTE plus HSPA+ and friends.. all these things contribute to making a piece of hardware better. They’re incremental improvements taken individually, but they really add up. And talking of technical improvements, let’s not forget that
• It was bloody brave, but right, to change the dock connector. The easier solution would have been to keep things the same for yet another couple of years, but let’s look at the 30-pin dock connector of yore. Of those 30 pins, 6 are disused entirely (Firewire support, which has been missing from iPods for many years now), so that’s just wasted space. The rest are used for a horrible mishmash of signals, some of which most users will never use, and with various other hacks involving pulldown resistors and the like to change the behaviour of some pins. Way, way better to declare a flag day, take a PR hit and replace the thing completely. The new connector (Lightning) has 8 pins, it’s reversible, it’s easy to connect by touch, it’s a giant improvement. Apple have a history of making major connector changes in this manner, and they’ve generally turned out to be right. Killing ADC annoyed people with ADC monitors. Killing serial and parallel ports on the iMac drew a lot of dismissive comments from nerds but turned out to be the right thing. Killing ADB in favour of USB keyboards was a financially poor but user-friendly move.  The list goes on. The common view seems to be that this is being done to extract money from users. This seems unlikely, as the cost of developing and rolling out a completely new connector system is high, and will completely eat the profits from selling an awful lot of…
• Those Lightning to Dock adaptors. There’s an impressive amount of FUD in the media about these. Apple state that they don’t support video out or iPod Out. The iPod Out bit doesn’t mean it doesn’t support any audio output at all. iPod Out is a very specific interface used by some car interfaces and the like to enable things like the display of video content from an iPod on an in-car display. It only works with iOS 4 and up in the first place, and at a random guess the reason this won’t work through the adaptor is that it includes video out. The word on the street seems to be that the adaptor does include a DAC, so your speakers will work just fine, and this also helps to explain why it costs $29. Which is still steep, but at least a bit more justified. Almost. Well, it’s not a straight-through pin converter, at least.

So in summary.. as an object I like the idea and I like the design and I think the innards are pretty sexy. Will I buy one based on this? Dunno.

In my attempt to avoid having to actually write any blog posts, I’ve moved things around yet again. The blog’s now a WordPress instance hosted on one of my own machines – old Movable Type entries and Tumblr stuff have all been imported, but there’s still the small matter of the really old posts that I’m pretty sure I don’t have raw MT data for any more, just archived HTML. Extracting and importing those should be possible – my eventual plan is to get more or less everything I’ve ever published (I use the term advisedly – “bletherings I have spewed forth unto the Internet” is probably more accurate but also more wordy) into one place rather than scattered around all kinds of random places (and therefore at risk of being blown away by disk failures &c.) as it is now.

I’m also feeling driven a little bit by the way in which scattering stuff around third-party services and social networks dilutes it and makes me lose track of what I’ve written and where. More than once I’ve gone fishing around for something I knew I’d written on Livejournal, or Tumblr, or Google+, or Facebook, or wherever, but had to give up.

It’s either move stuff around like this or actually write things about politics, or TV history, or doping cases in sports, or trains and stuff. Your call, really.

Twitter, the current darling of new media whatever, has long bugged me for one major reason – while 140 characters are enough to express a thought or an opinion, they leave no room for nuance. 140 characters are enough for a snark, for a slogan or for a simply expressed opinion. They’re not enough for conveying any further data. That opinion has to stand by itself, like a political slogan on a poster, context-free. Any opinion more complex than what Twitter originally claimed to be for – What are you doing right now? – doesn’t really belong there.

But still we try. We post our kneejerk reactions, our opinions, and whatever else comes to mind, trying to squeeze them into 140 characters. We strip them down, remove the context, eliminate the further discussion and the “yes, but…” bits. All that’s left is the bare essentials.

This means that tweets never make people sound like they’re on the fence about anything. Politically, you’re either a right-on leftie or a dyed-in-the-wool Tory. After all, the extremes of the political spectrum are the ones most likely to communicate in slogans (in the case of the extreme right, mostly misspelled slogans written in crayon).

And thus I was shocked to see that I’d managed to make myself sound like a Tory earlier this evening, and the reactions reinforced that. How did that happen? I’m not a Tory! I’m a kind of moderate left-of-centre guy, a “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice” type. I grew up under the jackboot of the Thatcher junta! I cheered for Neil Kinnock in 1992 and cheered for Tony Blair for at least a little while after May 1997 before giving in to nauseous, crushing disappointment! How could I, of all people, be coming across like Boris Johnson about to trash a restaurant at a Bullingdon Club dinner?

Here’s what happened. I’d read a story on fixmytransport.com, a useful website which helps people get their problems and complaints and so on back to the right transport providers and public bodies in the UK, in the hope of getting them fixed. The complainant was recounting a particularly horrific journey where their reserved seat had been taken, the ticket collector had refused to do anything, and a pregnant woman had had to sit on the floor outside the toilet. Anyone can agree that bloody hell, that’s awful. Attached to it, though, was a signup box where you could add yourself to a list calling for people to be allowed to sit in First Class if there’s no room in Standard Class (what the UK started calling Second Class a while ago in an attempt to make it sound less, well, second class).

After reading that, I scooched my mouse across to the Twitter client and tweeted:

I hate to be posh here, but “Railways should let you sit in first class if there aren’t any seats free in second” is.. a bit demanding.

That’s 135 characters.

The reaction was, understandably, swift and terrible. You mean the plebs shouldn’t be allowed to expect a seat for their expensive tickets? If there are empty seats or a mostly-empty first class, why shouldn’t people sit there? Isn’t it being pretty rude saying that’s being demanding?

Gods, I realised. And then I tried to defend myself. And as always happens when you try and extract the spaghetti of your thought processes that leads to a particular opinion and justify it in 140 characters, it only made things worse. I’d prefer it if first class was just abolished on busy routes, I said. First class in the UK is insanely expensive compared to other countries, I said. A passenger in first class is one who’s not having to fit in second, but it’s so overpriced it’s often mostly empty, I said. But nothing would get away from the original statement, however much I attempted to plead my case in 140-character snippets.

Finally I just gave up, ran away, and started shopping for blazers and practicing my looks of crowing Tory superiority. From now on, the Internet would hold irrefutable evidence of my being a closet right-winger, and there was nothing I could do about it.

So what did I really mean to say, which got squeezed down into those 135 fatal characters? Here it is, and it takes a lot more than 140 characters:

Well, overcrowding’s a difficult problem. Most first class travellers are regular commuters, which means that off-peak demand for first class is very low compared to