I was having lunch recently, when the topic of Weightwatchers came up, and how one of the fellas at the table had lost 47 pounds in about six months.
I'm over weight, about 40 lbs heavier than when I started college, and I have been trying desperately to change that. His 47 lbs weight loss struck a chord.
I got home early from work that afternoon (it was the Thursday before Easter, we had the next day off, and the lunch was an appreciation lunch for a project roll out) and decided to surf a little cable while my laptop booted up.
*flip*Weight Watchers Commercial
*flip*Weight Watchers Commercial
*flip*Weight Watchers Commercial
*GAH*
And I proceeded to surf over to perl monks for some light reading. A few hours later my girlfriend got home from work (she works at a styling salon), and the first thing out of her mouth?
<VOICE accent="Ben Stein">
Anyone?
Anyone?
</VOICE >
"We had a new customer today, and she was really informative. She is a manager at the local Weight Watchers, and I want to go, but I don't want to do it alone."
OKAY!! I can take a hint!!
For those of you that don't know (but might care) WW uses a "POINTS" system to determine how much and of what you can eat in one day. Based on my weight, I can eat so many points in one day, each food item has a points value based on Dietary Fiber, Calories and Fat. But I'll be damned, all of their data is in booklets, in pamphlets and on a little slide-rule like device.
How archaic!
(Of course, they do have a subscription based on-line service, but I'm already shelling out $12 each for the two of us a week plus the money it's costing me to change my diet - cleaning out the fridge can be painful)
And so began the quest. I scoured the web for all of the data files and perhaps even a canned application to do all this data tracking and number crunching. I found one for the Palm (that has been 'decommisioned' thanks to the WW legal team - but that's another story) and it's related data files. Problem is, only one of us has a PalmPilot, and it ain't the girlfriend.
So the quest continued. I've found a large number of text files that contain most of the data I want, now it's a matter of parsing over 100 different files with different file formats, getting them into a data base with some kind of maintainable structure, and implementing an application that will track all the data on the intranet at home.
*sigh*
If she hadn't said something, I could have ignored the prompting, but no...
At least I can flex the geek(tm) by designing the application
C-.
