This weekend I have just completed the P90X fitness program. During the last 13 weeks I did about 120 hours of workout including about 2,700 pull-ups and 2,500 push-ups. Beyond the gain of muscles and weight, I learned a lot and here is what I retained:

1. The weight you lift is NOT the most important - Performing the move in a proper form is critical to obtain results, I didn't let my ego get in the way and choose lighter weight to focus on nice and control moves.
2. Recovery is key to allow muscles to grow - Even if I felt guilty during the recovery weeks, my performance always increased when I started again with intense workouts. 
3. Good food really helps to sustain workouts - The adequate food contributes to stamina, strength and balance. On the other hand junk food can kill all the efforts and the will. P90X definitively changed my food habits: I eat to have enough energy and to quickly recover.
4. Whole wheat pasta are actually tasty - That's good luck, it's inexpensive and simple to prepare, I eat it a lot!
5. Not ALL protein powder are bad - I eat a lot of banana milk-shake (vegetal milk) mixed with Jay Robb whey proteins. They seem to be natural and are recommended by dieteticiens.  
6. Before P90X I was using only a fraction of my capacity - I did running and workouts for many years but I realize now that I wasn't pushing me to the edge and I was focusing just on some specific spots. 
7. The more energy I spend, the more I have - I needed less sleeping hours to feel fully loaded (6 or 7 hours instead of 8), the two extra hours were the opportunity to catch up time spend to do exercise.  
8. Fitness is really addictive - The more I exercise, the more I enjoy it, that's why it's so hard to respect a resting day during the week. 

   

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celebrating-end-of-p90x-with-japanese-food-oCDabkgfbalhGuijcfFt.zip (1637 KB)

Snaps from Tanto Japanese restaurant on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. 

• Gyu ishiyaki - hot stone plate beef
• Tofu satsuma age - deep fried tofu cakes

• Kani gratin - Crab gratin ***
• Gyoza - pork & vegetables potstickers
• Hotate butter uni nose - scallop & sea urchin ***

So yummy ! 

A few pictures from a fun bike ride in the Bay area, we took the Caltrain from Mountain View to San Francisco, reached Larkspur by ferry then bike 37 miles to go back to SF via Sausalito and the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a pretty nice way to enjoy with good friends the city, the bay and the changing weather :-)

                     

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a-pretty-nice-way-to-discover-the-bay-area-bvxuBbznallitbxuEauy.zip (11839 KB)

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Brain_Mindset.pdf (601 KB)

Back in May, amazing talk about how mindset works at BayCHI by Carol S. Dweck - http://bit.ly/amFt8U 

This week I went to the Monthly Program Meetings at BayCHI, user experience experts from Cisco shown how to apply today's and tomorrow's technologies to collaboration. As a Product Manager located in California and working with an engineering team in France, it speaks to me: I'm definitively facing the challenge of dealing with a virtual team. 

The Cisco team (Alison Ruge, Oliver Wenz, Jenni Kim) introduced problems that organization are facing today and why current classic tools are anti-collaborative: For instance phone calls can not be replayed, email messages which are usually not put in context of goal do not shared mind, produce more confusion, misunderstanding and frustration than desire to get things done and to achieve common objectives, etc. 

Key of success factors for a good collaboration are: clarity, continuity, visibility and human touch. The latter was the main point of the conference that Cisco heavily promote through the usage of video in virtual community (actually the more people consume videos the more they sell switches and routers... ;-). They want to make videos as consumable as email and demonstrated with their new service "Show and Share" that face time creates real time, clear information and minimize confusion. Videos allow complex and detailed communication where other mediums fall short.

I'm not yet ready to replace my emails by video messages (for sure the iPhone 4 and FaceTime will help to generalize video messaging) but I can see some ways to enhance my collaboration oversea:

• Schedule regular web / video conferences (my company is using GoToMeeting, this is a great service, even if I would prefer Webex that provides an iPhone App :-)
• Use collaborative tools such as Google Docs, Google Wave or Cisco Show and Share rather than exchanging files via email
• Clarify my writing and apply recommendation from the "Plain English Campaign" web site

And you, how do you collaborate with your team? Are you ready to add a more personal touch in your communication?

I started the P90X fitness program 45 days ago. At half way I can say that it's really worth the sweat of the 10 hours weekly training. Intensive workouts combined with the right food that fuels me up definitively changed within a few months, both my mind and body. Anyway if you want to improve your health and the quality of your life, you should think about such a fitness program, you will think more clearly, feel better under stress and your coordination will improve, let's do it :-)

I already wrote about the power of sketching, so here is follow up and a good example of how visual communications really enhances the Daniel Pink's talk. I also really enjoyed it, especially because money is not what drives me to perform.

There are a lot of IT companies in my neighborhood but there is also the NASA and the SETI Institute and today was an open day at the SETI. It was the opportunity to meet the father of SETI, Dr. Frank Drake and author of the Drake Equation for estimating the number of possible civilizations in the galaxy. It was amazing to meet people that spend their days to hunt evidence of life on Mars or Europa and as alien hunter, Seth Shostak said, this is not science fiction, "our grandkids will live in space”... I will add "to flee the world or to save it...". Pandora, we are coming ! :-)

       

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meeting-with-alien-hunters-at-the-seti-institute-gfimDgcAwpAjbqeEvtHz.zip (2182 KB)