I’m fat.

I stepped on the scale this morning and it appears I have once again eclipsed the magical 300-pound mark. How embarrassing.

It’s time to prioritize my health instead of work, social networking, education and other things I’ve been using as excuses. Now, how can I trick myself into believing a healthy exercise regimen and sensible diet are fun? The answer for me is, of course, to figure out a way to geek out while accomplishing these goals.

Geocaching
I’m pretty sure Geocaching was invented to trick geeks into leaving their computer terminals to go for a walk in the woods. The premise: a real-life treasure hunt for people with GPS devices. Go to Geocaching.com to find info, including GPS coordinates, of the cache you want to find. Then, just navigate to the treasure. A lot of caches are in urban parks and public property, but the most challenging caches, with the best booty, are often located off hiking trails deep in the woods.

RunKeeper
I used to use RunKeeper to track walks with my beloved pooch (@ReeseTheDog), but she’s living the leash-free good life now on acres of wooded land owned by my parents. It’s a lot tougher to motivate myself to walk without her, but when I do, I’ll be able to track my time, distance and calories burned with RunKeeper. Plus, it also maps my route so I can duplicate my route for consistency. Anyone taking bets on how long it will take before I can actually run a route instead of just walk it?

DailyBurn
The data nerd in me wants to take a data-driven approach to getting fit. In order to do that, I need a centralized place to collect, sort and synthesize all the data. That’s where DailyBurn comes in. It’s a lot like other dieting websites. I can enter my meals and exercise and it calculates my calories consumed and burned to help keep me on track. It also integrates with other gadgets and services, and it also features support groups, motivators and discussion boards.

Withings Scale
Speaking of gadgets integrating with DailyBurn, the Withings scale is one of them. This Wi-fi-enabled scale records your weight, body-mass index and other measurements, and sends them to the web. If I ever splurge and pay $159 for one of these bad boys, you can bet that I’ll not only sync my info with DailyBurn, I’ll also broadcast it to the entire world via Twitter. Public shame can be a good motivator for losing weight, right?

Google Maps Bike Routes
Eventually, I’ll get sick of walking around my neighborhood and I’ll need to go a bit further. It seems like jumping on a bicycle would be a good way to accomplish that, but urban bike-riding can be daunting to a beginner. Luckily, I can get a clue by checking out the bicycling view in Google Maps before my ride. Even though it doesn’t tell me that 23rd Avenue is a huge hill, it does tell me that I can pedal there without being flattened by a semi truck.

Do you have any technology tips to help a fat geek get back into shape (other than going to the gym)? Tell me in the comments.

I got my beta invite for Check.in on Friday and after just a few check-ins, I’m already loving it.

Now, before you let out a heavy sigh and say, “Really? Another location service I have to check into?,” you’ve got to know something about Check.in. It’s a website set up for mobile use that allows users to check into location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and (Seattle-based) Whrrl all at once. It’s catchphrase is “one checkin to rule them all.”
A line at the bottom of the site says it’s a Brightkite product and credits Martin May, Brady Becker and Jordan Harband with the site’s creation after suffering “severe check-in fatigue.” A Tech Crunch post from last month details how it works.

Now, I wouldn’t classify myself as a check-in fatigue sufferer, but I am totally stoked to see this service available. Of course I had signed up for Foursquare, Brightkite, Whrrl and Gowalla, but I had only been using Foursquare. Checking into multiple services seemed to be a waste of time.

As a result, I was missing out on some pretty cool location-based gameplay on Gowalla and some pretty excellent social networking on Whrrl by not using those services regularly. Check.in solves that problem. Now I can check into all four with just one checkin.

So, if you’re into location-based services, you need to go to http://check.in and sign up for a beta invite. I’m not sure how long it will be before a general public roll out of the site, but a quick look at the @checkdotin Twitter feed shows that they are thinking about (and hopefully working on) integrating even more location-based services. I can’t wait to see how it grows and evolves over time.

What other location services would you like to see available on Check.in? — Google? Facebook? Yelp? What else?

There was a dust up on Twitter today about Blippy, the online service that people use to announce their purchases to the world (My Blippy account). I saw it first this morning on a Venturebeat blog post. Apparently, some smart person found out that a specific type of search would churn up Blippy results with credit card numbers in them. Of course, this caused hysteria, lashing out and loss of trust in the service.

Things looked bad — real bad. After conducting my own search, I was surprised to see page after page of results, all with credit card numbers in them. This was enough to set the lynch mob that is Twitter into motion. It wasn’t long before Philip Kaplan responded with a detailed account of what had gone wrong. To my amazement, of the pages upon pages of search results, only four credit card numbers were actually listed.

Don’t get me wrong, that really sucks for those four people. But it was far from a massive breach of the Blippy credit card number database. Still, Blippy had quite a PR nightmare on its hands. For a service completely built on the trust people have in sharing their financial information with it, everything seems to have been lost. After news broke of credit card numbers in Google results, who would trust Blippy again?

I saw tweets left on right all morning from angry users who were closing their Blippy accounts, even after Kaplan’s explanation of the small, contained problem.

This demonstrates what all too many companies don’t appreciate — your most valuable asset is your customer’s trust.

What, if anything, can Blippy do to regain users’ trust? The Next Web advocates giving Blippy another chance by doing the following:

… publicly remunerate the people who had their information leaked, redouble security efforts, and make plain hopefully through a high-profile new hire that security is at the very core of the Blippy product.

What do you think? Can Blippy regain the trust it lost today? If so, how should it go about doing so?

Jennifer Cabala from KING 5 News here in Seattle interviewed me for a story she did about Blippy. If you’re unfamiliar with Blippy, it’s the controversial service that lets you share your expenditures publicly online. It’s not for everyone, but I use it.

A month or two ago, I started using an iPhone app called RunKeeper to log how far and how often I take long dog walks. I’m trying a variety of routes to see which one are easiest, longest, etc.

The program uses the GPS in the iPhone to track exactly where you are walking. Of course, you can make the maps private if you’re afraid of stalkers. It’s a free app, so it’s worth a try.

If you have the first-generation iPhone (like I do), you’ll have to go in and manually clean up the map coordinates after your walk, because the first-generation iPhone’s location reporting is based on unreliable cell tower triangulation, not GPS. But, if you have an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, it will probably work perfectly for you. It’s a good alternative to the Nike + system.

Check out a (cleaned up) map of my latest 5.21-mile walk by clicking the above image or going to http://bit.ly/M4AL8.

Originally published on my lifestream at MichealFoley.com

What do you think? Thumbs up? Thumbs down?

What are some other ways we could use vidly?

As of 10:30 a.m. Sunday morning, I was winning in my Foursquare battle against my work friend Jen P. (Photo by foleymo)

I started playing Foursquare on my iPhone almost two weeks ago and I’m totally addicted.

If you’re not familiar with Foursquare, it’s a Web and mobile app that turns real life into poin-accumulating game. Players are rewarded for being adventurous and outgoing in real life.

Here’s how it works:

When you go out to a favorite restaurant, attraction or venue, check in online or with a mobile app.

Foursquare will award points based on your check-ins — five points for adding a new venue, five points for checking in at a new place, one point for checking in where you have been before.

There are also other goals. You can become “mayor” of a venue by being the person who has checked in there the most over the last two months. You also can collect badges by accomplishing certain tasks. It’s also a good way to keep tabs on what your friends are up to. For example, when a friend of mine checks into a bar down the block from me I can easily drop in on them or text them to set up plans for later.

After explaining Foursquare to my friends and asking them to join, I usually get one of two responses — “Sounds like fun. How do I join?” or “What do the points get me? Nothing? Why would I want to do that?”

Their answer tells me a lot about them. If they are for it, I assume they are the kind of people who grew up accumulating points in Pac-Man, for no other reason than to have fun. If they are looking for the real-world personal payoff for this online game, I can gather that they are solidly grounded in the real world and don’t like to feel like they’re wasting their time.

Anyway, I think it’s fun. And I’m determined to beat Jen P. in this week’s game (it ends at midnight).