Last week was rough. Work stuff. Family stuff. Exercise stuff. And worst of all… my internet enabled scale had to be reconfigured with the internet.

Definitely not feeling very humorous or engaging or fun.

But the week was over on Monday.

Except it wasn’t.

My favorite gadget of all time is my Withings scale that uploads my weight data to the cloud. The data driven approach to weight loss has made it possible to confront my own magical thinking about weight loss. Magical thinking I didn’t even realize I have.

This scale is an example of the internet of things. And when it works life is magical and when it to doesn’t I am reminded of the mess that is technology.

Well it turns out that the wifi connection in my house isn’t perfect. And it turns out that blue-tooth enabled android phone and my Withings scale don’t like working together. And it turns out that the UX of the Withings scale and iPhone suck. To configure the Withings scale I have to get out of the Withings application and go to the iPhone configuration set up and then return to the Withings app — why oh why can’t I just do it directly from the Withings app.

Because Jony Ive doesn’t think I should.

Oh well.

So it took me several days of futzing and tweaking and screaming and being very grouchy to get my internet enabled scale to work. And that made me think that doing the same for hundreds of devices would be insane. I would… quite literally… go insane. For the internet of things to work devices and registration of devices on networks has to be at least 4 orders of magnitude simpler.

I have less hair as a result of this. And I am more convinced that the internet of things is a long term trend not a short term trend.

As for what this has to do with my half-ironman?

Lots. You can’t really blog without your weight and you can’t blog about your weight if your stupid scale doesn’t connect to the internet. So there.

But it works all better now, so that’s good.

And here’s the weight data 

Less progress than usual (.8 pounds vs 1 pound) and that is disappointing given my weight loss.

But the stress of the broken scale was just too too much to overcome this week.