Just broke 300 miles cycling this year - going pretty well. Commuting to work is where I can bag distance (30 miles a day), plus the sudden arrival of summer gives me motivation.
The ride home is slightly down hill, with a tailwind today… Averaged 20mph and maxed out at 35mph :-). Even made it up one of the slight hils with a 60 second effort to keep rolling at 28mph. Getting more and more done on the aero bars on every ride - can now corner and ride for long periods of time without neck pain.
Next race looks like being the Lancaster Sprint Tri in 3 weeks time.
May 6th, 2008
Today I completed my first triathlon - the sprint distance Kendal Tri. It was a fun experience, regardless of the wind, rain and a large hill (406m of ascent 
) on the bike course!
I placed 64th out of 83 racers, and my results were as follows:
Swim 750m - 22:04 - 78th
Bike 20km - 51:22 - 61st
Run 5km - 27:29 - 63rd
Total: 1:40:55
I’m pretty happy with that result, but now very tempted to go do the next event in Lancaster in 3 weeks time - I want sub 1:30! My swimming obviously needs work, and I didn’t put full effort in on any of the 3 sports - I had no idea what it would be like and didn’t want to blow up. Lancaster is flatter and I know more now. My transitions also need work.
Overall a well organised event, though the muddy transition and lack of any kind of keepsake were a bit of a let-down based on the entry fee.
May 4th, 2008
Were last night it seems. I didnt even notice, which is galling as I missed an oppotunity to indicate my lack of confidence in Labour. Why dont they advertise these things? Elections are supposed to be important, but no publicity reached me…… The fact I don’t watch any TV beyond the snooker right now and listen to radio1 might have something to do with it, but advertising on websites could have helped.
May 2nd, 2008
Theres a free UK Income tax calculator which I find useful - it deals with working out your monthly / weekly take home pay based on salary etc etc. It has the new and much publicised tax bands in it, and it deals with student load deductions. Very handy!
www.listentotaxman.com
April 30th, 2008
Ok, so its not as feature rich as visio, but for drawing tho odd network diagram or flow chart, gliffy rocks!
Here’s an example of a network diagram (my home net)
I need to check this service out a bit more, but its looking good so far. I will probably need to buy a business account if it does what I want it to do - got a few flow charts and net diagrams to do at work…..
Check Gliffy Out.
April 30th, 2008
Still neglecting my blog. I have been back in the UK for nearly 4 months now, and have made a good start on fitness, but a shambles of my weight management. I put on a stone while travelling, mainly because of physical jobs and skiing lots when I settled down in the Queenstown Area.
It all went wrong at Christmas and has not improved since then - I am eating the wrong foods and eating when bored / down. I need more activites to fill up my time and prevent the boredom that sets in at home…… Which I am working on. The target is 22lb in 12 weeks - which takes me neatly to my first summer holiday.
Exercise wise, I started the c25k plan in January, and ran a 3 mile race for Sport Relief in March which I was happy about. I have now extended to run 5.2k outdoors and up to 7k on the treadmill, without the shin injuries that took me out last time. Cycling is a strong point as well - getting out on the weekends in Wales mountain biking, and also having bought a road bike (more on this another day) I have been logging the road miles and commuting to work (not as often as I would like).
I have moved to a new gym with a swimming pool, which brings me on to this years target - the Helvellyn Tri, which involves a mile open water swim in Ullswater, 38 miles on the bike over the Kirkstone pass and finally a 9.1 mile run up and down Helvellyn. I have some sprint tris and 10k races booked in to help me towards this aim…
Finally I have all my photos of my travels to sort out and post. Should keep me busy, along with some new websites to launch around all this running and biking I will be doing…….
April 8th, 2008
Yesterday afternoon, I made a new mail server live for testing. It took until 9 pm last night before the first spammer tried to use it as an open relay. Which is scary. The server does not allow open relay of course, but this just underlines the fact that there are 1000’s of machines searching the internet for sapmming and or hacking oppotunities.
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:11 Connected
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:11 >>> 220 -***********-An Anonymous Mail Server; Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:04:11 +0100
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 < << helo www.MyMainServer.com
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 >>> 250 *********** Hello www.MyMainServer.com [118.169.205.121], pleased to meet you.
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 < << mail from:
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 >>> 250 2.1.0 … Sender ok
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 < << rcpt to:
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 >>> 550 5.7.1 … we do not relay
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 *** <> 0 0 00:00:00 INCOMPLETE-SESSION
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 Disconnected
I hate spammers. On another note, I added a little math quiz to my contact form as spam from that was on the up - again spammer looking for an easy way to send mail through badly written php. Luckily as its all robots doing this, they dont know how to deal with the math question :-). Capatcha would be a good idea, but more effort.
April 4th, 2008
This was a photo I took exactly a year ago - while I was living (in a tent) in Queenstown. April was a big month last year - lots of work at the start, plus road trips to Milford and later around the south coast and walking on Stewart island.
April 4th, 2008
Did the 3 mile sport relief today in Liverpool. I have been training since January for this - on the C25k plan. I ran with a couple of mates in 26:26 which is well under my target of 30 mins. The pace at the start was slow, dodging runners, walkers and a few prams and wheel chairs. By lap 2, a lot of people had done a mile and finished, leaving us lots more space.
Overall, pretty well orgainised and run, with just a few over narrow sections causing congestion. Pretty chuffed I did it!
Next target is a 10K in June, and a sprint distance triathlon in April / May, depending whats on. I aim to do a Half Ironman and the Helvellyn Tri at the end of summer, but thats for another post!
March 16th, 2008
I spend a lot of time at work using Kerio Mail’s web interface - its a full mail client in a browser window. The catch is it gets lost in a sea of tabs in firefox and its an annoyance to log back in every time I end up closing or crashing firefox…
Enter prism from the mozilla labs - its a version of firefox that just supports one site, with no status bars, menus or anything else. It rus as a seperate program in windows, so its always there on my taskbar, and the lack of menus and panels gives more room for the web app - most web apps dont need back buttons etc. I run one of these for gmail and one for kerio - which works out well.
Get Prism from Mozilla Labs Blog
March 5th, 2008
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