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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Queenstown at Sunset
Originally uploaded by markc123.

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.

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

A while ago, Yahoo bought Flickr. This was bad – I have a hatred of Yahoo accounts. Maybe not justified or reasoned, but I still hate em. I have put up with the awful login system, lack of persistent logins etc etc – as I love flickr.

However, I cant imagine what will happen if Microsoft buy the whole of Yahoo. Microsoft passport? The only login and identity system I hate more than Yahoo……. Bad. Lets hope someone can come up with a convincing alternative (copy?) of Flickr, and a good tool to export accounts. Maybe Google’s Picassa will be the one. Or just maybe the Americans have something like our Monopolies and Mergers commission and can stop this mess……