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2003-02-09 21:06:32 Source: Web

Climbing rocks! (Heh! Geddit!)

I started my climbing course today. Basically we covered all the techniques that are necessary in order to climb safely on an indoor wall - top rope climbing, belaying, leading and falling (yup, we practised falling a couple of metres to build confidence in our partners and to learn how to cushion a fall when belaying).

We climbed for a couple of hours or so and I'm expecting some nice pain in my forearms tomroorw, though I've been stretching and gently exercising all day to try and reduce the damage ;-) Next week we get to basically climb some more and learn a little more climbing technique. After that I'll be qualified to climb (with a partner of course) without an instructor present.

Unfortunately, as the afternoon has gone on I've been feeling pretty rough. I have a sore throat and I'm hoping I'm not coming down with something. The week ahead is looking like a big one at work, so it would be pretty bad timing. I'm hoping that I have whatever Lotta had last week which flared up, but went away overnight.

I was at the Swedish Rally last week. We built their ticket booking system, so we got to travel up and spend a day there. It was pretty cool - we saw a normal stage, out in the woods watching cars drive by at breakneck speeds and saw a sprint stretch, which was more interesting, as one could see most of the course and actually watch the driving skill (rather than just seeing a blur as the car sped by). The Finn, Marcus Grönholm won the rally and a couple of the girls from our company were dead chuffed to get his autograph during the day (when they managed to blag their way into a VIP enclosure!). All in all, I don't think that I'll be learning to drive rally cars any time soon - I think I'll keep myself to sports like running, swimming, cyling and climbing!

2003-02-03 22:19:28 Source: Web

Bizarro! We have currently around 15cm of slush! Driving was pretty horrible today and I didn't make matters any better by getting completely confused on my way back from the swimming baths! I drove onto the motorway headed in the wrong direction and when I took the first exit to try and get onto the lanes going the other way I ended up driving to another area of town by mistake! What should have been a 15-20 minute drive home ended up taking almost an hour as confused by the snow I ended up missing turning after turning. I was mostly in areas that I knew, I just kept missing my chance to head towards home. You've gotta laugh!

I picked up my years pass for the swimming baths where I train today. Tomorrow I'm determined to join my first training session with the local triathlon club as well (I missed my chace at the weekend due to heavy snow and a meeting with my boss that took an hour longer than expected). Also in my training diary, I've booked myself onto an indoor climbing course for beginners. 2 3 hour sessions starting this Sunday. I've climbed a little before, a long time ago and although I have vertigo I actually really enjoyed it! I'm definitely looking forward to it this time and doing the course will mean that I can climb at the gyms climbing wall when I choose. Should be a good upper-body compliment to my other training.

I'm heading north this Friday - it's the Swedish Rally who are one of our clients. A team of us are going up for the day, which I'm also really looking forward to. Lots of cars driving at a mad pace in deep snow. Cool!

2003-01-26 21:39:34 Source: Web

Cool weekend! Mostly car oriented though! So I am now a car owner - it passed its MOT and I've taken over the ownership. So on Saturday I took it to a nearby garage and gave it a proper carwash and hoovered and cleaned the inside. Now it's shiny and clean, though it won't be for long given Gothenburgs normal winter weather!

Saturday was extremely productive in fact and I managed to go for a run around the park in the morning and get along to a bike & motorbike exhibition during the afternoon with a friend. That was pretty good town driving practise as the traffic was amazing - it took us over 10 minutes to get a parking place *after* I'd driven into the carpark!

The exhibition was great, though there was way more focus on motorbikes than cycles. Only to be expected I guess, however I'd hoped for a little more. I did manage to load myself down with catalogues though. Mmmmm - shiny shiny bicycle stuff! Want to buy lots ;-=

Lotta was away for the weekend on a course and I thought that it would be a good excuse to try out some longer distance driving if I went to collect her. We decided that I would borrow her mum's new car as it's nicer to drive long distance than my 13 year old Ford. However I was going to drive out to their house in the morning (stopping off for a swim on the way) and then swap cars. Unfortunately I had left a light on inside the car overnight and the battery was dead! Typical newbie mistake I guess! So the swim was cancelled and I took the bus there instead.

The drive down to pick up Lotta went just fine though (about 100km each way) and I had time to take a nice walk by the river in the nearby town. Then after a little trouble finding the right road out of town I got to where the course was without any further trouble. All in all, it went fine and by the time we got back, Lotta's folks had been to our garage, jumpstarted the car (while frying their jump leads!) and driven it back to their place so that we could easily hop into our car and get back home! Aren't they sweet ,-)

2003-01-21 22:07:26 Source: Web

The local pub quiz started a new season this evening! Lotta, her mum and I went as a team and walked away with first prize (heh!). That's a good way to start the new season - especially when we missed the whole of the last season because it clashed with a course Lotta took.

Also, it looks like we should have a car from thursday! Apparently it doesn't need a full MOT, just a quick checkover of the work that was done. So on Thursday lunch (time allowing) I'm going to hook up with Lotta's mum and get the car checked over. It will be nice to have the freedom of having a car in the garage, though I'm planning on still cycling to work at least 3 days a week - if nothing else, I need the training before the triathlon season kicks in ;-)

Talking of which, I started work on improving my crawl technique today. I didn't have a huge amount of time, but I swam 600m with 250 of those as crawl. I have pretty terrible endurance - I still have to pause after every 50m crawl, but it's considerably faster than my breastsroke, so it's worth perservering with and trying to get to the point where I can swim consistent crawl over a longer distance. There are no rules about which stroke one swims in a tri, and I know I can clear the distance without any problems using breastroke, but I'd love to be able to cut off an extra 5 minutes or so, which should be possible by changing stroke.

I'm going to join the local triathlon club once I get paid. One of the advantages is that they have regular training session where I can get some good advice from other people. Hopefully that should pay off. I got a one year pass to the swimming pool nearest work today and it's the same pool where they train, so it's just up to me to make the effort now. Heh - I know I can do this!

2003-01-21 07:40:22 Source: Web

Oh man! My heart goes out to Dave. Sorry to hear the op was postponed mate - I know how prepared you were for it. I got winter vomiting disease late last year though and I can assure you - you *don't* want it! I hope the new date comes soon :-(

2003-01-20 21:10:20 Source: Web

Well, I just uploaded an updated version of the code for my site. I have NO idea why I didn't get around to doing this earlier, as it only took me an hour or so to lick it into shape. It gives me the ability to run multiple sites from the same database and with minimal changes to a few files. That means that with a bit of luck I'll be able to get some work done on another couple of projects I have up my sleeve! Not least, releasing the source to the site itself!

I ran around 4-4.5km at the weekend (a lap around the nearby park, so I'm not entirely sure of the distance). Time was a not unrespectable 30 minutes. I can probably carve at least 5 minutes off that by summer, which should leave me in an OK condition for the run part of the Tri. However, judging by the appalling spelling in my last post, exercising seems to make your brain go soft! Maybe I should give it a miss then ;-)

Looks like I am going to get a car after all! Lotta's mum has a 1990 Ford Escort (stop sniggering there in the back!) which was on its way to the dump as she's just bought a newer Mazda. It kinda failed its MOT, but the work that needed to be done for it to be passed was done this weekend (and for much less than we had feared it might cost!). So it just needs to be re-MOT'ed and then I'll be taking over ownership! Woohoo! It's not beautiful, but it drives pretty nicely and should hopefully have a few years of life left now. And it's not going to cost me very much at all! Nice - thanks Lotta's folks ;-)

Work has started on completing my New Years resolution! A trip to Ike at the weekend resulted in the purchase of "Magiker" TV bench. Pretty huh? I also got paint for my office and some other smaller bits & pieces I needed. The work is underway!!

2003-01-16 14:07:57 Source: Web

After cycling to wkr and swimming a kilomter on my lunchbreak yesterday I was feling pretty fired up about my training schedule, which meant that when Dave asked if I'd be interested in joining him in the London Triathlon this summer I jumped at the chance!

We're looking for another team-mate, although if we can't find a third nutter to join us we'll go it alone as singles. We're looking to do the Team Super Sprint, which is a relatively comfortable 400m swim, 10km bike and 2.5km run. So if you fancy a fun training goal for the summer just let either of us know and come and join us. We're not out to win, just to have a laugh - it's also a great excuse for me to get over to London this summer!

2003-01-14 19:07:53 Source: Web

An interesting morning - I was at Comdex Scandinavia (an IT Expo for those not in the know) and saw a talk by Jonas Birgesson, the founder of Framfab. I guess that Framfab has a reputation outside of Sweden, but in case you're non-the-wiser it was an Internet consultancy that grew to have several thousand employees at the peak of the Internet boom and today has lost more than 95% of its value, proving that the bigger you are the harder you fall.

I have never been impressed with Birgesson having only seen him on TV before. I never really saw how Framfab managed to support all the employees it had an never really bought into his vision. However seeing him speak in person was extremely interesting. He's a far more charismatic person than I would have thought, very lively and animated as a speaker and he commanded the audience's attention completely. On top of that his presentation was thought-provoking and definitely worth having taken a morning out of my schedule to see.

It's difficult to sum up, but he basically painted a strategic vision of how Sweden is failing in investing in the future by focussing on traditional manufacturing industries (shipbuilding, aerospace and vehicle manufacture) instead of enabling technologies which can cause a growth explosion. His reasoning took a very interesting line of thought and seemed to me at least to be based on sound strategic principles. He pointed out that a highly controversial infrastructure project in Sweden for a rail tunnel that will shorten the journey time between most of Sweden and Denmark by 3 minutes, is projected to cost 9 billion SEK - 1 billion more than his proposal to introduce broadband to every home in the country, enabling countless new projects, any one of which could be the seed for a new major industry. You do the math!

It was hard to not like his schpiel and it was the first time for a long time I felt that there are still people out there with a vision of IT as an enabling technology. Something that in the climate of the last couple of years seems to have been lost amongst all the failures brought about by the gold rush.

2003-01-13 19:47:21 Source: Web

Well, no sooner do I post a link to my recommended web game than their servers are attacked by a particularly virulent Dos attack (Denial of Service), meaning that all their servers are down and nobody can play the game *sigh*. Doesn't help that their system administrator is on holiday!

I managed to miss hiring a car at the weekend by 20 minutes! The rental place closed at 12 and muggins didn't realise! Oh well, it saved me a little money anyway! I did get to drive work's Renault Kangoo today (it's a minvan type thing), which was pretty fun. It's a nippy car for a van! I had an errand in town which meant I got to do all sorts of fun navigation around the town centre (only drove the wrong way once) and got to try my hand at "pocket" parking for the first time since I got my license (it went fine, but I did pick a pretty big space to park in!).

I also cycled to work today, which was possibly a mistake! I thought the snow had thawed more than it catually had, so large stretches of the cycle-path I take to work were more like rutted ice-sheets! Not so much fun. I managed to avoid falling, though I almost slid into the back of a car I cycled round the back of!

Having dismantled an old scanner over the weekend, I'm feeling pretty fired up about getting on with my robot building. It's been a good long while! I have my test platform completed, now I need to plan out a proper mini-sumo robot to build! That and decorating should keep me busy over the coming winter/spring transition!

2003-01-11 09:40:48 Source: Web

This is kinda fun...

A3 Awakening: The story continues I'm not going to say anything about what it is, but I've been playing the original game for over a month now and it's been pretty good. This looks like it could be a fun addition. I think it is starting small and will pick up pace with time.

To play the original game (Alien Adoption Agency - A3), sign up here. It's free to try out and they don't send spam thank god!