Yesterday, I finally got around to sorting through photos I’d taken over the last few months, condensing them down to a few albums and uploading them to the site.

We visited the Blue Mountains (photos) back in early August for a wintery weekend away which certainly lived up to its name, with a howling gale knocking out the electricity on Friday night and playing havoc with our attempts to keep warm.

My trip to Malaysia resulted in lots of photos, from walking around Georgetown and Batu Feringgi, to visiting temples and seeing Orang Utans, although I still have to go through the ones from the wedding, which was one of the main reasons for going to Malaysia in the first place. Maybe next week.

I started smoking when I was 21 - why? I don’t know. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the actual reasons, if indeed there were any, are lost to me. After a couple of years I decided I’d give up after 10 years. Research seemed to suggest that ten years wasn’t long enough to do serious damage, and there was plenty of time for your lungs to recover.

31 came and went, and while I tried to give up, it never stuck and I was still smoking. Three years ago I tried again, and this time it worked - more or less. I went from smoking about 15/day to smoking none, except when I was around other smokers, when I’d usually cave in and have one or two.

I’d go weeks without having a smoke, and wouldn’t miss them at all, then I’d be out at a party and would end up having a couple and be back to square one. I became that parasite smoker - that friend who won’t buy his own smokes lest he be tempted to smoke them all, yet still wants a few of yours. To counteract this I’d buy packets for my regular ‘dealers’, but I really didn’t want to smoke at all.

Two of my friends, Mike and Nick, went to see a hypnotist to help them quit smoking, with pretty good results. Both went from a pack a day to rarely smoking, so I figured it should be possible for me to go from ‘rarely smoking’ to ‘never smoking’ and resolved to give it a go.

Yesterday was the day. I showed up at his office and was given a brief explanation of how hypnosis works, and how I couldn’t be made to do anything against my will, thereby alleviating my worries that in the future I’d suddenly start squawking like a chicken in response to certain stimuli. All it boils down to is becoming deeply relaxed and having the hypnotist suggest anti-smoking messages to you. The best thing is you don’t even have to pay attention, in fact it’s better if you don’t, as your sub-conscious still takes it all in.

So, $170 later I was out the door, feeling no different and wondering if it would work. I’m happy to report now that all seems well. I went to a barbie with friends last night, have a few beers and wasn’t tempted to have a smoke at all, despite a few smokers standing around me. Previously I would definitely have caved and had one or two, whereas last night I didn’t even have to consciously choose not to smoke - I just never go the “I’d love a smoke” thought.

However, one night does not a non-smoker make, but it’s a promising start. :-)

The Guardian has an article covering Sarah Palin’s first TV interview last night in which she put forth her foreign policy credentials.

A hawkish and occasionally combative Sarah Palin warned last night she might commit US troops to a war against Russia in defence of Georgia and Ukraine in her first interview since John McCain chose her as his running mate.

Palin, who admitted last night she made her first trip outside North America last year…

Palin’s interview was carefully stage-managed to counter criticism that she lacks foreign policy experience…

In sometimes tense exchanges, Palin demonstrated a more bellicose posture towards Russia than the Bush administration during the conflict with Georgia. She also supported military action against Islamist extremists in Pakistan even without the support of the Islamabad government.

So she might commit troops to a war against Russia, which still has probably more nukes than the US, and she also advocates conducting military operations on Pakistani soil without the support of the Pakistani government? That’s all we need. Another fucking idiot in the White House who thinks that bombing the shit out of things is the answer to everything.

BTW, I’d hate to see what she’d come out with on a non-stage-managed interview!

Greetings from Malaysia!

Myself and Jacqui are here to visit her Dad and also for a friend’s wedding. We flew in to a dark and rainy welcome on Thursday, but the weather has improved since then. Standouts so far are:

• being woken at dawn by the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer
• our banana fritter supplier closing down because Ramadan’s starting
• our bus from town picking people up at the main shopping centre, then going around the block to stop there again because the bus wasn’t full enough, and then stopping at the petrol station on the way home to fill up

All-in-all, I’m having fun and getting to eat a lot of local food.

As of a couple of days ago, I’m now an uncle for the second time. My sister Cliona, and her husband Dave, had their first child, Isabella Maria, at 04:30 on August 20th. To quote Jacqui: Oh she’s a very pretty baby! Not all screwed up like most of them. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Yesterday was the City2Surf, and I’m happy to say it went pretty well. Jacqui was also doing it, but she was planning to walk most of it with friends and was starting at the back of the pack, at least 30mins behind me, so I ventured into the city alone to get myself organised. Dropped my ‘keep-warm’ clothes off to get taken to the finish, and queued for about 15mins for the last minute toilet, then made my way over to my start group. It was a bit warmer than I’d expected which was good as I was standing around for about half an hour before the start.

As mentioned previously, I’d managed to get myself in to the fast start group which had a cut-off time of 1:15:00, but I was hoping to crack 1:10 for an average of 12km/h. I hadn’t done any training on hilly courses so was a bit unsure of how I’d get on, so I decided to take it relatively easy until the top of Heartbreak Hill (around 8km) and then see how I felt, and I also decided to start at the back of my group as I was likely to be one of the slower members and this would allow me to stay out of everyone’s way and make it easier to settle into my own pace.

I’d loaded my Shuffle with the metronome MP3s I used on Friday, two 175bpms and a 180bpm, so once the gun went and I crossed the line I hit play, started my HR monitor and I was off. The graph up top gives and idea of how things went. The red line is my heart rate and the green is the altitude, so you can see the course is quite hilly.

As expected, my group slowly pulled away from me at the start, but I synced with the ‘tick, tock’ in my ear and just cruised along at my own pace. There were quite a few people lining the streets to watch the race, and The Golden Sheaf had a rock band blasting away from their balcony, playing some Metallica as I ran by. The first couple of hills weren’t too bad and I split 25:19 for the first 5km, or 5:04/km pace, which I was pretty happy with. By this stage I was running along beside the harbour at Rose Bay, approaching the dreaded Heartbreak Hill, the almost vertical line you can see on the above graph. I hit the bottom and just focused on keeping a decent rhythm going and I started passing people who had gone out too fast and were paying the price.

The half-way point at 7km was about half-way up Heartbreak Hill and I went through that in 36:41 (5:14/km). Doubling that gave me 1:13:20 so I figured that I now had no chance of breaking 1:10, but at that stage I just wanted to get to the top of the hill and get all the climbing over and done with! I was also conscious of the fact that once I got to the top of the hill I was on familiar roads that I’d run many times previously when I was living in Vaucluse, and that it was mostly downhill to the finish. I made it into Vaucluse village still feeling good and with my HR coming down after the uphill exertions, so I decided now was the time to pick things up a bit.

Turning onto Military Road at 9km I was still well over 5:00/km pace, so I pushed the downhill bit then rounded the corner facing another uphill. I was getting sick of the uphills at this stage, but once I got to Dover Heights that was definitely the last of them. I missed the 10km marker, but my running was feeling good, despite the onset of a stitch. I jammed my fingers under my ribcage to get rid of it and just kept going. By 11km the downhill pace was taking effect and I was getting close to 5:00/km pace, and I reached 12km in 59:50, taking me under 5:00/km pace for the first time. At this stage I knew I’d break 1:10 so I just kept going and resolved to try to maintain my current pace all the way to the finish when I hit the flats of Campbell Parade.

By this stage I was passing people left, right and centre but still feeling good. I came around the roundabout onto the promenade and could see the finish line, with the clock counting down to 1:10. I knew I had a bit of time in hand as it had taken me some time to cross the start line after the gun went off, but I decided to try to beat the finish clock to 1:10 anyway. The race announcer was shouting encouragement, trying to get everyone in under 1:10 so I just went for it, remembering to stop my watch as I hit the timing pads. That was it. All over and I still felt surprisingly good. HR peaked at 183 across the line.

1:08:03. That was my time by my watch, which I was pretty happy with. I’d knocked off the second 7km (mainly downhill) in 31:22 (4:28/km) and the last two kms in 8:13 (4:06/km), so perhaps I took it a bit too easy in the first half? Official results are published in the paper tomorrow, so I’ll have to wait until then to get my final time.

I went home, had a quick shower, grabbed my camera and headed back down to the finish to get a snap of Karly, Jacqui and Debbie in the finishing straight…

After that I was off to Reidy’s for a much-deserved BBQ to compare notes with other runners. Stu and Gareth both managed around 1:07, whereas Adrian was way out in front with a 1:01. Nice work!

This week has been my first proper week back in the pool since doing my 1km TT about two weeks ago. I looked around for a swim squad to join up with, as I hate swim training by myself, and found one in Cook & Phillip Park which had a range of sessions that I could join. Morning training was 5:30-7:00, but I had enough trouble getting up for morning training when I was swimming competitively so I was keen to avoid it now.

I settled on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings, plus Saturday morning which is at an altogether more civilised time of 8:30. Monday was a bit of an eye opener. The last time I was doing squads, I was comfortably fastest in the fastest lane, but that was two years ago and it was also a lunchtime squads. Now, not having been in a pool for two years, I was happy to tag along in the second fastest lane. I started out leading it, but have no endurance in my arms, so although I’m not physically tired, my arms are just die and I have to drop back.

The coach has decided that I should be in the fast lane, although I can’t yet make the times they’re doing. He thinks it will be better for me to bust my arse to keep up, fall apart, have a quick rest and then repeat, but I’d prefer to stay down a lane and plod along at a more respectable pace, getting used to doing multiple swim sessions a week first. Plus, the fact that the fast lane did a set of 100s off 1:30, coming in on 1:13, when I could only manage 1:35-1:40 doesn’t help.

Still, by Thursday I was doing a bit better, though that was because the fast guys weren’t there, and I’d managed 9200m for the week which I was pretty happy with. I opted not to go this morning as I’ve the City2Surf tomorrow and I’m already tired after 3 swim sessions and 3 run sessions.

When I did the 10K training course in Vancouver, we had a half hour talk every week on a different topic. The most interesting to me were the ones on biomechanics and injury prevention, both of which said the same thing - to minimise your risk of injury, you should aim to run at 90 strides per minute, i.e: 90 left footfalls and 90 right footfalls, or 180 ‘beats’ per minute. The idea is that you’re taking shorter strides, and have a much lesser force going through your leg on each step, therefore reducing shock and the odds of injuring yourself.

I’d since heard and read the same advice a number of times, but never knew what bpm I was running at, so when I found some free metronome MP3s for download I decided to try them out with my iPod. I forgot all about it for a while, but finally got around to trying it today. I loaded the 170, 175 and 180bpm files onto my Shuffle, set it to loop and headed out for a 9km run.

Each file is between 2 and 3 minutes long, and just consists of a single beep at the given tempo, so you just try and sync your stride with whatever you’re listening too. I struggled to keep up at first, until I realised I’d started with the 180bpm file. I found 175bpm suited me the best, and 170 was a tiny bit too slow, so it was good to know I was almost at the recommended frequency. As the run progressed I found it easier to stick to 180bpm as well, and I also noticed that staying in sync with the metronome also helped keep me on a nice run pace too.

I’ve got the City2Surf on Sunday, so I might put a 175, a 175 and a 180 on the Shuffle and see how that goes…

Finally, after almost nine years in Sydney, I got around to entering the City2Surf last week. The City2Surf is a 14km fun-run, starting in Sydney’s CBD and finishing at Bondi Beach, and is one of the biggest races in the world, with 67,000 particpants last year. Most of my friends have done it, but I was always snowboarding or something at this time of the year, so I never got around to it.

When I went to the site to enter, I discovered, to my dismay, that it was going to be a bit more difficult than I thought. Due to the sheer numbers participating, there are 4 different start groups. The first two, SH1 and SH2, require that you submit a previous time before you can be included, which ruled me out as a first-timer. The problem was that the third group was full, so my only option was to run with the “back-of-the-pack” group.

Now I know I can run 14km, so I’m not doing the race just to finish it, I’d like to post a time, and there’s no way I could do that with 40,000 people already on the road in front of me. Luckily I discovered that I could submit some previous race results and the organisers might permit me to start in one of the SH groups, even though I haven’t done a City2Surf before. SH1 is for those with a previous time of under 75mins for the 14km, so, since I can comfortably run 51mins for 10km, I figured I’d aim high and apply for that group. As a backup, I also asked that the organisers consider me for SH2 (<100mins) if they felt I wasn’t up to scratch for SH1, but that turned out not to be necessary as they let me in to SH1!

So, next Sunday morning, look out for me lining up with the Kenyans! I’ll be the pasty white bloke giving away 25kgs ;-)

“Here, I would like to pause to acknowledge the shame which we have all felt as a result of the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy and religious in this country.

“Indeed I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that as their pastor, I too share in their suffering.

“These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation. They have caused great pain and have damaged the Church’s witness.”

With these words the Pope apologised for past sexual abuse committed by priests in Australia. As recently as yesterday, there was speculation that he wasn’t going to acknowledge it at all, but that wasn’t really an option, given both that the media were highlighting the issue, and that he’d already commended the Government for saying sorry to Aborigines.

Today’s the grand finale of World Youth Day, with a mass being said at Randwick Racecourse, then they all go home and life goes back to normal. Phew!

Q: Why is the Pope holding mass at Randwick Race Course?

A: It’s the only place you can throw your leg over a 3 year old and get away with it.

Good news! Last night the Federal Court overturned the ridiculous law which could have seen people being fined up to $5500 for ‘annoying’ World Youth Day participants. The law, granted to police and emergency services, potentially allowed them to fine people for handing out condoms, or wearing t-shirts deemed offensive to Catholic sensibilites, and was widely criticised as being totally over-the-top, and a violation of civil rights.

RACHEL EVANS and Amber Pike handed out condoms on the steps of Sydney’s Federal Court yesterday - flushed with a ruling that struck out a World Youth Day law that made it a crime to annoy participants in the Catholic event. The NoToPope Coalition protesters object to several Catholic moral teachings and Ms Evans - emboldened by the court triumph - immediately went and handed more condoms to Catholic pilgrims posing for photographs outside a nearby church.

Wearing an anti-Pope T-shirt, for which she might previously have been fined as much as $5500, Ms Evans called it a “major victory for the protest movement”.

A full bench of the court, comprising Robert French, Catherine Branson and Margaret Stone, had ruled that part of the World Youth Day Act, passed by the NSW Parliament to keep order during this week’s events, “should not be interpreted as conferring powers that are repugnant to fundamental rights and freedoms at common law in the absence of clear authority from Parliament”.

The court struck the words “annoyance or” out of World Youth Day regulations, which originally referred to “conduct that causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event”.

Well so much for the running going well. Last week was an easy week, so I was refreshed and ready to get back into it on Monday, but I woke up with a sore throat. Since the schedule called for an easy 6km I went ahead and ran anyway and felt pretty good.

Tuesday called for 9km, and I opted to follow the advice of it being OK to train with a head cold, but not OK to train when the illness is in your chest. Since my chest was clear, I ran the 9km and felt great, posting the fastest time for my normal route without too much effort.

Sadly, for me anyway, by Wednesday I was coughing occasionally, so, playing it safe, I havne’t been able to run since. I’m almost recovered, so I might get another 9km in tomorrow morning, though I’ll wait until I wake up to see how I feel.

Scientists at MIT have announced the development of organic dyes which, when applied to a pane of glass, can catch solar energy and direct it to the edge of the glass for collection by photo-voltaic cells. The Guardian has the details…

Sunlight is concentrated in existing solar power devices using large, mobile mirrors that track the sun as it moves across the sky. But these can be expensive to deploy and maintain. In the MIT device, called an “organic solar concentrator” and described in the latest issue of Science, the researchers painted a mixture of organic dyes onto the surface of a pane of glass. The dyes trap different wavelengths of sunlight and then guide the energy along the glass towards the PV cells at the edges.

“The point of all this is to get away with using far fewer solar cells,” said Marc Baldo, an electrical engineer at MIT. “The concentrator collects light over its whole front surface, but the solar cells need only cover the area of the edges.”

As the edges of a glass panel can often be 100 times smaller in area than the surface itself, he added, solar panels would need 100 times fewer PV cells to collect the same energy. “So we can save money. Since industry can’t produce enough solar cells to satisfy demand, this might also be a good way to stretch production.”

I noticed this amazing photo at the Big Picture, a blog about the day’s photo images from the news wires. The first of a series of 17 images covering the Californian bushfires, it was taken by David McNew of Getty Images.

My running has been going really well lately. I’ve been running consistently for the last 11 weeks or so, with every third week being a rest week. Last week was my biggest week so far at 37.4km and I’m enjoying my rest week this week.

Since I’ve no running history, consistency if the key for me rather than doing speed work or hills, so I’ve been trying to run 5 days a week. My basic weeks looks like:

From now on I’ll try increasing the length of my long run on Saturday, but the rest of the runs will pretty much stay as they are. I just head out and settle into a comfortable pace, which usually turns out to be a HR around 155bpm, or roughly 75% of MaxHR. Right now, that has me covering in the region of 11.5km per hour, but that’s up from 10.5km/h 7 weeks ago, so I expect to continue to get faster as the weeks go by, due to fitness increases and also technique improvements.

Also, my new shoes arrived yesterday, 5 days after ordering them from the US. That’s service!

The Spanish parliament has taken the first step towards granting basic ‘human’ rights to apes. This is an idea we’ll hear more of in the years to come. After all, the great apes are our closest relatives and we are ourselves apes. In fact, there is an argument that the only reason we have our own taxonomical group is due to vanity, and that we don’t warrant it scientifically. Still, it’s pretty obvious that apes are self-aware and suffer similar emotions to us and therefore have the greatest claim to an extension of basic rights which up to now have been regarded as our exclusive preserve.

Great apes should have the right to life and freedom, according to a resolution passed in the Spanish parliament, in what could become landmark legislation to enshrine human rights for chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans and bonobos.

The environmental committee in the Spanish parliament has approved resolutions urging the country to comply with the Great Apes Project, founded in 1993, which argues that “non-human hominids” should enjoy the right to life, freedom and not to be tortured.

See Also: The Great Ape Project

Have you ever wondered what life is like as an asylum seeker? Award-winning novelist Mark Haddon wrote an article for The Observer on documenting just that.

I start by asking why she had to leave Uganda and I regret it immediately. It’s a horrible story and she has to stop several times because she is crying. I tell her we can talk about something else, but she insists.

I realise later what a stupid question it is. It’s the one every refugee gets asked when they apply for asylum. It’s the one asked in every newspaper article about the subject, every television report, every radio programme. Is this person’s claim justified? Did these things really happen to them?

You couldn’t spend five minutes with Sergey, or Mariam, or Margaret without believing their stories. But to ask whether they might be lying is to miss the point. The point is this… Imagine what it must be like to live this kind of life, to leave everything behind, your job, your family, your home. To travel to Stuttgart in the back of a truck. Or Oslo. Or Rotterdam. Any place where you don’t speak the language. You have no friends. You sleep in the street, or share a house with strangers who speak yet another language. Imagine living on £35 of Asda vouchers a week. Imagine not being able to see your family. Then ask yourself what kind of experience would make this kind of life preferable to going home?

It’s pretty sad to think that one of the things that Australia exports to the world is how to treat refugees like scum and shirk your responsibilities towards them.

The Independent has an article on the ingenuity of a local Gaza man who has built his own electric car to get around the fuel shortages caused by Israeli blockades. He converted a Peugeot 205 to electric power, with the ability to plug it in to a wall charger to recharge the batteries.

It took them just three months to crack the technical problems. You might think Mr Khazendar had more pressing – and local – worries than the future of the planet. But he closely followed the saga of General Motors’ EV1 electric car programme, which was cancelled in 2003 and which he believes was the victim of pressure from the major oil companies. He is conscious that, having surged above $130 a barrel, the high price of oil could still help to make his proposition a commercial one, if and when fuel flows normally into Gaza again. “After 100 years we will have no petrol,” he adds. “We should start now to try and deal with that, not wait until it happens.”

The electric car is ideal for the Gaza Strip, a flat coastal territory which is about 45 kilometres long and eight kilometres wide. Not surprisingly, there has been brisk demand from Gazans – about 400 so far – seeking similar conversions at an average estimated cost of $2,500, depending on the size of vehicle. The men behind the innovation argue that the initial outlay is swiftly recoverable because of the lower running costs. The two friends are confident they can make similar conversions of lorries and buses. They say that an Italian non-governmental organisation which provides school transport in Gaza has already registered interest in having its buses electrified.

Football in Australia has always been the poor cousin of the ‘native’ codes, Australian Football (AFL) and Rugby League (NRL), generally gaining very little air time and being seen as a game for immigrants, or Wogs, Sheilas and Poofters as the title of Johnny Warren’s auto-biography suggests. The old National Soccer League was disbanded a few years ago, and relaunched after a year’s break as the A-League, an 8-team competition spread across the country.

Sydney FC became my local team, as their home stadium is about 3km from my house, and I’d always considered becoming a member, but never got around to it. That all changed today, when myself, Darrell & Monique bought our season passes for the upcoming season, due to start in August. We now have our own seats for all the home games, and preferential access to tickets for non-league games involving the club.

This will be the 4th season of the A-League, and it’s going from strength to strength. When the national side qualified for the 2006 World Cup, the country really woke up to football and the contrast with AFL & League was stark, neither of which have an international series (League does, but only a handful of countries play and Australia usually wins). The sport has managed to build on that foothold and average spectator numbers are rising every season. NRL, which I always thought was massive, turns out to be an ugly duckling, with the A-League already matching it in terms of average attendance. In fact, most of the NRL teams have dismal attendances, and the average is only as high as it is due to the Broncos and the Titans. Roll on next season and we can relegate them to third place!