Well I finally got around to it. After much debate I’m now a BRAT, or more specifically a member of the Bondi Running And Triathlon Club.

I went to join after work yesterday, but got told I had to show up before 6pm, a feat I managed today. $75 changed hands and I’m now in possession of a shiny new membership card, which also includes membership of the Bondi Icebergs.

BRAT have cycling and running training sessions which I’ll find useful, and also their own race series, comprising triathlon, ocean swims and running. Since those races start with the basics, and nice short distances, they should make it a bit easier to get into this sport.

As for swimming, well I’m also thinking of joining Norths Aussi Masters and training with them. I’m going to head over and check out one of their sessions tomorrow night.

Finally, I think it’s time to buy a bike. I’ll organise a bike fit when I get back from Canberra, and then buy one in August when I get back from snowboarding in New Zealand.

Stayed up late watching the Tour de France live last night. SBS are showing it live on Sundays, which is great, as otherwise the only coverage I get is a half-hour daily highlight. Given that the first 10mins of that highlight is a recap of the previous day, and allowing for ads, it ends up being only about 10mins coverage of the day’s stage. Better than nothing I guess.

So, got back on the bike this morning and my knee feels fine. Will see how I go cycling up the hill this evening. If that goes OK well then the knee is back to normal.

B: 5km

Tipped the scales at 88.0kg this morning. Looks like I’ve stabilised at 87.5-88kg at the moment, which, given that I’ve done no exercise in three weeks, isn’t too bad.

Myself, Jacqui and Tom went to see Touching The Void last night in the new Greater Union in Bondi Junction.

Great movie, and very well done, though it would have been better if I hadn’t seen Joe Simpson interviewed on Andrew Denton the previous evening, as it was essentially a distillation of his narration of the movie. It makes you wonder what you’d do in the same situation. I’d never even get to that situation because I don’t think I’d ever be prepared to trust someone else’s abillity enough to consider climbing such a mountain alpine style! Would I have cut the rope? I guess so, since I can’t see what other choices he had, though maybe if I was a mountaineer something would be obvious. Incidentally, I originally typed ‘mountaineer’ as ‘mountainerr’ – maybe more appropriate in this case ;-)

Went to the physio this afternoon to get her to look at my knee. It’s not that sore, but it’s not perfect either and still feels a bit stiff. I want to get back to running, as I’m a bit behind in my 10K training plan which is pissing me off a little, and I decided it would probably be best if I got a professional opinion before pounding the pavement.

I rang this morning for an appointment and they enquired about my injury. I mentioned that I’d done it snowboarding, so she said, “we’ll put you with Ashley, she’s a skier as well”. I show up this afternoon and run through exactly what happened with Ashley. She asked had there been any other injuries at the weekend. I related the story of Tom being taken off the mountain by ski patrol, and it turned out that she was one of the members who’d helped Tom out. Small world ;-)

Anyway, after much pushing, prodding and tests it turns out that there’s nothing major wrong with my knee; just some strained tendons & ligaments. I’m allowed to swim, and light biking, but no running for at least a week, maybe more. Between that and the ski season I’ll get bugger all training done before September. Oh well, I’m doing that bloody 10K even if I end up walking it.

Weighed in at 87.0kg this morning, but I was pretty dehydrated, so I reckon I’ll be back to 87.5 or so once I “water up”.

George W. Bush was interviewed by RTE‘s Carol Coleman recently. Despite the fact that she submitted her questions three days in advance, Bush still comes across like an idiot. You can see him stumbling as he tries to formulate answers to followup questions, then relaxing as he settles into the well-worn “terrorist, freedom, democracy, freedom” groove. It would be funny if this guy wasn’t the most powerful guy in the world!

View the video feed here, or download the audio-only version as an MP3 <ahref =“http://radio.indymedia.org/uploads/rte-carol-coleman-bush.mp3”>here.

Well 10.4 got previewed this morning and provoked mixed reviews. 3-way video conferencing in iChat AV will be pretty useful for keeping in touch with family etc., there’s some cool graphics stuff and the Spotlight search thing has potential. If the user can specify their own metadata it could be really cool. Automator just seems to be a GUI for building Applescripts.

Dashboard seems to have been a rip-off of Konfabulator, though Tom deems me an idiot for saying so. Desk Accessories were allegedly Apple’s prior art, which is rubbish. They were little applications implemented as device drivers that relied on main applications to figure out that a mouse click should go to a DA and then pass it to them. If the app didn’t support DAs then tough. That’s hardly a comparison to Konfabulator, which is a scripting engine, which uses XML to define the UI and JavaScript to provide functionality, in a manner which makes it easy for people to write their own widgets. Apparently it’s also a big deal that these widgets are out of the way and accessible by hot-key a la Expose. When I’m using a big application all my small apps are already hidden behind it and easily accessible by Cmd-Tab. Certainly just as quick to access. Just missing the eye candy.

The Konfabulator debate doesn’t centre around whether ot not it was a unique idea. It’s true that it has been around before in various guises. However, it didn’t exist on OS X before Konfabulator came along. Apple made a big song and dance at the launch of OS X about developer relations and encouraging more developers onto the Mac platform. They should be offering support and encouragement to sharware developers who come up with good, slick products, not just waiting to see what it reasonably popular and then incorporating it into the OS. Apple should spend their R&D money on bringing $5000 media tools to the common man, a la Final Cut Express and GarageBand, not shitting on the little guy.

RSS in Safari doesn’t seem to be much of a big deal. Anyone who is aware of blogs knows that RSS has been around for years and is not new as Jobs claims. If I go to a site I don’t want to see its RSS feed. I want to subscribe to RSS feeds of sites I like and have an aggregator alert me when one of those sites publishes something. NetNewsWire already does all that and does it well. I can see a precis of the article and if I’m interested, then a key press opens it in Safari. Maybe when it comes out in almost a years time there’ll be something more significant.

So, we have searchable metadata from BeOS, widgets from Konfabulator and RSS from NetNewsWire. Not exactly innovation and a bit hypocritical when you have “Redmond, start your photocopiers” posters all over the conference hall.

Just back from a great weekend down in Perisher. The first boarding weekend of the year and what a good one it was. Friday was OK. It was good just to be on the slopes but the visibility was terrible. I managed to fall into a dip while traversing Mt. Perisher and twisted my knee a little. It was pretty sore at the time, but after 10mins or so all was well again and I could get back on the board. That was just as well, since Saturday was perfect. Clear blue skies and lots of powder made for a brilliant day. It was easily the best conditions I’ve boarded on, though that only covers the last two years ;-) Flying around the slopes in knee deep powder with the tunes blaring on the iPod makes for happy days. Sunday was also good, though there was no snow overnight. Tom managed to get himself rescued by ski patrol, which evened up the score between himself and Kevin. Thankfully it seems to be nothing serious, just a bad case of “dead leg”. I accompanied him back to Front Valley in the big Snow Cat which was fun. After a couple of more hours all over the resort it was time to call an end to the weekend and hit the road back to Sydney. All in all, a great weekend. Hopefully there’ll be plenty more this season.

88.6kg this morning. Not too bad given I did no exercise last week.

Went to the movies last night with Tom. Saw Dawn Of The Dead…. don’t bother. 28 Days Later was much better, or maybe I just preferred that because I saw it first. There’s only so much you can do with a zombbie-flick it would seem. Anyway, unless you’re particularly into the genre, don’t waste your hard-earned.

Tipped the scales at 88.3kg this morning.

Went up to Bondi Junction yesterday to check out the new shopping megaplex thing they’ve almost finished building. It looks pretty nice, though I did notice that it has been divided into ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-nots’ sections! On one side you have David Jones, Versace, Tag-Heuer and various designer stuff, whereas the other side has Myers and regular stores. Even to food courts are themed differently, with the ‘Haves’ section being very subtle and stylish and the ‘Have-nots’ being garish and in-your-face. Pretty funny really.

I bought myself a new phone while I was up there too. I ended up getting the SonyEricsson T630 in black, though they had to order it for me so I’ll collect it next week.

Finally, saw Shrek 2 last night. Great fun, really funny and well worth a look.

Got my short run in last night – 2.3km. Felt good, getting the hang of this running lark ;-) I kept the pace down and timed it at 11:30 which is just about right.

500m easy

D: 2.3km – T: 11:30 – HR: 150

I woke up yesterday with the beginnings of a cold/sore throat. It felt OK last night so I went for the run, but this morning it’s there again. I’m supposed to go for a bike ride this evening, but I reckon I’ll skip that, do nothing tomorrow either, dose myself with Beroccas and hope for the best.

B: 94.6km – R: 6.6km

My new plan seems to be working. Rather than cycling in to/out of work every day I’ve decided to try and do three longer rides a week, aiming to exceed 100km in total. The first of those was on Monday, and I’ve just done the second. On the way home from work I did five laps of Centennial Park, which was quite good fun because it was pitch black and there were very few other cyclists around. I was a little worried that the park would be locked up after dark, so I checked after 2 laps before continuing on for the remainder. I cycled down to Rose Bay expecting to see Jacqui doing her Step Into Life class, but apparently she does it on Thursday night instead. Oh well, it counts for a couple of extra kms.

B: 94km – R: 3.8km

Did another 3.3km run this evening which went a little better than Sunday. Made a concious decision to try and slow down even more, and went through 2.3km in 11:25 (12.1kmh) which is about right. My HR was down to 144 from 160 or so, and the run felt quite good, so I think I’ll try and stick to this pace in future.

500m easy
D: 3.3km – T: 17:00 – HR: 144

B: 56.6km – R: 3.8km

I thought that Grand Drive in Centennial Park was 3.6kms long, but it’s actually 3.8kms. That means my total ride yesterday gets boosted to 56.6kms, a bonus of 6.6km.

I was supposed to bet up for a swim this morning, but I was bloody exhausted and fell straight back to sleep after the alarm.

B: 56.6km

Weighed in at 87.6kg this morning. Still progressing in the right direction.

Just back from a cycle around Centennial Park. There were loads of people up there relaxing and enjoying the day off work for the Queen’s Birthday. Plenty of kids on rollerblade and rented bikes. I did 50km in total, including to and from my house, which now pushes me over 1000km on the bike since Feb 1st. I’m pretty happy with that, though I’m also pretty tired now ;-)

B: 50km

Went for a slightly longer run this afternoon, trying to maintain a slower pace. Felt reasonably OK, and managed to complete 2.3km in 11mins, almost 1min slower than the last time. That still works out at 12.5kmh, which I reckon is still too fast. I think I should be training at less than 12 at least, though it starts to feel more like shuffling at that stage. I continued on for a total of approximately 3.25km, the furthest I’ve run so far. I can feel the extra distance in my calves though ;-)

500m easy
D: 3.25 – T: ? – HR: 162bpm

B: 30km – R:6.8km