An Unenthusiastic Monday

I had very little sleep last night - thanks to my son, who seemed to develop some kind of weird toddler insomnia - and that, in combination with a miserable grey Monday morning didn’t enthuse me about going to the gym at all. But, I still managed it.

The Sennheisers I purchased really are excellent. They arrived on Saturday morning, which is impressive work by online supplier Qfonic given that I only ordered them on Friday, and aren’t quite as green as they look. They’re still green…but not that green. In a gym, they kind of blend in with the brightly coloured Lycra. Albeit not my brightly coloured Lycra, because I’m not wearing any. There’s a horrible set of images for those who know me, but FYI: I wear comfortable shorts and the first t-shirt I can get my hands on.

My green headphones managed to stop the drivel pumping out of the gym’s speakers penetrating my ear drums, and The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land sounded pretty good through them. Brilliantly, there’s never any worry about them coming out of your ears, because they’re held in place by the neck-band.

Having noticed that my heart rate was something like 200 last week - after a bit of research it sounds like this could either be “a bit high” or “dangerous” or “quite close to dropping dead” - I tried to keep more of an eye on it today. Not running helps, but then that’s like saying not eating is a good way to lose weight, or not jumping off a tall building is a good way to not break your legs. A few stabs of the “incline ^” button, and I managed to find a brisk, up-hill walking pace that was hard work, and kept my heart at around 165-170, which I’m told is OK.

PS: for those of you worried that this blog is simply going to become a log of my training - and I’ll not lie to you, I’m going to carry on writing about that - I’ll have some film and tech content along shortly.

Headphones - Update

I found some headphones that seem to get universal praise: I give you the horrific looking Sennheiser PMX 70 headphones.

I’ve read that they’re not quite that green in real life. I’ll let you know.

Morning Gym: Day Two

I managed to drag my lazy buttocks out of bed and down to the gym for the second day this week, despite the depressingly miserable weather we’re having. My plan is to do three days a week, so hopefully next week I can get into gear and commence three day gymification. I even ran for a bit today.

I have noticed a problem though - the headphones I’ve got don’t block out the horrific noise that the gym considers to be music. So, my next mission is to feed my headphone addiction find a set of headphones that block noise and aren’t too heavy for the gym. And in-ear ones don’t seem to live up to their name and stay in my ears, so they’re probably not an option.

Game on…

RUN!

I’m going to start running. Here’s why:

Last year, I changed jobs and soon after I joined the company, during the annual company conference, a representative from the Anthony Nolan Trust gave a talk about their charity. He was assisted by Lloyd Scott.  At the time I had no idea who Lloyd Scott was, but his presentation was moving, entertaining, and inspiring in equal parts. Some of his frankly insane ideas for fundraising events are the stuff of legend, it seems, and there’s more to come: he mentioned something about strapping a deck chair to a ludicrous number of balloons and floating himself over a pre-determined distance. While dressed as a clown.

After Scott’s presentation, it was announced that we’d be putting forward a team to run the London 10k race in May. And I decided that I was going to be in that team.

Now: those of you who know me will find this highly amusing. I don’t run, I don’t do any kind of physical exercise, and I weigh far more than a man of my age probably should. My brother-in-law is convinced that there’s no way I’m going to be able to get myself in shape. But to all the sniggerers I say this: "Bollocks".

I am going to run this race, and in order to do that I am going to get myself in a sufficient fit state to do it. And I’ll post about it here while I do it.

My plan is to start going to the gym three times a week, and on the days that I don’t go to the gym I’ll walk to work. We’ll see how that goes…

Dreamhost Billing Screw Up

I went into a bit of a panic earlier when I received an email from Dreamhost saying I owed them a large wad of cash, and that I should deliver it to their offices in a brown paper bag full of small unmarked bills, or they’d send the boys ’round and “do me”.

Well, ok, maybe it wasn’t quite so strongly worded, but it might as well have been. Having a significant amount of cash demanded from you when you’re not expecting it is slightly disconcerting. Particularly when that cash is for a fairly unreliable webhost, and the very, very cheap account you opened has never been used.

I sent their accounting monkeys a snotty email reply, and looked into my account details a bit closer. The email said something along the lines of “right, seeing as it’s now April 2008, you owe us lots of cash”. “Hang on,” thinks I, “it’s not April yet!”, and off I go in search of evidence that this is a balls up. And, as luck would have it, Dreamhost’s own status page has a post on the problem. And a long line of ranty customers leaving comments.

So, if you’ve had an email from Dreamhost, don’t panic. Unless, of course, you had your billing set to “automatic” in which cash you’ve been charged quite a lot of money out of the blue. Oh, and don’t think you’re safe if your account was closed - according some comments left on their page, they’ve been charged too!

Not good, Dreamhost. Expect numerous cancellations. Server downtime on a cheap host is one thing, but messing with peoples’ hard earned is a good way to become extremely unpopular, very quickly.

A Belated New Year

Happy new year to you, dear reader. For it seems there are a few of you left, despite the fact that I’ve neglected this place for the last few months.

A recent check of my stats shows I’m still getting traffic, and I still have quite a few people reading my RSS Feed. So thank you for sticking with me; I’ll have some more content for you directly.

The new year will hopefully see increased activity at ITF towers. A new design is currently being feverishly worked on, which should launch soon. I say "feverishly" but I actually mean "during what little time I have to actually devote to such endeavours". And I say "soon" but I actually mean "when it’s done".

I owe you some reviews - most significantly Diary of the Dead. It’s coming. Having recently finished reading the excellent Book of the Dead, it’s given me a bit of a taste for writing up my reviews again. It also seems to have turned me back on to reading, so I’ve picked up a few Cormac McCarthy novels (The Road, No Country for Old Men, and Blood Meridian, just so you know) and will be posting my thoughts on those.

More soon people. Honest.