Running Log
Week: 15th January 2012 Total: 33.56km Cumulative: 119.63km
Played squash on Monday and Friday this week - which made a big difference to my energy levels as they were tough games!
- 10 Jan 12 - Distance: 7.12km Time: 0:45:07 Average km pace: 6:20
- 11 Jan 12 - Distance: 15.93km Time: 1:32:44 Average km pace: 5:49
- 14 Jan 12 - Distance: 10.51km Time: 0:58:28 Average km pace: 5:33
No running this coming week as I’ll be hitting the ski slopes instead!
Running Log
This week I’ve starting trying something new. Instead of focusing on building up speed - I’m trying to follow some theories about using your heart rate to train for a longer duration at a lower intensity (and then gradually increase the HR over a number of weeks). So with the exception of the run on the 8th January, I’ve either been trying to keep my HR at 150 or 160 depending on whether I was aiming for a easy or medium intensity workout. Unsurprisingly, at either of those intensities I felt I could keep for as long as I wanted!
Week: 8th January 2012 Total: 38.78km Cumulative: 86.07km
- 3 Jan 12 - Distance: 8.29km Time: 0:51:32 Average km pace: 6:12
- 4 Jan 12 - Distance: 9.37km Time: 1:01:08 Average km pace: 6:31
- 6 Jan 12 - Distance: 13.840km Time: 1:25:15 Average km pace: 6:09
- 8 Jan 12 - Distance: 7.28km Time: 0:40:44 Average km pace: 5:36
Hurray! I was a loser in 2011!
What a year 2011 was! Finally, after years of thinking about it - I finally lost it in 2011!!!!
And of course, by it, I’m referring to excess weight! In 2011 I managed to lose 6 stone (84 pounds or 38kg).
It all started with a free iPhone app called myfitnesspal.com (they have android and website versions too). It’s basically a technology driven calorie controlled diet where you keep a log of your exercise and food.
I started off with the mindset of trying it religiously for a month to see if it would work. Well, 1 month later and an average weight loss of 2lbs/week later I was convinced.
Several months later I’m now not only more aware of what I’m eating but more importantly, the portion sizes. I’m still eating the same foods - with the occasional treat or indulgence but I guess the key is about balance.
It’s also important to note that I’m no longer religiously logging my food intake with myfitnesspal.com. After using it for several months I’m now able to self regulate my calorie consumption - albeit it’s a bit more up and down but it’s generally close enough. I still use the app to log my weight once a week just to make sure I’m staying on track. And at least its comforting to know that if things start going badly, I can revert back to using the app more strictly to get things back on track!
So what has 6 stone done for me? Well, no back or leg problems anymore. I’m now playing some of the best squash I’ve ever played. I’ve taken up yoga and running and now make the time to get to the gym - as I can now see and feel the benefits of exercise.
Aside from that, I’ve dropped 8 inches in my waist when it comes to jean sizes, I’ve dropped 2.5 inches in my neck for shirts and my t-shirts are now medium as opposed to XXL!!!! I’ve even had to get my wedding band reduced by 1.5 sizes to stop it dropping off my finger!!!
Looking to the future - what’s my aim for 2012? Well, going by BMI - I’m about 5 pounds away from entering the healthy band. Ultimately I’m probably aiming to loose about 14-20 pounds as that should put me right in the middle of the healthy band but we’ll see how I feel!
I’m also looking forward to skiing in a few weeks time - it will be interesting to see what difference the weight loss and fitness gains will make to my stamina for whizzing down the slopes!
All in all, 2011 was a good year - so thank you myfitnesspal.com - it’s amazing what can be achieved with a free app and a bucket full of determination!
Running Log
Hmmm - so when did that happen? When did I become a runner!??
Well, I guess it started towards the end of November 2011 when I decided to add a bit of treadmill running into my weekly gym routine - primarily with a view to improving my squash stamina.
Then Christmas arrived and I knew I was going to be away from the gym for several days so I turned to running as a way of balancing out the normal festive over indulgence. Did it work? Well, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I actually lost a few pounds over Christmas!
Now - with a ski holiday in early January 2012 and regular games of high paced squash to look forward to, I think I’ll try and keep the running effort up for a bit and see how things go!
Granted, I’m not setting the world on fire with a blistering pace, but hopefully I’ll work on that when I get comfortable with the distances I’m running!
Times and distances are recorded with Nike+
Week: 1st January 2012 Total: 35.09km Cumulative: 47.29km
- 1 Jan 12 - Distance: 10.6km Time: 1:01:54 Average km pace: 5:50
- 31 Dec 11 - Distance: 5km Time: 28:58 Average km pace: 5:47
- 29 Dec 11 - Distance: 6.83km Time: 42:00 Average km pace: 6:09
- 27 Dec 11 - Distance: 6.75km Time: 43:10 Average km pace: 6:24
- 26 Dec 11 - Distance: 5.91km Time: 38:12 Average km pace: 6:27
Week: 25th December 2011 Total: 12.2km Cumulative: 12.2km
- 24 Dec 11 - Distance: 7.2km Time: 44:51 Average km pace: 6:13
- 22 Dec 11 - Distance: 5km Time: 30:30 Average km pace: 6:06
What happened the first rabbit?
It’s ironic the things you notice whilst mindlessly flicking through the TV channels. For instance, there’s a strange new ad here in Ireland about paying your TV license. Actually, calling it strange is probably being kind!
The whole premise of the advert is that there are several ways to pay your TV license. The unfortunately woman in this ad is trying to persuade a bunny rabbit to do it for her. When the bunny fails to be coaxed by a carrot, the male voice over states that “getting a rabbit to do it for you, is not one of them…”
This ad raises several questions: Why would a woman, in business attire and sitting in an office environment, be trying to coax a rabbit to pay her TV license? Where did the rabbit come from? What company has rabbit’s roaming around the office anyway? And, what are the TV licensing people trying to say about female logic and the sensibilities of trying to use a rabbit in the first place? Is this some sort of deranged female stereotype?
And as if this wasn’t shocking enough, they had to use two different rabbits!!!
Which leads you to even more serious questions - why? Did the first rabbit suffer an accident during the filming? Did it go on strike because of working conditions or pay? Did it run out squeaking at its agent about having been booked for such a deranged gig in the first place?
I guess we’ll never know… but let’s hope the TV license did the right thing by the first rabbit and that it wasn’t harmed in the process of making this really silly advert!
Here’s an online link to the ad so you can judge for yourself: http://www.tvads.ie/ads/1434-tv-licence-bunny
And here’s two screen grabs of the two very different rabbits:-
The Wooden Flower Project
Blimey - time flies - has it really been this long?? Sadly, I haven’t really had much time or energy to do many home projects these days, but time to change all that me thinks!
A friend has been off work sick for the last few months and I wanted to make a little something to welcome her back to work… thus the wooden flower project was born.
Having left it to the last minute, it’s a slightly more simple version that I first envisaged, but I’m still fairly pleased with the end result. Whilst not strictly intarsia, it’s still made up of 24 pieces of wood (Walnut, Cherry and Maple).
Given that the petals are quite small I had a few minor accidents along the way - both with petals being launched at high speed as I lost my grip whilst trying to hold them against the belt sander and by accidentally trying to sand down the tips of my fingers in the process! All good fun for a Sunday evening whilst waiting for the X Factor results!!!
I had an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone recently. For work, I needed a 10 minute video clip that was rights free and that could be used for IBC (A broadcast industry trade show in Amsterdam in September) and for pleasure I wanted to test drive the Canon XA-10 camcorder.
So on a pleasurable sunny Saturday afternoon we headed down to Dun Laoghaire harbour in Dublin and shoot some test footage which was later stitched together in Adobe Premiere.
Hmmm… another misspent weekend of experimentation! Meet Fred! My first attempt at making a model and animating it… going to be a slow process me thinks!
Black and White
What is it about black and white images? Sometimes when you strip back the colour you can give an image completely different lease of life and achieve some powerful results. In the days gone by, printing B&W images was a skill confined to the darkroom. Now, in the digital age, with a suitable plug-in or Photoshop skills, a black and white image can be created in minutes (if not seconds).
(click to open a larger version)
I personally love Nik Soft’s Silver Efex Pro 2 (See their website - http://www.niksoftware.com/). Take this fairly ordinary image of a tree… (shot at the Irish National Stud in Kildare, Ireland) and with about 2 minutes tweaking in Silver Efex we end up with a much more interesting B&W shot… simple as that!
The making of The Wheel Of Doom!
This is one of those silly ideas that I created purely for fun and which provided an interesting weekend project! The Wheel of Doom draws on scientifically proven indicators that would have any decent project manager quaking in their boots… more often that not it can reliability predict the outcome of any given project or task! (Well, maybe not!). Check it out for yourself at http://www.thewheelofdoom.com/
When I decided to create The Wheel of Doom I wanted to do (a) spend no more time than a weekend and (b) play with some new stuff that I wouldn’t normally use in my day job.
With these requirements in mind I purchased Hype (version 1.0.3) from the Mac’s App Store. Hype is made by Tumult (http://tumultco.com/hype/) and cost €23.99. In short, it’s a visual editor for generating animations using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
Once I had decided upon the technology and software I was going to use, I worked in Adobe Illustrator CS4 and created the various graphical elements that would be used to create The Wheel of Doom. At this stage I also wanted to ensure the web page would run nicely on the iPad, so I designed for a screen size of 1024px by 690px.
Does Hype live up to the hype? It’s a hard one to answer - on one level I was impressed and on another I was left frustrated.
So, what was good? Well, to start with, if you’ve ever used Adobe Flash, or have any form of understanding of animations, transitions and key frames, then Hype is fairly easy and intuitive. As well as that, there’s a few online video’s to help you get started with the basics.
However, once you scratch the surface you start to run into some silly bugs and missing features. For example, when re-ordering the items on the timeline by dragging an element to a new z-order position, you have to drop it one position above where you really wanted it to go otherwise it ends up in the wrong place – this is clearly a bug and fairly annoying as it should have been easily spotted before the software was released! And speaking of the timeline, because you can’t group items together you end up with a long list of items! Again, for simple animations it’s probably not a problem, but The Wheel of Doom had 28 layers for one scene so it involved a lot of scrolling up and down the list – groupings would have made it much more user friendly.
Also, moving individual items around can be a pain – especially once you start layering items. By clicking the name of a background item on the timeline, it becomes selected on the stage. If you then try to move that item with the mouse it reselects the front item instead. Thus, the only way you can reposition the background item is to manually bring it to the foreground or type new values into the element’s properties – which is a bit of a pain!
And as you try to do more complicated stuff, you run into some of Hype’s limitations – for example, if you want to insert a Twitter share button… then just forget it. The UI doesn’t appear to support it. You can’t actually insert a container for custom HTML code. You can probably do this programmatically using JavaScript but even this isn’t straight forward. With Twitter they provide a script that parses the DOM looking for the twitter container and then formats it accordingly – if you try to insert the button programmatically, then the Twitter JavaScript function won’t find the container as it doesn’t exist when the initial script runs. Given my time limitation I gave up trying to find a way to do this in Hyper and just added the code to a container in the top level HTML file and positioned it absolutely so that it would appear in the top right corner.
And then you start to discover even more serious issues… in the course of the weekend, Hype crashed about 3 or 4 times and had to restart. With my background in software design, I’m well programmed in hitting the save button at periodic intervals – so thankfully I never lost any work. Strangely enough, it would usually crash when I was away from the computer for a break!
And finally, there’s one very important limitation… Internet Explorer. Not unsurprisingly Hype will not produce an HTML5 animation for IE8 or older. However, it’s important to note that this isn’t Hype’s fault – IE only started seriously supporting HTML5/CSS3 from IE 9. Depending on your animation it might work but if you use anything involving transforms such as rotation then forget it.
One final problem I ran into was hooking in JavaScript mouse events. Hype’s UI makes it easy for you to create JavaScript function that can be connected to mouse events associated with an object. However, if you need to actually get the event object to determine the mouse position then forget it. Due to the way they wrap your function with their framework, they forget to pass the event object in – so things like event.screenX (or even window.event for some browsers) don’t work. There might be a way to do it, but in the end I simply created a function that got called when the animation loaded and in turn registered my own mouse event handlers thus bypassing hype’s event framework. Again, this is one of those silly things, which suggests the creators of Hype haven’t really spent much time trying to use their own application to do anything complicated! (And The Wheel of Doom isn’t really that complicated!) One other advantage of doing your own event handlers is that you can easily hook in the event handlers for touch events (for the iPad), as these aren’t supported in Hype yet.
In conclusion, is Hype any good? Well, given how little time I actually spent on this project, Hype certainly made the job easier than if I hadn’t used it, so in that respect, it’s not bad. However, if they’d address some of the issues highlighted here, then it’s got the potential to be a very powerful application. Would I have paid €23.99 for it if I knew now it’s shortcomings and bugs? Probably not but here’s hoping it might get updated in the near future.
About Me
Welcome to my blog.
I'm a Chartered Engineer, technology enthusiast (aka gadget lover), wannabe stock motion animator, dabbles with wood and lover of good jazz music, books and photography!
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