Work is good. Family life is good. I’m healthier and fitter than I’ve ever been before (which has had a clear and massive impact on the first two things).

Fitness

It all started when I signed up for the gym on the 27th of December 2010 weighing about 89kg. When I was 17 I was 72.5kg, so there had been some definite excess in those 11 years. I used an Olympic Distance Triathlon in July as my motivation.

I trained really hard. Weights, running, swimming and riding, and I hit my goal of finishing and just missed my hopeful target of 3hrs (it took me 3hrs and 4minutes).

It’s now 2012 and I’m down to 79kg. I’m hoping for another good year and to get down to 72 before 2013 rolls around.

Some stats for 2011 (yes I love numbers):

• Cycling: 5933km
• Running: 279km
• Swimming: 17km (not enough training. This is why I didn’t finish in under 3 hours!)

Favourite rides:

• My first ever ride up Cheddar Gorge on the 1st of October
• 96km in San Francisco across the bridge and up Mount Tamalpais

Goals for 2012:

• Half an hour quicker in the Bristol triathlon
• “Gold” time in the Dartmoor Classic 106 mile cyclosportive event in June
• Start racing my bike in criteriums (and maybe road races) and not fall off/get dropped
• 12,000km on the bike

Family

Having Mum stay with us for a couple of weeks, and then Dad, Krista and Tom all come over and stay as well was brilliant.

It was sad to see Brad and Renee head back to Australia, but it was great having them over here for a couple of years.

Galen is 3 (“I’m three, three and a half”) and is so much fun to spend time with it’s crazy. It was tough at times earlier in the year (especially when we were forced to move house in April), but he is now a complete joy and pleasure to be with, almost all of the time!

Onwards

The hope for 2012 is much more of the same, just harder/stronger/faster/further, and as much quality time with friends and family as possible.

So I decided to get a new bike for the winter. I like the geometry and feel of my road bike, so went for a Specialized Langster. Almost the same frame, but a single-speed and it’s a bit lighter.

The plan is to use the freewheel to start with, then see if I can cope with it fixed.

• Twitterrific (Mac)
• Twitterrific (iPhone)
• Twitterrific Premium
• Twitterrific MAS
• Tweetie 1
• Tweetie 2
• Tweetie (Mac)
• Birdbrain
• DMs
• Kiwi

But during this time I haven’t been able to give Twitter any money.

If Twitter would concentrate on their platform rather than selling their users and forcing me to use their service the way they want me to use it, I would definitely pay for the following:

• £20/year just to support Twitter
• £40/year to get a “supporter” badge on my profile like the “verified” badge the celebrities I don’t care about get
• £5/month if I could filter tweets on the server so they were hidden in any client application I chose to use

I’m sure I’m not the only one of the millions and millions of Twitter users who want to give you money. Be innovative. Be brave.

Twitter is an extremely important platform. Please don’t ruin it.

Before the games we had The Games, a “mockumentary” by John Clarke, Bryan Dawe and Gina Riley about the Sydney Organising Committee. During the event we were lucky to have The Dream with Roy and HG on every night. Both were top quality. Brilliant and hilarious and unmissable.

However the best thing about The Olympics was this.

This appeared in The Indian Express on the 22nd of September 2000.

The caption is:

IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch (L) and an unidentified official watch the judo preliminaries at the Olympics. The 80-year old Samaranch, who left the games following the opening ceremony to be by his dying wife’s side, returned to the games late on Wednesday, only two days after her funeral. (AFP)

It makes me proud to be an Australian.

It was a sad day.

I got a new phone earlier this year, put the old 3G in a box, and then forgot about it. A few weeks ago when I was moving things around I re-discovered it and decided I should have a go at fixing the screen.

I looked around for information about replacing the screen, and the best how-to articles I could find were the ones at TidBITS and wikiHow.

http://db.tidbits.com/article/10389
http://www.wikihow.com/Fix-an-iPhone-3G-Screen

These sites told me that I needed to buy a new digitizer and screen kit (fortunately the LCD hadn’t been damaged when I dropped the phone), so I hopped over to eBay and bought one of these for £13, which duly arrived a couple of days later.

I followed the instructions and after a minor issue removing one of the screws that attaches the screen frame to the LCD (be careful with the tiny little things), I had the broken glass removed, the new screen attached, and the iPhone back together and working.

Once I’d made sure that everything was working perfectly, I decided that I wanted to get rid of the phone rather than keep it. I was directed to Mobile Valuer (a MoneySavingExpert site), plugged in the details of the phone, and was shown who would give me money for it.

I chose to go with Royal Mail’s Simply Drop.

I filled out their form online, received a valuation (£155) and a unique code, and was then sent a special envelope so that I could send the phone to them (after removing all my old data).

On Saturday morning I wandered in to town, wrote my unique code on the envelope and then paid for registered mail. This cost me £5.50 but meant the phone was fully insured for the £155 I was hoping to get back.

Two mornings later I got an email and an SMS message from Simply Drop telling me that they’d inspected the phone, were happy that it was in fully working order, and that £155 would be transferred to my Paypal account (Simply Drop provides a number of payment options, including donating the payment to charity). The next day the money arrived, and by this morning (just 5 days after sending my phone in) the money was already in my bank account.

If you have a go:

• Make sure to get the right digitizer/LCD (and get it from a reputable dealer)
• Be very careful that you don’t strip the screws when removing the screen frame from the LCD
• Be very careful when removing the screen glass (lots of little tiny shards)
• Send your phone to a company that you feel confident about

We have a book of “Big Machines” that Galen loves. He can now recognise and name the following both in the book and when we’re out. He has a bit of a thing for tractors.

• Bulldozer
• Excavator
• Backhoe Loader
• Crane
• Tower crane
• Dump truck
• Grader (used when building a road)
• Roller
• Paver
• Concrete Mixer
• Concrete Pump
• Tunnel Digger
• Tractor
• Plough
• Harrow
• Roller
• Seed drill
• Muckspreader
• Sprayer
• Combine harvester
• Mower
• Swath Turner
• Baler
• Grab
• Bale Fork
• Tractor loader
• Hedge-trimmer
• Post driver
• Giant tractor
• Potato planter
• Tow truck
• Snow blower

When Galen and I were driving to swimming this morning he saw a tractor, after which he then said:

"Might see a combine harvester. Keep eyes peeled."

You could say that his vocabulary is coming along.

Unfortunately the ITV page is full of stuff I just don’t want to see – all I’m interested in is occasionally glancing at the video and seeing the score.

To fix this I did the following:

• Installed this extension for Chrome
• Added a new rule
• Set the regular expression for matching the URL to ^http://live.itv.com/*
• Added some CSS

The CSS:

/* Remove the main background image */
body.tipsy { 
    background-image: none !important; 
    background-color: black;
}
.applicationArea { 
    background: none !important;
}

/* Hide the view buttons we don't want to use */
.game_menu h4,
.views_comments,
.views_grid,
.views_big-screen,
.views_video-highlights,
.share_button {
    display: none !important;
}

/* Clear out some backgrounds */
#game_menu_bar,
#alert_bar,
.open_block {
    background: none !important;
    background-color: none !important;
}

/* Remove the border from the video */
.video_container {
    border: 0 !important;
}

/* Hide other misc crap */
.comment_container,
#header_bar,
.footer,
#time_line,
#main_grid_panel {
    display: none !important;
}

This basically turns this:

Into a big black screen that looks like this:

Much nicer.