It’s a Lego City surfing nightmare!
Vegetable Patch 2014
Planted the vegetables for this year. It’s a disgrace really as I don’t eat them and neither do the kids but I think it’s important for them to see stuff grow.
This year we have:
Sweetcorn
Onions
Carrots
Potatoes
The potatoes are in round pots to try and keep them contained:
We have the rest planted in the ground. The silver plant container has chestnut trees we planted last autumn.
Spot The News
Can you spot the news in the following BBC Website clip?
NO?
Neither could I. This appears at first reading of the headline to indicate that they’ve found a signal from the airplane. Then you read the next bit and realise it isn’t. Maybe, just maybe the BBC should have waited for the Chinese to confirm something. The endless speculation about this airplane has driven me to indifference.
Here’s a crazy idea for the BBC News people:
How about you report something when it really is new and confirmed from two independent sources.
Can you believe that this organisation is the pinnacle of reporting in this country? No, once again neither can I. I have pretty much given up following the news. I get most of my information from the following sources:
- The Today Programme on Radio 4
- The New Quiz on BBC Radio 4
- Private Eye
Here’s a recent tweet of mine to show I don’t hold The Today Programme in high esteem all the time:
Here’s a link to a recent rant about BBC News Reporting. I find that I get the general idea of what is going on in this country by listening to and reading satire. While listening to the radio I used to think that people were being a bit harsh in their picking on Ed Milliband’s voice, but that was until I heard him. Thank goodness for satire. Putting the stories in their place.
I am sure this isn’t the last of my rants and moans about news reporting. There’s plenty more to come in future communications. Happy weekend.
Whoops!
I hit some cones after cutting a blind corner too much. This was then end result!
Losing Mass
I want to try and have more communications on here with an overview of my take on the evidence out there for common practices. I’ve only really done one of these before and it is a look at the evidence for osteopathy. Our greatest achievement as human beings is to be able to test ideas and then form better ideas based on the evidence. It’s quite simple really, but, at the same time it’s denied by most of us. Just look at religion, it’s a pervasive and destructive view of the world backed up by an entire lack of evidence and it has such a hold on humans, we just want to believe the easy stuff and ignore the realities of what we know.
You would think that the subject of dieting be straight forward. It’s a very basic law of physics [thermodynamics]. For a subject to use energy the energy must be there in the first place. The human body synthesises food to make energy. If there is excess energy the human body stores this as fat. It really is that simple. To make the body use fat you have to reduce your energy intake and force the body to use its stores of energy. Essentially:
Make energy out greater than energy in.
This should be the end of the communication. But there are some pervasive ideas I wish to contend. To maintain a mass loss you have to change your overall behaviour.
It’s My Genes
Yes, it is your genes and it is “programed” into you. That’s why it’s so hard to do. It’s not an excuse. No, you do not have a “hormone” problem. You have an eating problem. It is IMPOSSIBLE to get fat by eating fewer calories than you need to maintain your body. The thinner you are the less food you require to maintain your body. The fatter you are the more food you need to maintain your body. It’s not a lot though. Look up your Basel Metabolic rate, mine is below. It’s surprising how little energy we need to stay alive.
Diets DO NOT work
Temporarily restricting the foods you eat with the desire to lose mass will always result in later mass gain. You might see a mass loss and you might be really happy about it. However, ultimately you need to change your behaviours permanently. You have to develop your habits to find food that suits you and fits into a calorie controlled diet. You have to be HAPPY with what you eat and how much you exercise. This is REALLY hard to do. This is why Weightwatchers doesn’t work. You lose the mass and feel the peer pressure but ultimately you end up putting the mass back on because you haven’t changed your behaviours overall.
A lot of diets, where you count points or use replacement foods, are just calorie control mechanisms. You are too lazy to understand how to add up calories and so you rely on a crappy points system and buy into foods branded with your particular regime. You might wander the supermarket with a booklet giving you permission to buy certain foods or not. This is not a good way to live. You must change your habits entirely.
Food and kcalories
Ever wondered why in some diets you are allowed unlimited amounts of some vegetables? It’s because they contain so few calories compared to other foods that you can’t eat enough to survive or if you could you’d hate it. Here’s an idea of calorie content:
- Water – 0
- Pre-cut slice of bread – 100
- Apple – 80
- Chocolate bar 200-400
- Café Latte – 120 or more
- Can coke – 140
- Glass (small) red wine – 120
- Bottle beer – 150
- Shot spirit – 50
- Cookie from supermarket – 300
- Donut – 250
- Crisps (30g) – 180
- Carrots (100g) – 40
- Chicken breast – 200
- Richmond Thick Sausage (grilled) – 130
- Rice (100g) – 120
- Pasta (100g uncooked) – 370
- Potato (100g) – 80
- Granola / muesli (100g) – 500
- Cornflakes (100g) – 380
- Special K – (100g) – 375
- 12″ thin pepperoni pizza (supermarket frozen) – 900
- Dominos lg reg crust pepperoni passion pizza – 3200
The surprises for me when I started looking into this were:
Pasta and all wheat products are really efficient in terms of food mass to calories. Other wheat products are all bad, essentially anything cooked with flour: cakes, biscuits all types of bread are all heavy with energy, flat breads are the worst, a large pitta could be about 300kcal. They are the baddies. If you want to lose mass really restrict these items. Cook with alternatives. Potato is a good this to use but you have to make sure you cook it sensibly. Roast potatoes are lovely because of their texture and because they are soaked in fat.
Beer and wine are pretty bad. They don’t have to label bottles with calorie information so it’s hard to tell. I tend to drink a spirit and diet coke. Fortunately for me I’m not that fussed about beer.
Café Latte is a surprising one here. Coffee shops tend to use semi-skimmed milk but that’s still quite calorific. Ask for a skinny-latte or better still just have an Americano with semi-skimmed milk. A teaspoon of sugar is about 30kcal. Use sweeteners to help control the overall calories. It’s very surprising how quickly you reach 2000kcal a day just with a normal routine.
Breakfast
Breakfast cereals contain CEREAL and so are high in energy content. Muesli and granola are the worst [peddled as healthy by the advertising industry] because they have loads of wheat and other cereals. Have you ever measured a “serving” of 30g of cereal. It’s depressing. The industry might think it’s a serving and call it such but it’s not what most people would call a breakfast. The little multipack boxes are 25g.
The most amusing thing about breakfasts (apart from all the sugar and chocolate that are added to encourage kids to eat a healthy cereal based breakfast) is that Special K has (effectively) the same energy content as normal cornflakes. This STILL makes me chuckle whenever I see adverts for it!
FAT
Low fat. High fat. People seemed programed to think that if they eat fat they will get fat and the way to lose mass is to cut out fat. Yes, this will help as fat in foods is energy-efficient. However, food manufacturers replace the fat with SUGAR! Start looking at the energy content of all foods as you buy them, you might be surprised. Choose foods you enjoy but have lower energy content. It really is:
Energy in, energy out.
Exercise
It hurts and requires effort. Losing mass is really hard. If you watch something like “Biggest Loser” on TV you see people losing mass really fast. Why? because they eat sensible amounts and work out like crazy in the gym. More importantly they learn to enjoy the new control they have over their lives. They like the power they feel. I hope they are able to maintain this loss once they have left the ranch. It’s very hard to keep these changes going and all too easy to think that one biscuit doesn’t matter.
Thin People
Do you know someone who
can eat what they want and not put on mass
I do. Thing is, it’s bullshit. Skinny people tend to eat less or exercise more. It’s that simple.
SuperFoods
Do not exist, it’s bullshit. Just eat a sensible varied diet.
Diet Pills
Bullshit. They may help a little bit but you’d do better to spend your money on vegetables and fruit. We love a quick fix and they DON’T exist.
The Summary
Change your entire behaviour and develop a new approach to life or forever life with a poor relationship to food.
More information is available everywhere on the planet. Read around the subject but don’t buy into schemes or special diets. This article on Science Based Medicine is a good start. Do not trust health GURUS, do not read diet books. It really is quite simple really:
energy in, energy out
The Gaia View
Being overweight is morally reprehensible given that we (as a species) don’t feed all our own kind. It’s a disgrace that I can enter six massive shops within five miles of my house and pretty much buy anything I want to eat while there are 870 MILLION under-nourished people living in this world. This does not count those for whom finding food is their primary concern.
Mass
Once again I have used the term MASS in this communication. It’s because I understand physics.
Evidence
Early on in this communication I used the phrase “my take on the evidence”. I realise after writing this that the phrase is rubbish. The evidence shows what the evidence shows. This is more my generalisation of the evidence for you, my readers. There may be some discussion in “science” about some issues and that generally occurs where the evidence seems conflicting. I am not talking about the “debate” about global climate change or evolution as these are pretty much as settled as they can be. There is no debate. Just the imaginings of the deluded few who see these things as attacks on their beliefs. Which is what they are. Your beliefs do not follow the evidence, hence the term belief and so you have to change your beliefs, which is really hard. It is much easier to deny the evidence that to change your beliefs. Anyway, this communication has been my interpretation of the evidence for you.
Spring
Just a picture I took in the HM Garden.
The Mass I Lost
The quick way but maybe not the easiest way I could lose mass would be to change the cross component of the Higgs Field, a by-product of which would be adjusting the mass of the Higgs Boson. I failed in my quest to do this, the scientists at Cern weren’t happy with my suggestions.
Towards the end of 2011 I wanted to lose mass. I had been large (95Kg) for a while and it was time to get fitter and aim for a healthy mass. I had heartburn a lot and snored a lot with some sleep apnea rolled in for fun. My details from Wolfram|Alpha.
By simply calorie watching and keeping to a maximum of 1800kCal a day I lost weight. Probably at about half a kilogram a week. The sums are quite simple! A kilogram of body fat contains around 7000kCal. So, if you reduce your calorie intake by 500kCal a day, you will lose around 3500kCal a week of body fat. If you don’t believe my fat energy content then just look up the calorific content of butter or margarine. They are both pretty similar to body fat.
Within 3 or 4 months I had reached a natural limit of mass loss by diet alone and so decided to up the game with some serious exercise. I started small. Running and jogging a mile. Eventually I built this up to 4 or 5 mile runs over about a period of six months. I lost the rest of the mass and settled at about 80Kg. I tried to do about three runs a week at roughly 500kCal each. That means about 3 miles per run. You could walk this distance and achieve roughly the same effect, it just takes longer to complete the 3 miles.
My heartburn has vanished. I no longer snore. I don’t have sleep apnea anymore. I have a resting heart rate of around 50 bpm and I can run for 10k without feeling dead. As long as I run I get to enjoy some bad foods now and then. I feel pretty great.
There are days I hate this. There are days I really don’t want to run or I find it particularly unenjoyable. You have to get over these. It’s so easy to slip back into old habits.
I know the BMI isn’t perfect as a measurement but it’s a good guide to use.
Logging My Life
I’ve had a request [!] to cover some subject matter on this website! What a wonderful thing to happen. I’m quite excited to use this opportunity to pass on information that might influence others. Mind you, I guess the point of some of my communications is to persuade readers to think and to challenge their current thought patterns.
Since December 2011 I have been recording everything I eat. I did this originally to help me lose mass. I do it now to maintain my mass. I think I have a curious relationship with food, although it’s probably not much different to anyone else’s. Over the last twenty five years or so my mass has varied from around 80Kg to 95Kg. Long gone are the active days of my teenage years where I didn’t have to think about these things. I can still remember going gliding with the Air Cadets at RAF Wethersfield and being asked my mass in pounds, it was 140lbs. I don’t think I could physically get that low any more.
During the first half of 2012 I actively tried to lose mass. The process of this will be covered in another communication. To help this process of losing body mass I logged my food using an iPhone app. This is good for a few reasons. Firstly, you get to learn and understand the calorific values of the foods you eat. Secondly, you realise that it’s extremely easy to over eat. Lastly, you start to see the body as an incredibly efficient food-to-energy machine. It shouldn’t really be a surprise but the amount of food needed to sustain the body is not really that much in comparison to the amount we expect to eat. There is a big social problem in that large portions are acceptable and that people can’t add up. When you learn that walking or running 1600 metres will burn around 160 calories [just under two slices of plain bread] you realise that it’s a lot of effort to lose half a kilo of fat!
I use MyFitnessPal to record my food intake and, early on during my mass loss programme, I used this to record my activity and exercise too.
Food can be scanned and the nutritional details are entered automatically. It’s a very handy way to keep track of what you eat. Sometimes you have to guess, especially if you eat out, but over time you get a good idea of how much energy is in the food. I will be a bit more specific in another communication.
To track my exercise I use an app called MapMyRun. It tracks the route that I run and then also converts the information it receives to calculate my energy burn. This app can be used for cycling, walking or logging any activity.
I have spent quite a while looking up energy burn and calibrating the data I get from the app. I have looked at academic papers about energy use and also looked at information from Australian sports institutes. In very basic terms, if you walk or run 10m you use 1 kCal. I think the apps I use are accurate to a sensible level of accuracy. If there are errors it could be within a 200kCal range and it wouldn’t really affect the outcome. Just by being more aware of energy intake and output you learn to self regulate a bit.
I like the apps I used to log my life as they synchronise with my Up software. This means that all the information I enter cross-pollinates and everything adds up nicely! It saves having to enter lots of data into different apps.
Yes, I do know that I used the term MASS throughout this communication and I am aware that I was actually referring to what most people would call WEIGHT. The problem is that I’ve not been measuring my weight for a few years, if I had the units would be in Newtons. If I use the units of KG then I must be measuring MASS. If you don’t like the use of this term then I suggest you don’t read any more of these communications.
We Are Pathetic
The picture below is a screen clip from the BBC website this morning. Now, I should point out that I don’t like the reporting regime of news in this country and, unfortunately for me, I would consider the BBC the best of a bad bunch. The news, it seems from what I see and read, should be entertainment and not the representation of facts.
Corporations that peddle the news are convinced that “the public” can’t cope with being informed about the facts in a sensible way. They create stories with human interest and neglect to INFORM the public so that we make up our own minds. The media seem to have a need for balance [even when it’s demonstrably false] and they seem unwilling to question to get to the facts. It is time for a news organisation to give the public the chance to have serious news reporting.
- Let’s question politicians and make them answer what we want to know.
- Let’s require TWO separate sources for confirmation of a story.
- Let’s focus on what the public should know to make informed decision.
- If there’s nothing new, then say so.
The BBC needs to grow up. This headline seems to be saying “our boy didn’t get selected for a prize and we think he should”. In reality, this screams at me: “We Are Pathetic”.
This headline or story should read:
These radio presenters have been short-listed for their shows. Congratulations. Unfortunately our best presenter wasn’t selected but we wish everyone the best of luck in the awards.
There, that wasn’t hard was it?
Rant over for a while. I will try and construct a more effective argument towards what I think the news should be and how I think the public need to grow up.
Up – One Year
I have been a member of the Up community for a year. I first found out about the Up band on the flight to Washington DC and then bought one in the Apple Store in Georgetown.
The Up band measures and stores information about my movement. That is pretty much it. What this allows me to do is track my steps each day and also my sleep patterns. The Up app on my iPhone also connects to my food intake app and the app I use to track my runs and other forms of exercise.
In the year that I have owned an Up band I have had a number of replacements. I think I have had to get three replacements. I’m not sure if there is a build issue but something seems to go wrong. While I still have a band that is in the guarantee period I will continue to use an Up band. Eventually, the company will stop replacing them for me and I’ll probably jump ship to another fitness tracker.
Over the last year and for the periods that data is available [there’s about two months for which I do not have any data as I had no band] I have:
- Eaten an average of 2492 kCal per day
- Burnt an average of 2502 kCal per day
- Made an average of 9064 steps per day
- Walked an average of 7803 metres per day
- Average sleep per night is 7.04 hours
I have just noticed that n=308, so two months without the band is about right.
My Up band, large, onyx.
British Summer Time
I don’t like change. I particularly don’t like changing the clocks. Some of my distaste for this biannual event is that it means I have to walk around my house adjusting various time displays and I also have to find the instructions for the cooker because I can never remember how to change the time on it. Why does my cooker need a clock? I also don’t like the day being asymmetric for around six months of the year. Finally, more daylight in the evening means more glare on my television [I need to buy some curtains but haven’t for ten years and so the likelihood of me getting around to it is quite low].
For around six months of the year we change the clocks so that we are in British Summer Time, what our American cousins would call Daylight Saving. I find this bizarre. I like how our clocks are aligned during the winter. When it is midday the sun is at its highest point in the sky and also due south. This makes an amazing amount of sense. I am aware that local midday is different across the UK and it depends how far east or west you are from the meridian but as a general measure it works well.
What I don’t like is the notion of midday during British Summer Time. The sun is not at its highest in the sky and won’t be for about an hour (depending on where you are). There is apparently an economic argument for having more daylight time later in the evening but I have yet to be convinced that it makes any difference. The “farmers need the light” argument is quite pathetic. Farmers would just get up earlier. I am not aware of any good reason to perform this ritual mess up of my routines.
Let me explain a couple of things.
The definition of noon is, first and formost, MIDDAY.
The definition of midday is the MIDDLE of the day. If our clocks say 12pm [12:00] then this should be the middle part of the day. If the sun is yet to rise to its highest point and we have more daylight hours after 12:00 than we had before the 12:00 BST is NOT midday. AM and PM both contain M which stands for meridian.
So, meridian refers to midday which refers to the middle of the day which, to me, is quite clearly the middle of the day when the sun is at its highest.
I could almost accept us changing to be in line with other European countries as we trade and work closely with them but unfortunately they are also wrong. France is either GMT+1 or GMT+2 and given that Paris lies on the meridian they clearly have no idea about how time works.
By the way, the National Physical Laboratory recommends the use of the 24 hour clock. I think I tend to use the 24 hour clock on this site more than I do am and pm. Apparently there is no convention to indicate whether midday is am or pm. I had thought that this was solved and that midday is pm but amazingly not.
If the NPL are telling us something we should listen.
I am quite aware that my bad feeling towards BST is mostly to do with my interpretation of the definitions and that other people might decide to define midday as the point when our clocks are halfway through the day rather than use the sun to define the halves of the day.
Just so you are aware the international time standard is UTC.
Although UTC is synonymous with GMT and for all intents and purposes the same it is no longer a recognised standard. UTC is maintained by the scientific community and GMT is not. I used UTC as the time indicator on my tattoos.
Five Finger Death Punch
I snuck into London last night to see Five Finger Death Punch at The Forum in Kentish Town. Curiously Kentish Town didn’t look as Kent-like as the name implies. Here’s a power station viewed from the fast train from Ebbsfleet to St Pancras [who was a Roman convert to Christianity and beheaded for his belief].
I had a pleasant walk from the London terminus to The Forum, about 40 minutes, and waited in The Assembly Rooms for Smith. Once he had arrived we chatted and ate. The queues to enter the auditorium were large, but gave us time to digest the contents of the flyers we were handed before discarding them in the traditional manner.
The first band on were called Pop Evil. They played ROCK. It was ok. Not to my current tastes but they were a good warm up band.
Then, on came Upon A Burning Body. A band from Texas. They played pretty good music although I couldn’t understand most of what the singer sang. This didn’t worry me, I don’t really do lyrics. Although I wouldn’t go out of my way to see this band again they were pretty good over all. I liked the suits they wore.
During their set all the lights stopped working and they carried on while lit from torches held by security and the guys in the “desk-in-the-middle”. The pit opened up in front of me and it was quite funny to see this close. Young men running in circles and generally pushing into each other. The atmosphere was one of comradeship as when someone fell down after being hit, they would be helped up by everybody. I saw a couple of rugby tackles and at some point it turned into a competition to see who would be the last man standing. Then, it went wrong. A short tubby man decided he was going to hit with his hands. He threw a punch and got warned to stop by most in and around the circle. He had gone too far. You don’t intentionally hit people in this small world of machismo. Then he threw another punch, caught a chap on the chin and stood gloating. About five guys rushed at him, pushing him to the floor and then two of them dragged the guy to the side and security. I didn’t see him again. As much as most people would look in horror at “the pit” it’s actually a safe place where, if you accept the rules, you will be looked after and everyone has the same needs.
Five Finger Death Punch burst onto the stage playing “Under and Over It”. There was energy and excitement. They played well and have a good stage presence. I was really impressed at Download last year and so was looking forward to this. They played songs. I don’t know the names of the songs. I just recognise them. I’m pretty sure my head is full up and can’t learn new song names. Also, the way I listen to music has changed. I no longer sit in my bedroom staring and the record sleeve, I play music while running, driving or working.
It was a solid gig. They played well. They played 3 ballads too many. I hate ballads. The atmosphere gets lost and the energy of the room fades during ballads. Also, as a rock child of the eighties, ballads were how bands promoted themselves. They had their place but are not necessary anymore.
The set finished at 22:30. This made the FFDP stage time about seventy minutes which was rather short. I was hoping to hear four more hard and heavy songs when the houselights went up. I was left feeling a little disappointed. They didn’t quite “bring the house down” in my opinion. A big problem for me was the singing of the chorus to Champagne Supernova by Oasis. I never liked Oasis. I think they wrote poor songs, sang badly and were hyped in a battle with a group of real intelligent people who could write songs. Don’t be a metal band and then play some Oasis. They were shit. It’s shit and it makes you shit.
White Hart
The White Hart in Godstone is a place where I meet with a close friend, named Penguin, to put the world to rights, to try and figure out answers to the questions and to have old fashioned conversations without using the internet to find out the real answers.
We normally meet on an evening and arrive around 19:30 and are the last people to leave, barring the few employees still around. Our usual waitress is Caroline. On the times when I have been there at different times somehow Caroline is working! I went on a Sunday with Smith and family and Caroline was working there and today, Caroline was on shift and looked after us for the duration of her time working, she left before us!
Our conversations are rather Sorkin-like. Or, at least that’s what we like to think. We jump from topic to topic and sometimes never resolve the original problem or question. I had intended to write up a summary of our conversation but after meeting and chatting it was quite clear I would not be able to do this. Our topics changed so frequently and jumped back and forth that to produce an accurate representation would require recording the conversation and then categorising it while listening to about six hours of audio. I couldn’t write stuff as we were talking, it took my concentration away from the listening.
Here’s what I managed to grab from the first 10-15 minutes:
- XKCD and XKCD prints
- Waitress and whether we should eat outside
- The hierarchy of conversations
- Gran Turismo 6 and my note pad
- Fingernail and the rock evening
- Punctuation marks
- Cameras
- 80s pop music and memory theories concentrating on facial recognition.
This does not include any matters that were discussed that shouldn’t appear in this particular format! To keep recording conversations for about 5 hours would be detrimental to the conversation. Maybe next time we should hire a stenographer?
These are the presents I received and I’m very happy with them too. In my opinion you can’t go wrong with Lego and a book explaining how to watch NFL is a good move.
We do allow ourselves a chance to correct or inform post-meeting. If one of us finds out something important or a correction then we SMS each other. I got a link to this graphing website after discussing The Newsroom and The West Wing [both Sorkin]. I also got some news about a couple of New Orleans Saints players who might be traded.
My time spent in Godstone is incredibly precious to me. It’s a chance to really nerd-out and discuss any issue without fear of what might be thought of me. I am very grateful for this.
Lego 18 Model 75032
Many thanks to Penguin for this rather excellent Lego present that now gets placed in my cupboard of my things along with my Landspeeder [which was also a gift from Penguin] and DeLorean.
This model was constructed in the pleasant surrounds of the Beefeater in Godstone. It was a sunny day.
Rain, Sunset and Fields
A Kent sunset:
A panorama. To be honest it looked much better than this!
Lego 17 Model 76006
This is a Lego Marvel Super Heroes model that #1 son got recently.
The Longest Day
This isn’t the longest day in terms of the hours of sunlight during a rotation of the Earth. However, this is being written reasonably close to the vernal equinox. Nor is the about the film The Longest Day. This probably isn’t really about my longest day, which was, in recent times, my first day in Rome last year.
This communication regards my involvement in Sports Relief Charity Day at MGS.
I set the alarms for 04:00 as I had promised to do some rowing on the ergs at 05:00. The MGS 24 Hour Row started at 10:55 on Thursday 20th March and was so scheduled to finish at 10:55 on Friday 21st March. When the sign up sheets had been up for a while there was a big area of dead time in the early morning so I said I would come in and help.
So I woke at 03:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. My neighbour was coughing lots and I could hear that. At 03:45 I got up and made a coffee. I got ready and then left for work. When I arrived at the Big Hall there were rowers asleep on collections of chairs. There was a space for rowing already free and so a bit before my allotted time I sat down to row until 05:40. At the end of my time I had rowed 11074m in 50 minutes. Not bad!
I hung around and did some marking and preparation and then once the Home Tech room was open I went and cooked a good old fashioned fry up for me and DM. We ate at around 07:40 and everything was washed up and tidy by 08:00.
Time to do some work. I went to register my form group. Then I had another 40 minute stint to complete as I had volunteered to do 09:00 to 09:40 as I had a free lesson. There was more of a crowd now and I concentrated more on my split time and aimed to keep that at around 2:10 /500m and my average split at that too. Nearing the end of this session I decided to row further than earlier this morning and so I managed 11120m in about 48 minutes. I was happy but very tired. I had to wash up and head to teach some mechanics.
I listened to my own music during my rowing excursions. The first time I listened to Combichrist’s “What the F^^K is Wrong With You People – Darkside” and the second time I listened to Combichrist’s “What the F^^K is Wrong With You People”. Very good music for working out.
This is the time lapse video for the event. You can see me do my first stint on Erg 2 [from the right] at 1:48. You might then see me in a bright blue top do some marking at about 1:56. My breakfast appears at 2:06, bright blue top on the right hand side. Then my second rowing stint is at 2:12, I am on Erg 1 [RHS] wearing a black top.
During break time I headed back to the Big Hall to see the end of the row-a-thon. There were four rowers active at the end and the atmosphere was really nice. Once the allotted time was up the total distance covered was just over 900km, which gets us from Maidstone to about halfway through Scotland to John O’ Groats. It was a splendid effort and a brilliant piece of community building work. Well done to all.
I had another two lessons before entering the MGS mile at lunchtime. I had booked an ICT suite for these lessons so that the pupils could do some independent learning, focussing on their weaknesses. It didn’t take long for the lunch hour to arrive and during those couple of hours my back was starting to feel rather dodgy.
Just under seven minutes was my time for the MGS mile according to my Up band. I’m not convinced I did it that quick because I didn’t feel as tired as I do when I try and do a fast mile on my usual runs. I will still claim a sub-seven-minute mile though. I know I could make that time. The lunch hour had been extended to a full hour and the mathematics department took full advantage of this to have a good meeting to discuss department business. As soon as I had completed my mile I jogged to the mathematics office to make sure I didn’t miss anything important during the meeting. It was a good gathering.
For my final lesson of the day I had a statistics class. They worked well on the past examination paper I set. Then, for me, it was off home to collect my children and clean up ready for the evening performances.
I am part of the MGS staff band and we are called Disaster Area [with apologies to Douglas Adams]. The evening of this day was dominated by the Rock Band evening at MGS where student bands play in front of parents and other pupils. As the staff band we get to go first and warm up the crowd. This time around we played “The Ace Of Spades” and “Highway To Hell”. I understand there are videos available on Facebook but as you should be aware I don’t do Facebook. About halfway through Highway I started to relax and really enjoyed the experience, especially as I sand some backing vocals in the song.
I came on about 20 minutes later to play bass guitar for a pupil band playing “The Trooper” by Iron Maiden. When I get footage of this I will link it from here. Playing this song was great fun and I hope I get the chance to play it again.
Finally my school day was over. I got home about 20:30 after bailing out on the rock evening. I should have stayed for longer with DM as he had been in school a since 05:00 but I wanted to try and get some sleep before my sons woke at 05:00 Saturday morning. This felt like the longest day. I’m sure it won’t be the last. I’ll keep you informed of more throughout the coming years.
Me, playing with Disaster Area at MGS:
House Fairy
I stayed at a friend’s house last night. He’s a good friend so I shan’t name him. If you know me well, you’ll know who I’m talking about.
I get to sleep on the divan in the office. I don’t have a problem with that per se. My problem is with the state of wiring in his office. This picture shows the state of wires and plugs in one corner under the desk!
This particular set up is somewhat distressing. Not really because of the fire risk but more because it needs a good tidy up. The total current drain is quite small and so the fire risk is pretty minimal. But, look at the state of it! Quite distressing!
I might start a service called “House Fairies”. Give me your address and at sometime while you are out I’ll come and magically wire up your appliances nice and neatly with proper colours and clips, making it look lovely and you’ll know where things are. Another part of this service would be to adjust any light switches which work the wrong way around. The house where this photo was taken also has light switch where you have to press the top bit to turn the light on. This is wrong. I can adjust that.
The light switch when the light is off (flash photo):
The light switch when the light is on:
I should have a website where you sign up and list the “House Fairy” jobs you want done. I will then come around at some random time and, Hey Presto! You’ll come home one day and everything in your house will work properly!
Racing Approach
I probably do it all wrong. I’ve no idea what other people do. It’s not what should be done in real life.
I recently started a line of communications looking at my progress through GT6. There’s a definite pattern to my play. I have made the following conclusions:
- Try to get a steady lap time recorded to ensure I have an idea of:
- Control under braking
- Control under power
- How much under/oversteer
- Corner speed
- Gearing
- Try to increase speed at the first few corners, normally coming off a lot.
- Try to increase start speed.
- Try to maximise corner speed on all corners, normally with one or two bogie corners.
- Crash a lot.
This approach isn’t what should happen in the real world. No-one could afford to pay me to drive and crash as much as I do. If I was driving in real life I would need to have an innate understanding of where the limit of traction and how to improve speed around a track. I would also, I hope, have better reactions to control the car. To get such a deep understanding I would need to have been driving and undertaking purposeful practice for a long time. It’s no surprise that the world’s best racers in any of the top formats started racing and driving when they were young and so effectively know no different.
To learn to race a car as fast as possible would require a certain number of crashes and offs, but not as many as afforded me in the console game. There’s no danger to life in the game, I just press restart.
There are some of you who might be thinking that I need to change my approach and that you want to tell me I don’t do it the right way. To you I say, “maybe” and “I know”. It’s something to work on in the future.
GT6 Birthday Present
If you sign into GT6 on or after your birthday you get a present. The car you receive is from the year you were born. I will remain grateful for the present but surely there were other cars released in 1972!
