Diary 2008-01-13

Posted on January 13, 2008

Lots of stuff…

  • Got me an iPod shuffle for running and I must say the absolute absence of weight and the ridiculous small size of it make it really, really good for the job. I was getting a bit tired of lugging the big iPod photo around and this is a much better way of bringing my music with me while exercising. The fact that I got it for a discount (due to the fact that the colour I chose is being discontinued) was no great shame either;

  • Running with the appropriate gear makes all the diference. I combined the new iPod shuffle with a new high-tech, body-moulded shirt and wind breaker and I did feel a huge difference;

  • The perfect album for running is (at the moment) Live after Death (yes, by Iron Maiden. Yes, from the stone age. Yes, I’m that old!) :-)

  • The swiss exercise ball my brother got me for christmas a year ago is really useful for the ski-specific exercises. I never did like the gym and ended up only emptying my wallet whenever I was “going” to one, but running outside and exercising at home is turning out to be much more effective (and fun) than I ever could have guessed;

  • The golfing I did over the Christmas/New year break in Algarve got me hooked. Yet another expensive sport that tickles my fancy (I also find myself missing going out sailing a lot more than I thought I would). Oh deary, deary me…

  • The Argentine Tango is really fun to dance (and, in a way quite different from all the other styles I learned during my ballroom dancing days). I went to an open class and stayed a bit for the Milonga that followed and thoroughly enjoyed learning the few steps that I did. They played much electronic tango, as well the the traditional one and since I was already a fan of that music genre it added to the overall fun. Having a partner that knows her way around the dance floor and is willing to forgive the stupid beginner mistakes is also a huge help, of course;

  • So now that NetNewsWire is free (I’ve been a paying customer for years) all I’m missing is a Linux desktop-app to read my feeds off NewsGator. I use the web interface (which got a much needed functionality revamp just last week), but I really would like a desktop client for that platform;

  • Another thing I’m trying to get on a remote (and possibly web-based) solution (OK, two things) are my contacts and my calendar. I would love to use my mac server at home as the base for that information and then synch it with Google Calendar for my domain, but the fact of the matter is that for all the hype, whenever I tested the Spanning Sync solution it just didn’t work. Last time it kept generating duplicates of all my appointments, all with an hour of diference of the original, so after N synchs I had N copies of each, all of them one hour appart. Also, it never really managed to deal with my timezone and the daylight savings time shift. A shame really, I’d really love to use it, since then synching my home calendar, my mobile phone and my on-line calendars would be a cinch. I even tried a service to synch my mobile phone directly to my Google-based calendars, but that failed miserably too. Synch is really, really hard…

Like I said, lots and lots of stuff, and no links because I’m feeling lazy and I want to go torture the neighbors practise my sax. :-)