Health And Fitness

I just thought I would catch up on my ongoing attempt to get fit and healthy. A few weeks ago I started taking my bike in to work — cycling from home to the train station, train station to office and back again in the evening. That’s about five miles a day. Last week, I started cycling all the way home in the evening. That puts my mileage up to ten miles a day; fifty miles per week! That was hard work but by the end of the week I’d got my time down from 45 minutes to 36. It also saves me lots of money!
The no smoking has been going fine. This is now my seventh week without a smoke. I really only have one ‘problem’ time — 11am in the office. It still get a strong craving of some description at that time. It’s not really that I want a cigarette, it’s more that I know I would be having one at that time if I hadn’t stopped. I don’t know why that time is so strong, and it is only when I am in the office too. Weekends are fine. The rest of the time I just have to consciously keep myself occupied. Mostly that seems to involve drinking coffee or eating. Otherwise I have to be reading, or on the computer, or something. If my hands are idle I get a little ‘twitchy’! Sometimes really twitchy.
So, with no alcohol, no cigarettes, cycling 50 miles a week, and watching what I eat, I should soon be feeling really fit and healthy.
Bizarrely, I’ve been off work ill today!

WordPress 0.71 Released

Woot! Version 0.71 of WordPress is out!. There are loads of new features:
300% speedup (honest!), post status (publish, draft, and private), comments status, combined trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments, security fixes, opml import (including from blogrolling), ezsql database functions, cleaner, smoother administration, clean upgrades, links weblogs.com checking improved, and bug fixes galore.
So what are you waiting for? Go get it!
Official announcement (with more details) here.

Geekiness Abounds

Christine over at bigpinkcookie.com has blogged about Mike and Matt IM-chatting over WiFi at a coffee shop in downtown Houston. In fact, as she discovered, they were chatting with me. Cool!

“I just had to snap this photo of Matt and Mike with my phone before we got down to business. I think they are actually IM’ing with each other, right here at the table. Ok, it’s an IM chat with a third WordPress developer who is in England.”

Lucky Man, Artemis Fowl, Riotous Robots, and Troublesome Words

Yep, it’s books catchup time again. Since I last mentioned books, I finished the Michael J. Fox autobiography: Lucky Man which I really enjoyed. It was quite moving in parts, but without being too sentimental. Recommended. Since then I have read a couple of Jamie‘s books: Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer; Very, very, good. Great characters. Some really nice touches of humour. Recommended. I can’t wait to read the next one in the series; and Riotous Robots by Mike Goldsmith (edited by Clive Goddard) part of “The Knowledge” series. This was pretty good, informative without being too technical. Quite well balanced too, no bias at all. A good book.
Finally, I’m now reading Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson which is remarkably good for what is essentially a short dictionary.

Unplanned Work Again

I’ve spent the last two days doing unscheduled work. Again! It’s a good job they decided to take me (mostly) off the critical path on the current project. I’ve had a nasty bug to track down and fix. I issued the release this morning. Then another problem came to light, I spent the rest of this afternoon looking in to that. I’m leaning toward a data issue now, but it’s taken all afternoon to get there 🙁