Jibbering Musings

I signed up for this marathon in the winter after having unfinished business with the last one having failed to get the 3:30 target. It’s pretty flat, very fast, lots of competitors and well supported. Unfortunately my training’s been very poor, I was sick in December, and simply haven’t been motivated enough to do any long runs since, cycling has been more fun. My longest run pre-marathon was around 10miles. So not great preparation.

Annoyingly the organisers had me as a “recreational” runner, which means unlike the club runners (the majority) or the Elites, I wasn’t chip timed. So I needed to get myself near the front of the pens, and with some dodging and weaving past the crowds of club runners, I managed to end up crossing the start line only 12 seconds after the gun went.

Despite the manouvering, I was still passing a lot of very slow people strung across the road. I normally start too fast anyway, but with the added bonus of lots of people to pass and gaps to find, I started very fast. Up and across the Erasmus Bridge, 2km came by in 7:56, but I was still feeling pretty good running along with everyone and decided to keep at the pace, even if it turned out I couldn’t hold it.

The 5km mark was after a complete 180 turnaround coming back on the same road you were running down, so at 4.75km I could see the marker and looked at my garmin and then it hit me, I was going to get a sub 20minute 5km. But my 5km PB was 20:35, what was I doing going so fast? Sure enough the 5km marker was crossed with 19:38 on the clock, almost a minute off the 5km PB, but I still had the entire rest of the race to go, could I keep the pace up?

I couldn’t, the sun had come out more, and I was really beginning to overheat, I’d dressed for 9C and clouds, and it was about 15C and sunny. I pressed on, two more kilometers went by in 4:09 and 4:06. Then we had another bridge to go over, it wasn’t steep, hardly even a hill. Howevre my hip flexors which were hurting from about 30km in the last marathon began to scream at me today after only 7km, and I only managed the next two km in 4:11 and 4:10. I was definately slowing down a lot by now, but seeing the 9km marker and looking at the Garmin saying 35:55. I decided to press on and really work for the rest of the race, the time was still pretty good.

There were very few people around me, but I guy in blue came past and I tried to keep with him, and then just after a kink in the road, I saw the glorious site of the word FINISH over a gantry, and a clock counting down next do it. I sure was glad I’d swapped to the 10km race from the marathon the day before when collecting the numbers. With about 20m to go, the big clock rolled over the 40:00, and I crossed the line just beating the guy in blue to stop my Garmin at 39:51.

So a very pleasing outcome for the 10km - 93 seconds off of my PB. Marred by some disappointments - the leg pains that slowed me down and the lack of official result, that actually says I ran that time. They don’t even give me a gun time, which would’ve been 40:03, it’s as if I never ran the race.

I know I did, and I know it was a PB, I also know that 39minutes is probably doable on a good day on a similarly fast 10km with some actual training, so that should probably be my next goal

One of the problems of exercising more, is that you need to eat more, now that’s just a good thing when you’re at home after a hard work out as I can continue my lifetime love affair with the roast potato without worry. However you also need to eat food whilst exercising, and that’s harder. The foods you can eat whilst exercising need to be easy to carry, easy to eat and easy to digest. A great many products are sold to help you do this, from powders you mix with water and carry on your bike, to solid bars, and sweet like looking things only with even more calories. My favourite though is the energy gel, very concentrated, easy to eat.

Energy gels have a problem though, they cost about a pound a time, and I eat 4 an hour or there abouts. Inspired by the stories of Maryka of making her own sports food, I decided to follow suit. Maryka though likes to eat a paste that I’ve heard described as baby food. I’ve written up my first attempts at creating a home made Energy Gel, but I’ll probably continue to blog as I attempt more things.

I’ll probably try to recreate “Clif shot bloks” - small sweet like things with lots of calories, very easy to carry and eat. A gel that contains protein - Hammer say they don’t create these due to problems with shelf life amoung other things, which won’t be a problem for home made.

I’ve also got more interested in all things gel like after reading the excellent collection of hydrocolloid recipes in researching how to make gels.

Read more about making cheap home made energy gels .

Regular readers will know, I don’t blog much now, but I really should try and change that. Irregular readers, who read random odd pages from the depths of history or people with a very long memory who read my blog a long time ago, will remember I used to blog about running every now and then.

I was pretty pleased with myself with that last one, I ran 20:19 for 3 miles. Shortly after that I pretty much stopped running after a marathon I ran in February the following year (2003).

Eighteen months ago, I was “fat jim” as I was later dubbed, and not surprising I was single. I was over 100kg / 16 stone, but then it changed and I started losing weight, it had a lot to do with being happier. So that’s my first weight loss tip - get happier.

By January 2008, I was down to 87kg, and that’s when I started running again, firstly just as an excuse to get a date with a hot triathlete. After that though it was more to be able to be fit enough to keep up with a hot roadie.

I did okay, when I started back running at the running club in Feb 2008, my handicap time had shot up to 22:41. Of course I had the incentive to train now, simply to keep up. So now a year later I have it down to 18:36, and I only weigh 76kg. So here’s my second weight loss tip get a fit girlfriend.

Last week I was sent a voucher for Expansys, needing a USB hub for recharging Garmins and iPods and the like I thought it was a good opportunity to buy one. Easy, pick a D-Link 7 port powered hub, 20 quid, with the 10 quid off, a great deal, I had the voucher code and all is good. I then remember I want an micro SD card for the Garmin 705, so before checking out, I add one. Returning to the basket though, my voucher disappeared. I add it again, now I get a red error message saying “Voucher code not valid”.

Assuming that the software was really useless and marked the voucher code used as soon as it was added, rather then when the basket was paid for. Expansys support got a call. After explaining the problem they said the voucher code was lost, but no-one could do anything about it until the following monday. They didn’t explain why.

Today I called again - and this time Expansys support said the voucher code was fine, not lost, but because the basket had memory in it, it couldn’t be used. So even though the voucher conditions were met with the USB hub, simply having a micro-SD card in the same basket ruled the voucher no good.

Blessed with this insanity, I left it, Expansys obviously didn’t want my business. There were many problems with them, all focused on poor customer experience. The business decision that memory products aren’t valid for voucher offers is an understandable one - memory is a very competively priced and margins correspondingly low, and people can easily fill up on it. But the website development teams decision to implement that with a simple voucher is invalid rather than explaining that having a basket containing an SD card failed the conditions of the voucher. Or for real service accepting the voucher and applying it only to the parts where it was valid and 10 pounds off a 20 pound spend was fine without the memory.

After the web devs had failed though, the phone support guys started failing. The first guy had wrong information, but even thinking that, what he should have said - Why don’t you give me your order over the phone and I’ll put it through now. Once you’ve got a customer engaged enough to call you, reel them in! It was the week of new years though, so maybe this guy was a temp, and they can’t trust their temps with giving discounts.

However the regular guys were no better, again no offer to just do the order, just an explanation that memory wasn’t applicable and it was impossible to buy anything with the voucher if memory was included. Not even apologising for the poor site, and poor messaging, or offering to help, just stating the fact.

I’m sure Expansys internally talk a lot about customer focus, and putting the customer first, but what happens, as what happens in a lot of badly managed places, is that people start doing things to make their own work easier, rather than the customers life better.

Maintaining a user focus is hard, it’s easy to slack off and go well that will only happen to a few people, it doesn’t matter much if I don’t write the useful error message or skip over some edge cases. The reality is it matters a lot, because those edge cases are the ones that cause problems - they phone your support lines, they blog about the poor quality they moan. In the end you lose far more than just the single sale where it happened.

Of course, if you’re doing phone support or are a junior developer, then you’re going to need strong management to get over this. All too commonly though the management don’t care, because the middle manager sitting over the developer is looking for an easy time, and won’t argue for quality, and isn’t measured on how much the phone support team costs anyway.

User Experience has to be led from the very top, and it has to be one of the very most important things you do, if it’s not, you’re customers will disappear, in bad times like these, that’s enough to fail.

It’s new years - actually it’s a long time after, but that’s just my slowness at writing blogposts - and people are always reflecting on their lives, and wanting to reflect on yours too. I mentioned to a friend of mine that at the end of The Game there was the intro to another book by Neil Strauss The Rules of the Game. This book promised to help you “Get a date in thirty days”, my friend instantly went “what’s your address, I’ll buy it for you!”

So when your friends think that you need that much help, you have to take it seriously. I started thinking about some of the other comments my female friends had said “you’re slightly clammy”, “just dress in an updated way and get a modern hair cut and you’re good”, “you can do alright with girls with a bit of confidence, even you!”. Of course this last advice is what really matters, confidence is key.

So I figured with that much “encouragement” from my friends, maybe I should have a look at the book, with a borders 40 yards from the front door, I bought it, and started looking what I had to do to get a date. Unfortunately it really was even more depressing than the game. Day ones main mission was “operation small talk”, the idea being to make small talk to five people, people suggested were a homeless person or an old lady in the supermarket queue. Day two was do the same, but remember the eye colour to make sure you look people in the eye as you talk.

Day four has the radical idea that showering, shampooing, smelling nice, shaving or grooming your beard, wearing clean well fitting clothes can help you attract someone. Now I realise this is all important advice, but I’m wondering if the sort of people who need this advice really need to get a date more importantly than say some friends or a basic course in social interaction.

On reaching Day 7, you’re given a big, big reminder to not read on ahead, and how important it is to just read one day at a time. Now this is a bog standard psychological trick to get people to buy in and invest in doing it - maybe that’s a good thing if you’re the sort of guy who needs to be told not smelling of 2 week old stale sweat will help you get a date, but I’m just not trusting enough to do that, so I read on.

The build up is all to day 30, where you have to plan a dinner party to invite the “date” you manage to get to come to, in a “I’m having a few friends over for dinner, why don’t you come along too.” It doesn’t have to be at your place, you could just be at a restaurant with a group of friends. My problem with this again is at one point it’s pitched at people who don’t have friends to tell them that they smell, but at another point they have enough friends to get round and impress a date with how interesting and worthy of dating the guy is at a dinner party.

Now I enjoy cooking for people, can manage not to poison them, have a pretty okay flat to host a dinner party in, so it’d be a good end for me - but again this book is pitched at people who 30 days before couldn’t look someone in the eye when paying for stuff in the supermarket, let alone carry off hosting an eight person dinner party, cooking all the food, impressing the date, and if you follow the actual subtext of the book finally getting his end away.

Maybe if I’d've followed the book rather than just read it, I could’ve believed how such a drastic transformation could’ve happened, but at the minute, I just can’t buy it. I don’t doubt that following the exercises would’ve improved the chances of anyone doing it - as my friend said above most important thing is confidence, both to try and that you will succeed, following the exercises will probably help fake that confidence. I can’t really believe it will actually make any fundamental difference to a persons life - of course maybe faking it a few time will give a guy the confidence to not need to next time.

I think better advice for the guy I feel the book is targetted at could be had from Dan Savage who was actually targetting it at 15 year old boys, but I think that’s really who the book is talking to, guys who never made it past their awkward/repulsive phase.

“But don’t despair, TGTW. Your awkward/repulsive stage will pass. In the meantime here’s what you need to do: Worry less about getting your 15-year-old self laid and start thinking about getting your 18- or 20-year-old self laid. Join a gym and get yourself a body that girls will find irresistible; read so that you’ll have something to say to girls (the best way to make girls think you’re interesting is to actually be interesting); and get out of the house and do shit–political shit, sporty shit, arty shit–so that you’ll meet different kinds of girls in different kinds of settings and become comfortable talking with them.”

Substitute however old you are in the above, but if you’re really that inept that you need to be told to shower, work on a few year plan, and not a 30 day one.

So unfortunately my original plan of following the book, maybe even blogging about it as I went has gone out of the window, not simply because I got a date - I got one of those from a girl on the train on the way back from convincing a friend of mine to do the book aswell. The plan really got knocked on the head after a date I had led to something more - it wasn’t a dinner party date though - more of a run - although the next night…

The other day I took a flight to New York, due to the non-arrival of the fast bus, I didn’t have much time after the rush hour slow bus to the airpor. So I didn’t have time to do the important things, like shower, eat breakfast, buy books for the flight and check email. There wasn’t much choice in the easy quick grab book sections that I’d not already read - either people aren’t writing enough, or I’m flying too much and buying too many books, but I ended up picking up The Game by Neil Strauss.

Geeks seem very popular in the media at the minute, we have The Big Bang Theory, The IT Crowd and of course all the reality shows like The Pick Up Artist, which I found ‘cos it appears on Joost, which has characters from the book in.

The Game is pretty much a book about the obsessiveness of the geek mind, and what goes wrong when the nerdy thought processes get re-routed into trying to pick up girls. Other than Neil Strauss himself, all the other major characters are from a very computer geek background - they all started in the early days of the internet.

It turns out that geeks try and pick up women in much the same way as they code, learning simple routines by memory and cobbling them together into something larger. They also seem to suffer many the same problems as they do with programming projects - they get increasingly obsessed with the art and the process and lose the actual aim of it. So like with projects that never get complete because some developers try and perfect a pretty irrelevant routine that was working fine rather than actually complete the project. So the geeks go out and “number close” or even “kiss close” a girl, but never actually go out with a girl, or spend time with them - which to me is kind of not the point of being a pick up artist, but maybe I’ve missed the point.

As a single shy “engineer” reading about the ideas and techniques has made me think about why not start try out the ideas from the pick up artist community, unfortunately there were two problems with this, one the work involved really seemed to be quite a lot, but much more importantly you have to do it without drinking and there really seems silly. So I think I’ll stick with the traditional English fallback of getting really, really drunk, and hoping something happens - I mean it wouldn’t be traditional if it didn’t work sometimes right?

Following on in my continued development into a regular guy this year, where I started doing all the normal things people do like not being homeless and buying iPod’s. Last week I got a regular job, and I’m happy to say that I am now a junior developer at Joost. It’s not been a secret I’ve been working with the folk at Joost for a fair old time now, but now it’s a proper thing, with holidays, HR rules, and a salary at the end of the month.

It’s been an interesting time watching Joost grow from a few crazed people meeting in random London hotels, and working sitting on top of shredders into a company with now a 100 people working in proper offices. I’ve had a lot of fun in both phases though, and am surprisingly happy to have now entered my new corporate life. Hopefully I can work my way up from the Junior Developer role into something with more influence, but there’s a lot of good people at Joost to elbow out of the way on the way up the corprorate ladder so it might take awhile. Of course 100 people isn’t actually very corporate, and neither is Joost and I’m probably still able to say that I’ve drunk beer with all of the Joost folk bar except a very, very select people (*). In fact, I owe lots of them beer still, due to a mistake I made in a Joost easter egg.

Of course the best thing about working at Joost isn’t the bright people, it isn’t even the technology we work with, it’s not even the cool Joost towels we have to brand our bathrooms with at home (I checked, we have to, it’s in the contract.) but it’s the content. Working on Joost, means I get to watch a lot of TV, especially as I work from home, and have always worked with television on in the background. So in a spirit of eating our own dogfood I watch Joost almost all the time (Other than on sunday afternoons, when I’m kind of obsessed by “Come dine with me” at the moment).

I’ve found that there is actually a lot of good stuff to watch, there’s the big brand stuff, [pick some], but actually that has attracted me less than the other stuff that I might not normally have tripped over on regular TV. There’s all sorts of good short movies, such as No, No, No, or other Movieola short films, even Bad Yogurt on TVBOMB is good in a particularly disgusting kind of way. Superdeluxe was something I’d probably never see normally which was good when I was in the US the other week, and the nostalgia hit from stuff like Full House and Duckula are also always a worthwhile diversion. And The Onion is perhaps now my favourite channel for its in depth news reporting, that seems subtly different in a way I can’t quite grasp from what I’m getting from my regular Economist reading.

I actually end up watching a lot of music videos, as the continuous starting/stopping of Joost as I try to fix some bugs or add some features, makes the longer stuff harder to get into - of course, even some of these can be distracting. In some ways it would be good to return to the days when all we had to watch on Joost were the Giant Sleepy Sharks.

(*) I guess the missing ones just don’t like me much, or maybe are just too hard working.

It’s strange how often Richard Herring’s life seems to resonate with me - you wouldn’t've thought the life of a slightly overweight 40 year old stand up comic from the West Country living in west london would often resonate as I’m only 33, and could never stand up in front of any one, but it does.

Today Richard ruminates on social networking, (that’s real social networking, not the sort of thing you do on facebook or linkedin) and:

Sometimes if I am full to the brim with alcohol I can overcome the shyness part of the equation, but given my state of inebriation I will usually say or do something that would have a detrimental effect on my employment or social status.

Of course it’s not really too bad for me, as I neither get invited to the sort of parties that have important industry people hanging around in them (or indeed any parties if I’m completely honest with myself) and unlike the Media world, being a geek is actually much more of a meritocracy. Although I’m still sure the people who spend their time writing lots to get themselves known end up doing better than those who quitely get on with things and just get them done. Good job the internet made that possible for us wall flowers.

It’s been a bloody long time since I’ve blogged anything, so long that now the endless “sell me your blog to let me turn it into a link farm on the page rank” remind me of how long since I last updated it, it’s been surprising, nothing has annoyed me enough to write anything, at least nothing on stuff I can blog about anyway.

I’ve had a pretty good last year money-wise, as I’ve actually done some work, and with that I’m no longer homeless, so if you need a place to stay in south-west London, drop me a line. In fact, things have been so good I’ve even splashed out on luxuries and bought an iPod nano - my first ever iPod, for something that is supposed to be the ultimate in consumer user interfaces, it’s pretty annoying.

There’s no OFF button, pause and rely on it the auto-off behaviour, that’s strange, stop it and shut up is extremely important functionality for me, but not something the nano supports.

There’s no auto-lock, that I just can’t understand, my phone, which is the cheapest sell has it, it doesn’t need a little push switch in an inaccessible place to stop the volume changing randomly when it’s in your pocket, it just solves that for you by automatically locking.

They’re minor niggles from what is a generally good user interface, but for what is a very limited device designed to do one thing, not as impressive as I would’ve imagined from the talk. At the same time, why is the macbook asking me for the macbook password to update the nano’s firmware? If it’s for security, it should be the nano’s password you’re asking me, not a password for a completely different device, that’s just teaching me to enter my system password for nothing to do with my system, bad lesson to learn.

To complete the apple annoyances, they’ve patented the anti-theft device I talked about last time, let’s hope the bar on patent obviousness carries on raising to avoid this sort of thing.

As a homeless internet developer, I spend a lot of my time in pubs using their wifi and drinking their beer, drinking beer has a side-effect, and not just on my code quality, my bladder fills and I need to partake of the facillities, this means abandoning the laptop on the table of a strange pub in a strange town - the data’s safe, that’s encrypted - not for me the embarrassment of losing a laptop chock full of an unsecured source tree, but the machine is worth a fair bit, and it’d be bloody annoying too.

So I was thinking - T60’s and indeed all decent laptops already have an accellerometer in it, why isn’t there a program which starts shrieking “Help, Help, he’s stealing me” at full volume. Probably be really crap, but it should at least exist - people?

Of course if you do see a strange bloke sitting in a corner drinking alone yet talking to himself and imaginary people on IRC, go buy him a drink - it might be me.