Tonight was the night.

Being too busy disorganised, I didn’t realise that tonight was the deadline until today. If I had realised I would probably have prepared a little better. Two days ago I ran my first Kymin Dash, a ~7 mile run but includes a decent hill. Four days ago I ran in a 10km race between local clubs and broke 40 minutes for the first time.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t have the highest hopes before tonights race, my legs were tight and still a bit sore. I got chatting with another runner at the start line and we exchanged excuses as to why we weren’t going to do very well (an unwritten custom). I was mid-sentence when the whistle blew.

Woah! Quick! Start the watch and run!

Maybe it was being caught off-guard, but I shot off without any time to get nervous and build thoughts of self-doubt. I reached the half-way point, and glanced at my watch. I was on target. I was better than on target, I was going too fast. It didn’t matter though, I felt good. I dug in for the return to the finished line. Although the course is a simple 2.5km out, then 2.5km back, I’m pretty sure that the return leg is longer

I can see the finish in the distance now, another look at my watch, 17 minutes. 2 minutes left if I’m to hit my target. The finish looks far away and although I’m running as fast as I can, I know I’ve slowed down. I pick out a road sign ahead that I think is half way between me and the end. I tell myself, “If I can reach that in 1 minute, then I can do it”. 1 minute and 15 seconds later I run past the sign. Damn. “Forget that, it probably wasn’t half way”, my legs are burning, “it’s only another 45 seconds, just sprint like mad!” I fly over the finish line and tap my watch. It takes me a second or two before I’m physically able to look at the watch because my arms are still flailing around trying to slow down. 18:58. Whoop! I punch the air like I’ve just won the thing as other runners who finished earlier clap slowly and politely.

So, I hit my target with 2 seconds to spare. Well done me. That’s that then. Thanks for reading. Bye.

Ahem. Oh. You’re still here. “What about the weight thing?”. Erm, yeah, well, I kinda focussed more on the running. I just weighed myself and I’m exactly the same as when I started.

Yeah, I failed the challenge really, but I don’t care. It was great fun and with my fresh personal bests I’m buzzing!

I ran the same race on Tuesday in 19:15, painfully close to my speed target of 19 minutes. However, I also weighed myself again but have actually lost a pound.

Gah!

Must try harder…

It took me a little while to work out, but GWTCanvas works slightly differently to Graphic2D in Java. It’s important to realise that with GWTCanvas, when you invoke “rotate(r)” you’re actually transforming the coordinate space that will be used for subsequent drawing.

Produces:

In order to rotate it, you must invoke rotate before you start any drawing.

Tadaa!

The same is also true for other transformation methods such as “scale” and “translate”.

Yesterday, I attended a workshop hosted by the talented Lou O’Bedlam. Although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, I was getting inspired. Not only was I getting inspired to take more picutres, I was getting inspired to focus on stepping out of my comfort zone and going after my dreams.

Lou talked about recently teaching his nephew how to ask a girl out. His advice was simple: “Just ask her”. His nephew replied, “But then what would I say?”. “Woah!, that’s phase 2, don’t worry about that. Focus on phase 1: Asking her”.

The analogy was straight forward enough and was advice for us as photographers if we want to take pictures of the strangers we meet in the street. The worst that can happen is they can say no.

I took my camera to work today determined I would simply take pictures of all the interesting people I met. Throughout the day I saw several ideal candidates. But I can’t ask her, she has headphones on. She’s walking too fast, must be in a rush. The light’s not right. He doesn’t look friendly. She’s too tall, I’d have to climb something to get the right angle, but she’ll think I’m just trying to take a picture of her boobs… My brain found an excuse in an instant for all of them. The truth was that I was a big scared wimp.

I went out again, on my own this evening to walk around the harbour specifically to see if I could pluck up the courage to ask someone if I could take their portrait. All too soon, my opportunities were missed and the sun had set so I headed home dragging my heels. On the way however I saw a girl with an amazing look and I went for it so spontaneously that I surprised myself.

“Hi!”

She looks startled. I mean, very startled. It’s quite late and there are only one or two other people around. I panic a little and start to blurt out my words at record pace (the opposite of Lou’s advice):

“Erm, I know this is a bit random, but you have a really pretty and interesting face, do you mind if  take your picture?”

She’s still startled, perhaps so much so she can’t think of a better answer:

“Um, yeah, ok”

What? She said yes. Christ, now I’m gonna have to take this thing, where’s the light? It’s about 9:45pm and getting dark. I don’t want to use flash. I slap the camera on aperture priority to f/1.8 and cross my fingers.

-Click-

Blurry, damn.

I glance up and can see she wants to leave. She heard a click and I only asked for a photo. I can’t remember what I then said, some mumbling nonsense about grain and ISO settings probably. I quickly knock the ISO up to 800.

-Click-

I eyeball the screen, blurry? Probably. Good enough? Yes!

“Thanks so much for letting me take them. I can see I’m freaking you out a bit so I’m just gonna go the long way home over this way so you don’t think I’m following you. Er.. thanks again.”

I start to scuttle off, feeling awful for scaring the poor girl then hear a feint “Cheers”. Maybe she’s just a little shocked, but flattered. I wanted to give her my card so she could at least choose to email me if she wanted to see the photos but I forgot. I didn’t even tell her my name, or ask her hers. The whole thing was a nightmare display of clumsy social awkwardness that would make any observer cringe. Did I step out of my comfort zone? Yes. Did I learn about 50 things in as many seconds? Yes. None of that matters, that’s just perfecting phase 2. I’ll work on that tomorrow…

I want to buy an SLR, what one shall I get?

In my software engineering life, clients often approach me with a description of software they want me to write. What you really want is for them to describe the problems they are having that need to be solved. That way you might be able to design a better (simpler) solution. I’m sure it applies to every discipline, but a simple method for finding out the root problem is to just ask Why? a lot.

The trouble is, I get asked this question quite a lot and asking Why? to everyone multiple times takes too long so I’m just going to ask them all here as a default response to future question askers…

Unfortunately, they’ve decided to end the scheme deeming it unsuccessful:

Dear Hourbike Member,

It is with regret that I have to report that the bike sharing

pilot project that we started in partnership with Bristol City
Council, The University of the West of England and First Great
Western Trains is coming to a close. The intention of the current
pilot was to test the acceptance of the concept and determine the
potential demand for such a scheme with the hope of expanding it
beyond a pilot. Feedback from yourselves and from enquiries has
clearly shown that there is an interest in this type of scheme
but the Cycling City project has determined that it has more
pressing priorities and therefore cannot commit further funding at
this point in time.

The support of Bristol City Council both in terms of finance but
also the credibility of the scheme is particularly important, and
though other funding was received from the other founding partners
- First Great Western and the University of West of England - the
significant majority of funding has come from private investment.
Without the support of the local authority the scheme is unable
to attract further private investment.

My apologies to any of you that have noticed the recent reduction
in the availability of bikes at the stands. Our discussions with
the city council have taken some time to come to a conclusion.

We are hoping to continue the rental stations at Parkway and UWE,
and of course your memberships are still valid at the growing list
of our other Hourbike operated schemes in the UK, so please keep
your card and membership number for future use. I am a strong
believer in the value of large scale public bicycle rental schemes
and we are being successful in other towns around the country that
are investing in similar services, and I believe you will shortly
be seeing other schemes becoming available across the UK. This is
not a decision that I have taken lightly, but hope you understand
some of the reasoning behind the change.

If you would like further information from us I will do my best to
respond to you personally.

Best Regards

Tim Caswell
Managing Director
Hourbike Ltd

I’m gutted

More details here (the Hourbike website isn’t particularly useful).

I also need to put on some weight because at 6 foot I’m pretty puny weighing in at 10st 9lb. According to the NHS weight calculator I should be over 12 Stone.

I’m setting myself the challenge of knocking 2.5 minutes off my 5km time (I’ve never run it under 19 minutes before) and reaching 12st 2lb before the Bridge Inn 5km summer series finishes on July 27th (the website hints there’s one in August but I’m pretty sure it’s wrong…).

I’m not sure how hard this challenge is going to be since I pretty much plucked the numbers out of the air. I also don’t know how to find out if I’m on track. Should I aim for linear gains and therefore expect to be half way to each of my targets halfway through the challenge? Or is there some kind of curved graph in which I get most the way very quickly but it soon flattens out?

Anyway, I’m sure it’s going to be tricky since they are both conflicting targets. The heavier I get, the harder it will be to run faster, but the more I train, the harder it’ll be to get heavier.

I’ll track my progress on here as often as possible. It should be an interesting experiment…

<web-app>

<security-role>

<role-name>member</role-name>

</security-role>

…

Of the 4 autehntication types, “BASIC” uses Base64, in the same way that on a Commodore 64 you’d write BASIC.

Showing my age there.

• ServletRequest
• HttpSession
• ServletContext