A group of us went house boating on Lake Shasta last weekend.  We took a tonne of polaroids which Tessa was kind enough to scan.

The camera rocks.  It’s big and chunky, and takes a good 20s to charge up the flash, but the noise it makes when you take a photo, and the retro-quality of the prints are awesome.

I’m not a big chess player by any means, but I wanted an authentic scene for this shot, so I looked-up some famous matches on Google. I found The Game of the Century, where 13-year old Bobby Fischer beat a renowned chess master.  This photo replicates the last move in that match.

Tessa turned out to be a great hand model :)

Then in December I saw an ex-colleague tweet that he’d signed up for the Wildflower long course. I checked out the website and noticed the Mountain Bike Course: a much more manageable 1/4-mile swim, 9.7-mile bike, 2-mile run.

I told my personal trainer about it and in February we both signed up. We trained in the pools and the gym at work, then at China Camp Beach on the weekends. The distances aren’t very long, so I was mainly focussed on getting a reasonable time.

Last weekend was the actual event. We drove down Friday and camped on the hill above Lake San Antonio.

On race morning we got up at 6, ate a solid breakfast of granola and expresso beans, and then headed down to set up the transition area before the long course got underway. I got pretty nervous while we watched the long course participants leave, but by the time it was my wave’s turn I was calm and ready to go.

There seemed to be a lot of people unprepared for the swim, and I caught up to the tail end of the first wave by the mid-way point.

My transition to bike was pretty terrible; I spent way to much time putting my shoes and gloves on.  But the bike course itself wasn’t too bad at all, with only a couple of hills of note. Everyone is marked with their “race age” on their left leg, so I could tell I was overtaking people from the first wave, which was very motivating.

My transition to run was nearly as bad as the one to bike; I managed to misplace the t-shirt that had my bib number and spent valuable time digging through my bag. The run is definitely my weakest leg and having pushed hard on the bike I found it pretty tough. I made it back to the stadium though, with enough energy to do a sprint finish :)

My end time was 1:04:43, placing 17th 16th of 131 in my age group, 59th 1012 overall. Some of the times are messed up so I’m not 100% sure of my overall ranking. My bike time didn’t record correctly so I don’t know how long I spent in the second transition, but if my first was anything to go by I think I should be able to shave 2 or 3 minutes off my time just at the transitions.

What next? I definitely want to do longer tri’s in the future but I think for now I’d like to focus on improving my time on sprint courses while working on my running.

Update: looks like they fixed the timing data.

Tessa came out for a bike ride while Sani and I did a trial run at China Camp. I’m getting more used to swimming in the cold, salty water, but it’s still not the most pleasant experience.

This week we’ll be winding down and doing some relatively light training. Don’t want to start the race with sore legs!

I felt a little jealous just watching from the sidelines, but at least I managed to get a few photos.  Maybe next year :)

This site has some good information on how to go about cancelling. I didn’t have too many problems, but they did try pretty hard to keep me on, and when that didn’t work they offered me a free a month in the hope I’d forget to cancel again.

If you ever used this site, I’d recommend checking you’re not still paying for it unbeknownst to you.

So, its cool that I got my first patent, even if it is a moderately embarrassing one :)

A lot of the example JS code is based on the project Erik and I started, and some is available for download from the SVN depot.

I looked at both Google’s own PicasaWeb and Flickr. While I prefer Picasa for browsing photos I really like the over all aesthetics of Flickr, and the organizational tools. So I went with the latter and have started with my photos from Christmas in England.

Update: All is well. My colleagues who grew up on the west coast ensure me that its not worth worrying about until things start falling over and breaking.

My favourite feature: visible history means shareable searches.