Category Archives: Change

Jun 2 2013

The less of me for May


The less of me for May- A moth where it ended in abruptly and in tragedy

Lessof Me May

  • 8Runs – that’s half of what I expected
  • 42.06 kms kms in total
  • 5.2kms average per walk-out
  • Fastest 5km improves all the time 32:53  - remembering back that it was 44:03 in December when I really started to go for it.
  • Weight  dropping slowly – now at 94 kg, but only because I ate to comfort myself in the last two weeks.
  • New shoes – I brought some more New Balance shoes M1010, They’re still in the box unworn.

NB1

So to recap then.

I hurt myself.

I’d got to 498 kms and wanted to get to 500 (in total), and I went out in the morning. I had a “tight” right calf, but stretching seemed to ease it, in my head. I’d got less than 500 meters where I stopped to stretch it again, and nearly gave up, but mistaking the pain as being similar to the pain that shins sometimes give me I pushed ahead.

Then at the furthest point from home I’d stopped to walk a bit, the calf was quite “knotted” and I thought I’d walk it off, but I came to a junction and then the gentle downhill bit that I really enjoy. So I ran accross the road, in the way you do to beat the truck that’s coming up. and that’s when the tears started :-(

calfrupt_2

gastroc-soleus

The burning stabbing that indicates some part of your body has given up.  For those of you that know this is both painful, embarrassing and confusing.

So there I was in comparative agony  by the side of the road, unable to walk, and some kind passerby stopped and offered me a lift home, I was sweaty and grimacing but still they stopped. It was incredibly kind and thoughtful and I hope that i’d be as charitable if ever I had the chance.

Cold pads and hot water bottle’s for a few hours, compress bandage and rest.

Oddly I had no problems standing on top toes had a full range of foot motion but I couldn’t walk in any coherent way, and getting down stairs was pretty impossible for the first day.

In the week since, it’s calmed down a lot, only aches if I’ve been sitting for a while, and doesn’t like being cold. I massage it daily and use deep heat (you know that stuff that smells like locker rooms, the opposite of chick-magnet”

I’m really itching to get back and exercise, and will have a gentle walk tomorrow.

And there you have it – May done and dusted, some wins, a few set backs, a few compliments about how less fat I am becoming. It’s all good.

May 19 2013

The Less of me for April


April

The less of me for April – A moth where I had to push on

  • 16 Runs
  • 94.14kms in total
  • 5.8kms average per walk-out
  • Fastest 5km improves all the time 34:44  - remembering back that it was 44:03 in December when I really started to go for it.
  • Weight  dropping slowy – now at 95 kg
  • New shoes – New Balance Minimus

Finished the month off with a niggling injury of hamstrings that took a while to settle down, and it was disappointing not to finish at 100km.

Mar 14 2013

A Letter to Murray McCully


I expect a form letter asnwer.

 

Mr.McCully,

I understand that you’re voted in for your opinions and preferences, but I can’t let it pass without comment that you changed your vote to change your support of Marriage Equality to be opposed to it.

As the National MP in the ECB you’ve secured my vote for the previous elections. Mostly because you’re inoffensive and are in a party that by and large suits my own thinking. By and large.

Being the intelligent, well travelled, and well rounded man that you are I can’t begin to understand how you can vote against something that I’ve enjoyed for coming up to 25 years this year, that of being married.

I can’t begin to understand how you could support it one day and be against it the next. You’re now one of only 4 people who’ve been swayed, cajoled, or harangued into taking a contrary position to one which you came to on your own.

I’d lay Dollars to Cents that you’ve been lobbied by the religious element in this. Modern marriage is a construct of religion, religion that does all it can to deny minorities the status that they themselves confer upon themselves.

The world will not end, churches will not crumble, men will not start eyeing me up lustily in the streets, people will go about their lives. Traditional marriage, and denial of it to all people, is about religious dogma. Traditional Marriage isn’t for life, as the number of divorces will attest. Marriage isn’t for everyone, else everyone would be married.

At a time when Atheism or non-religion becomes more prevalent and religious dogma and teaching become less relevant you find yourself in a position where you are in danger of becoming a dinosaur of a past age.

Mr. MCully I ask you, if you could travel back in time would you yourself would have voted for women’s suffrage? And whilst not comparable in moving society forward, I ask you why you would vote against Marriage Equality, something that clearly brings equity to everyone?

I’d ask that you do me the service of not sending me a stock/form reply, because that’s just avoidance, and my one vote might not make a difference, but then again it might.

Philip Walter

Mar 1 2013

The Thin me is trying – the less of me update for February


1febwalkingCapture

A bit of fun in February and by my own personally competitive nature I managed to crack a 100kms of exercise in the 4 week period, says my Nike+ SportsWatch GPS

My weight hasn’t exactly plummeted, but from being 105Kg in November I’m back to 97kg, and having been on or at 100Kg for years and a while I’m inwardly smiling about gaining the extra notch on my belt back.

My goal is to lose about 1kg a month, by a combination of better eating, for instance the breakfast porridge, a lighter lunch and better dinners, and having cut out snack things like crisps/chips and chocolate (for the most part), and to be much healthier and thinner by next summer. And I’ve invested in a bit of gear so I have a motivation.

I’m also drinking less beer less often too, but I’m enjoying it more, and instead of the whole cheese I can now enjoy it 1/3 at a time over three days.

Nike-Free-Run-3-01I’ve all but worn out my current  Nike shoes (around 250kms) and will move on the new ones I brought this weekend. MrsPdubyah says I should slow down and go further, I’m going to seek advice on what’s the best way forward. I don’t think I can walk any faster without getting into the whole speed walking gait and thing, and I probably look just a bit odd now, although I do manage to break into a run for a few hundred meters (he says kidding himself), which is more than I could in December. I think I’d be aiming for more jogging intervals than just walking fast. That would be plan A.

Stretching has helped, the massage stick has helped, I still have stiffness in the calf area, and now around the knees, although the latter might be the result of the worn out shoes. Touching your toes is quite the joy :-)

So far then Pdubyah world all is going to plan.

May 22 2012

As I get older I get different – #2


Space, the final frontier. What a wonderful concept, infinity. UFO’s. How romantic are they when you’re 14, 15, 16…. the idea that flashing lights in the sky are visitors, from another planet. Stoked by such films as “The Day the Earth Stood Still“, and “Close Encounters“, TV series such as Gerry Anderson‘s UFO, and Space 1999, and of course Star Trek and Star Wars.

2 Gerry Anderson UFO series aliens on a desert...

2 Gerry Anderson UFO series aliens on a desert planet. I made the image with CGI. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And how can you not believe? How can you possibly not look at the sky and wonder who it can be that there isn’t life on other planets. A long way away planets, a long long way away. But plants, aliens, visitors.

Aliens, ancient aliens, greys, reptoids, blues, blond nordics, chupacabras… you name they’ve been everywhere.

Of course they’ve all been to Earth, why not, we’re significant, we’re rulers of a planet, with resources.  They’ve all been here, mostly at night, mostly to prod things up our backside, dismember sheep, implant tracking devices or breed. Of course.

And then one day perhaps not. After you read some books, and thought about it, the question was “How?, followed by “Why?”. Two important questions, two of the very best.

And so the slightly older me smiles when people talk of Alien visitations, visitors, abductions, formations of spacecraft in the sky.

Now I know there are enough wonders in the back yard to keep me occupied, without having to have a feeling that there is something out there.

And I think this goes hand in hand with my Atheism.  Sort of.  Except that there must be other planets, and there must be life somewhere else. It’s an infinite universe with infinite suns,sort of. Infinite in the sense that there must be an edge somewhere, a long long way away and I can’t quite grasp the distance to Alpha Centauri for instance, and so the other side of the universe must be a long way away, infinitely far.

And whilst it’s understandable that some people think that Aliens must walk amongst us, there are people that think there is an imaginary sky god. They’re not so different. That they both are in out imagination is all they have in common.

So I’ve changed, we are alone, all alone, at least on this planet, and possibly alien me thinks the same thing.

My love of science fiction films is in no way diminished by my beliefs, it’s in fact the opposite.

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Jul 8 2011

Fabulous at 50 – why I’m the same but different


http://blog.broadcastengineering.com/briefingroom/2005/09/01/frances-visual-technology-opts-for-rts%C2%AE-telex%C2%AE/I’ve always worked with technology, well from way back when.  Data entry learnt me to type, and I learnt to type on a T15 telex machine and could at one point read mylar tape with alarming accuracy, well it was a numbers thing and you had to be accurate when you’re dealing in millions of dollars.

Then I worked with a progressive group that had a bunch of IBM PC’s, and the bright kids built a network in the office for kicks. This was the very very early 80’s. The excitement of getting the IBM 5160 PC/XT and then eventually the PC/AT!

Then with Commodore Computers, the PC10, PC20 and PC30 and the Amiga computers, I remember seeing one of those in a Farmers shop showing a rotating window with a leopard walking within it, smoke and mirrors.

I’ve always had personal computers around me. Very early on efforts at Email, and file transfer by modem for business, and BBS systems in the evening.

Things moved quickly after that of course, and we’ve seen all manner of magic that we now call Plasma or LCD, apple iEverything, BluRay, etc etc, lots of tech.

Being around technology leads you down buying technology, and using technology, and I have for a long time. It should not be a surprise that my cupboard at home contains amongst other things a MiniDisc player, a 1Megapixel digital camera, a Sony Walkman stick thing, a video camea, and we have in the house a media player that will play .avi and other format video, various ieverythings, couple of plasmatrons, and that.

The family has also always had access to the best internet we could afford, so they have always had Hotmail accounts for instance, and been through bebo, myspace and Facepage. They’ve played online games and had software games, not to mention the Playstations – which reminds me I won one of those the first week they were out! Score

Which reminds me that I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much on technology, aside from the splash purchase of the 42” Plasma, which was a house moving reward upgrade.

 At 50 then I would suggest that I’m fairly tech savvy, and able to offer up some advice about technology.  I’ll admit to being clueless about CPU technology in PC’s and Notebooks but I know where to go to find out about what’s what, the internet is a tool for that.

What of my peers, which is where I wanted to go with this, and I alluded to in another post.

Just because I have “all the toys” does not make me rich, it makes me curious. But what is does mean is that to my peers that I’m somewhat of an oddity. Just because I have, and use an iPad makes me a bit different and geeky. I just use it because it is. My peers don’t work in I.T., they may use a computer at work, but they moan about it and “it’s a big one” if you press them as to which type they have.

Twitter, Facepage, Google+, LinkedIN, might as well be talking babble. And we talk sometimes as it seems they try to address their getting up to speed with their children’s acceptance of this stuff.

I don’t think I’m weird, odd or otherwise different from my peers, and I envy them their jobs, as I’m sure they envy mine.

Can I imagine not having a computer, sure yes I can, no internet? Sure I grew up without one, or a cellphone? when I was a boy we said we’d meet at 5pm and we met, we didn’t text, fret or otherwise track each other through the day to ensure we would do what we said we’d do.

Would I give up any of it? No.

Sep 23 2009

Overhaulin’


When you spend as much time as I do looking at performance based statistics it throws up some interesting things.

Most importantly it shows up that you need to be nimble and ready to accept and process on a new idea, no matter how left-field it seems or appears to be.

Changing your focus, or changing the status quo can have a knock on effect, and changing to a non-measurable metric is always a difficult choice.

As is giving people an optional choice. My thinking (belief) is that if you make something optional then likely as not it does not get done. So the challenge is to come up with a non-optional option. Cunning that.

Implementing change without reason is difficult so it’s a matter of spinning this into something that those that have to do the work think its a great idea. Cunning that.

Will it change the world? I have no idea, if I can’t measure it by empirical data I’m back to “I feel” kind of things, which is something I shy away from.

We’ll see where this goes, and it might be that we get back to the “I feel” metric based on pop-surveys and sat-survey techniques, which is something to look forward to and a good way to measure your trust and love quotient amongst those that you are there to be nice to.

Sep 22 2009

The importance of self-importance


” Hey I know my rights!” which is what someone who generally doesn’t says when they are clearly wrong. Just an observation and generalization.

But we’re shuffling desks at work, and there are some people who will gather around them a new shiny job title. Different in some way to their old one. Newer.

Scary.

But some people find this type of change challenging. They don’t want to change desks, and they don’t want a new job title. They prefer “Assistant to the Manager” to “Team Leader“. Some of them anyway. Some are looking forward to a new title. It’ll empower them with enthusiasm and a new outlook.

But that’s what some people are like, those that missed the meaning of the communication or the reason for the shuffle and re-focus. The “I know my rights” people who now need a “new contract” since this is a different job. Not Quite right.

But as a beneficiary of the reshuffle I have a bigger quandary, that of what promises were made to the new team members – those changing from the window seat to the hub. I guess we’ll find out on the 1st

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