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Our family fitness has taken another leap forward this last week with our joining in a virtual race across Australia. For us its more of an amble than a race and we are not in it to win it, but for the fitness.

Jadeen and Erin and Mercedes also received their first mentions for running on the web – though Jadeen was published in the news paper for her running a few weeks back.

I bought a Garmin 310XT training computer watch gizmo and Jude and I have been using this to track our heart rate, speed and distance, and cadence for running and cycling. Here’s the list of our activities on Garmin Connect – you can see the maps, distances and all the details by opening up any of the specific activities. You can even use the player feature to overlay the different metrics and see them play out over the whole course. See the SheepStation Creek course I did on Sunday with Mick.

Photography stuff

After reading this article about 7 ways to get your photos seen, I created a book of photos at Blurb. It is coming soon. You can preview and purchase the book here if you are interested – it makes a great coffee table book.

I have published more photos in our Dreamcoat Photography family portraits section on Flickr. We are in the process of developing our new website for this and are now taking bookings for clients.

Swearing an Oath

Finally, I have sworn an oath this week after following the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd’s lead. We have both made this oath and encourage other men to do the same.

I swear:
never to commit violence against women,
never to excuse violence against women, and
never to remain silent about violence against women.
This is my oath.

August 30 saw Judith and Jadeen compete with another 47,000 odd runners in the annual Bridge to Brisbane charity fun run. Jude and Jadeen competed in the 5km run finishing in the first 2000 odd runners I think. Official results will come later.

I took a bunch of photos – 942 to be precise – these are posted up on my flickr account with the bridgetobrisbane tag. Here is the public listing of photos with the bridgetobrisbane tag

Here are some of the best / funniest ones I took. Number 32531 was the winning woman. Judith was number 40065 and I didn’t see Jadeen bolt past me in the crowd so I didn’t get a photo of her.

Windows 7 – the news keeps on coming in!

• How low can you go? What is the minimum hardware requirement for Windows 7? SO far the record is a Pentium II with a 266 MHz CPU, 96MB of memory, and a 4MB graphics card.
• Nick Hodge is in charge of getting 58 palettes of HP Netbooks preloaded with Windows 7 for Tech Ed 2009 delegates! – i could go – but I’m going sailing instead!
• Susan Bradley has webcasts on using the XP mode in Win7
• Upgrade and retail pricing was announced for Win7 for USA and Australia this week.
  

I have been doing a lot of photography lately. Something to do with getting my new gear! I’m playing with White Balance, ISO, Aperture and Shutter settings and trying different things. A lot of these things I have of course done before, but now I am doing it with good gear and I am starting to get some good results.

I’ve put some of my good photos into this article. There are lots more in my flickr account, and for those connected to me on facebook a few there as well. A couple of very good shots have made it to my red bubble account where they can be purchased.

We went on a fun run on Sunday morning. I entered int he 5km run, but had to pull out early due to an injuury sustained at squash last Friday. I have pulled / damaged / twisted a nerve in the side of my left calf and it is very sore. The good thing was that as I got back to the finish line before most people I was able to take a large number of photos that have subsequently been made available for the runners to access.

Today I delivered some work to a client to get a major piece of work completed. The client was 100% happy and there were only a couple of minor things to fix. They have requested more work but that will have to wait until after other jobs are completed. From there I drove to the school convention and picked up a car full of athletes who I have been coaching. We headed of to St Lucia University campus for a 5PM start of the athletic meet.

Unfortunately due to my “childishness” I broke my phone screen and I didn’t have any other camera with me. I did take a couple of shots of my main man Drew running the 1500 metre with someone else's camera though.

Drew cleaned up tonight. Although he could have ran a much faster 1500 than he did I made him run a slow race to save himself for the other events. He followed my instructions exactly. Ran into second place within the first 100 metres and sat right on the heels of that guy for 400 metres before hitting him with a 10 metre clear burst on the 2nd back straight. Settling back down the the same pace he ran with the 10 metre lead for another full lap. Then he picked up the pace and ran harder drawing away to a 50 metre lead. He held this then right into the main finishing straight and then turned on his sprint for the last 50 metres winning by an easy 75 metres or so. I think he could have won by close to a full lap but he was very good and ran our race plan exactly. This was good because he was straight into the 100 metres – though because his was the lat 100 metre heat / final he had time to prepare. I had 2 runners in the 100 metres and I played the waiting game as long as possible to keep them out of the chill breeze. I walked them to the start last of all the runners every time, warmed them up at the back of the staging area with some calisthenics, stretches and short sprints. No other athletes were as well prepared so I was happy with that. Caleb came second in his U16 100 metres and drew came in first or second – it was a photo finish and we haven’t been told the result yet.