Well, I did it.  It’s supposed to take 6 weeks of training but I managed to get there 2 training sessions earlier than the plan.

My plan was to always exceed the number of push-ups that were outlined in each set and each session so that I could ensure that, when the time came, I’d be well and truly ready.  You can see from the red line in the following graph how I was consistently above the prescribed number (the blue line) and I’ve also marked when I did the 100.

Along the way I dumped the data from the website for each week into OneNote and tracked my progress in there:

My plan now is to continue on and see just how far I can go.  Ideally, I’d like to see myself being able to do 10 sets of 50 push-ups every 2nd day and then being able to do a maximum set of around 125.  Either way, it feels good to get a bit of tone back into my upper body and abs.

I came across these great resources for setting up a mirrored failover environment for MOSS:

SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0/Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Part 1 (Introduction, Overview, and basics)

http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/04/23/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-1-introduction-overview-and-basics.aspx

Part 2 (Configuration)

http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/05/25/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-2-configuration.aspx

Part 3 (Failover)

http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/08/01/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-3-failover.aspx

I know that there’s been mixed reaction to the latest marketing campaign by Microsoft for Windows – but I’m actually enjoying these:

 
Video: New Family

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my participation in the 100 pushups challenge.  Since then I’ve been diligently going about my practice routine which consists of doing exercises 3 times per week.  I practice on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Each practice session requires you to do 5 sets of pushups – with the number of pushups in each set growing with each new practice session.  The final goal being that, in Week 7 you are able to simply sit down and crank out 100 consecutive pushups.

In the first couple of weeks of the challenge I stuck to the prescribed number of pushups to be done, but I’ve now started pushing myself a little harder so that I’m hopefully ahead of the game come week’s 6 and 7.

You can see from the following table just how much the numbers have grown since week 1:

Which looks even more impressive when graphed:

Overall it’s been enjoyable working towards the challenge of doing 100 pushups and I’m interested to see how I go.  At the end of each fortnight you are asked to do 1 set of as many pushups as you can.  This Friday I’m hopeful that I can hit 70… we’ll see :-)

Recently I came across this site which claimed that it could help train me to do 100 consecutive pushups!  This sounded like an interesting enough challenge (for both the site’s claims as well as myself) so I decided to take it on.

The basis of the program is that each week you do 3 training sessions, 2 days apart.  I’m doing my training on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday’s.  And each day/week, the number of repetitions that you have to do, increases.  I’m in my second week and have done 5 sessions so far – you can see my progress against the program’s numbers in both of the following charts:

The good thing about this challenge is that it’s fun and very easy to find the 10 minutes that are required to do a session.  And hopefully at the end of it all, I’ll look and feel a little stronger too!

This week, Starbucks announced that it would close 61 of its 84 Australian stores by the weekend.  The closures would affect 685 jobs and follows the closure of around 600 underperforming stores in the US recently.

In my home town of Adelaide, I was surprised to see that the main Starbucks store in Rundle Mall was one of the affected sites (see picture at left for the notice that was posted on their front door this morning).

In interviews with locals, many city workers cited that they had recently cut their weekly expenditure on coffee by as much as 50% with dollar figures falling from as high as $70 per week down to $30-40 per week. 

The cut in consumer expenditure is undoubtedly related to the rise in world oil prices and their subsequent knock on effect into retail goods as well as lower consumer confidence in the wake of financial sector shocks in the US and recently locally here in Australia too.

Recently Grant split his blog into personal and work.  I’m doing a similar thing by splitting my blogging activities into 2 separate blogs.  They are:

This blog that you are reading now and my new blog.

They are both hosted on Live Spaces, but my new blog will be focused solely on articles about the Live platform.  So expect to see me blogging over there about things such as:

• Live @edu
• Managing small businesses on the Live platform
• Live ID
• and a raft of other Live-focused topics

So if Live is of interest to you, please add the URL for my new feed into your aggregator.

Back in February, I posted a blog entry when my blog views reached 50,000.  Today I was surprised to see that they have now passed the 100,000 mark! 

Recently I’ve been talking about some of the cool uses for Live Spaces but, in this post, I’d like to talk about a pet peeve of mine - the lack of work that is put into development and communication from the Live Spaces team about upcoming features

I’d like to use this article/post as a place where I can keep a list of the things that the community believe we need to improve Live Spaces.  If you have any items on your wish list please add them as comments and I’ll add them into the table.  Then hopefully we can send them off to the team and lobby for a response of some kind from the Spaces team.

One of the first questions that I had when I started using Windows Live Spaces last year was “How do I remove spam comments from my Live Spaces blog”?  It took me a while to work it out because the process for getting to the right screen to delete these comments is not necessarily that intuitive.  So here are the steps that you can go through if you need to delete comments from your Live space.

The Problem

As someone who likes to keep my blog free of spam, I’ve always been in the habit of removing the wretched stuff promptly – partly because I believe that spam has a habit of leading to more spam.  So let me take you through the steps that are required to remove just one of these spam comments from my Live Spaces blog.

The Solution

Step 1 – Identify the comment as spam

The first thing that I like to do is to click through to view the full comment, just to be sure that the comment is actually spam.  In the case of the comment below we can see that it clearly is spam.

Step 2 – Get the date of the blog entry

Now that we’ve identified the comment as spam, we need to get the date of the post so that we can locate it when we switch into Summary mode in just a moment.  For the post that we are concerned about here, we can see that the date is the 27 January.  

Step 3 – Switch the Blog View into Summary View Mode

In order to delete the spam comment from your blog you must switch into the Summary View mode which you can do from the navigation controls located on the left side of the page.  You can also select the month of the post that you are interested in to quickly navigate to the correct set of entries.

Step 4 – Select the spam comment to mark it for deletion

Once in Summary View mode you can scroll to the location of the post and then click on the Comments link to expand out a view of comments for that particular post.  Once you have the comments displayed, simply check on the checkbox to the left of the offending comment to mark it for deletion.

Step 5 – Delete the spam comment

Now that you have selected the comment for entry, scroll back to the top of the page and click the Delete selected items link to delete the comment.

You will be asked to confirm that you wish to delete the entries that are selected.

A Proposed Solution

Because most of the spam that I get is easily identified on the home page comments module, a feature that I’d love to see is the ability to delete comments directly from within that view.  The following image shows my proposed solution for doing that.

It would also be good if spam could also be removed directly from within the post as you were reading it as shown in the following image.

Over the years I’ve used many methods for managing my Favorite web sites on the Internet.  While each new method has provided it’s own set of features, each has fallen short of becoming my favorite Favorite method :-)

Today I thought that I’d share how (and why) I’m currently using Windows Live Favorites to manage all of my Internet favorite sites.

Before we get into an explanation of Windows Live Favorites, let’s take a look at the trusty browser-managed favorite’s, and see where they fall short:

• They are not automatically backed up.
  This often leads to losing favorite’s whenever you rebuild your computer or purchase a new one.
• They are not synchronized across computers. 
  If I work from a different computer then I no longer have access to my favorite’s.
• They are not centrally managed.
  Even though I can copy my favorite’s and manually share them around on all of my computer’s, if I make a change on one computer, this change is not replicated to all of my other computer’s.

Windows Live Favorites solves each of these issues by allowing me to manage your Favorites from a centrally hosted location online. 

Another reason that I love having my Favorites stored online is that it makes them so much easier to use in other ways – such as sharing them between my other web applications.  Here’s an image of my Favorites being displayed via a module on my Live Spaces portal:

Windows Live Favorites allows me to manage your Favorites both through the traditional ‘Folders’ paradigm or through the use of tagging.  Let’s take a peek at the following screencast to see how simple it is to use Windows Live Favorites:

So now the only thing that I need to remember to access my Favorites from wherever I am is: http://favorites.live.com.

Staying connected for me means that my friends get to read my alerts and find out where I am and what I’m up to whatever I’m doing.  To keep them informed I constantly update my ‘status’ on various social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and of course richer content goes in my blog. 

In the past, getting my status alerts updated has meant visiting each site separately and making updates.  Thankfully the tools are getting better and much of this stuff is now getting automated as the sites start to integrate and tools make it easier to share my updates around.

A few moments ago I published an article on my blog about how I had downloaded the latest version of Live Writer and the associated SDK.  One of the sample applications that comes with the SDK is a plug-in that cross-posts your published articles as a tweet on Twitter.

To highlight how well this works for sharing information with my circle of friends, within 4 minutes of me posting that article, one of my friends read the tweet on Twitter and instantly posted a comment against the blog post to let me know that they were sold on this feature and that they were heading off to download the new version right away!

For me, staying connected means sharing information and experiences.  By using Live Writer and the new Twitter Notify plug-in, the job of managing my community updates just got easier!

I’ve just downloaded the latest version of Live Writer and the SDK for developing against it.

There’s a few changes to the UI of the new Writer application but by far my favourite is the tabbed interface for switching between views of your posts.

One of the things in the SDK which has generated some interest so far are the new events that you can hook when developing Plug-ins for Writer.  There’s an event that you can handle prior to publishing and one which fires post-publishing too.  This potentially opens up many scenarios for adding value to markup prior to posting and doing things after you’ve posted - such as notifying your social networks that you’ve posted.

In fact the SDK comes with a sample Plug-in called Twitter Notify which sends a tweet after you’ve posted alerting your Twitter friends of your new post.  In fact, I’ve just installed it prior to writing this post, so if it worked, then a tweet should be appearing on my Twitter account shortly

Update: Sweet, it worked :-)

Band of Horses - Ode to LRC

 The Shortwave Set - No Social

Jimmy Recard - Drapht

http://www.myspace.com/drapht

The Presets - This Boy's In Love 

This video has caused quite a stir in Australia based on discussion around the perceived 'gay' and 'sexuality' overtones.

Yesterday I vented about the so-called 'alpha users' and how they have recently turned on Twitter.  You can read that post here:

The 'alpha crowd' have started calling the death of Twitter

Today I read 2 blog posts which have resonated with this theme.  First I read this post by Rob La Gesse:

Robert Scoble has a "Social Problem"

In that post, Rob shows that his thoughts are similar to my own on the subject. 

The lessons to be learned here are that you shouldn't always blindly follow people who are paid to write about new technology when they talk about new technology.  Robert, ReadWriteWeb, and many others with them are 'talking their own book'.  This would actually be illegal in financial circles!  And as many people have said before me: if you talk your own book for so long and for so often you'll end up believing your own crap.

The next post that I read was from Scoble himself:

Should services charge “super users”?

I don't think that it's about super users at all really.  For me I actually just question the integrity of the opinions of these people.

In his article Scoble is clearly pimping FriendFeed these days, and much of his bias against Twitter is now showing up as a bias for FriendFeed.  In 6 months time who knows what he'll be saying about either of these free tools. 

If Scoble truly did care about the 'industry' then it wouldn't actually be a question of one implementation over another, and it certainly wouldn't come down to an issue of whether 1 company was a tad faster. 

If Scoble really did care about the business uses of this software ("no business “utility” if I can’t make infinitely large friend lists and use those lists in the same way I use email) then surely he'd be less interested in massive numbers ("FriendFeed which lets 11,000 people interact with me in a public") (he passed the 20,000 mark on Twitter not long ago) and more focused on services?  But no.  For Scoble it is almost always about having the biggest numbers.

Technology and innovation bloggers such as Scoble and ReadWriteWeb seem to have too much of a vested interest in keeping things moving for the sake of drawing eyeball's for me to really take what they say too seriously.

It seems that many of the so-called 'alpha users' have started to turn their back on Twitter lately.  I've seen articles like this on ReadWriteWeb and also on other blogs too.  I think that the main source of angst is that sometimes Twitter tends to go down - and perhaps finally that they suffered a DB crash.

I find comments such as this one by ReadWriteWeb totally absurd:

Our beloved Twitter has been digging its own grave for several months now. Recently, the service has experienced an absurd amount of downtime. There have been numerous posts calling for Twitter to be replaced

These alpha freeloaders are calling for a free application to be replaced?  Who the f*ck do these people think they are?  If you are using Twitter so often that having it out of your life for a few minutes causes you to have a brain fart, then perhaps you need to either get a life, or do some work.  I agree with this comment from the Twitter 'Man Down' post:

Twitter is free - I miss it when it's down but cut 'em some slack....

I believe that a lot of the call for change probably comes from the fact that these 'alpha-types' like to lead the way.  They felt like they led us to Twitter, told us that we need to use the service to follow 5000 others, and now they are bored and need to feel important all over again.

I like Twitter, I use it 20 or 30 times a week, and it's fun.

Weezer - Pork and Beans

James - Getting Away With It

Readify's new State Manager for WA, Andy Lamb, has things well and truly up and running over in the west.  Per Andy's post from today, we will running an RDN in Perth later this month:

On the 29th May in Perth, come and see our free seminar Silverlight with Alister Jones and Reactive Programming with LINQ by Paul Stovell.

If you are in Perth, this is a great opportunity to drop in and learn about what's going on and to be a part of our successful RDN series of talks.

Cajun Dance Party - The Race

Flight Of The Conchords - Robots (Radio Version) Music Video