30.04.08
Posted in Crossfit, General, The Zone Diet at 8:14 am by Colin McNulty
Fish Oil Supplements are highly recommended not only on the Zone Diet, but also by Crossfit. I’m finally prepared to make a recommendation for a supplier that meets my own exacting standards.
Despite spending many hours searching and contacting suppliers in the UK, I eventually gave up trying to find a reliable UK supplier of properly and verifiably refined Fish Oil (Pharmaceutical Grade if you care for that term) to the proportions and quality levels as define in The Zone Diet. I didn’t want to go to the States as I expected shipping to be prohibitive and didn’t trust them to arrive basically.
However I’ve found a US Fish Oil supplier that has the right product, publishes the quality reports, delivers within 10 days to the UK and most importantly, is cheap by most standards. I ordered 2 bottles of 120 capsules, at a strength which requires only 2 caps per day (2.5g of EPA/DHA per day) which is 4 months supply, for less than £24 including delivery, which works at a bargain £1.40 for a weeks supply, or 20p a day if you prefer.
Compare this to the Holland & Barrett Fish Oil at £32 inc p&p for 55 days worth (at 9 caps per day for a matching EPA/DHA dose) which is a vastly inferior product and works out 3x more expensive at £4.07 per week. This is the Fish Oil I’m taking:
The more you order, the cheaper shipping becomes. However here’s the rub: if you order more than $35 worth of product (excluding shipping price) your package may get stopped by UK customs and you’ll have to pay VAT on the import. Despite this, if you order a years supply it is slightly cheaper (about 50p per month cheaper). However I went for the less risky option and ordered 2 bottles @ $30 ish and avoided all that nonsense. Seemed like the most sensible option to me.
So there you have it, a top quality fish oil with very low levels of those nasty PCB’s and Dioxins etc, at a high purity level (about 70%), all at a price cheaper than the high street.
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25.04.08
Posted in General at 5:49 am by Colin McNulty
Don’t ask me how but I stumbled onto a funny condom advert the other day so thought I’d post a few up. These are all completely safe to watch, no nudity or swearing or anything, although I wouldn’t show them round my daughter, simply because I don’t yet want to answer the obvious first question: “What’s a condom for?”
The consequences of not using Condoms:
The effects of keeping Condoms in the car:
Apparently this advert was banned, but I remember seeing it on TV and laughing. Can’t think why it was banned?
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22.04.08
Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization at 9:49 pm by Colin McNulty
Wow been a busy week or so.
- Have had a client who’s getting slow screwed by his arogant web developer who refuses to take responsibility for their mistakes and I’m playing piggy in the middle.
- Been working on promoting several client sites.
- Having issues with one of my outsourced staff not following instructions.
- Having to fire some outsourced authors and recruit others.
- Dealing with company issues.
- Reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen
- At not least of which, I’ve been working on a new air conditioning website.
Speaking of which, the new air con site hasn’t yet been spidered by Google since it’s new pages were launched. This post will serve as an interesting SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) experiment. As I’m sure you know all search engines work on links to sites and Google swings by this blog once or twice a week so should pick up these links shortly. I’m betting a few well placed links to the TotalHeatControl.com Sitemap and the 3 main categories of portable air conditioning (mobile air con units with casters), split air conditioning (have the noisy compressor outside and quiet air handles inside) and commercial air conditioning (hugely powerful air con units for an industrial setting) should do the job.
On a personal note, the golfers elbow is still a problem, and I seem to have developed a bad back this last week, and oddly a sore bone in my foot. I’m a wreck, lol.
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18.04.08
Posted in General at 9:21 am by Colin McNulty
I don’t know why I never thought about this before as it seems obvious to me now, but the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant. I’m not saying that it’s min and max distance varies or wobbles, I mean that the moon is getting further and further away every year. I don’t know why I thought that it would have settled down by now to be fixed.
The obvious implication is that one day, the moon will escape earth’s orbit! That’s kind of important. I’ve seen programs on what happens when the sun expands and goes Red Giant on us in about 5 billion years, but no programs on what happens when the moon shoots off into outer space. I guess that way before it actually “leaves”, it’s gravitational pull will have diminished to the point that we no longer have tides, which would be kind of bad. Tides have been credited with being fundamental to the evolution of life.
But another new thing I learnt yesterday was that the moons relative size and orbit, i.e. it’s gravitational pull is critical to maintaining our “polar tilt”. Apparently without the moons gravity, our polar axis would vary wildly from 0degs to 90degs (currently 23degs if memory serves). This would of course cause chaos as the north and south poles turned into deserts, and Africa (say) grew the next polar ice cap!
How far away do you think the moon needs to get to cause a change? Let’s say that the gravitation effect needs to reduce by a half for us to significantly notice it. Newton’s Universal Gravity Equation says: F = GMm/R² The important term for us here is R, the distance between the 2 objects. For 1 over R squared to result in a number half it’s original value, R must become approximately 1.4R. I.e. the distance increases by 40%.
Currently the distance from the earth to the moon is about 385,000km so the question is, when will this happen? Assuming constant drift (which of course it isn’t but makes the maths a little easier for our simple needs) the moon gets:
- 3.8cm further away each year
- 3.8m each century
- 38m each millennia
- 38km every million years
So in a million years it will have got 0.01% further away. But we need it to get 40% further away, which will take approximately 4,000 million years or 4 billion years. Ok panic over, that’s about the same timescale as the sun going Red Dwarf on us, which I think will be a far more significant event than the moon getting 40% further away and it’s gravitational pull on us halving.
Aren’t Friday mornings fun! 
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15.04.08
Posted in General, The Zone Diet at 7:08 pm by Colin McNulty
- Always eat within one hour of waking.
- Never let more than five hours go by without having a Zone meal or snack and don’t forget your bedtime snack.
- Keep a food diary and note how you feel after a meal. Make a list of which meals keep you in the Zone.
- When you go to the store, make sure to have a list in hand with ingredients for at least two or three Zone meals. Then you won’t be tempted to buy everything in sight while trying to create Zone meals on the spot.
- Never leave the house hungry, or you’ll be tempted by all the food waved in your face everywhere you go.
- In dips, replace part or all of the sour cream with cottage cheese. Place the cottage cheese in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Add seasonings and blend again.
- Instead of skimping with a small amount of mayo and having dry tuna, try using strained yogurt instead. Spice it up if you want.
- When making guacamole in the Zone, use cut up red, green and orange bell peppers instead of tortilla chips.
- Take any type of fruit you like, (lemons, limes, oranges, strawberries, or any combination of fruits), slice, place in a pitcher, fill with ice and water, and place in the fridge overnight. Stir just before serving.
- Miss mashed potatoes? Try mashed cauliflower instead.
- Slice zucchini (length wise), brush lightly with olive oil and broil until crisp/tender (about 5 minutes). Then use the zucchini like you would lasagna noodles.
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11.04.08
Posted in General at 7:56 am by Colin McNulty
Apologies to Americans in general, but these videos are nicely stereotypical, from an English point of view:
A predictable reaction to the Hawaii Chair:
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10.04.08
Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization at 3:24 pm by Colin McNulty
This is a Thursday Thirteen Meme post:
- Jogging
- Sit ups
- Press ups
- Squats
- Back extensions
- Pull ups
- Box Jumps
- Wall Balls
- Lunge Walks
- Burpees
- Ball slams
- Cleans
- Snatches
Tada!
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09.04.08
Posted in General at 8:48 am by Colin McNulty
Had a bit of dilemma this morning, what do you think I should have done?
My 7 year old daughter went to a local kiddies play centre at the weekend with a friend and her Dad. This is the second time they’ve taken her so I gave her £10 and told her to insist on paying. She also took her purse which had £11 in, which constitutes the bulk of her savings.
I’m not entirely sure why she took all her money as she’s meant to be saving up to buy some books. Yes I know, I feel a bit mean making my kid pay for her own books when as a parent I am delighted that she’s choosing to read rather than watch TV, well sometimes anyway. But we’ve bought her a lot of books and are making her pay for extra one’s in the series, and it is (meant to be) a good exercise in teaching her the value of money. She had £11 and the next set cost £16 and so at £1 pocket money per week, she knew she had 5 weeks to wait, providing that she didn’t spend any.
Anyway, this morning I remembered to ask if she had in fact paid for entry out of the £10 I gave her. She said no, that she’d tried but her friends Dad hadn’t let her. “Ok,” I said, “can I have my £10 back please?” That’s when it all started to unravel.
First it appears that her friend hadn’t taken as much money as her, so my daughter gave her friend £5 out of the £10 I gave her. You know, it’s sweet that my kid is so generous, but giving away money for no good reason, that’s not a good thing. Then she spent £3 on popcorn, for her and her friend. Ok that I can understand, I gave her the money for the trip and she spent it on stuff there. So that leaves £2, which she happily gave back. But it gets worse.
In discussions about the £5 given away, we decided that she would have to pay that money back to me. The options were to pay out of her savings or lose pocket money for 5 weeks. I didn’t want it to drag out so said that I would prefer it out of her savings, what an evil Dad that made me feel! But this is one of those “cruel to be kind” moments where hopefully a little hardship now will help her learn a valuable lesson later in life. But on opening her piggie bank, there was only a pound there, of course, because she’d taken £11 in her purse to the play area.
However on opening her purse, there was only 5 pence inside! “Where’s the £11 you took?” I asked….. her face dropped…. “I took it out to count it.” she replied “I must have left it there!”. So she took £21 in total out for the afternoon, didn’t pay to get in, gave £5 away, spent £3 on popcorn, and left the rest there, all bar 5p! That’s her entire savings gone, and she still owes me £3!
So what do I do? Do I say there there, never mind, forget the money you you spent that wasn’t yours, and I’ll replace what you lost? As a loving Dad, that’s what I want to do. But if I do that, what will she learn from this? Will she learn that money is a precious resource that should be looked after and cared for? Or will she learn she can do what she wants, give money away, spend 3 weeks pocket money on junk food, loose the rest, but don’t worry, Dad will bail her out each time? What happens when she’s at Uni and does the same thing and calls me to ask for money to pay the rent and buy food, cos she’s been clubbing all week?
But when faced with a repentant 7 year old in tears, cos she’s not only lost all her money (which she was saving up to buy books!) and also obviously disappointed Mum and Dad, it’s difficult to be harsh with her. I think she should ask her friend for the £5 back, but the wife disagrees. I also think we should find chores for her to do to earn extra pocket money over the next month. I have also considered calling the play centre to see if any money was found, it’s unlikely, but I could pretend that it was and supply the money anyway. But am I undermining the lesson if I do that?
It’s tricky being a father sometimes you know!
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05.04.08
Posted in Crossfit, General at 12:24 pm by Colin McNulty
I’m feeling very pleased with myself today. I went for a morning run round my 1 mile route, this time deciding to take it easy rather than Pose running for time. I already had in mind that I might try to extend the distance, as previously when I’d done an intentionally slower run, I’d felt that I could have continued.
I was in 2 minds mind about how far to actually extend it, but in the end I ran another whole lap, for a total distance of 2 miles! At 35, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever run that far without walking. In fact my previous “distance record” (lol) is the single mile I ran back in May 2007 which was a first for me.
I know to most people it’s doesn’t sound much, but it’s a major breakthrough I think. For the first time I appear to really managed to reach a stead state whilst running. By that I mean that the current 100m say, feels the same in terms of tiredness / pain etc, as the previous 100m. These frequent mile runs have started to bring that out, the latter half doesn’t feel much worse than I do at the end of the first half. Given that, there’s not much to stop me running further.
I do think running on roads on the hill I live on is not doing me any good though, as the frequent cambers make running tricky. At the end of the 2 miles today, it was really the pain in my right hip that made me stop.
Next and final target is 3 miles or 5k. That’s as far as I think I need or want to get up to. I have no desire to be a “runner” as I don’t believe in the health implications of it, and to be honest, it’s a dull form of exercise compared to Crossfit. It shouldn’t be too far off now though.
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04.04.08
Posted in General at 10:29 am by Colin McNulty
Got to be the best April Fool since Microsoft announced they would be launching their own free version of Linux, called Winux!
Project Virgle by Richard Branson:
And now by Google founders, Sergey and Larry:
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