05.07.08
Posted in General at 4:45 am by Colin McNulty
A diary of a terrible week and an explanation of why there was no Friday Fun post this week (as promised):
- At the beginning of the week my daughter got sick, full on vomiting, the works. She nearly missed a birthday party because of it, which when you’re 7, would have been a world ending disaster.
- I’ve finally had to come to a decision I didn’t want to make about work, and it’s not a good one. Won’t bore you with the details but I’m going to have to make a slight change of direction.
- As per my last post, my Wordpress Blog was hacked, necessitating the best part of a day to upgrade it and get everything re-setup (plugins etc).
- The wife is finding it harder than she thought finding a contract as a jobbing programmer.
- A world ending event did happen to my daughter: she dropped the top off the (very rare) ice-cream I bought her, on the floor! We had floods of uncontrollable tears for about 20 minutes. Still it’s a consolation to know that she’ll remember that day for the rest of her life. I still have vivid memories of dropping the top of an ice cream with my Grandma when I was 6! One of only a handful at that age.
- The wife got sick, what the daughter had, lots of throwing up, it was pretty bad.
- I got sick! Woke up at 3am hurling my guts up. Now I know I’m a fella and there’s Man Flu and all that, but I can honestly say, it was the worst illness I’ve had for as long as I can remember. For 24-36 hours I could barely move, certainly couldn’t eat. Thankfully I’m all right now and 2 pounds lighter! Must get back on the fish oil (I’ve been lax recently.)
- I discovered that after upgrading my blog, I was locked out! Every time I logged in, I just got the Wordpress Blank Screen of Death. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a completely blank screen with nothing on it. Nothing I seemed to do could get me in. Obviously the fact that I’m writing this post (at 5am on a Saturday *sigh*) means that I fixed it, but it took all Friday afternoon to work it out. I’ll do a full post on it later, as it appears to be a common problem.
- Now that I’m better I’m back to my normal ways: waking up far too early. Why *DO* I wake up at 5am most days when I have no reason to get out of bed??
So there you have it, an appalling week by any standards. How was yours?
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30.06.08
Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization at 3:04 pm by Colin McNulty
I’ve been having some problems these last few weeks with excessive bandwidth usage and had been unable to work out why the average bandwidth used per visitor had increased five fold!
Basically I’d hit my upper bandwidth limit twice in the last week (you may had noticed) despite not loading the site with much more material than normal. Further, the webserver statistics showed that 93% of the bandwidth was being used consumed just downloading raw html files, not images or videos or anything. I was flummoxed as to what the problem was.
Then this morning I saved the home page to my PC, to see if it really was as big a file as the stats seemed to be suggesting… sure enough it was: a 900kb .html file! Why was it so big? Checking the raw html source code I was shocked to discover literally thousands of hidden links out to other sites, for all sorts of nefarious links, I’m sure your imagination can work it out.
My blog had been hacked and had all these links inserted without anyone noticing. They were hidden with a style that stopped them being displayed by your browser, but they were still there.
It only took a few minutes to delete them all, but it’s taken me all morning to upgrade the wordpress version from 2.1 to 2.5.1 I hate upgrading, it’s a pain in the butt, not least of which because of incompatibilities between the new version and all the plug-ins I have installed. This is why I’d been sitting on such an old version for so long.
The irony of the situation is this though: if the hackers hadn’t been greedy and uploaded such a huge number of links (a pointless exercise from an SEO perspective to be honest) I would never had noticed. If they’d just restrained themselves to 2-3 links, or hell, even 50, I probably would never have suspected a thing. But 800kb of hidden links is hard to miss. Just to be clear, that’s about 2000 lines of extra links.
If you don’t understand why someone would do such a thing, it’s all to do with how the search engines rank pages in their results. Basically links to your sites are like votes, the more votes you get, the more important Google thinks your site is and the higher up it lists your website when people search for stuff. It’s rather more complicated than that, as I’m sure you realise, but that’s the essence of it.
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27.06.08
Posted in General at 3:40 am by Colin McNulty
Being busy making all the Olympic weightlifting videos meant that I am a bit late posting about the developments with week with NASA and ESA. So I thought I’d roll it into a Friday Fun post too. So here’s a nice spot the difference competition, courtesy of NASA.
Whilst looking innocuous, this is one of the most monumental photographs in the history of man kinds space program. It’s the picture of the Phoenix space craft on Mars, digging in the dirt and finding ice just beneath the surface. This discovery is what is going to make a Martian Base possible.
It’s also a great spot the difference picture. Can you see the rocks of ice that have evaporated in the 2nd pic?
In other astronauty news, ESA has revealed that far from the 50,000 suspected applicants only 8,413 people from across the whole of Europe submitted an ESA Astronaut Application. The list includes just 822 people from the UK, 697 men and 167 women.
…
The quick amongst you will have spotted that 697 + 167 does not = 822! That’s because included in the break down figures are 42 people who indicated this country as their 2nd citizenship.
Either way, that’s a lot of application forms for them to trawl through. The applicants successfully making the next stage get to attend psychological testing, defined as:
Those tests aim to identify the psychological and technical skills of the applicants, who will be tested in different fields including visual memory and psychomotor aptitude.
Sounds like fun! 
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25.06.08
Posted in Crossfit, General at 6:43 pm by Colin McNulty
I’ve saved the best video till last. This is Chris, a fellow member of Crossfit Manchester, also in his first Olympic Weight lifting competition. I had the most fun putting this video together. It was great lifting with you Chris.
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24.06.08
Posted in Crossfit, General at 5:40 pm by Colin McNulty
I’ve done another video of the weekends Olympic Lifting competition as attended by Crossfit Manchester. This one is a compilation of the 4 women who were lifting.
The first is Lawraine and I’m gagging to say how old she is, but I can’t do that to a lady. Let’s just say, she has a couple of decades on me and we’re all very proud of her. Not least because of her impressive lifting, but also for having the confidence to compete in front of strangers and a judge.
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23.06.08
Posted in Crossfit, General at 5:54 pm by Colin McNulty
This is another video from the West Wythenshawe Weight Lifting club Olympic Weightlifting competition at the weekend. This time it’s Dominic, a very impressive member of Crossfit Manchester. He lifted just after me.
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22.06.08
Posted in Crossfit, General at 6:02 pm by Colin McNulty
The first video is ready of the Olympic Weightlifting competition I went to today. It wasn’t really a competition, but was done under competition conditions. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Bill and Sid from the British Weight Lifting Association were officiating there, which was very nice of them.
My elbow is still not quite 100% and I’m still building up to pre 2008 levels, but it held up well. Certainly I can feel that it’s been used today but it’s not too sore, which is good.
Several things about these lifts. Firstly I am quite pleased that I made all the lifts. I hadn’t even attempted a 55kg snatch this year and also failed to make the 80kg Clean & Jerk only this week.
The snatches looked good. Trying to criticising myself, I think my form was pretty good, though I still haven’t quite got the thigh bounce right.
The Clean and Jerks are clearly a different matter. The cleans were ok, again the thigh bounce needs work. But the Jerks were a bit ropey. The main problem I think is in the dip, I’m dipping too low and I’m pushing my bum back which is launching the bar forward in the air. This in turn forces me to jump forward which means I’m off balance at the top, as can be clearly seen!
It just comes down to practice. Having not done any Olympic lifting for all of 2008 before 3 weeks ago, I am simply a bit rusty. Still the purpose of today was to get experience of lifting in a competition setting, which was well worth it just for that. And of course, it was fun!
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21.06.08
Posted in Crossfit, General, The Zone Diet at 7:55 am by Colin McNulty
I am remaining steadily under 13st (182 lbs / 82kg) but need that final push to lose that last 1/2 stone. Since starting back at Crossfit for the last few weeks, I’ve noticed the jeans are a little loser again, and indeed my waist has dropped 1/2″ in the last month. I still feel I’m not quite putting in 100% effort to getting that last bit of fat off to drop the last few body fat percentage points. Note to self, must try harder.
I’m looking forward to the weight lifting mini competiton tomorrow. Had a Personal Training session yesterday and think I’ve worked out what I aim to do:
Snatch: 45 - 50 - 55kg
Clean & Jerk: 60 - 70 - 75kg
These lifts are a way off my Personal Bests last year of 65kg and 90kg respectively, but I’m happy to still be taking things easy and build back up slowly. As it is, these weights will be the most I’ve lifted this year. Hopefully there will be people taking videos there and I’ll get some uploaded.
Friday Funs - Sorry I keep missing the Friday fun posts! Just been too busy with work, normal schedule will resume next week.
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19.06.08
Posted in Crossfit, General at 6:03 am by Colin McNulty
Despite the fact that I am still a long way off my best for the Olympic lifts, the Snatch and Clean & Jerk, I’m entering my first competition on Sunday.
Well that sounds all very grandiose, it’s more of a dress rehearsal really at a local weight lifting club in Wythenshawe. There’s only going to be about a dozen lifters in total and there’s nothing to win as it were, but it will be done under the normal competition process. I.e. there will be an allotted lifting order, with timed sessions in which to make the lift, and the lifts will be formally judged with a buzzer and all that.
Should be good fun, though I expect my lifts to be well below what I’m capable off. I’ll probably aim for 45 -50 - 55kg in the Snatch and something like 60 - 70 - 80kg in the Clean and Jerk.
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17.06.08
Posted in General at 1:35 pm by Colin McNulty
It bothered me at the weekend, that after submitting my ESA Astronaut application, I didn’t get the confirmation email that the website said I would. Relogging in, it showed as “submitted” but no email. Patience is a virue however and I’m pleased to report that it just turned up:
Dear Colin McNulty,
We would like to inform you that your application has been submitted successfully and in time. We will now begin our evaluation and contact you within the next six weeks.
Once submitted, you can check the status of your application by browsing your data file where you can see the sentence “Your application has already been submitted and can not be changed” on each data page. This indicates a successful closure of your database.
Kind regards,
European Space Agency
Please do not respond to this email.
T minus 6 weeks and counting. 
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