Property Investments, Landlording, CrossFit, Nutrition & Safety

I’ve just realised that I never got round to posting up the picture of me and Giles Greenwood, one of the coaches at Bethnal Green. Well here it is:

If you don’t remember me mentioning him before, Giles is the British Record holder for the Snatch (180 kg / 396 lbs) and Clean & Jerk (207.5 kg / 456 lbs) in the 105+ weight category. As such, he’s lifted more than any other British person, since they reset all the records that is.

That photo is taken when he did both those lifts in the 2002 Commonwealth Games, he had less hair back then, though he’s since shaved it all off again. Giles took Gold in the Snatch, Bronze for the C&J and Silver over all. Along with Patrick Atteridge, he’s a dedicated and committed weightlifting coach, with a cutting and typical English sarcastic sense of humour.

I’ve previously posted an amazing video of someone editing a fat girl, thin, with photoshop. These are 2 more videos in the same vein. I’m amazed by what you can do with PhotoShop!

It just goes to show, that you can’t believe what you see on TV or in the magazines. This video is the reverse though, what if Celebrities we chubbers?!?

I’ve finally got round to doing the video of me lifts at the 2009 BWLA British Masters Weightlifting Championships. For the record, I was lifting in M1 (Males age 35-39) in the 85kg category: I weighed in at 80.3kg (177 lbs / 12 stone 9).

I’ve posted before about my attempts to lift the 175kg qualifying total, e.g. at the BWLA Northern Masters a couple of months ago. In brief, despite not having made the 175kg qualifying total (adding together the best Snatch and best Clean & Jerk) I was allowed to enter the competition. As a result, my aim was to lift 175kg on the day, basically to justify my presence at the tournament. This is how I did:

This is a perfect example of why crash tests are performed. As much as we hate red tape and bureaucracy, it’s a fact that it does save lives. Or would you like to be driving this Chinese truck in just a 40mph crash:

Don’t fancy a truck? How about a Chinese car:

Nope? How about a Chinese 4×4… I think we might be seeing a pattern here:

There are so many things I want to post up on this blog, but am finding it soooo hard to find the time. I’m currently working a 7 day week, crammed into 5 days, 2 of which are shorter days due to commuting to Newport, and trying to be a Dad, Husband and Home Owner at the weekend (and buy a motorbike, more on that if I can find the time, or checkout pictures of my new custom bobber on facebook).

Here’s today’s time table for example:

6:15 – Up and out of bed for the 3 S’s.
6:30 – Prepare breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack.
6:50 – Drive to work.
7:00 – Arrive at work, eat breakfast at desk.
12:00 – Break for pre-prepared lunch.
12:30 – Back to work.
17:00 – Eat pre-prepared afternoon snack at desk.
19:30 – Leave work (12 hour day, excluding lunch) and drive straight to the gym.
20:00 – Arrive at gym and do yesterday’s Crossfit Manchester workout. Ouch, that row sucked! I did 10 x 3 Front Squats all at 97.5kg (85% of PB) and the row achieved 962m total.
21:00 – Finish at gym, drive to the house in Newport.
21:30 – Arrive “home”, get changed.
21:40 – Prepare something to eat.
21:50 – Sit down to eat
22:00 – Wash up the dishes (pesky landland hasn’t got a dishwasher!!)
22:10 – Put a load of washing on from last week.
22:15 – Iron 4 shirts
22:30 – Make bed with fresh sheets and stuff.
22:40 – Turn on pooter, read and process 27 emails since yesterday.
23:20 – Write this blog post.
23:40 – Get clothes from washing machine and hang up.
23:50 – Get ready for bed.
00:00 – Lights out… it starts again at 06:15 tomorrow!

Rinse and repeat with minor variations 5 days a week.

You may have noticed that my blog has been offline for a couple of days. To be honest, I’m not sure how it happened, but I have discovered the cause. The process of fixing it may prove beneficial to others, so I’ll detail it here. Here’s what the problem looked like:

As you can see, that’s of no help. So the first thing to check was whether the blog WordPress admin pages were working. Nope, same error there. So it’s off to the trusty cPanel to check the server logs. Clicking the “Error Log” gave a lot more information:

Aha, now we’re getting somewhere:

SoftException in Application.cpp:252: File “/home/xxxxx/public_html/blog/index.php” is writeable by group

Now this makes no sense at first, what’s a SoftException and what’s a writeable group? Here’s my simple interpretation, a soft exception is an error, which in this case isn’t to do with the file contents itself, but the real clue is the “[file] is writeable by group” bit.

Writeable is a permission (like read or execute) and group is one of the 3 types of user that you can set permissions for: Owner, Group and Public. So it appears that our problem is to do with the file permissions for the index.php file, specifically that the Group set, has writeable permissions, which isn’t correct. Now it’s off to the cPanel “File Manager” to check the permissions:

You can see the permissions are set to “0777“. Don’t worry too much about this, but you do need to know that this is wrong and it should be 755 in most cases. In fact, it wasn’t just index.php that was set to 777, but every file and every folder! I can’t imagine what has caused this, but I assume it was a dodgy upgrade script. Either way, now to fix it by setting the permissions back to 755.

I use an ftp plugin for Firefox called FireFTP which allows this. Selecting all the files and folders using Ctrl+A, right clicking and selecting “Properties (incl contents)” and after a few minutes of processing, you get a permissions dialog box up:

Just untick the Write boxes against the Group and Public users, and tick the “All Contained Folders” and “All Contained Files”

Click OK and wait for a few minutes whilst Fire FTP ripples through all your files and folders resetting the permissions, and Bob’s your uncle, Internal Server errors and “is writable by group” errors are gone and the WordPress blog is back up!

This is a great Heineken ad, probably one of the best I’ve seen:

Now I don’t watch the x-factor, but this magic illusion is astonishing, no matter what show it’s on:

What a torrid few days it’s been. One of our cats “Snap” has been ill since the new year with a wounds in his leg and behind his neck that won’t heal. We’ve been through 7 different treatments, 4 types of bandage, 3 collars, 2 vets, £700 and he’s been incarcerated in the living room for 10 weeks.

Sadly it all came to no avail and after getting gangrene in his leg, we had to take the decision to have him put to sleep on Friday. It was made worse by the fact that I wasn’t at home and the family had to deal with it without me. It’s always sad to lose a cat, especially when we’ve put in such an effort to treat him, he was only 4 years old too. In fact, it’s the very first cat we’ve had to put down, others have been run over or simply gone missing. Jadzia was very upset, as I’m sure you can imagine.

I’m beginning to wonder if naming cats in a theme when you get them is a good idea. We got 3 cats at once and so called them Snap, Crackle and Pop. First Pop disappeared when we were on holiday and now Snap has gone, leaving just Crackle. We also got Romulus and Remus, but Romulus got run over round the corner. Somewhere along the line, Crackle and Remus doesn’t have quite the same ring to it…

Then this morning whilst at work, I get a call from a crying little girl: she’s woken up to find her hamster is dead in its cage. Losing 2 pets in 4 days, that’s not good! It makes me feel terrible for working away from home too, as I’m not there to help with Daddy comfort and burial duties. At 2 years old, it’s not a terrible age for a hamster, and given the number of times it escaped and was chased by the cats in the house (once actually getting properly caught!) it’s been lucky to live that long to be honest.

Not a good week.

Yesterday was my best lifting event yet, by far. To say I’m extremely pleased, is a major understatement. The goal of the day was to lift the 175kg qualifying total, as much as anything, to justify my attendance there. (This is because they let me go, even though I hadn’t managed to lift the 175 qualifying weight before.)

To do this I needed something like a 75kg snatch and a 100kg clean and jerk. Considering my personal best for Snatch was 70kg and I’ve only ever got 100kg on the C&J once before, that was always going to be tough. My recent terrible form hasn’t helped (getting 70kg snatch only 3 times in the last 35ish attempts!) nor was doing my shoulder in last week. On top of that, apparently the rules are that you have to start within 10kg of the qualifying weight, so I had to start at 70kg and 95kg. It entered my mind that I might actually bomb out (miss all 3 lifts) of the snatch!

Still, fortune favours the bold and all that, so after getting up at 5am for the 3 hour drive up to Lilleshall National Sports centre, near Newport, Shropshire I arrived for the 8:30 weigh in and weighed in at 80.3kg. Bang in the middle of the 85kg category (77 – 85kg).

It was basically me and Mark Beck lifting together at the start, and we pretty much took it in turns. I warmed up to two 65kg snatches, and didn’t dare try a 70 in the warm up for fear of missing it and trashing my already shaky confidence. I wanted to go out at least having made all my warm up lifts. I was pleased with the fact that the warm up wasn’t bothering my shoulder at all, so whatever I’ve done to it (it hurts to press the buttons my car radio for example), it wasn’t weightlifting!

Cutting a long story short, I got the 70kg snatch fine, which was a major surprise to me. Sadly my remote control of the camera failed and I didn’t get it on tape. Whilst Mark was doing his 75kg snatch, I ran round to reset the camera and trotted back in time to go out for the big one, my 2nd lift and first go at the elusive 75kg, something I’ve missed twice before in competitions: at the Yorkshire and NE Counties Open, and at the Northern Masters.

I was nervous as hell for the 75kg snatch, but was determined and very pleased when it shot up no problem. New PB, woot! The issue for me has been getting the bar to stop in the right position over my head, so that it’s over my centre of gravity and I can stand up. This time it did and up I popped. I was very pleased. Suddenly however, I was being asked what my next weight was going to be…. I hadn’t given it any thought, the idea that I’d get both my first 2 opening lifts had never crossed my mind! I opted for 77kg, which seemed like the right thing to do.

I can’t wait to get the video uploaded, cos I can tell you, the 77kg was the best snatch I’ve ever done, it was perfect. The bar stopped in just the right place and I got extremely low under it. 77kg, another personal best, and a 10% jump to boot. 28 hours later, I’m still smiling!

After trying to sabotage myself in the warm up for the clean and jerk, by hitting myself in the neck with a 50kg bar, the C&Js actually went very well as well. My opening 95kg was sound and the big 100kg was really great to get up. I failed a 103, but I was past caring by then, I’d beaten my target of 175, instead getting 177kg and was (and am) very pleased with the day’s events. Sadly, the camera failed completely and I missed all the clean & jerks. I’m hoping to get some footage off other peoples flip videos next weekend.

In a final bonus, I was expecting to come 3rd of 3, in the face of competition from a Scottish champion and a Northern Ireland champ. As it turned out, the NI guy came in over weight and so was bumped up to the next category up. The Scottish guy (a very nice fella by the name of Ian Robertson) has been lifting since he was 14 (that’s 25 years) so it’s no real surprise that be won by a large margin. Still, it meant I was 2nd (out of 2, lol) and have another nice trophy to show for it. I’ll get whatever videos etc uploaded when I can.

It was also great to see Pat Atteridge again, as well as the 4 very impressive lifters from his London weightlifting club at Bethnal Green. And last bu not least, it was a pleasure to lift with Mark and see him qualify for the British Seniors, an immensely impressive performance for a 39 year old!