I’ve been quiet lax on the blog front for a while now, both in terms of producing and consuming blog content. Curse you Twitter! So it came as quiet a surprise while reading one of Matt’s blog posts to discover my humble blog had been nominated in the Best Personal Blog category of the 2009 Irish Blog Awards. Must. Blog. More. Update: Thanks to DavyMac for the great logo!

To date, a lot of interesting applications have been built on top of the Twitter service with new apps being released almost daily, each one more ingenious than the last. In my spare time I’ve been tinkering with Ruby, my motivation being to learn something new and to see if Ruby lives up the hype that has been surrounding it in recent years. In conjunction with this I’ve also been experimenting with obtaining content from existing web sites and services, content being king after all.

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My friend John Devlin, also know as “Tripper J,” is dead 2 years today. He was 29 when he finally lost his battle against an incurable, progress and fatal disease. As a memorial I’ve setup tripperj.com. We all still miss you John.

A couple of months ago I decided to add some variety to my strength training program. The main change has been to alternate between front and back squats. The higher frequency with the back squat has brought some much needed practice to an exercise I find mechanically more difficult to perform, quite possibly due to difficulties with my right knee I had when I was a teenager. Through the influence of stronglifts.

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As any weightlifter knows, protein is an integral part of any diet. To this end I was picking up some chicken and whole milk the other day and you can imagine my amusement when it came time to hand over my shiny pennies that this was the amount owed: Rock on!

Before calling it a day last night I pushed out another release of my “toy” web-application, hometi.me. Thank you Capistrano! I mentioned last month that I was intending on following the “release early, release often” paradigm with this project, but as always, life had other plans and I found myself doing very little hacking outside of the 9-5. Regardless, I believe this release provides a great deal of extra functionality and I’m content to just have gotten the code out the door.

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For nearly 3 months my strength training has revolved around squatting 3 times a week and this is my current program: Monday Front squat Neutral-grip chin up Parallel bar dip Wednesday Back squat Overhead press Row Friday Front squat Dumbbell bench press Deadlift All squats are done to below parallel with all free-weight exercises being performed for 3 sets of 5 repetitions, after warm-ups, with the exception of the deadlift for which my “work” consists of a single set of 5 reps.

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When I’m out in a Chinese restaurant my favorite dishes to order usually involve seafood, with salted chili squid being a regular delight. Squid is something I had never even thought of cooking before and recently my good friend Nick K mentioned that it was not only easy to cook but also inexpensive to buy from the ethnic store just down the road from me. In my naivity I presumed the squid I purchased to resemble that served to hungry diners, albeit uncooked and frozen, so you can imagine my surprise when I defrosted a box and saw a bunch of these guys staring out at me:

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I’ve just released the first iteration of hometi.me which provides an answer to the important question of is it home time yet? My general dislike of working for a living inspired me to craft a python script during my tenure at $BIG_CORP and last week the creativity bug bit me and I decided to quickly develop a web-application and get it publicly available. Thanks CakePHP! I’m following the “release early, release often” philosophy and as such this iteration only has the most basic of functionality but I’ve some more interesting/useful things planned and will get them out as soon as possible.

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Once again it was my weekly deadlift session this morning but unfortunately I have no injuries to share with you all this time:( My lower-back and hips took a battering though so I might me complaining tomorrow and there would appear to be a possibility of having some tasty bruising over my left clavicle and anterior deltoid from doing front-squats of which I’ll post a photo of if they “shine through” :)

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