Continuing what appears to be turning into a series detailing my training injuries I present the following: I nipped my finger loading extra plates onto the bar during the warm-up sets of my last deadlift session and I must say it looked more “impressive” covered with magnesium carbonate and dripping blood ;) More haste, less speed may be required next time.

I’ve just shutdown the beige box that was home to this blog for just over a year and a half until I started renting a VPS. I had intended to shutdown this machine since the start of the year but never got around to it and after a techie chat on IM with Dave Dripps earlier in the day decided to just “pull the finger out” and do the needful.

Read more...

Yep, you guessed it, today was deadlift day:

I’ve now completed my third week of a new strength program. This program involves full-body training 3 times a week with squatting each session (!) and deadlifting once a week. Until I read Practical Programming I didn’t know that bodybuilders were generally the only weight-lifters to squat once per week, or to “train legs” to use their lingo, but apparently many other weight-lifting disciplines are built upon more frequent squatting, especially power-lifting and olympic-lifting.

Read more...

$WEB_CORP has taken on the maintenance contract of a particular site and the client has asked for some changes to be made along with fixing up some SQL injection vulnerabilities. My first step was to GET all the site’s scripts via FTP so I could create a local DEV instance of it and was surprised to see the following: $ ls -1 index*.asp index-old.asp index.11May2007.asp index.11Oct2006.asp index.13March2006.asp index.18aug2006.asp index.20Feb2007.asp index.20Jan2006.asp index.

Read more...

Johnny has kicked the wheel off and BLUG meetings are starting up again on the last Wednesday of the month, starting this evening at 6pm in The Tap House, Lower Crescent, just off Botanic Avenue, Belfast. Some additional information is available on the BLUG Facebook group and on the Belfast Linux newsgroup. See you there!

It’s nearly time to get your geek-on… Check out Andy’s blog for the skinny on BarCamp Belfast 2008. I hope to see you all there!

I’ve just released the latest iteration of my “professional” site, stevenwilkin.com. There’s the possibility the designers I’m working with will think my design-fu is weak, but the site badly needed something as it has been barely put to use in the years I’ve owned it. I don’t know how the Steven Wilkin web experience will evolve but the words of Eric S. Raymond are ringing true when he mentions not hiding behind a hacker-style alias so I may put more emphasis on this domain in the future.

Read more...

In my post on batch preparation of oats, written in response to Trent’s post, I mentioned that I also prepare the boiled eggs I enjoy for breakfast in advance. At the weekend past I’d just boiled a saucepan of eggs, cooled them with cold water and put them into a tupperware box when I remembered my previous post, so I took a quick snap to provide a follow-up: Whole, boiled eggs will keep for up to a week in their shells in the fridge and provide an excellent source of complete protein, saturated fat and dietary cholesterol along with a hearty dose of Vitamin D, all of which are essential to those pursuing an active lifestyle which includes weight training.

Read more...

There have been times in my life when my job description could well have been best described as being a professional coffee drinker. These days however I’ve found gainful employment but continue to consume vast quantities of the stuff and even use coffee nomenclature to name my new *nix boxes. During a caffeine-fuelled session with my domain registrar I happened to lookup professionalcoffeedrinker.com; it was available, all sense went out the window and my money and myself were swiftly parted.

Read more...