Property Investments, Landlording, CrossFit, Nutrition & Safety

This is a compilation video of both real road crashes and public safety adverts. It’s a stunning reminder of just how dangerous the roads are and how it only takes a split second to be in a life changing (or ending) event.

If you can honestly say you’ve never been distracted whilst driving, not even for a second, then feel free not to watch this video. If you ever have been though, as I have, it’s a timely reminder that when you drive a car, death is only a quarter turn of the steering wheel away.

WARNING: Graphic scenes, most fake, some real:

I had a great day yesterday at Crossfit 3D in Manchester, attending a SPEAR self defence course.

SPEAR is a self defence system that’s based on using your basic human physiology to make yourself and your stance as strong as possible, and I can honestly say, I was amazed how doing something as simple as opening your hand and splaying your fingers, can massively increase the strength in your arm.

We did hours of drills and exercises to show specific traits and strengths of the SPEAR system, always with a view to what happens in the real world and in a real situation. It was intense. It was physical. It was bruising (but then I was paired with a professional rugby player, so it was never going to be easy grappling with someone who does it for a living!). But it was educational, insightful and a lot of fun.

But most of all, I am now better equipped to handle myself in a real situation than I was before. If you get the chance to have a go, I’d definitely recommend a SPEAR course. Here’s a quick intro video that gives you a flavour:

I was very interested to see this article on the BBC website this week on a study from Harvard University: ‘Sausage not steak’ increases heart disease risk of particular interest was this key quote:

“the lifestyle factors associated with eating unprocessed meats and processed meats were similar, but only processed meats were linked to higher risk.”

That’s a really telling conclusion. Personally I think it’s a load of old nonsense that eating red meat is linked to health issues, the reason being, several studies I’ve seen lump processed meats with red meats, when assessing risk factors. It’s very refreshing to see this study do the exact opposite and conclude that red meat does not increase the risk of heart disease!

The world’s dietary advice can be changed, one study at a time.

So far in my life there have been 3 bits of technology that I’ve bought, all of which I never thought I’d need or really use much, but now couldn’t imagine my life without them. They are:

1. My first Mobile Phone – Duh, I know!  But like many people, I was sure I’d hardly ever use a mobile phone, I mean, I’d survived fine without one all these years right?  Yeah, clearly silly once I got one.
2. Sat Nav – “What’s wrong with a map.  I hardly ever get lost.”  Yeah, I remember saying that many times, but oh man, sat nav is an awesome bit of kit.  I note that there are still some poor people stuck without it.  They’ll come round.  😉
3. The iPhone – I always swore I’d never by a Mac, or any other Apple product for that matter.  But I have to say, the iPhone is AMAZING.  It was everything my previous smart phone should have been.  The things you can do with it are simply incredible and I can’t imagine life without it now.

So that’s 1-3 and as the iPhone was a recent acquisition, I didn’t really expect to come across another bit of revolutionary tech so soon. But today I did and I have to say, when I saw the demo video of it, my jaw was on the floor! This might be the single most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen, and will ever see, until I take delivery of my own personal flying car.

For anyone in education or who works in an office or has any contact with clients or suppliers, this is going to replace the humble pen: It is the LiveScribe Pulse Smart Pen. Put simply this pen:

• Is a computer in a pen
• It records all audio as you write
• It can play back the audio, just by clicking on the words you wrote on the page
• It understands what you’re “clicking” on with the pen. You can draw interactive menus!
• You can upload everything you wrote straight into your computer. No scanner needed

Look, words will never describe properly what this “pen” (I use the term loosely) can do. Check out these 2 videos and then checkout just how cheap it is. I can see this appearing in a parcel in my near future.

Given the hung parliament, I thought the UK election results map was interesting, as it really shows the partisan nature of various regions throughout the UK. I know it’s a slightly simplistic interpretation, but you can see in the map below, that the Conservatives control most of England, especially in rural areas, whereas the Labour strength comes mostly from highly populated inner city areas.

Yes of course there’s an argument for how constituency boundaries are drawn, but it’s very difficult to have an unbiased opinion on that, and I accept that my own view would be clearly clouded by the outcome that I’d want. But what has not occurred to me before, is that 2 of Labour’s clear areas of dominance, are South Scotland and South Wales. In fact Labour have 41 seats in Scotland as a whole, and 26 seats in Wales, compared with the Tories’ 1(!) and 8 respectively.

So consider this: if Labour ever really allowed the devolution of Scotland and Wales and this general election turned into an English election, that would result in a loss of 67 Labour seats, compared with a loss of only 9 conservative seats, meaning a swing to the Tories of 58, or a fifth of Labour’s power base. It would also reduce the number of MPs in the English parliament by 100, to 550. In the current election then, this would have given the Tories a clear majority with 298 seats (54%). Compared with Labour’s 191 seats (35%).

It is no surprise at all then that Labour rejected the Scottish National Party’s suggestion of a “Progressive Alliance” with Labour and Plaid Cymru (Welsh nationalist party). I can’t ever see Labour agreeing to the full political devolution of Scotland or Wales, as to do so would be political suicide.

Robb Wolf has be at the forefront of dietary and lifestyle advice in the Crossfit community for as long as I can remember and I’m quite looking forward to getting his first book, which is now available on pre-order at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk:

I received 4 copies of this phishing email today:

If you don’t know, a “phishing” (pronounced “fishing”) website, is a fake website that tries to pass itself off as a real website in order to get you to enter your login credentials, which they then steal your login and use on the legitimate website. So this phishing email, is trying to get me to go to the phishing website and enter my Google AdWords account details. Typically scammers try it with bank accounts, but this is the first time I’ve seen it for Google AdWords.

Why AdWords? Because if they get your adwords account (if you have one) they can put their own ads up and spend your advertising budget for their own websites! Now it’s no surprise that having been to the website (note I’ve disabled the phishing links to it in the email copy above, except for the real link at the bottom), it looks completely legitimate, just like the normal Google login page.

How do I know it’s a phishing email / website then? There are several give aways, but the main one is the url; it’s not the regular google.com one. Also, you can tell the url without even clicking the link, just by hovering your mouse over the link in your email program, you get a popup that shows you the url:

You see that “google-sn.com” is not google.com. That extra “-sn” shouldn’t be there. This is subtle I know, but if you want to protect yourself online, you need to do one simple thing: pay attention to the urls, that is the actual domains / website names that you visit when you have an account that has anything to do with money. This alone tells me this if a phishing attack. But there are several other tells, to use a poker term, that you can look for to see if you’ve got a phishing email. They were:

– I received 4 copies of the same email, I would expect a legitimate email from Google to have sent only one.

– There was no email address in the “To:” field of the email, I would have expected to see not only my own personal email address here, but also specifically the email address I use for my Google AdWords account (I have several hundred email addresses!).

– There was a broken image in the email, meaning that it had a blank square with a red X in. It probably was meant to be the Google logo. I wouldn’t have expected a real email to be properly constructed.

– The email started “Hello,” and didn’t address me by name. Google know my name and use it in their emails. Further, there were no personally identifying bits of information in the email, it was completely generic.

– Finally, whilst I have an AdWords account, I’m not currently running any ads, so there are none to disable!

Anyway, I hope that helps someone avoid getting ripped off!

It’s such a shame that such a worthy cause (Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital) uses such an inappropriate technique to raise money: selling unhealthy sweets to kids.

Apart from the well documented negative health issues of sweets that are high in sugar, glucose syrup and E numbers, I also found hydrogenated vegetable oil (a source of cancer inducing trans fats) and palm oil (at least they admitted it) which is the cause a massive environmental damage across the world. Palm oil is becoming a bigger and bigger issue at the moment.

IMO as a children’s charity, Great Ormond Street Hospital should seriously re-evaluate their fund raising strategy to one that promotes health not disease in kids, and one that is more environmently reasponsible.

It proved to be a busy weekend. I got the train to London on Saturday to see my old Uni mate who emigrated to Oz some 7 years ago and was back in Blighty for a visit. Only my train was cancelled so I had to get another via Bristol. I stopped off in Reading to meet my brother on the way (I never knew you were allowed to break a train journey and hop off at a station along the way!). Then continued into London.

The London Underground was a pain with a lots of line closures, e.g. the entire circle line was shut all weekend! Still I got there fine and got to spend quality time with my old uni mates. Just like old times. Awesome day and evening.

Off to Ladywell and stayed over at a friends for the night. Then Sunday morning, sporting a reasonable hangover, I popped into the Crossfit Level 1 cert at Crossfit Central London (see map) and met the very nice Brian who runs the place, and the very pregnant Rachel Steadman who’s travelled all the way down from Manchester on her “due week”!

Fought with the trains getting back to Wales. First the train broke and never arrived at Paddington. The replacement train was late. We were stopped for 15 minutes outside Slough for no good reason. The line was closed between Swindon and Bristol so we had to take a detour, which meant that we pulled into Bristol Parkway in one direction, the reversed out going the other way. I’ve never known a train to change direction mid journey!

Thankful the land lady recorded the Grand Prix for me, which I watched whilst doing my ironing (rock and roll, lol!). Nothing like a bit of rain to spice up a motor race. It was a great race. And I’ve ended the day by relisting my bike on eBay as the guy who won the last auction, never contacted me. He didn’t pay and I didn’t hear a peep from him! I’m still very annoyed by that. Why would you bid on a bike that you weren’t prepared to buy? It’s not like he got carried away as his first bid was the winning bid. Anyway, it’s back on again now, so hopefully will do better the second time round.