Property Investments, Landlording, CrossFit, Nutrition & Safety

I’m not entirely sure if this video is working, but here goes, the new and full Theatrical StarTrek movie trailer is out. Actually I’ve found 2 new ones:

This is star trek trailer #4 I think:

I posted about the old star trek trailer here.

I recently watched a program about space and NASA and was amazed to discover that the space agencies are tracking over 8,000 items of space debris orbiting the planet! Thinking about it, that sort of makes sense given the decades of space launches and old and broken satellites, but it was the imagery of the earth surrounded by a cloud of detritus that really shocked me:

The question is, is this really a problem? Well there was the news story a couple of weeks ago about 2 whole satellites colliding and destroying each other, the first time ever that this has happened. Add to that the fact that the international space station has to actually change its orbit regularly in order to avoid space debris. How soon will it be before a space shuttle or rocket launch is compromised by some lost bolt doing 18,000 mph? The space shuttle even suffered a cracked window due to being hit by a speck of paint! And take a look what the night’s sky looks like when you add the debris in:

I’ve wondered what the solution to this problem is, as surely sorting it out now before it gets much worse, is the right thing to do. There are 2 sources of space junk: there are thousands of old satellites that are now defunct but just left in space; then there are accidental losses, like the NASA astronaut that dropped her tool kit whilst on space walk.

The satellites should be easily fixable. The addition of a rocket or similar thrusting device should be able to shunt the satellite out of its orbit. I guess there are 2 options, but both have issues:

1) Decay the orbit so the satellite burns up in the atmosphere. I’m not a great fan of this approach as who knows what we’re contaminating the atmosphere with, and I guess there’s always the chance that some part of the satellite won’t burn up and will land on someone’s head.

2) Shoot the satellite out of orbit at the Sun. The Sun is certainly the best place to incinerate old satellites, but it occurs to me that the amount of thrust required to actually escape the earth’s orbit, might make this approach prohibitive. Actually I don’t know the numbers, but I imagine that’s so.

3) The third and by far the most complicated solution is to get some garbage disposal robotised satellites into orbit, that will track down space junk and destroy it. Of course the question is how?

It’s a tricky issue, but I do hope that the human race is capable of continuing space exploration without trashing our own orbital space and storing up a more problem for our children.

Last week I posted some funny beer commercials so I thought I’d do the same this week too.  This will be the last time though, at least for a while. As before, a couple are a bit risqué, especially the last one, but were suitable for TV:

This one cleverly visualises what happens to all of us when consuming the amber nectar:

Apparently this lady(?) is advertising something, I’m not sure what:

I remember this one on British TV, it was very funny at the time, and certainly on the edge of English sensibilities:

I got confirmation a couple of days ago that I’m definitely in the BWLA British Masters Weightlifting Championships in Lilleshall, Shropshire in 2.5 weeks.  The bad news is, I’m lifting against Brendan Cooke an established lifter from Northern Ireland and Ian Robertson, a 14x Scottish champion. There goes my chance to sneak a title then, lol.

I did think about trying to drop a weight category and go for the 77kg (169 lbs / 12 st 1) category, but I’ve checked the rules with the Chairman Bill Barton, and apparently I’m not allowed to do that now that I’ve entered the 85kg category. You are allowed to go up a category it seems, I assume that’s for those that don’t make the weight. I’ve also learned that you have to open within 10kg of the qualifying standard, so that fixes my opening weights at 70kg for the Snatch and 95kg for the Clean and Jerk.

I had high hopes for this week at the gym, however their new bumpers still haven’t arrived, but they have said I can have exclusive use of the knackered bumper plates. Here’s a photo of the Apollo bumper plates that I’ve been moaning about:

They really are shocking.  This is the second gym I’ve been in that’s had Apollo bumpers and they’ve both broken the same way.  I don’t have a shot of the 20s, but you see the 5 bolts of the centre plate, they all sheared off inside whilst I was using it, so the metal plate fell off!  This is the collection of 15kg bumper bits that I collected after one session, and these are just the big bits I could be bothered to pick up:

Putting both the 10s and 15s on gives some stability, so I quickly worked up to 70kg on Tuesday and aimed to work at 70kg snatches for a while. Sadly things didn’t go according to plan. The warm up snatches were fine, upto and including 60kg, but the jump to 70kg was too much. I spent 45 minutes practising how to drop 70kg! I did finally get a scrappy one up, but was too tired by then to keep going and want to stop on a success. So I moved onto over head squats and worked up to 3 reps of 80kg (my body weight).

Then yesterday, having got my 100kg Clean & Jerk at the weekend, I was very hopeful for &J practice. But, for whatever reason, I started feeling dizzy and light headed at the top of the clean. I soon learnt that jerking whilst dizzy is not good for your health… nearly dropping 90kg on your head will do that for you! So again I moved on and decided to do a Crossfit Total:

• Back Squat: 140kg, 150, 155(F)
• Shoulder Press: 50, 52.5, 55
• Deadlift: 140, 150
• Crossfit Total = 335kg or 781 lbs

The Back Squat and Shoulder Press went well, but my back was feeling very tired on the deadlift and without someone to tell me how rounded my back was getting, I decided not to go up. I can’t remember what my PBs are, will update this post when I know.

I finally got round to getting a Facebook Account. I have been resisting the momentum that is Facebook for some time, but was finally persuaded, in part because of my mates at Crossfit Manchester who entered the English Indoor Rowing Championships and had posted pictures and videos up on Facebook. Iif you’re interested, feel free to send me a friend invite: Colin McNulty’s Facebook Profile

I followed I’m sure a typical process of looking for friends via friends of friends, and in groups from previous employment and schools. What surprised me however, was just how rubbish the friend search function is! The problem with Facebook is that there are sooo many people that even rare names typically return dozens of hits and it’s not always straight forward working out who is your friend based on some dodgy picture. Worse, any kind of location search doesn’t seem to work either. It’s really surprisingly poor.

The ability to tie it into a YouTube account is a nice feature, so now whenever I post a new youtube video, it’ll automatically get sucked into my Facebook profile. (See all my videos at: Colin McNulty on YouTube.) At first I was excited by the similar looking RSS feed too.

So I dutifully setup my Facebook profile to import the RSS feed from this blog and it certainly it worked, the titles to my last 10 blog posts appeared on my Facebook Wall. But it was a disappointment. Clicking the links didn’t take me to this blog, but instead to a Facebook hosted copy of my post, less all the videos and pictures. Not at all what I wanted. So I’ve removed the RSS feed, which is a shame.

After a couple of weeks in I have about 100 “friends” and have contacted some people I haven’t spoken to since school. It’s nice to know they are still alive and note that in most occasions busy procreating. More interesting however is the people I thought were going to be there, but aren’t. There are several friends I had at school for example that I can’t find anywhere on Facebook or on the web at all. What happened to them?

• Did they die?
• Are they in prison?
• Are they slumming it on a beach in Bali?

I don’t know, but if your name is Paul Coggins, Jonathan Handle or Simon Deeves and you went to Emmbrook School in Wokingham, hey, get in touch! 😉

I periodically check my blog stats with Google Analytics, something I did the other night. Take a look at the traffic graph (click the image to see a bigger version):

As you can see, something happened around the 5th Feb that knocked about 75% of the normal traffic off the site! Obviously I was bothered about this and so decided to investigate. The question is, where to start? First I started by checking why the traffic dropped. Searching Google for terms I know I normally rank for proved it, I was no way near the top for many of the search terms I normal am for.

The first thing to do was to check Google Webmaster Tools, which is a great resource for managing your site and for getting notified of any issues that Google finds with your site. Initially it identified a missing page, which has 4 links on my site pointing to it. I was aware of this (will fix it one day) which was caused a couple of years ago when I renamed a category. So nope, that wasn’t it. What else?

Webmaster Tools didn’t throw up any specific warnings so I had to delve a bit deeper. The Crawl Statistics page was the first page that started to give a hint as to what was going on, take a look:

Compare the pages downloaded per day to the bandwidth per day graphs. You can see that the number of pages that the Googlebot is crawling has stayed pretty much the same (i.e. each time Google visits my blog) , but the amount of bandwidth google downloaded per day more than doubles around the 5th Feb. Coincidence? I think not!

Let’s think about this, if the pages downloaded is the same number but the bandwidth has increased, then the physical size of each page must have increased. About doubled in fact. I was starting to get a déjà vu feeling here, somewhat similar to when my wordpress blog was hacked last year.

So off to another Webmaster Tools page, the one that shows what Google sees on your site. There it lists the external links to your site, but also the keywords that Google has identified. Here’s what Google thinks my site is about, in descending order of importance:

WTF!!! You can see Crossfit down in 18th place and my blog is certainly nothing to do with ringtones. There we go, proof my website was hacked. Now to check: off to Google to check the cache that Google keeps of my site. However there was nothing obvious on the normal cache, until I looked at the Text Only Version, which is a really useful tool for assessing what Google really sees on your site. Aha, result. Take a look what I find at the very bottom of my home page (in fact every page on the site):

Damn it, hacked again. The exact same problem as last time, about 500 hidden links inserted at the bottom of the page. The last time this happened, I had not updated my WordPress version for some time, mostly due to laziness and fear of the upgrade breaking something.

This time however, I was only just behind the latest version. I had the latest 2.6.x version (I forget what the x was, 2.6.5 I think, but it was the latest). However WordPress v2.7 was out and I hadn’t upgraded to it. Mostly because it was a major re-write of the WordPress admin user interface and I was waiting for a point release (i.e. 2.7.1) before upgrading to make sure any problems with the latest release had been ironed out.

That was obviously going to have to change, so straight away I backed up the site and upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 . A quick check of the source code showed that the errant urls had gone as a result of the upgrade, which was nice. Just to be sure though I wanted to check the Google cache. To do this, I’d have to wait for Google to re-cache the site though and I didn’t want to wait that long, or risk the hack having been done some other way I hadn’t spotted.

So using some of the cool add-ins I’ve got with FireFox (you do use FireFox instead of Internet Explorer don’t you??) to disable java script and turn off Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) so as to see a virtually text only version of the page, and it looks like this:

Magic, dodgy urls gone. Lessons then: 1) Keep up to date with WordPress upgrade versions. 2) Think of some way to monitor and identify if this happens again.

Also I want my rankings back as soon as possible. It’s likely that when Google re-caches my site, it should sort itself out, but in order to make sure there were no lingering spam penalties, I have filed a Google Reinclusion Request (another feature of Google Webmaster Tools). I’ll be checking to see how my rankings are over the next few weeks and will report back if things don’t go according to plan.

Which of these commercials would you consider the best beer ad?  First up, the Aussie Big Beer Ad:

Not bad and certainly a hefty budget, if only for all those outfits! Moving swiftly on however, we have an interview with a lady friend:

Now that’s more like it! This best beer advert contender though, I remember seeing on British TV (slightly risqué but nothing particularly rude, as I said, it was on TV):

So which is your favourite?

I haven’t posted much in the way of workouts recently, so thought I’d stick up what I’ve done the last 2 days at the globo gym in Cardiff. Yesterday I was really hopeful the new bumper plates had turned up so I could do some Oly lifting, but no. It’s been over 3 weeks now. Worse, they tell me that they’ve cancelled the order cos the guy hasn’t even taken their money yet, so all his promises of they were “in the post” were clearly tosh. So now they have to find a new supplier and start the process all over again, gah!

Anyway, yesterday I did:

• 3 x Snatch Pulls at: 40kg, 50, 60, 70, 75 and 80.
• 3 x Front Squat + 1 jerk at: 40kg, 50, 60, 70. I tried 80 but it was too much for me, bringing the metal plated bar down gently.
• 10 minutes double under challenge, this time I got 164 which was very pleasing.

Today, after 3 weeks of nagging, they relented and allowed me to use the existing broken bumpers. But to be honest, I was so worried about them falling to bits completely, it put me off. I worked on Snatch technique at 60kg for an hour, then did some cleans in the power rack. But the fat bar was weird and it all went wrong when I got to 90kg.

A frustrating couple of days.

As promised this is the video of me lifting in the BWLA Northern Masters Olympic Weightlifting competition in Keighley, West Yorkshire last week. I was trying to get a 175 total. To be clear, I won due to the fact I was the only person lifting in my age and weight category, lol.

If you compare that video to my video of the Yorkshire and North East Counties Open championships last year, despite lifting more then, I think I’ve improved my form. Particularly I’ve worked hard on keeping the bar closer to my legs on the 1st pull, but there are still more things to work on. On both the Snatch, the Clean and the Jerk, the bar moves forward causing a forward jump. It’s not as bad as it was, but more effort is required to fix that. I’ve also been working on not raising my bum up first, as you can see, it’s not completely fixed yet.

If you’re interested, this is a very quick video of my daughter doing a deadlift. Checkout the facial expressions, bless her!