After doing two complete howlers of ’that ashridge run’, today I managed to pull off an incredible coup! To be honest, I’ve been so busy managing workload and family-time that my running has slipped slightly – which is why I’m amazed am PB’ing week upon week.
The howlers in question were the culmination of poor/disorganised diets during those days (belly full of sandwich/milkshake) and on one of the occasions, suffering from doing a days manual labour previously. However today, despite being possibly the windiest it’s been in months I managed to knock an amazing FOUR minutes off my 7.6 mile time. This brings myself under the key 10 minute mile(stone).
No swims this week, but other runs have included a sharp 90 second shaving of my MK 5 miler. Took up Yoga with ‘er-indoors’ via Wii Fit – which was nice.
Thinking of putting an ad in the local TESCOTs ‘community board’ to see if I can encourage any other locals out on a bi-weekly run!
Weight only down half a kilo – would have been more but despite being very careful at a family party on Saturday, I still managed to put on 1.5 kilos overnight!
My work often can be less technical and more determining the right solution for what people actually want to do – and to somehow politely suggest alternatives without outright telling them they’re barking up the wrong tree! I think we’re all bombarded by information from very ill informed sources and whilst I hate the word ‘consultant’, I do often detect the absence of any expert opinion behind plan.
This week it’s been about working away from your desk. I was asked to setup a VPN (virtual private network) for a client – and whilst these have their place (particularly for safe, transparent access to files on a server, software telephones etc), there are a few services around today that most people still aren’t using.
We’ve all heard of webex and gotomypc – which are great – but expensive tools. Isn’t there something out there just as good, but for £ree?
Yup.
www.Logmein.com is free for light/individual use and is entirely browser (IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome etc) based – and allows you to remote control up to five computers from any other computer, so long as both have access to the internet. This is an excellent free and simple way to control a machine with all your gubbins on.
www.teamviewer.com is also free from individual use and does what the pay-for logmein product does – allows you to share your desktop with someone else quickly and easily – both can control the same screen, if required and even do lots of other fancy stuff while ‘in session’.
With these two powerful, secure, OS-independent and most importantly – free tools under your belt, you can find life a lot easier!
