Gallery coming soon.

6:30pm on a sunny Sunday afternoon and i’m finding myself standing in front of 40 people giving a speech. Since 2pm on Friday i had been ’switched off’ from the world and was enjoying a great weekend of ultimate and at no point did i expect or think i’d be standing there at the end of the weekend collecting the trophy. 30 seconds after the speech i remembered all the things that i could have said which included the famous Skunks speech of “This isn’t the trophy we came here for. We were beaten by the seedings”. But then again, this was the trophy we came here for.

And the weekend started as it eventually carried on really. After being able to get away reasonably early we made our way West to Exmouth and ahead of all the traffic we made it there in enough time to put the tents up and explore a bit. Compulsory fish and chips on the sea front later and we were in a pub demonstrating how bad some of us could be at pool.

The first game on the Saturday was at 9am and with it came new kit which looked great. As the day went by we found ourselves either winning really well or loosing really well – nothing in the middle. The one thing that was consistent was how much fun we had. I don’t know why this tournament was any different but the teams here just seemed to be a lot more fun – even the ones that beat us. We had a good banter going with each of them any many ended up supporting us as the days went on. Interwoven with games of haccy, volleyball, and mini golf ( i was rubbish ) the day was so relaxing as the sun beat down. We then went to get some beers ready for after our last game and after two of us being ID’d ( ! ) we made the process more complicated than we needed too. It was worth it however because after the last game we were forced to wait for the cricket to finish while sitting in the sun beer in hand with the team, talking through the days events. Relaxing.

Saturday night was all about us and i think was the differentiator for the trophy. We found the local Weatherspoons type pub, found some food, and then setup shop in the corner of the bar. I couldn’t believe how time went and was even more surprised when the tournament director was basically leading the rest of the ‘party’ out to join us, rather than the other way round. A few drinks later, and a few games later ( das ist gud ) we were the last out of the pub in what had turned out to be a great evening.

Not playing until 11:15 the next day meant we had time to get some breakfast and take the tents down. Winning two games out of 3 on the Sunday meant we finished 5th but the result didn’t matter. I can honestly say that this had been one of the most fun, most relaxing and most enjoyable tournaments i had been to in a long time. And it obviously rubbed of on the teams we played. As i’m playing i can hear cheers of “rawhyde” from the lines. As i go fully horrizontal to catch a stray pass i hear the crowd go wild and regardless of how my body feels, it feels great.

It was the icing on the cake to win the Spirit trophy, especially as for me its the most important trophy. It shows what our club is about and it makes for a much better tournament. I’m feeling a bit broken this week but for all of the above, and for so many other reasons it was all worth it.

To say i’m rather pleased about this is an understatement. There have been a few things that have put a smile on my face recently and this is one of them. My overall experience with the Swimathon this year hasn’t been a good one but being able to finally see how well i did has made a big different to my overall feeling. To make the image above clear, there are multiple challenges of which i did the Individual 5K swim ( the longest ). In that challenge i was the 6th fastest for my age group, the 19th fastest male, and the 32nd fastest overall to complete the distance. Given that this was with relatively small training and not being able to tumbleturn i’m really, really pleased.

Someone asked me only last night if i would do it again and my reply was ‘Not sure, but not at River Park’. I think my reply today is ‘Yes, and still not at River Park’. Its a shame because so many simple things were missed out from the organisation. I’ve had pester for 2 months now to get this time accepted and registered in the database and considering it was my own timing and that the event should have timed me that was pretty appalling. Together with the communication, the event organisation on the day and poor way of managing sponsors i’m not totally convinced, but now i’ll be doing it again next year! Watch this space for #1!

Gallery

As i get to work this morning, i’m tired and my body aches. Its normally the sign i’ve had a great weekend and i wouldn’t have changed it for the all cuts, bruises, aches, pains, washing and sand to clear out of my car. What was i doing? Well, this weekend i was playing ultimate at the ‘Smack my beach up’ tournament in Swansea, Wales.

Unlike playing on grass, beach ultimate is played with a slightly different sized pitch and with 5 players rather than 7. As you can imagine 25 minute games of hard running on sand is quite hard work and so typically you’d like teams to be 9+ players. We had 6 for Saturday! Fortunatley the weather was kind and after a 12:30 start the games went on into the early evening. Other than a first game loss, the rest of our games had demonstrated how we’d improved as a team over the previous months, often beating teams we didn’t expect to, and playing well together. It was then off to the campsite, ontop of a hill to shower, beer up, tent up, play a bit of hacky before heading out into town. By this time it was about 10pm and Swansea was in full swing. It was quite like anything i’ve ever seen. We had been prepared for it after seeing a local gig down by the beach but the evening was quite something. People everywhere in all kinds of get-up. Police everywhere too. A few drinking games later ( this is a what! ) and before we knew it we were being kicked out of the pub. The day had gone so fast and yet so fun.

Because of a fantastic win the day before ( including a point i’m particularly proud of : awesome pull to back corner, ran down, got the point block inside their zone, then proceeded to score the point too! Yeah MVP! ) we didn’t have to start games until 3:30 the next day. This meant we had time to explore the three cliffs bay and even get a chance for a bit of a swim. Even that was so refreshing in more ways that one. Was great to play around in the waves, surf, and just generally soak up a glorious day. Another convincing win put us in the top 4 and already beaten our seedings. Unforunately what followed were two other games where we didn’t seem to get going at all but none of that spoilt what had already been a really great weekend.

Driving back i can remember thinking over what we’d done and it had been like any other tournament i’d been to. We had played a lot of good quality, hard work ultimate and yet still had plenty of time to enjoy the company of friends and relax a bit. And that is what i love about ultimate. Its not just a sport. When we play we play to enjoy it, and when we aren’t playing, we know how to enjoy each others company. A really great weekend for so many reasons.

** The photos **

It didn’t take them long before we were escorted to the 10th floor of the SETT and from that moment the realisation of what i was about to do kicked in. The 10th floor, and looking down through the crystal clear water, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to feel at least some vertigo even when standing on level ground. Then again, on the way back down to the classroom, the time it took the lift to get the bottom really hit home – this is a BIG tank of water.

And so it began, two days of training to become an AIDA * Freediver. I’ve done some swimming underwater before when snorkling and a share of SCUBA diving but this was very different. We were tought about the various disciplines, and the techniques that allow people to reach such unbelievable depths. The balance of the course was good and it wasn’t long before we were up at the 10th floor again getting our feet wet. Practical sessions started slowly with static breath holding and followed by slowly pulling yourself up and down a line. It was the kind of start we needed and even with this relaxed approach we were going lower than 10 meters. After lunch its fair to say it’ll be the first and only time i have a lecture where both lecturer and students are all in dressing gowns! Very odd. Not too much later and we were back in the pool continuing to increase the depth a bit at a time. By the end of the day i was down at 20m with another 8.1 meters of this amazing tank left to reach.

Although the activity is a sport, i can remember coming back on Saturday night the most relaxed i’ve been for a while. The nature of holding your breath forces you to calm your body and mind and this persists through late into the evening. The tranquillity and warmth of the water also helped to put me in an almost euphoric state of mind. Later that night i was joined by friends for what turned out to be a really great evening, and for me it was a perfect day.

Despite the late night and not much sleep i was up, wide awake early the next day. I don’t know if the relaxed mental state meant i slept well but i felt really good. After a nice chat and a drink i was off for the second day and in this day we were to have an exam, to practice rescuing people, and another 3.5 hours in the tank – this time with fins. Although much of the day was the same, on the second day we had a lot more responsibility. Those of us that could dive to depth were diving as a buddy pair and this meant not only watching them at the surface but also underwater. The really strange part of this meant meeting them half of the way back up their dive. So for example, if they were diving to 15 meters, when they got to the bottom we would start from the top and meet in the middle. The idea is to avoid shallow water blackouts and make sure the person gets back to the surface. In reality its a very new concept. Frequently we were talking about the dives and ‘arranging to meet at 10 meters’. Despite how strange it sounded, this gave us freedom from the dive instructors and meant that we got through a lot of dives.

With most of the theory out of the way, and buddying each other, the rest of Sunday was spent exploring our limits and the tank. You might not think that a tank of that sort would be very interesting but we did find a porthole that looked out into the building that surrounded the tank, and in that part of the building was another window. As a result we were down at 18 meters, looking through two windows out onto what was a very sunny day in Gosport. A very strange feeling. And we did stretch our limits too. As a SCUBA diver i’m used to coming up slowly and this was evident in the freediving. To start with i came up slowly and therefore saved lots of air but as you progress you realise you can swim up very quickly and as a result can go that little bit deeper. By the end of the weekend i had gone down 23m and while i was there had time to look around at the rooms & equipment used for the submarine escape training which were at the bottom of the tank only a few meters more.

The really strange part of the weekend was the sinking feeling. Below about 6 meters ( for me ), the air in my lungs was compressed enough to mean it was no longer sufficient to keep me floating. As a result, i sank. The strange thing is you want to sink because by sinking you are not using up energy to swim down and you are calm ( as can be ). The best way i can describe this is in a glass lift. Imagine standing in a glass lift with your face close to the glass. You press the button for the 10th floor and as the lift goes up, the world flashes before you. You aren’t exerting effort but you can see the effects. The same is true for freediving only the other way up. As i’m head down in the tank, i’m sinking, and the side of the tank is moving past me. 5 meters. 10 meters. 15 meters. 20 meters – like floors in a building. Only when you can overcome the thinking that you are sinking can you learn to relax and just accept whats happening. Only when you do that, can you save your Oxygen because of course going down is only half of it – you still have to come back up!

Before the weekend i didn’t know what to expect. I had read the article and wasn’t sure what to how much to believe. Now that i’ve done it, i can honestly say i agree. “The physical challenge of the diving was fun, but it is the feeling of immense calm that persists.”

With the RSMB in any normal application, you get a way to provide close to real time updates to the clients that are subscribed to a particular topic. In the context of a scoring system this would be all the web browsers that were looking at the data at that particular point in time. For a ideal world, HTML elements would be passed down the wire and the page would be updated dynamically using an AJAX based approach. Unfortunately we aren’t quite in an ideal world.

The biggest problem with this approach was to find a client side API which could offer a persistent connection. While tools such as JavaScript are client side they do not support sockets. PHP and other server side tools do not allow for call backs and as such once the data is laoded it would be static.

To overcome this problem, Andy and myself have decided to write an implementation to bridge the gap. This implementation is a combination of JavaScript and Flash. JavaScript was used because it can provide a nice interface so that we can update the HTML on the fly. In addition it also provides a call back interface into Flash, which fortunately for us allows sockets to be opened. That gets the theory in place, but what we had to do was to implement the MQTT API in Flash. Although at the moment only a small part of the API, it implements enough to keep a connection alive, publish and importantly subscribe to a topic. So far the initial reaction has been really positive and the code has been working well with all kinds of data. Over the coming weeks we hope to be putting the finishing touches to the code and fixing any bugs so that it can be used more widespread. If anyone would like to see it in action, there is a live demo here

To use this new code, the intention was to make the modifications as small as possible. For any standard web page, adding the following two sections is enough.

1. Load the classes – at the top of the ‘body’ tag, add the following.

   <script language="JavaScript" src="./dev/html/include/mqtt/jquery.js"></script>
   <script language="JavaScript" src="./dev/html/include/mqtt/swfobject.js"></script>
   <script language="JavaScript" src="./dev/html/include/mqtt/mqtt.js"></script>
   <script language="JavaScript">
       var ip = "<?php echo $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."_".$_SERVER['REMOTE_PORT']; ?>";
       var clientID="client_" + ip;
   
       var broker = new Broker();
       broker.connect("localhost", 1883, clientID, false, false);
       broker.setTimeout(50);
   </script>
           

2. Add the subscription for each node – adding the following class and title attributes to any HTML
   object will subscribe to ‘test/topic’.

   <td width="55"
       class="mqtt" title="test/topic"
           style="background: #FD8171;"
           >  </td>
           

And thats it! The code will look for all objects of class ‘mqtt’ and subscribe to the topic given in the ‘title’
attribute. Information about the connection, subscription, and publication will all be logged into the console
windows and the elements will be updated with an animated icon indicating progress.

However, the post had more to it than that. Andy spoke of a personal brand which i can get on board with and although i’m fortunate to have a site online to demonstrate this persona two things came to mind. Firstly how can people convey this without personal blogs and sites. Secondly is my online presence accurate?

While i can’t do much for the first, the tag cloud on the right goes some way to describing me however the thing that i noticed were a few obvious omissions which until now i clearly haven’t written about, and will proceed to do over the coming weeks.

Ultimate – i couldn’t believe that i didn’t have a tag for this. Its a team sport that i’ve been playing for more years than i can now remember and its unlike most. In fact its a cross between lots such as basketball, netball and american football. Unlike others though it has no referee and relies on players spirit of the game to officiate itself. I used to play with the university team and now have ( together with a few others ) created a new team called Rawhyde. Its a game that can be played at all levels and during my ‘career’ i have also travelled the world to play, including a 3 year stint playing for Great Britain ( the last of which i was the captain ).

All in all, i’m disappointed about the organisation of the event ( and not being timed properly ) but i’m really pleased i completed it, raising £375 for charity in the process. Thank you to all of you that have donated money.

Now on to my next challenge…

It seems like ages ago ( maybe jan ‘09 ) we visited friends in London who took us to the Natural History Museum ( NHM ) for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. I can’t even start to think when i was last in the Natural History Museum and so that alone was quite fun to see the tRex in the lobby etc. The exhibit itself is divided into categories such as Birds, Underwater, Plants, Wild places, and Creative Visions. Each category had maybe 10 photos in and in total there were probably 200 photos to see. Aside from the obvious quality of the photos, what really stood out for me was some of the Junior awards. These are photos from children between 11 and 17 and quite frankly some of them were no different to the adult photos – they were very impressive. However, what stood out is an 11 year old kid with £4k’s worth of digital camera on safari in Africa! Makes you wonder who else would be a good photographer if they had those sorts of experiences from a young age.

The exhibit is something that i would go back to next year ( maybe even EVERY year ) and at the time i was even contemplating buying some prints of the photos. Its taken me until now to actually find out if you can get prints and hence deciding to blog about it! Fortunately for me, some of the photos are available to get on print and i’ve included links & thumbnails to some of my favourites on the right. Please click through the links to find more information about the photograph and photographer.

Thats right ladies and gents i’m learning how to sink and what makes it even more strange is i’m actually paying to do this! Okay, let me explain… 

I’m and Advanced Open water SCUBA diver and as you’ve seen from the swimming i feel very comfortable in the water. Although i haven’t been diving for a couple of years anywhere hot, when i do typically i also snorkel. Whenever i did snorkel i always used to enjoy ducking under the water every time i saw i fish i wanted to swim with or some coral i wanted to see. The more i swam underwater, the more i enjoyed doing it and this is why i’ve enrolled myself on a Freediving course. This is essentially swimming underwater in a way that conserves your energy and allows you to spend more time underwater.  There are a few varients on this that vary on using weights and / or fins but essentially the theory is still the same – relax and make the most of the air you have ( at least as i understand it at the moment ). 

Fortunately i don’t have to go to any great lengths to try this out and in fact at the end of may i’m making my way over to Portsmouth to make use of their Submarine Escape Training Facility ( SETT ) as part of a Freediving Course. The tank in question is 30 meters deep and as you can see from these two videos ( #1 & #2 ) the technique seems to basically get to the point where you sink so that you don’t have to swim down. I’m sure thats a very simplistic approach for now but needless to say i’m looking forward to finding out more and seeing for myself. Although it would be nice to say that i managed to get down to the 30 meters after a weekend based on how i enjoy what i do now, and what i’ve read in articles, i’m really looking forward to giving this a go.