Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

My browser is filling up with pages left right and centre.

I need to reduce the number of windows open – even though I am running Google Chrome now. I have noticed it is way more stable than Firefox and leaves Internet Explorer for dead – except for a few sites that will only open properly in IE. Qantas being one of them. Actually the Qantas site works fine, but the Infotriever software uses a plugin that extracts my flight bookings and inserts them into Outlook for me. So where am I going?

First I am flying to Sydney for the day on 18th October to attend the Australian DrupalCamp. The at Christmas time I am flying to New Zealand to attend a family reunion as the resident tech geek – set up and manage a wifi network, patch PCs, probably build a new one for my folks etc. Oh and hang out with my siblings and nieces and nephews for a couple of days :)

Wow! what a day yesterday was. I have never had so much fun as a coach! I thought the athletics was fun but this was even better!.

First I had to get all the girls from the convention site down to the gym and ready to play. This was harder than it sounds. It was absolutely belting down with torrential rain, I was looking after my two youngest girls – who were very well behaved, and some of the girls were doing other performances beforehand. Also the captain was too sick to play.

We all got to the courts and started warming up – and dodging the rain that was falling onto the court through holes in the roof – it was so heavy the roof leaked! we did have a good warm up which was great and the girls were the first team there which is also a psychological advantage. They were not very switched on for a while but eventually we got them into some drills that made them focus and get the blood pumping. My fantastic assistant coach aManda was also sick so that made it even harder as I had to do all the other organising things I usually left her to do.

Today I delivered some work to a client to get a major piece of work completed. The client was 100% happy and there were only a couple of minor things to fix. They have requested more work but that will have to wait until after other jobs are completed. From there I drove to the school convention and picked up a car full of athletes who I have been coaching. We headed of to St Lucia University campus for a 5PM start of the athletic meet.

Unfortunately due to my “childishness” I broke my phone screen and I didn’t have any other camera with me. I did take a couple of shots of my main man Drew running the 1500 metre with someone else's camera though.

Drew cleaned up tonight. Although he could have ran a much faster 1500 than he did I made him run a slow race to save himself for the other events. He followed my instructions exactly. Ran into second place within the first 100 metres and sat right on the heels of that guy for 400 metres before hitting him with a 10 metre clear burst on the 2nd back straight. Settling back down the the same pace he ran with the 10 metre lead for another full lap. Then he picked up the pace and ran harder drawing away to a 50 metre lead. He held this then right into the main finishing straight and then turned on his sprint for the last 50 metres winning by an easy 75 metres or so. I think he could have won by close to a full lap but he was very good and ran our race plan exactly. This was good because he was straight into the 100 metres – though because his was the lat 100 metre heat / final he had time to prepare. I had 2 runners in the 100 metres and I played the waiting game as long as possible to keep them out of the chill breeze. I walked them to the start last of all the runners every time, warmed them up at the back of the staging area with some calisthenics, stretches and short sprints. No other athletes were as well prepared so I was happy with that. Caleb came second in his U16 100 metres and drew came in first or second – it was a photo finish and we haven’t been told the result yet.

our boys team played their first game yesterday. The other team was quite a bit better then them and this was evident before the game. I think this overawed them at first and i had to call a time out 3 minutes in. I told them they were playing like girls and to stop being nice. The rest of the game they played really hard and i was really proud of their efforts. The defence was very good most of the time though we need to work on rebounds. We also need to work on offence.