This is the June review, meaning I've already wasted the first half of the year.
I started the month in poor (physical) shape, going on a weekend 19km "grind" run and trying to ignore the pain along the way. I've been having progressively more soreness in my left hamstring and gluteal muscles for a few months, I figured I could just work through it as with most of my other injuries, but that may have finally been wrong this time.
Another ongoing problem I've been hoping would just go away is the jerk next door who randomly gets up and starts his car at exactly
3:30am at least three different days during the week,
every week. The first week of June it was Monday through Wednesday without a break, which woke me up every time since it's right outside my window, so by Thursday I was absolutely exhausted at work. I eventually drafted a letter and left it on his car, but I haven't found out what the outcome of that is yet - most likely nothing...
Other than being exhausted,
work has been acceptable. After finishing a tough project there's been a couple of weeks of down time where I was able to focus on getting our "devops" in order. It's been a good opportunity to combine a few tools like Ant, Bamboo, Git and SSH to have totally automated deployments for release environments, I even learnt a few minor new things. With that adventure just concluding I was called upon to help out another team for a few weeks, which has just begun but has been a good change so far too - I've been mostly dealing with the same people for fifteen months or so up until now. Again there has been a few different technologies to deal with, mostly Spring MVC and SQL deployed to Tomcat, however it was a bit of a ridiculous situation that just because I am a Java developer it was assumed I'd be able to just pick up all these new frameworks instantly and help deliver a solution in under three weeks. The pressure starts to build up when you get stuck on something and lose half a day trying to find the right (or any) solution, which has been the case a couple of times already.
I finally settled on the dates for my upcoming
holiday and made all the flight and hotel bookings in under a week. I had to abandon the plans to make a detour via Singapore at the end of the trip, it would have been nice to break up the return journey a bit better but there was going to be too much wasted time given the few flights in and out of Singapore that were still available. I was pretty happy with how everything turned out otherwise, except for the (very) early flight I have out of Shanghai is from the airport that is not really close to the city or the hotels, so I will probably have one very early morning adventure trying to get to the airport on time. I still need to figure out how to book a train from Beijing to Shanghai, but apparently there will still be lots of available tickets after I arrive. Any sports or tour tickets will mostly need to be arranged on site as well, since there is a lack of any online (and English) options to purchase these things in advance - we've only had a major uptake of the internet for twenty years or so by now...
The
NBA conference finals ended the same as last year, with Miami
beating Indiana and San Antonio beating Oklahoma. I wasn't really upset
at all with Oklahoma losing because I haven't really liked them since
they left Seattle in the first place, but the way the team is run -
including the coaching, drafting, trading and roster - has made me like
them even less. So instead I actually found that I wanted the Spurs to
win both the Western conference and the NBA finals instead.
Some quick opinions on the
NBA finals - besides game two falling on a public holiday I just watched the second half of each game on replay:
- Game One
- The "no air-conditioning" game
- LeBron James was the only player to break down
- Promising start to the finals series by the Spurs
- Game Two
- Spurs should have been able to close out the game but didn't
- Heat win and take home court advantage
- Game Three
- A record score in the first half for the Spurs
- Heat had a good comeback in the third, but then Spurs dominated again afterwards
- Game Four
- Another huge win for the Spurs, looks like they have the Heat figured out this year
- Game Five
- A disaster in the first quarter for the Spurs, barely making a field goal
- The exact opposite in the second quarter
- All the Spurs made big plays to finish the game, including Patty Mills
- I thought Duncan could have got the finals MVP instead of Leonard
Over the public holiday long weekend I got in a bit more
running as my injuries had settled down a little bit. On the Sunday I did a long 19km run but picked up a cold due to the bad weather. The next day I backed up with an early morning 13km as well, which was just as cold and not much fun to do while sick either. The following weekend I did another 18km run where my leg injury became significantly worse - so much so that I had to take an entire week off running.
With a whole week off from all physical activity I thought I was ready to go
running again, just in time for the next race - the
Sri Chinmoy 5km / 10km / half marathon at Albert Park. I was only planning to do the 10km but at the last minute Jason revealed he was going to do a full speed half marathon instead. Because of my injuries I didn't take my race too seriously in the beginning, I got stuck back in the pack at the start line and lost a heap of time over the first kilometre, but otherwise had a surprisingly good result, a personal best for
10km in 38:00 exactly and thirteenth place overall - although frustratingly I forgot to bring my Garmin GPS watch due to the rush to leave in the morning! I ran around a bit with Jason as he continued his race and set a personal best half marathon too, I probably covered close to 20 kilometres myself but all of the my injuries came back just a bad as ever once I had a chance to cool down - meaning another week off running (at least) and finally it's time to concede I may need to take a trip to the physio (which I generally think is a bit of a waste of money in most cases).
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| Nearing the finish line for the 10km. |
In addition to the physio, it felt like every couple of days I had an appointment of one kind or another to attend to during the month:
- Dentist check-up
- Dentist filling
- Physio initial visit
- I have no strength in my left leg, causing knee and calf problems as well
- Physio follow-up visit
- Now I also have lower back problems
- More stretching and strength exercises, and more appointments
- Tourist visa for China application
- Only open from 9am to 3pm on weekdays on St. Kilda Road
- I followed all the instructions, only to find you need a photocopy of your passport too
- Since they hold onto my passport and charge nearly $100, you'd think they could do that
- Tourist visa for China collection
Just as the NBA was finishing it was about time for the FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil to start. In preparation for this I
finally purchased a personal recording device - the
Topfield TRF-7260 which has a built in 500 gigabyte hard drive I think, the only downside was that it didn't come with a HDMI cable or a WiFi dongle - you have to buy that separately from somewhere. It has some good features like dual tuners, time shifting and a decent program guide. I think it cost about $300.
My other purchase for the month was a
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8" tablet. The Android OS is pretty boring so I wasn't so excited to unpack it, but it was cheap and the GPS in particular should be very handy on my upcoming holiday - not to mentioning being much smaller, lighter and less valuable than taking a whole laptop. I still need to buy an SD card and a micro USB converter so that it can use it to charge my other devices such as my camera and watch.
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| Tablet. |
Most of my free time this month has therefore been occupied by either getting up early to watch "almost live" recorded
World Cup matches or trying to avoid the results (mostly successful so far) and watch highlights in the evening. The group games have just concluded now, and I have generally found them to be the most enjoyable of the last few tournaments. As with the NBA I'll give give a quick opinion on some of the matches, otherwise I'd be here all day reviewing each one:
- Brazil 3 - Croatia 1 (almost live)
- First attempt to use the PVR to watch a game before work
- By skipping all of the wasted time I was able to catch up to live play after 60 minutes
- Decent first game of the tournament
- Australia 1 - Chile 3 (live)
- Watched this one on the big screen at Knox Village Cinemas
- A disaster in the first twenty minutes for Australia, couldn't complete a pass and down 2-0
- A good comeback afterwards, back to 2-1 and had some chances to get back to 2-2
- Just gave up another goal at the very end of the match
- Holland 5 - Spain 1 (recorded)
- The result was ruined several times during the Australia match
- A big surprise for Spain to be beating so badly
- England 1 - Italy 2 (recorded)
- Once again England fails to live up to expectations
- Still a good match, although England just didn't have enough impact players
- Germany 4 - Portugal 0 (almost live)
- Like Holland, I didn't think Germany would win by quite so much
- Portugal actually did well after losing a player to a red card
- Australia 2 - Holland 3 (almost live)
- Amazing effort by Australia
- Actually leading 2-1, I didn't think they'd hold the lead but a draw seemed possible
- Much better than expected from Australia in the first two games
- England 1 - Uruguay 2 (almost live)
- England had all the chances in the first half, only Uruguay stole a late goal
- England fought back, looked like getting a draw at least, then another bad mistake
- France 5 - Switzerland 2 (highlights)
- Wasn't much of a match, just lots of goals
- Germany 2 - Ghana 2 (highlights)
- Ghana have been much better than I expected, could have started with two draws in the "group of death"
- Algeria 4 - South Korea 2 (highlights)
- Algeria actually looked like a good team, or perhaps South Korea are just really bad
- Portugal 2 - USA 2 (highlights)
- I couldn't believe USA gave up a goal in injury time, otherwise they were through to the next round
- Australia 0 - Spain 3 (almost live)
- Disappointing way to end the tournament
- Back to the bad old Australia, I thought they'd play like this in every game
- Costa Rica 0 - England 0 (almost live)
- England had nothing to play for, but I thought they might provide some entertainment
- Mostly a second string team, not a lot of action and no goals
- Bosnia 3 - Iran 1 (almost live)
- Bosnia also had nothing to play for, but were much more exciting
- Iran finally got their first goal late, but were basically eliminated by then
- Germany 1 - USA 0 (almost live)
- I was expecting another good game but neither team wanted to attack much
- Both teams still qualified for the next round by being conservative
I think I've watched the highlights of every game so far, although the downloads can be a bit of a mixed bag:
- Sometimes they are literally two minutes long and only show the goals
- Some only have the second half
- Some only in Russian (at least you don't have other match results spoiled)
The
NBA draft also came along late in the month. I flicked through the first round but it wasn't particularly exciting, most teams actually made decent selections and there weren't many trades going on. Sadly Oklahoma City (and Phoenix) were the only teams to make numerous bad decisions.
I finally made it to
Baking Episode 50. I started these articles back on September 22, so that's 50 in about 9 months, which is a pretty good effort.
This post has gone on way too long, so I'll end with a quick media review:
- Books
- Stephen King - Full Dark, No Stars (6 out of 10)
- Pretty good, four short stories, some better than others
- Stephen King - Needful Things (8 out of 10)
- A bit slow, but lots of characters and related storylines
- I just found out there is a movie too!
- Movies
- Sonicsgate (5 out of 10)
- A documentary about the Seattle Sonics losing their NBA team
- The first half hour was good and detailed the Sonics history
- The rest of the movie was boring politics and interviews
- Veronica Mars (5 out of 10)
- I had high hopes and great memories from the TV series
- The plot was a bit confusing, with too many conspiracies and cover-ups
- It was just alright because it had all the old characters
- Music
- I haven't listened to much new music since I don't really get an opportunity at work anymore
- I went back over the past 6-12 months and found a lot of albums I'd missed out on:
- !!!
- Broken Bells
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
- Conor Oberst
- Death Cab For Cutie
- Editors
- Kaiser Chiefs
- Kasabian
- Maximo Park
- MGMT
- Nine Black Alps
- Sigur Ros
- Sleigh Bells
- The Faint
- The Polyphonic Spree
- Tune-Yards
- TV
- The Following (2 out of 10)
- The Kevin Bacon character in the show just needs to die, so annoying
- The storyline is just too ridiculous, not worth saying any more about it
- The Real World: Portland (6 out of 10)
- The cast were a bit boring, didn't really do much
- Added a crazy female after a few episodes
- She physically assaulted others but somehow didn't get kicked out
- The Real World: Explosion (3 out of 10)
- Decent idea, but failed badly
- The cast were really poor, and even worse when they reunited with their exes
- Revolution (4 out of 10)
- Only watched the first half of season two so far (got cancelled after this season)
- Almost as annoying as The Following where nobody dies, and overcome ridiculous situations
- Video Games
