I’ve been rather quiet - work has been pretty busy, and I’ve been trying to do a lot of riding.

League races have gone relatively well, with Paul grabbing one win, and both Paul and myself with the front group over most of the climbs. We rode Sani2C together and managed 20th overall. We’re pretty chuffed with that, since neither of us are at peak fitness. In fact Paul was giving me a push up some of the climbs on the last day. Sani2C has by far the most spectacular course of any mountain bike race in South Africa. There was soooo much single-track. And mostly nice fast, flowing, non-technical stuff, which was a lot of fun.

Yesterday was funride world champs, and the VA group had a very smooth (and crash-free) ride to come in around 2:47. Not the fastest time, but I’m not complaining. I managed to sneak in with 17th place in the very long sprint.

Cycling will take a bit of a back seat now as I try to prepare for the 7-day hike we’re doing in Scotland in early April. The average day is over 20km, and I’m carrying the tent and everything. Looking forward to it!

I bought a new MacBook Pro a few weeks ago to replace my ageing Dell Precision M60. I’m not missing Windows at all, but there are two apps that don’t have Mac versions, which I use almost daily. Those are Quickbooks and CyclingPeaks.

The solution is to install VMWare Fusion, which lets you run a Windows virtual machine on the Mac. Sounds inefficient in theory, but reality is that both apps run a lot faster than they did on my old Dell.

To get my Powertap downloading to CyclingPeaks I needed to install the USB driver from the Saris website. Once that was done VMWare picked it up on COM3, and CyclingPeaks downloaded first time.

Finally!

This is my first video game console since Atari, way back when.

I got it with Wii Sports and Wii Play. Wii Sports is as good as they say it is. Favourites are tennis and bowling. Wii Play are all pretty simple games, but the best one has to be the cow racing.

The Nintendo Wii is being released in SA. I have my pre-order in!

Site of the week!

The blog has been very quiet lately. For a few reasons, the main one being that work has been insanely busy. That’s a good thing they tell me.

Then to complicate things even more, we’re splitting our company into two. So now we have Glasshouse Multimedia (new website coming soon) - web and multimedia design specialists, and my new baby, CodeVader (website to come still!), Agile web development specialists. The two companies will still work very closely together, but they will operate independently. There’s several strategic reasons for the split that I won’t go into here, but there’s some really positive outcomes for me.

Firstly, I’ll be getting back into programming and building of web apps. In the last year or two my job has become more and more an admin one. Not fun. CodeVader will let me start building stuff again. Secondly, we’re going to run it remotely. So no office - all the guys will work from home. A few years back I probably would have thought this was a bad idea, but with modern technology like skype, IM, email and of course phones, its actually pretty painless. Of course a face-to-face meeting is still needed occasionally, but not as often as you think. Then we have the wonder of Google Docs for sharing files, and great software like TargetProcess for managing our projects.

So to start we have myself and two full-time developers, and one contract developer. We’ll be looking for one or two more people shortly, I’m sure. We’re focusing on Ruby on Rails development using an Agile methodology (based mostly on Scrum).

Things have started with a bang and we’re already running at full capacity, which is nice!

We’re starting work on an exciting project soon, but there’s an unknown element I haven’t figured out yet.

We’re building a Flash web application which plays a movie. As the movie ends a character in the movie dials a telephone. At that point the user’s phone rings. Surprise! When they answer they are played a pre-recorded message. Since the users have to log in to the application we know who they are.

The challenge is how to make out outgoing call from a website? I’ve come across jaduka.com, but their service only makes US and Canadian calls. Our site needs to call phones in the Netherlands.

Anyone have any suggestions as to how to do this??

2 weeks ago we got ourselves a new member in the family - a Boston Terrier puppy. Max is a little terrorist, and growing fast!

Follow Max’s escapades at http://maxisincharge.wordpress.com/