Starting tomorrow, I’m going to go on the paleo diet again, in preparation for Tough Mudder. This time I’m going to cut down on dairy, although I’m not sure I’ll cut it entirely. I’m hoping to stick to the diet just as strictly as I did last time, although there’s no threat of 100 burpee pullups hanging over me.
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I haven’t been that happy with my blog posts recently. It’s not that I think all of them are terrible, or that the quality suddenly dropped off a cliff, but I feel as if there’s been a decline. It’s tough to measure this, of course, with no clear criteria. But that I feel this way is indicative of some problem.

At the same time, I feel as if I haven’t been writing what I want to write, mainly because I’ve shied away from a lot of topics that I’ve wanted to write about.
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The temperature in San Francisco hit 101° Fahrenheit today, the hottest it’s been since May 2001. I’m not comfortable at such high temperatures, and was pretty sluggish all day.
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Last Friday I played soccer for the first time in almost two decades. I managed not to disgrace myself, and enjoyed it a great deal. It was a variant of five-a-side, although we played first with six players per side and later with four. I was with a group of regular players at SportsCo in Ringsend, and the quality of the pitch there was pretty good. Not that I’m an expert, but it’s the best surface I’ve played on.
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I first saw a fox in a city setting somewhere around eighteen years ago, cycling home very late one night along Woodbine Road. It was about eighty meters away, running across the road. It saw me and was quite skittish, running into a garden for cover as fast as it could.
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I’m not that fond of the water. I can swim, just about, but I don’t generally like to. Before doing boogie boarding for a couple of years, I hadn’t been in the water in a long time. I haven’t even done that since 2006, and as I did boogie boarding while wearing a wetsuit, it’s been a long time indeed since I did much more than just touch the water.
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My friend Jennifer Greenwood recently recommended poco dolce chocolate, so I picked some up as gifts. Having sampled it, I can confirm that their “Bittersweet Tiles” are fantastic. They’re from San Francisco, which may or may not influence you. So far, everyone I know who’s tried them has loved them.

I don’t tend to think of myself as a particularly disciplined or organized person, a view often at odds with how others perceive me, but I will admit to liking to organize and order things in specific ways. This may be related to my left-handedness, and/or to my attraction to precision (which attraction falls short of achieving precision, although I hope that in language I occasionally come close).
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Despite my techie nature, I’ve never been enamored of books in electronic format. I love the feel of books, and while I have no trouble reading large amounts on screens of various kinds, I don’t like the idea of doing so for books.
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I’m not a big fan of shopping, and more or less loathe the idea of it as an entertainment activity. That didn’t stop me from coming up with a scoring system for it, one which could conceivably be useful in restraining spending.
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Two weeks ago I wrote about having difficulties finding a wallet to match my somewhat specific requirements. Today, while looking for something else, I found one that matched almost perfectly—it’s like a cheap clone of my earlier wallet.
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Usually going east is tough for me in terms of jet lag. This is related to my being a night owl—going east means it’s harder to get up in the morning and easier to stay up late, and I have enough issues with both those things already. This time it’s been a little easier, I think physical activity has a lot to do with that.
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Having had no internet here for two days, and with my phone lacking a data plan here, I’ve found myself more disturbed by the absence of internet access than perhaps I would have guessed.
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I stayed on the diet for five weeks, a little longer than the challenge required. When I last was on the diet, in the run up to Sectionals, I cheated once per week, getting a burger with buns. This time I didn’t cheat, at least not knowingly. I derived more benefit from it this time around, although I didn’t start really feeling that until the last two weeks.
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I haven’t tried it out, but this Lifehacker guide to meditation looks good. I’m interested in trying it, but have some resistance because I’ve never gotten anywhere with meditation in the past.

Entirely by coincidence (or at least that’s how it appears to me) the Deutsche Nepal track “The Hierophants of Light”, which I’ve never heard before, starting playing as I wrote this post (I bought the album it’s on, Deflagration of Hell, last night)—and it begins with this looped many times: “You shall hear nothing, you shall see nothing, you shall think nothing, you shall be nothing”.

I just signed up for the Northern California “Tough Mudder” event, a seven-mile, high-altitude, obstacle-ridden, sadistically-conceived, mud-covered race/challenge at Bear Valley Mountain on 09 October 2010.

Why? A good question, particularly since I’m paying to suffer through it.
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The official announcements are out, and my former employer Metaweb no longer exists. I’m happy that the ideas, and most of the people, have found a home, but it feels strange that the company is no longer a distinct entity. In many ways it makes a lot of sense for Google to end up owning them, and I hope the former-Metaweb-now-Google employees prosper.
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My wallet—not the metaphor, but the physical object I use to hold money and other things—has become worn and ragged. It’s time to buy a new one.

By “new one”, I mean ideally a new wallet of exactly the same model. This wallet has served me extremely well, and I don’t see why I would want to change its configuration given that it’s worked perfectly for years.
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Some time ago I wrote a feature film with Graham Jones: How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate, a heist movie about the Irish education system. It is now available on YouTube.

I’m leery of YouTube as a venue for feature films, since it’s geared much more towards short clips. On the other hand, if the film is insufficiently gripping, that’s down to mistakes we made.

The film has been in the news again recently, mentioned in stories concerning allegedly widespread cheating.

I’m amused that one of the primary funding sources for the film was the now-nationalized Anglo Irish Bank.

This meal seemed to exemplify many of the changes in my eating habits since resuming carnivorism:

Pictured is a medium burger, no bun, with swiss cheese, avocado, bacon, and a fried egg; plus tomato, onions, and salad. It was excellent, and I absolutely recommend Chez Maman—it was excellent when I was last there too, and I wasn’t a carnivore at that point.

About halfway through the 2010 World Cup, and it’s been all right so far. The refereeing has been fairly bad, and as usual is one of the worst things about watching the games. The other awful thing is closely related to the refereeing, and can be sampled in this MetaFilter post about diving.
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The rest of my CrossFit gym started a month-long paleo diet last week. I didn’t want to try to go strict paleo while restricted to soft food, so my month started yesterday. Naturally, there’s a penalty for straying: 100 burpee pullups (as unpleasant as you might think).
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I started CrossFit proper (i.e. non-intro classes) one year ago. Since then I’ve tried to go five times per week, and mostly succeeded. I’m in so much better shape now it’s a little ridiculous.

I had struggled for years to find some fitness program I could stick with, never managing it. Now I’m determined to keep doing CrossFit, or something very like it, as long as I am able.
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