Slowly reconnecting

It’s been a while since I’ve posted regularly here. Essentially the run-up to Henley Royal Regatta consumed every scrap of spare time I had. If you haven’t heard of it, Henley is one of the top rowing regattas in the world. It’s held on an absolutely beautiful stretch of the River Thames that has a straight section of just over 2km, the standard of international rowing races. Henley Regatta has existed since 1839 and has had a royal patron since 1851.

More importantly, Henley is known for being one of the most exclusive regattas in regards to talent. Virtually all of the best rowers in the world have raced there, and all of the best UK domestic rowers have. To have won Henley is a BIG feather in your cap; to have raced there means that you were at least a fairly serious rower.

Unfortunately, our crew failed to qualify to race at Henley this year. We’ve had some good races and some poor races, and the Stewards didn’t think we were of the standard to pre-qualify. Twenty-seven crews raced for seventeen places in the regatta, and we were the second-fastest non-qualifier. Though we rowed quite well on the day, if we had been just half a second faster (over a seven-and-a-half minute course) we would have competed this year. What’s even more unfortunate is that the conditions changed while the crews were on the course, and our division experienced significantly more headwind than other crews. This inevitably would have cut our time down enough that we would have qualified (in my opinion).

Since we weren’t of sufficient standard to pre-qualify we were subject to whatever happened on the day of qualifying races; this year simply didn’t work out for us. It’s tremendously disappointing for a whole host of reasons, and I was in a very non-sociable mood for several days afterward.

The one benefit of the experience is that it has completely drilled into me the standard of rowing and fitness I need to be at to achieve what I want to achieve in the sport. (See photo at top.) My focus for the next months and years will be to focus on the fitness and technique I need to reach my goals. It won’t be easy, but at least I know the size of the mountain I need to climb.

Running silent…

Hello, everyone.

I’m going dark here on the blog for a couple of weeks. I have a backlog of things I want to write on, but Henley Royal Regatta is coming up and my entire non-work focus is dedicated to that. The photo above is a IV, but I’ll be racing in an VIII.

Wish me luck! (Particularly this Friday and next Wednesday.)

iPhone 3G … I Want

While I’ve lusted a bit over the original iPhone, I wasn’t really interested. 2.5G speeds just aren’t that good compared to 3G. How would I know? Well, I’ve had a 3G network dongle for my laptop for the past year + and it is a dramatic difference when I have a 3G signal. London is flooded with 3G, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.

The real killer app for me is the MobileMe service. I’ve used .Mac since before Apple started charging for it. It’s been a bit of a rip-off lately, but so many accounts are set up with that address I would have a serious pain in the ass to change it. But now that there is e-mail, calendar and addressbook Sync through the MobileMe “cloud” I am absolutely hooked! (And it’s finally getting to be worth the cost.)

I’ll have to spend some time experimenting with how it can or might integrate with Plaxo. Plaxo to me is great for doing all that syncing, but not that many people in my addressbook use it, so the automatic update of my addressbook when they change their information isn’t that useful. It looks like I’ll need to do some experimentation as to how to hook Plaxo up with the MobileMe addressbook so that I can try to capture those changes.

So as of July 11th Apple is releasing the iPhone 3G world-wide, and I certainly plan on being in line to get one. (Maybe not the first day, but probably within the first weekend!) I’ve had my Motorola RAZR for over two and a half years now… it’s time for new technology.