Working on a project you feel really excited about is brilliant. The only downside is it’s a little easy to get carried away…

I was inspired by Rick and Ashleys project this week to do a self portrait (which is VERY rare for me)

It’s a bit noisey but I’m still getting used to doing setup shots with my X100 so go easy

It’s funny how as you get older the “invincibility” wears off. In the last 7 years I’ve gained 5 stone being sat behind a desk all day long, drinking leaves me with a 2 day hangover, and I’m usually in bed by 11pm.

I’ve spent years winging about needing more time and not having enough energy to get everything done, but finally decided to do something about it.

I’m now doing an hour in the gym every day, and eating a healthy diet consisting mainly of chicken, fish, nuts and rice cakes. It’s not exactly delicous but it’s filling and I seem to be losing weight.

I’m combining the work outs with Promax Diet shakes and I’ve been trying the non-caffeine version of Promax Thermobol to increase my metabolism. I used to take the caffeine version but with the equivalent of 6 cans of redbull in 3 tablets it was hard to sleep.

I’ve been doing this for a week so far and I’ve lost 6lbs. But more importantly I feel like I have a LOT more energy. Last night for the first time in a long time I picked my macbook up at 10pm and sat down to do some more coding.

I’ll be doing occasional posts about my progress over the next 6 months, mainly for myself really so I have something to look back on. But if any of you guys/gals are on diets or fitness plans – let me know what’s working and what’s not working for yourselves!

Keeping fit as a coder is not easy.

I managed to get over to Donington last sunday to do some photography at the BTCC. 99% of the shots I took are of the Clio race series, because well I love clios

You can see the rest of the set here on flickr.

I seem to have spent the last 6-8 years repeatedly moving jobs and/or houses and I’ve never really felt very settled. Yet again I’m having to move house next month but I do finally have a job that I feel is perfect for me and gives me the chance to work on something I’m very passionate about. With that sorted I want to take some money & time and get some things ticked off on my “to do before I die” list.

I’m sure I’ve missed a load of stuff I want to put on the list so I’ll keep updating it – but you can check it out here.

What’s on your bucket lists?

Before I do I should state that I’ve been using it through my Apple TV only, I’ve not had any reason to try using it’s web interface directly.

The service costs £5.99 a month which on the face of things is an absolute bargain as a single movie rental from iTunes can cost this much alone, however that is entirely where the good points ends.

The apple TV service seems to have absolutely no subtitles at all, which when watching Dexter for instance which has a high amount of non-english in it means it’s pretty much impossible to work out what’s going on.

On several occasions the show/film I’ve been watching has paused several times to “buffer” and that’s on a 50mb cable broadband connection. One evening I was trying to watch an episode of Dexter and after it paused for the 8th time I gave up and downloaded the entire episode instead. It took less than 2 minutes to download so there was obviously no issue with my internet connection.
It also seems to regularly just crash during a film with a message saying it couldn’t open the movie, but then if you click play and resume straight away it will work fine again for a while

The other major issue is with it’s lack of content, the films that are available are at best the bargain-bin style films you would find in a petrol station, there’s hardly anything recent. The TV shows are good as they are mainly scraped from 4onDemand or BBC iPlayer, however even here Netflix seems to have issues, for instance if you want to watch Top Gear every season is available up to about 3 years ago but nothing recent. Very confusing considering all the new episodes are watchable on BBC iPlayer.

I write this review with a great deal of disappointment, iTunes and spotify really revolutionised the way people buy music, but if you are a film enthusiast like me it’s still a very expensive experience.

With music these days you can listen to most of each individual track on iTunes and if you decide you like it you can buy just that track, saving you the cost of an album.
Pay once and listen as much as you want services like spotify have nearly made my iPod redundant as for a minimal monthly fee I can listen to 90% of music I can think of instantly even over a 3G connection while out and about.

When it comes to movies, other than a short trailer, your only option is to visit the cinema or rent a movie. The local cinema charges over £9 a ticket, and even renting a movie on iTunes can cost £6+.
Then if you decide you want to own the film you have to pay for the DVD. If I’ve already paid money to watch it in a cinema or rent it, I don’t want to pay again just to be able to own a copy!!

A service where you can pay a fixed monthly amount and stream whatever you want (a movie equivalent of spotify) would be brilliant, and I for one would pay a LOT more than £6 a month for it, but Netflix sadly just doesn’t provide that service, I hope something else will appear soon that does.