Posts from — July 2007

If you could ask the founders of Lonely Planet one question – what would it be?

Here’s your chance.

Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who arrived in Australia in 1972 after following the hippy trail with barely a cent to their names, decided to write about their travels and sell the resulting giudebook/manuscript to make ends meet. It worked, and they’ve been doing it ever since.

I’m interviewing the Lonely Planeteers for the Irish Echo next week, and while I’ve got a plethora of questions I intend to put to them, I’d like to hear what other travellers would ask.

So I’m throwing it out there – what would you ask the world’s ultimate backpackers?

Comments close on Tuesday, so get your questions in and keep them original and snappy – I’ll post the answers to as many as I can when the interview appears in the paper.

Incidentally, I’m currently reading Tony’s latest book: Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil, which makes a great case for travelling in Libya, Iran, northern Iraq, and North Korea.

On the way home, perhaps. I’m busy right now.

People think training for a marathon is all about running long distances – plodding along for ages at a nice, steady pace.

The tortoise rather than the hare. Joanna Newsome rather than Kurt Cobain. Not so.

To up your endurance, you have to pepper your running schedule with high-intensity runs. There’s a couple of ways to do it, which I’ll go into in a minute. But on your normal run, if you want to up the intensity, laziness can help.

Here’s how: Be Late. Leave late for a deadline, and you are forced into action to make it. The last five minutes of my run last night (I left the office late) were a looking-at-my-watch-while-dodging-cars-and-increasingly-angry-pedestrians urban path of mayhem. I didn’t want to end up sitting on a pier, waiting for the next ferry to chug around the Opera House half an hour later.

My ‘standard’ run is a 6km(ish) lollop across Sydney’s Anzac bridge from Rozelle, up into Sydney central and down to Circular Quay. It takes 30 minutes on the nose, and ferries home leave every half hour. So if I leave at 6:58 I have exactly 30 mins to get there before the gates close for the 7:30 ferry. If I leave at 7pm, I have 28 minutes. It’s not much, but one red light or busy intersection can mean missing the ferry.

Normal pedestrians, with iPods and briefcases, are ill-prepared for a sweaty Irishman with more hair than sense to be bearing down on them at great pace. To that lady who did a tennis split-step and froze in her spot on the pavement – bill me for your heart treatment. To everyone who ‘met’ me coming around a corner last night – apologies. I can’t see around them either.

The benefits of upping your intensity, be it through sprints, steady high-intensity work, fartlek, or hill runs, are manifold. You increase your VO2 max, which has something to do with taking in a greater volume of Oxygen per breath. You push out your lactate threshold, which is the intensity you can work at before your legs begin to cramp, seize, shrivel and curl like the wicked witch in the wizard of Oz. It also means that when you come to a hill in the race, your body is used to pushing out that extra effort for a while.

And the pedestrian-dodging? Well, that’s just good for the soul.

^Click and Give^

From the Tele (via the Australian) comes a familiar tale – Flickr pics being stolen and used without permission. Remember Redmum’s duckgate?

Pics from US flickr users have been plastered on billboards in Australia as part of their “Are you with us or what” campaign, and the owners aren’t happy. The pics are credited at the bottom, but virgin apparently never asked for permission to use them. Check out the victim’s comment on this flickr page, which also shows a stolen pic of the victim, plastered with the slogan ‘Dump your pen friend’.

The pics – personal pics of people – are paired with other slogans such as: ‘Work Friends Are Just That; If You Enjoy Your Company Too Much You’ll Go Blind; and Strangers Are Just Serial Killers You Haven’t Met Yet’.

The pic-posters are universally insulted that they are now the butt of international jokes.

Clearly this is the case of a designer sourcing images from a site, looking at the location of the poster and saying to him/herself: ‘They’ll probably never see it – it’ll be grand – but we’ll credit the site to cover our backs’. Silly. If you’re drawing from a global pool, effectively a global community, to source your images, there’s a good chance your pee will run back in and contaminate that pool some day, no matter how far away you piddle. And the other pool users won’t thank you for it.

There is a good chance that this was done out-of-house for Virgin, in which case someone’s about to lose a contract. In-house or out-house, the perps should end up in the dog house. [Read more →]

From the NYT, news that a group of triathletes needed psychiatrists to talk them into the water.

Some were afraid of the dirty water, some were afraid of the rats, and others were just plain afraid.

Are triathletes not meant to be tough? The only shrinkage that occurs during the Liffey Swim is inside the Speedos, as far as I know.

THE ball is rolling, finally, with donations for the City2Surf and marathon combination, with the first one coming from an anonoymous donor who dropped $50 on the fundraising website last week. I’ll be cross-posting between the two sites as training progresses.

The charity I’ve chosen is the Australian MS Society, for whom I did a charity walk a while back here in Sydney, and the team raised over $2,000. I can’t speak for any other charity runners, but choosing the MS society was a very personal experience for me, and being able to hand over funds raises can be quite emotional.

The last time I ran a marathon (also benefitting the MS Society) was while my mother was actually suffering from the disease. People who knew Mum were falling over themselves to give money to the cause. I raised an easy $2,000, mostly from one big night out, where palms were greased with alcohol, and my father’s wealthy and generous friends fought to outdo each other with fists full of notes. Sponsorship lines were bought like they were items at auction, with each bid for public generosity larger than the last.

Everyone knew what Mum was going through at that stage. MS is a degenerative neurological disease, that attacks the protective sheaths that encase your synapses, the links between nerves. Those sheaths break down and erode, leaving the synapses open to erosion.

In layman’s terms, it’s like stripping away the outer coating on a copper wire, leaving the metal inside exposed to the elements. As with knackered wiring, the neurological connections suffer, as does the patient. It leads to exhaustion and aches in the beginning, and as it progresses into its final stages, loss of sensation, chronic pain, gradual, creeping paralysis, loss of cognition and motor control, and eventually death.

It’s an awful thing to suffer from, and it’s a horrible thing to watch happen to someone you love.  With some people it happens all in one go, and with others, you can enjoy long periods of remission, where the effects are greatly lessened. Mum was one of the former, sadly.

One of my mum’s early symptoms was that she lost sensation in her feet. She couldn’t judge pressure, which meant she had trouble judging where the ground was, and when her feet were touching it, impacting on her mobility.  It was hugely frustrating for her, having been an active tennis player, golfer, and generally larger-than-life individual. So for me, running a marathon, and beating the crap out of the soles of my feet, is a perfectly apt way to honour her and raise funds for the disease that robbed her of so many years. (She died aged 49).

If you can spare two minutes and even a fiver, please click on the pic below to make a donation so that the MS Society can lessen the suffering of people like my mum.

^CLICK & GIVE^

Joey Tribiani once said: “You always have to think about the trail.”

Someone in the Australian Daily Telegraph forgot that precious little rule this morning, or at least forgot about the RSS trail that a deleted post can sometimes leave.

On Google Reader I spotted a funny headline (stamped at 8:30am) from the Tele’s business section: ‘Do Not Publish Until Aust Dollar hits $0.90′.

The above-the-fold snippet reads: ‘CHEAPER wide-screen televisions, clothes and computers will be filling stores ? and many homes – across the nation after the Aussie dollar reached US$0.90′.

But, lo and behold, there is no link-thru, just a 404 message saying the page I’m looking for doesn’t exist.

Which isn’t surprising, when you consider that the Aussie dollar, currently gathering pace in a march towards parity with the US dollar, didn’t reach $0.90 at all this morning, and the 9:00am headline which followed the aforementioned 8:30am one correctively reads: ‘Dollar retreats from fresh highs over US88c’, linking to this story.

The first story was clearly a pre-emptive piece, written in anticipation of the dollar bursting through the US90c threshold, and put on hold somewhere in the Tele’s electronic infrastructure. But it leaked out, and even though it may have been hastily deleted, it potentially left a trail on RSS readers all over the world.

Pre-emptive journalism is always a risky business, when you’re writing for an intended headline and looming deadline. It can be hugely damaging if a ‘story’ is let through the net, written for an anticipated outcome that fails to materialise as the deadline sweeps past with a whoosh.

And with news organisations struggling to fill their websites more quickly and regularly than their paper pages, it’s inevitable that some stuff slips through. Particularly on a cold Monday morning during the southern hemisphere winter, and it’s no big surprise that the Tele’s not alone.

From the Sydney Morning Herald’s national news section come two similar posts, one at the top of the page, one near the bottom, clearly clinging on despite an order to cut it free:

Somebody somewhere needs a coffee…..

Post-script: Incidentally, if you’re reading this on a browser rather than a reader, you’re getting an edited version, the earlier version having been revised and supplemented an hour or two after its first publication. So I’m guilty of the crime which I’ve highlighted.

One of Google’s more subtle variations.

Via

With the boss away, I’m left in the hotseat, and edited my first full paper last week. Press day (Monday) was long and draining, but the paper looks well, which I’m glad of.

The issue contains some cracking material – including an interview with Alan Joyce, chief exec of Australian budget airline, Jetstar, news of the completion of a world record series of climbs, culminating in an Australian summit (of which, more here), an interview with disgruntled crime fiction author John Connolly, and all the regular stuff besides. There’s also news that The Frames are playing two more gigs in Australia, to which I’m looking forward immensely.

Blogging has been correspondingly light, but with work, training for a marathon, (click and give….) and attempting to have a life, there’s not been much time for extra writing.

Normal business resumes August 6.

Why does this remind me of Damien’s dealings with Sky Handling Partners?

Two to-me-to-you adds on the blogroll this week, Kathy Foley and Dr Eoin O’Dell’s righteous cearta.ie site, and a fellow expad Morgan Carpenter, also living in Sydney, apparently. He’s got a separate page for his stunning pics at Lunasa.net.

Worth a look.