Well, I did it.  It’s supposed to take 6 weeks of training but I managed to get there 2 training sessions earlier than the plan.

My plan was to always exceed the number of push-ups that were outlined in each set and each session so that I could ensure that, when the time came, I’d be well and truly ready.  You can see from the red line in the following graph how I was consistently above the prescribed number (the blue line) and I’ve also marked when I did the 100.

Along the way I dumped the data from the website for each week into OneNote and tracked my progress in there:

My plan now is to continue on and see just how far I can go.  Ideally, I’d like to see myself being able to do 10 sets of 50 push-ups every 2nd day and then being able to do a maximum set of around 125.  Either way, it feels good to get a bit of tone back into my upper body and abs.

I came across these great resources for setting up a mirrored failover environment for MOSS:

SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0/Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Part 1 (Introduction, Overview, and basics)

http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/04/23/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-1-introduction-overview-and-basics.aspx

Part 2 (Configuration)

http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/05/25/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-2-configuration.aspx

Part 3 (Failover)

http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/08/01/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-3-failover.aspx

I know that there’s been mixed reaction to the latest marketing campaign by Microsoft for Windows – but I’m actually enjoying these:

http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf
Video: New Family

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my participation in the 100 pushups challenge.  Since then I’ve been diligently going about my practice routine which consists of doing exercises 3 times per week.  I practice on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Each practice session requires you to do 5 sets of pushups – with the number of pushups in each set growing with each new practice session.  The final goal being that, in Week 7 you are able to simply sit down and crank out 100 consecutive pushups.

In the first couple of weeks of the challenge I stuck to the prescribed number of pushups to be done, but I’ve now started pushing myself a little harder so that I’m hopefully ahead of the game come week’s 6 and 7.

You can see from the following table just how much the numbers have grown since week 1:

Which looks even more impressive when graphed:

Overall it’s been enjoyable working towards the challenge of doing 100 pushups and I’m interested to see how I go.  At the end of each fortnight you are asked to do 1 set of as many pushups as you can.  This Friday I’m hopeful that I can hit 70… we’ll see

Recently I came across this site which claimed that it could help train me to do 100 consecutive pushups!  This sounded like an interesting enough challenge (for both the site’s claims as well as myself) so I decided to take it on.

The basis of the program is that each week you do 3 training sessions, 2 days apart.  I’m doing my training on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday’s.  And each day/week, the number of repetitions that you have to do, increases.  I’m in my second week and have done 5 sessions so far – you can see my progress against the program’s numbers in both of the following charts:

The good thing about this challenge is that it’s fun and very easy to find the 10 minutes that are required to do a session.  And hopefully at the end of it all, I’ll look and feel a little stronger too!

This week, Starbucks announced that it would close 61 of its 84 Australian stores by the weekend.  The closures would affect 685 jobs and follows the closure of around 600 underperforming stores in the US recently.

In my home town of Adelaide, I was surprised to see that the main Starbucks store in Rundle Mall was one of the affected sites (see picture at left for the notice that was posted on their front door this morning).

In interviews with locals, many city workers cited that they had recently cut their weekly expenditure on coffee by as much as 50% with dollar figures falling from as high as $70 per week down to $30-40 per week. 

The cut in consumer expenditure is undoubtedly related to the rise in world oil prices and their subsequent knock on effect into retail goods as well as lower consumer confidence in the wake of financial sector shocks in the US and recently locally here in Australia too.

Recently Grant split his blog into personal and work.  I’m doing a similar thing by splitting my blogging activities into 2 separate blogs.  They are:

This blog that you are reading now and my new blog.

They are both hosted on Live Spaces, but my new blog will be focused solely on articles about the Live platform.  So expect to see me blogging over there about things such as:

• Live @edu
• Managing small businesses on the Live platform
• Live ID
• and a raft of other Live-focused topics

So if Live is of interest to you, please add the URL for my new feed into your aggregator.

Back in February, I posted a blog entry when my blog views reached 50,000.  Today I was surprised to see that they have now passed the 100,000 mark! 

Recently I’ve been talking about some of the cool uses for Live Spaces but, in this post, I’d like to talk about a pet peeve of mine – the lack of work that is put into development and communication from the Live Spaces team about upcoming features

I’d like to use this article/post as a place where I can keep a list of the things that the community believe we need to improve Live Spaces.  If you have any items on your wish list please add them as comments and I’ll add them into the table.  Then hopefully we can send them off to the team and lobby for a response of some kind from the Spaces team.

One of the first questions that I had when I started using Windows Live Spaces last year was “How do I remove spam comments from my Live Spaces blog”?  It took me a while to work it out because the process for getting to the right screen to delete these comments is not necessarily that intuitive.  So here are the steps that you can go through if you need to delete comments from your Live space.

The Problem

When you browse to the home page of your Space, you are presented with several modules (web parts), one of which shows you a listing of the recent comments on your space.  We can see this module in the following image along with some comments which appear as though they might be spam.

As someone who likes to keep my blog free of spam, I’ve always been in the habit of removing the wretched stuff promptly – partly because I believe that spam has a habit of leading to more spam.  So let me take you through the steps that are required to remove just one of these spam comments from my Live Spaces blog.

The Solution

Step 1 – Identify the comment as spam

The first thing that I like to do is to click through to view the full comment, just to be sure that the comment is actually spam.  In the case of the comment below we can see that it clearly is spam.

Step 2 – Get the date of the blog entry

Now that we’ve identified the comment as spam, we need to get the date of the post so that we can locate it when we switch into Summary mode in just a moment.  For the post that we are concerned about here, we can see that the date is the 27 January.  

Step 3 – Switch the Blog View into Summary View Mode

In order to delete the spam comment from your blog you must switch into the Summary View mode which you can do from the navigation controls located on the left side of the page.  You can also select the month of the post that you are interested in to quickly navigate to the correct set of entries.

Step 4 – Select the spam comment to mark it for deletion

Once in Summary View mode you can scroll to the location of the post and then click on the Comments link to expand out a view of comments for that particular post.  Once you have the comments displayed, simply check on the checkbox to the left of the offending comment to mark it for deletion.

Step 5 – Delete the spam comment

Now that you have selected the comment for entry, scroll back to the top of the page and click the Delete selected items link to delete the comment.

You will be asked to confirm that you wish to delete the entries that are selected.

A Proposed Solution

Because most of the spam that I get is easily identified on the home page comments module, a feature that I’d love to see is the ability to delete comments directly from within that view.  The following image shows my proposed solution for doing that.

It would also be good if spam could also be removed directly from within the post as you were reading it as shown in the following image.