Not long ago I realized I was getting a little heavier and slower (and yes, older) so to help motivate myself (there’s nothing like walking past an expensive piece of equipment every day) I got an elliptical.

It was great. I started to lose weight (and thanks to the pushups and situps I felt able to do get into slightly better shape). Of course motivation remains an issue (it’s always easy to find excuses).

Pounding away for half hours at a time (especially just before Christmas when the girls were away) gave me some thinking time… how to combine the aspects of motivation with the social networking tools that we have today – Facebook and Twitter for instance.

Twitter seemed like an obvious choice. Nice short messages that force clarity, and a really approachable API so that even I – now coming up to 18 months since I actually wrote code for a living – could get to grips with.

You may have noticed the occasional Twitter message from me (and a few other folks now) that reads like “@gtFtr Elliptical Lvl 7.5 30 mins 2.2 miles cal 318 77 watts 4.4 mph HR 152” – well those are sharing the stats from my latest workout with my pet project.

The trackers (different exercises) are all outlined on the blog, and it’s fairly easy to add new ones if you don’t see something you need. It is very much a part time project and there’s quite a to do list… assuming I ever get the time to do any of it (open to suggestions from folks with more skill, more time, or a good plan).

Feel free to check it out, suggest some new trackers or just laugh at my progress…

On February 3^rd this year, Australian PM Kevin Rudd announced that the Government would be convening a summit called “Australia2020” in Canberra to help shape a long term strategy for Australia’s future. In the announcement, the Government said the summit would have these objectives:

· To harness the best ideas across the nation

· To apply those ideas to the 10 core challenges that the Government has identified for Australia – to secure our long-term future through to 2020

· To provide a forum for free and open public debate in which there are no predetermined right or wrong answers

· For each of the Summit’s 10 areas to produce following the Summit options for consideration by government

· For the Government to produce a public response to these options papers by the end of 2008 with a view to shaping the nation’s long-term direction from 2009 and beyond.

Almost 8000 Australians applied to join this summit, both at home and overseas. 1000 were selected and will convene on April 19-20^th.

For those who were not selected there is now an unofficial forum for them to discuss these issues online at http://www.australia2020.net and I encourage you to let any Aussie friends or family know about this as well.

As a relatively new Aussie (I’ve been a citizen for about 2 years and ironically now living abroad) I hope this initiative will help to produce a country that I want to go back to.

To be like all the cool kids and join the Web 2.0 world of community rather than isolated islands I’ve updated my blog template to use Disqus for comments rather than the inbuilt solution.

All the old comments are still there, they just don’t show up on the homepage but if you click through to a post (eg this one) then you see any old comments but also the new disqus comment block.

I know there’s a bunch of services out there – coComment (which is built into Blog Engine) and IntenseDebate spring to mind but I prefer the feel and community at Disqus.

Give it a try. Leave a comment. Tell me what you think. I think it’s the start of what I asked for when I blogged about MeGC – now you can see what inspires me to join the conversation and also see any comments to this blog in one place – and it even integrates with other services like FriendFeed to spread the conversation.

Thanks to a tweet from FrankArr I’ve been playing with Digsby, a fairly new combined IM, Email and Social Networking client.

So what does that all mean?

Essentially it provides a replacement to the Windows Live Messenger and GTalk clients I usually have running on my dekstop. In that role it’s much like Pidgin or AdiumX for Mac users and does the job at least as well as they do. It still needs a bit more polish to get it on par with more developed clients for things like smileys but it does what it says on the tin (and I get tabbed chat which I love!)

The it adds on a notified for Social Networking tools like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to let you see messages, alerts, status changes and what have you. It saves me many a wasted moment in the browser checking these things. You can even respond to some things directly, or get taken straight to the relevant item to manipulate it however you want.

Finally it acts as a mail poller for Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, POP3 and IMAP accounts – letting you read, manage and reply to email.

If it continue to evolve and deliver a stable, reliable, light footprint (resources and screen real estate) client I think it’s going to be a keeper.

It’s not going to replace Outlook (or Communicator for Exchange based IM and phone control) any time soon, and it doesn’t support Skype or MagicJack to manage all my communications … but who knows what the next build will bring :)

Every 6 to 12 months I like to flatten my computers and build them up from scratch. Clean start with the operating system, applications I actually use and a chance to get rid of the trialware and redundant drivers for hardware that’s been consigned to the bin.

It’s also a really good time to take some backups!

I’ve been noticing though that my day to day laptop (which I don’t want to reformat for a couple of months) has been getting a bit slow, so I wondered what I could do to fix things up.

I’ve recently updated to Vista SP1 on all my applicable machines and noticed one significant usability factor on a couple of very similar machines we have at home. The one with 2 hard disks is much more responsive than the single disk machine. I’ve got the OS, apps and data on one drive and the pagefile on the second drive (it was fairly small) – note this are physical drives, not partitions.

That got me thinking if there was anything I could do on the laptop to speed things up.

First thing I did was get rid of old files by using the Disk Cleanup Wizard which got rid of some cruft.

Now I’ve always assumed that Vista has been doing a pretty good job of keeping my drive de-fragmented but I installed a trial of DiskKeeper and was surprised to find that it reported almost 20% fragmentation.

So I ran the defragment a couple of times and that certainly helped.

In order to get the number down significantly though I did have to make sure all my applications were closed – so no files were locked open. That made me wonder about the contents of (for instance) my Outlook OST (Exchange Offline Store) and PST (Personal files) – sure enough, right clicking on them allowed me to compact those – after emptying my deletes items folders.

My next experiment was based on the fact that my processor isn’t often stressed out, but the disk light is usually on. So I decided to compress the drive (on the grounds that reducing the physical I/O at the expense of some CPU cycles might be a good thing)

Net result…. compressed disk, clean up wizard done, compact application data files and running de-fragmentation utilities… gives you not only a bit of a spring clean but a more responsive machine.

Take some backups and give it a try. You might be surprised. Of course it’s better to get a second drive and balance the physical bottlenecks but for laptop and small form factor machines there’s still a fair bit you can do to tweak.

A while ago I posted about BrowserHawk adding support for Silverlight detection and for a while, apart from writing your own code, that had been it.

The good news is that as Silverlight is getting more popular the options are improving… I got a comment on the post to let me know that BrowserObject now also supports Silverlight detection in the same way as other plug ins.

The free version doesn’t detect plugins, but does give you some basic information for very little effort. The upscale product works for both .Net and PHP infrastructure and comes with some easy getting started samples to make you productive.

Good to see the eco-system growing.

IE7 has been available for a couple of years, and IE8 has just gone into beta. Firefox 2 is getting on nicely with v3 in the wings and even Safari with version3 is looking pretty good on Windows. Some people even like Opera (actually, it’s pretty cool on the Mobile platform).

So why are folks still persisting in using IE6? 31% of internet users in recent reports. That’s almost a third. More than all the non-IE browser population combined.

It’s old, and it’s got some quirks. And those quirks make developers lives a misery (I should know, I spent many happy years wrangling browser incompatibility issues).

If all those folks using a version of any browser older than IE7 could just upgrade, get with the program and do their bit (it’s only a few moments to download and install and it doesn’t even insist on a legal copy of Windows these days!) then developers could concentrate on making great web applications using all the cool Ajax, Silverlight and Javascript features without having to worry about testing a load of different quirky behaviors.

It’s not just old versions of IE that are a problem – if you’re running anything older than the current version of a browser then you’re part of the problem – be it Firefox, Opera, IE, Safari, Maxthon or one of many others. The newer browsers still can’t quite agree on what standards they’re complying with and how they interpret some of the instructions in the standards (and I’ve read some of those documents… they’re not exactly unambiguous in places) but they’re better.

I’m not saying you should run business critical processes on bleeding edge beta versions of IE or the alternatives, but at least upgrade to the latest “released” version – you’ll save a lot of developers a lot of pain.

Please. Save the developers. It’s a great cause and supporting it won’t cost you much more than a few moments of your time.

We live in a push-button, instant-on age. We leave devices in standby mode because we believe it’s helping save the planet… but is it really?

How much does your flat screen TV or l33t gaming rig consume when it’s “sleeping” and all you see is the little winking light telling you that you’re doing good.

And then all those wall warts. The chargers for your phone, your music player, the DS Lite. What are they draining long after the device is fully charged and idle?

I don’t know either – I’m lazy! But I do wish there was an easy way to shut things right down when I’m not using them, that was easy and wouldn’t inconvenience the family.

It looks like Belkin may have an answer to at least one of these problems about to hit the market. A powerstrip that you can turn on and off with a remote control!

It has two sockets that are always on (ideal for, say, the cable box and modem) and then 6 sockets which can be toggled with a remote control that you can put somewhere convenient.

For our house it means that for the $50 expected retail price we can easily power down the TV, the amplifier and speakers, the XBox360 and SqueezeBox music player without having to struggle and reach to find the wall switch.

Also from Belkin is a neat 3 way power strip than includes two USB chargers – that can eliminate a couple of the wall warts… really handy both at home and when you’re traveling (I often end up unplugging the alarm clock or kettle in a hotel room just to feed all my devices over night!)

While neither of these are a perfect solution – the remote control power strip probably still consumes some power when it’s idle (hopefully in the 2-5W not 25-45W range some surge protectors apparently consume) and the USB charge capabilities of the wall adapter which great I wonder if the transformer (and I hope it’s only one) shuts down when there’s nothing plugged into the sockets to need power…

I guess you could go a long way with some of the home automation solutions to managing this (and all with a universal remote control) but it would be nice to see a more common, consistent approach across all the equipment you find in home and office to really make an effort to stop sucking juice when it’s not needed. Your power bill will thank you now, and your kids will thank you when they don’t have to worry about the consequences!

Spending some time this evening writing down thoughts and strategies around some impending changes at work (one thing I’ve learnt that stays the same at Microsoft… Change!) and I thought of one of my favorite GapingVoid cartoons.

I’m not worried that there is change ahead – in fact it’s probably a very healthy thing as we react to changing conditions and adapt. My biggest concern with any change is that I will continue to be successful – both in how I’m perceived but also in how I feel I’m being utilized. The latter is probably more important… if I’m not challenged and feel that I’m able to rise to the challenge in a meaningful way then am I in the right job?

Once again Hugh summed it up very well (it was this cartoon that helped cement my decision to join Microsoft)

I came a fairly long way to do what I’m doing today, and hopefully in the last 18 months the big deliverables as well as the smaller ones have helped in their own little way to improve peoples perception of what Microsoft is (especially in the Web space). Going home is not on the agenda!

There’s change ahead… but it’s all for the good.

No offense to the trail blazing Hybrid from Toyota, but somehow it doesn’t quite match up to the $98,000 starting price, 139mpg equivalent, 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds roadster from Tesla Motors that is now officially in production after many months of rumor.

Not that it’s going to do you any good… they’ve already sold out the initial production run, and they’re taking deposits for the 2009 wait list!

If you’re wanting to go “green” but you’re worried about the damage to your street cred then this is a great sign that in the coming years you won’t need to compromise. Now all we need is an all electric Ferrari to be reviewed on Top Gear and we know the new era is here…