The first week at Salesforce.com has finished, so first impressions are it is a very dynamic and vibrant company and like all my previous employers loads of fantastic people. Enjoyed the welcome and the chance to get active with some customer work along with a long list of education, training and certification ahead of me.

Being back based in Staines was a bit of a deja vu moment especially being in a familiar building from the outside, but not from the outside. Staines can be a parking challenge, as it has been for years, which is a good incentive to arrive early to get a parking spot, but this should be expected with the organisation still growing and growing at a rapid rate. With four days spent in Staines so far I have managed to get a parking space, just hope it lasts. I have also had one day in the city where sometimes desks can be an issue, but managed to find one this morning before my meetings.

I will have to be a bit careful with the availability of various foods in the building there is a temptation that needs to be watched otherwise I will have to run 10miles 7 days a week just to stay constant Good thing healthy stuff also available :-)

I can wholeheartedly recommend Salesforce as an employer it has its heart in the right place about looking after its staff, but most importantly looking after its customers. I will post updates on how things progress and also will be starting my Photo 2012 project that will include photos from my work travels.

If anyone would like to join Salesforce.com just let me

It is now time to finish up for the night and enjoy the weekend before heading out to Vegas for a kickoff. Looking forward to meeting the PM team and to get the chance to really use some of the neat apps the organisation has built including a cool iPad/iPhone app to be used during the conference.

Jobs to be completed in the next few weeks include tidying and painting front door, filling some cracks, general tidying around house and finishing some of the garden ready for spring and may be selling in the not too distance future. Also on the list as late additions are find car key and tidy office again

So on gardening leave and once again jobs to do in the garden, how ironic!

One thing that I also decided to do was to do the race using a road bike.. I used my local store Wellington Trek to hire a 2011 Trek 2.3 Alpha road bike below you can see the 2012 model.

Trek 2.3 2012 model courtesy of Trek Bikes website

More about the bike in a minute… So I decided that each 2mile run should be completed in around 20mins and that the bike ride should take no more than 40mins. I didn’t separate the transition times out as that would have just been too complex…

Now how did I do?

I beat my target time by about 22 seconds which isn’t huge, but actually it was really satisfying to manage a time of 1 hour 19 minutes 38 seconds. This broke down into the following

The first run I averaged a pace of 8m 50sec miles and with the bike section I managed an average speed of more that 16mph which I was please with and finished with 10m 19sec mile pace.

Finally a little about the hire bike…

The Shimano STI shifters were sweet to use and so much easier than the clunky levers on my Specialized Hybrid, the changes were very smooth and the bike was much faster in comparison. I was surprised how quickly I had got use to the bike since the last time I rode a road bike was over 25 years ago. Now I have to wait until the new tax year to get a road bike on the bike to work scheme The bike was very light and as an aluminium frame I was impressed with the weight, rigidity and direct handling that I experienced. The kit on the bike was mainly Shimano 105 with Bontrager wheels, handlebars etc..

I now have to put this bike on the wishlist along with a host of others

Now I have decided to do this Duathlon again next year but hope to take a big chunk of time out of this weekends time. I have decided how much so will have to put some thought into that..

With life put into perspective with these two events it was only right that I captured briefly my thoughts on the genius that was Steve Jobs. Having joined the iPod revolution i quickly understood why they were such a success, it all about the user experience and making it simple that anyone can use the product. If only all things in life were designed this way….

After several years of suffering with microsoft products, don’t get me wrong Microsoft brought us some neat and cool capabilities in the PC era, but they did really rest on their laurels.. I decided on a business trip to take a larger bite of The Apple.. In Boston I purchased a first generation Mac Mini to give this OSX operating system a whirl. After a few days I had decided it was a far superior experience in comparison to Windows and also less hassle and maintenance.

Since these two purchases I would now be considered a fanboy by many, but I no longer spend my personal time fixing, troubleshooting and updating devices as I no longer use windows, except for one app at work. I own several Apple devices today and have own several Apple devices in the past. I think my tally is about 3 iPods, 2 iPhones, 1 Mac Mini, 1 MacBook, 2 MacBook Pros and 2 iPads…

All credit to Steve Jobs as the other thing he has taught me is that good presentations don’t need lots of bullet points and words.. Pictures work great and design is very important.. But let’s not forget that innovation is what make mine and many other people’s life’s easier!!!

RIP Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011

The next thing we looked at was what should we do with the terracing on the banking and how could we get more garden from the space. We contacted a garden designer and she was able to get us some rough estimates on what the ground works would cost if we wanted to excavate and sure up the banking. After we had picked ourselves off the ground we decided that the terracing would have to wait and be a lower priority. We had a rethink and got pencil and paper out & iPad to work out what we could do. Having spent sometime messing around we decided  that we could easily rearrange the parking and gain some area of the drive back to allow the kids to have more play area.

Here is an early sketch..

Over the coming weeks I will post updates on progress to the garden makeover.

Much research later and a great recommendation from Paul our neighbour I have subscribed to Crashplan as my cloud backup provider. So why you may ask and is it expensive? In short it does provide real value for money when we are talking about my photographs from the past 7 or 8 years plus the need to backup more than one device. As for price they charge in dollars, but for 2-10 devices with Crashplan+ family it was $119 per annum, which is pretty good value and if you buy more years in advance you get a bigger discount. Here is a comparision of the different options you have from Crashplan including there free device to device backup Crashplan comparison

I went for Crashplan+ as I wanted the ability to have unlimited cloud storage and chose the family option so I could backup the families Macs. The other great features of Crashplan+ include:

• Device to device backup – this allows me to backup my Mac to my linux desktop PC for example
• Backup sets – This is great as I can selectively backup my photo libraries and aperture vaults to different folders and devices
• Adoption – The ability to adopt a backup if you need to build a new device with the same data set, hence no requirement to backup all the data again.

After about a 20days I have approximately 600GB backed up to the cloud and now in a position to backup my main USB drive library which will be another several hundred gigabytes. With all data backed up I expect to be storing in excess of 1TB in the cloud which is great and a gives us piece of mind. If I now think back to the tradition paper developed and printed photos that if our house burnt down they would be lost, not anymore with the photos secured in the cloud.

The other question that could be asked is why not Flickr or a similar service for the photos? Well it is an option for finished photos, but when I want to keep RAW images and also the workflow process it is not an appropriate option.

Now have more piece of mind and data is much safer…. Head over to www.crashplan.com for more information..

Since then I have worked on the treadmill to get my time for 5Km down from about 34mins a year ago to a much better 28mins 59secs, but as this is a treadmill time I thought that really need to work on my road running. Over the last week I have managed to squeeze in two road running sessions based on a route that I did a training session recently. The route is circular around Ascot and is approx 5-5.1Km long with a mixture of hills and flat. The first clockwise run I managed to complete it in 36mins 5 secs, which I was a bit disappointed with, although it gave me a benchmark to work on. Today I did the second run, this anti-clockwise in direction and managed it in a better 32mins 45secs so made better progress from the average speed of 5.34mph to 5.90mph, so next target is to get to the magic 30min or 6.22mph

My next session booked in with Zoe will be to concentrate on some bike work looking at improving my hill climbs as so far that is a weakness. Will update the stats as I go along with my training and progress. BTW the duathlon is the Big Adventure Store Chilly Duathlon on the 20th November at Castle Combe,

Overall the content was excellent and top marks for Idris Elba for narrating and guiding us through the 50 things that have changed the world.

I would have liked Channel4 split the program into 2 or 3 parts so we could have more music and more detail, but I know airtime is valuable!

It was great to see such a mix past and present, commercial and non commercial, plus how many of these artists have done TV or movies, Goldie, Will Smith, to name just a few! The show could a good blend of the era’s of Hip Hop and wow there were some great memories and also some good live footage that I haven’t seen for years or even new to me.

With the likes of Run DMC, Cookie Crew, Africa Bambaataa, Public Enemy, NWA, London Posse, Grandmaster Flash, So Solid Crew, Chipmunk, Biggie Smalls, Snoop, De la Soul, Rakim, Tupac, A Tribe Called Quest, Mark Ronson, Jessie J, Beastie Boys, Marley Mar l and so on.. far too many too mention….

The number 1 was Barak Obama.. Shows the influence in one way, not sure I agree with that, but the good thing is you can vote for you moment from the Top 25 here

So what was mine.. after much thought I have gone for Grandmaster Flash- birth of the DJ and turntablism.. Basically it certainly influenced me to start DJing and mixing as a teenager. At last look the top 5 were:

• 3. East Coast vs West Coast – hip hop almost destroys itself 20.93%
• 16. Eminem’s My Name Is – the Marshall Mathers phenomenon 18.6%
• 1. Obama and Jay-Z – hip hop meets the White House 6.98%
• 8. Grandmaster Flash – birth of the DJ and turntablism 6.98%
• 11. NWA investigated by the FBI – hip hop and authority 6.98%

I wasn’t really prepared for the amount of hills I would have to climb during this ride, which certainly reflected in my completion time of 3hrs 56mins 40secs, but that said it was sure a great workout.

The event was extremely well organised by UK Cycling Events on behalf of Wiggle and the facilities, course markings, feeding stations and staff were all top notch..

The ride started with a gentle incline from Ardingly College before heading out on to a mix of A, B and side roads around Haywards Heath area, with a number of climbs and descents as you can see in the profile above. I had managed to knock my trip computer and my Garmin distance sensors so ended going off without any indication of distance covered. This proved a real challenge when trying to judge the distance covered and how far to go before I hit the feeding station. On the outward leg to the feeding station I had to stop on the climb around the 20Km mark to give my poor legs a rest.. The next challenge was a small shower with a slight drop in temperature but eventually I reached the feeding station around 1hour 55min.

After grabbing some fluids and food off I went on the second half of the ride through the stunning countryside initially with a transverse across what seemed to be a ridge before more climbs. Before reaching the climbs the heavens opened up and down came a massive rain shower. At this point it was a case of being soaked through wearing sunglasses and struggling up the hills with sore quads. A couple of more stops on the climbs were required and some much needed fuel from a gel and some energy bars. This also gave my quads a rest and a change of position.

With very wet roads and some areas with rivers of water running down hills it made the going slow with one hill being tackled at around 2.5-3.0mph, I know it would have been quicker to walk, but I think at this stage I didn’t have the energy to unclip from my pedals to stop. The wet roads were a bit hairy especially on the fast descents plus the incident of trying to climb a hill and getting out of the saddle as I hit a drain cover, this was a severe case of lossing grip in an instance and nearly pulling my stomach muscles and wiping out.

 The sun came out and I started to dry out with about an hour to go which was met by a large climb before a few smaller hills and then the signs for Ardingly appeared. This was a very welcome sight and with a decent another hill and then I entered the village before heading down college road and into the finishing area…..

So after some research I selected a Specialized Sirrus Comp Hybrid bike as my transport with its mis of aluminium and carbon it seemed a good mide level machine. With gearing provided by Shimano it seemed the ideal mix of quality.

But before I would be ready for that first cycle to work I would need to get bike fit and deciding on a trainer to help me in that process to ensure that I could last the distance. So the bike arrived around Easter time and the process started to get me fitter for the journey. Over a period of about two months I did sufficient training do one Sunday in July to tackle the trial run into work.

That first run we made the outbound leg in 1hr 14mins and it was just on 15miles so after a short break the return journey took around 1hr 26mins, which I was very pleased with progress. So since that trip I have done it few times and will continue to do that schedule permitting. One of the upgrades that has helped me was switching to clipless pedals and shoes this has gained me loads of time, while

Now that I have tackled the work ride I am planning to do a duathlon as my next target in the winter and so work on the running is underway with some progress being made. So far my 5k on the treadmill has come down from 34mins right down to just 29mins and I expect to reduce this more in the coming months.