Catching a wake-up

First wake up

For about the last 6 months I have had really bad pain in my hip and/or back when I take my daily walk.

My walk is 5km and usually around the 30 minute mark the pain starts with a little niggle and by the time I finish I want to roll on the ground in agony. It goes after about half an hour. Like it never happened.

After one 8km walk it took a lot more than ½ hour to recover and gave me quite a fright and I scuttled off to the orthopod who did my hip replacement 8 years ago; the x-rays were perfect – nothing had moved. He blithely suggested I just walk 3 kms then which irritated the hell out of me having just shelled out a small fortune and anyway, there a few expedition walks I still want to do.

I decided to have a rest from walking. When I started up again the first day was fine but by the end of the first week the same pain returned. Persist I did and carried on walking but I was feeling quite distressed.

Yesterday I went to see Stephan, a biokineticist. I did the tests for strength, flexibility, balance and failed just about everything. I have always been physically strong and was horrified that there were things I just couldn't do or really battled to do. Muscle weakness may very well be the problem with my hip/back.

So now I have been grounded from my daily walk for 2 weeks and have to stick to hectic strengthening regimen and then, very slowly over 7 weeks, build up to 5kms.  9 weeks to achieve this…quite a long time!

The one bit of brightness was Stephan saying I have get back to being an athlete –just like I was when I did the Camino!

Can’t say how much happier I feel today albeit a bit stiff in strange places. There is no guarantee that this is going to sort out my problem but I certainly need the strengthening exercises and wouldn't have known how weak I have got in the last few years if I hadn't seen Stephan.

Moral of this story: If you feel pain have it seen to straight away. It is not a bad idea to have yourself checked out and to make sure you are doing the correct exercises for the activities you are doing. Keep fit and keep strong.

Second wake up

Since January Lisa and I have been doing online university courses. They are interesting and fascinating I have just signed up for another 2, one starting next week and the other in few months time.

So what is the wake up about this?

Do you know how much you just don’t know? Do you know how much amazing stuff is out there? I have had so much fun listening to awesome people from really great universities teach and share what they know; following links for reading assignments and related lectures, finding new information, ideas and expanding my world which somehow got quite small over the past years.

Moral of this story: like keeping your body fit and strong do the same thing with your brain.

So many contradictions

Violent cyclist:

I want you to have a look at this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmasBlGellY&feature=youtu.be It shows at least 6 Cape Town cyclists beating up a taxi drive. I think it was taken on Sunday.

I picked this up on facebook and couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing..

There are also lots of ‘shock/horror’ comments on facebook and I read that these cyclists have been banned from riding in the next race. Harsh treatment indeed (my sarcasm).

But my ‘shock/horror’ is that there were other motorists and quite a few people on the pavement watching all this going on; and it was being filmed. But no-one helped the taxi driver. Now I quite understand that the taxi driver may have driven a bit close or cut them off (I make this assumption because a lot of taxi drivers are fairly awful drivers), and one might say he ‘deserved’ this beating but WOW…what a reaction from the cyclists and spectators.

Imagine the fall out if 6 taxi drivers beat up on one cyclist.

Oscar

The big bookie chain in UK and Ireland, Paddy Powers,  has offered money back if Oscar walks – not sure if the pun was intended but yes, you get your bet cash back if he gets off.

There are quite a few mutters about this advert being in bad taste.

I am not sure why people are being sensitive - the whole Oscar story is in bad taste including some of our own adverts (not a real Nando's advert BTW)

(http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/4009648.article?cmpid=mwbreak_154525)

Captcha and Family History

Captcha

Have you every wondered about these funny words?

Primarily they are to authenticate that you are a human and not a machine.

And they have a couple of secondary functions that are world changing/world enhancing! Yes, indeed. Have a look at this TED Talk to see the extent of how we are all contributing to digitizing books – one word at a time! And how we can translate the internet into every language.

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html

Even more exciting are these people asking the most amazing questions and coming up with answers – this is really ‘out the box’ thinking at its best.

Family History

I have been researching and collecting old information about my family – in particular my grandfather.  He went by a couple of names during his lifetime and prior to where we are at the moment with the Internet, tracking the family history was nearly impossible. Now, if you know a few pertinent sites all you need do is go there and search on names and words! So much information and so many records in so many countries has now been digitized – can you imaging the size and scope of these exercises?

Australia has digitized their newspapers back to about 1800 – which has provided a feast of information about my family, not just my wayward grandfather. Interesting, a lot of people these days would be quite pleased to have as many Google hits as my grandfather does in the old newspapers.

On the newspaper site, you can make corrections to the standard text where the OCR has not been able to translate properly. The more people who access the records and make corrections will result in improved standards and information – just like Captcha – one word at a time!

Back to School

I signed up for an online course with Duke University (free). It started on 13^th January and is set to run for 12 weeks.

Each week I get an email to tell me the next set of lectures is available and I am now into week 3. I am a bit behind; that is I still need to complete 2 lectures from last week and the associated test for each lecture. They cutely refer to them as quizzes – probably so we don’t get too stressed out. And during the lecture one gets little ‘quizzes’ thrown in to ensure we understand, at least up to that point.

I haven’t done anything like this for ages and whilst it is all online and quite impersonal I have been concerned to keep on top of things and do well. I know that if I don’t keep up to date I will find it difficult to catch up later. I have also been concerned, for no apparent reason and quite illogically, that my lecturer is keeping a beady eye on my progress – imagine my relief when I saw that there are 5,000 people doing this course…he cant possibly check up on me each week!

Here’s the thing: This course is so well done – it does, after all, come from a top US university. You get about 10 lectures per week; each lecture is approx 15 to 20 minutes long. You are quizzed during and after the lecture. If you get something wrong you are told why it is wrong – if you get the question right you are told why it is correct (just in case you took a wild guess I suppose). And then you can take the test again and hopefully score 100%. They do keep track of how many times you have a bash at it.

 The place to go to for a list of free online courses is: http://www.openculture.com/

You will also find a host of other things at this site: free language courses (Lisa is doing a Spanish course which she says is amazing), business courses, maths courses, art, art history, music, archaeology, biology, economics …in fact just about anything. You can also get free e-books, films, text books ---- an amazing amount of free stuff.

Have fun!