Amidst the great coverage of the Beijing Olympics on TV, I came across this article from the New Zealand Railways Magazine from 1936 that mentions my grandfather (a mile runner for the South African national team), I’ve bolded a few bits:

What is the predominant personal factor about the champion athlete? What manner of man makes the best athlete? These are two questions that come to my mind when recalling my associations with some twenty-four of the best athletes who have visited New Zealand since the Great War.

Men of the calibre of Jock Oosterlaak, Bukes, and Dave Leathern, from South Africa; Kirksey, Krogness, Merchant, Hahn, Scholz, Lermond, Simpson, Rothert and Kiser, from America; Carlton, Golding, Fitt, Cooper, Metcalfe, Barlow and Hampson, from Australia; Peltzer, from Germany; Perasalo and Sippala from Finland; and the four British athletes, Craske, Murdoch, Powell and Rampling, come readily to mind as one visualises the excellent athletic contests seen and personal friendships made.

It is not my intention to sort out the greatest sprinter, middle-distance runner or field event man from that assortment, but I will endeavour to analyse the personalities of the men who helped to encourage athletics in New Zealand—men who have won honours in big company.

Take Jock Oosterlaak, the wellbuilt Springbok athlete, who came to New Zealand in the 1921–22 season. He had an ideal temperament for big athletics. He knuckled down to serious business when the occasion justified it, but he could see the humorous side of sport as well. What New Zealander would see the funny side of travelling nearly 200 miles over the rougliest roads in New Zealand when seated on the door of a motor car? Well, Jock thought it an experience worth the while and is it any wonder that his memory, to-day, is cherished by those who had the good fortune to know him? Yes, he sat on the side door of a car when travelling from Napier to Gisborne; there was insufficient room on the seats, so Jock volunteered to sit on the door—and would not change places with any of the others. He won the big sprint at the meeting next day!

And J. W. Bukes, another Springbok athlete, was a fine fellow. Here we had the more stolid type of athlete; a man who would go to sleep twenty minutes before the start of his race, wake up and run 73/5 sees, for 75 yards! Dave Leathern, the third member of the Springbok team I met, was more serious than any other athlete I have seen. He took his sport as a serious mission and was always anxious to return good measure to the public. Before any contest he desired most of all a cup of tea.

It’s pretty cool how older articles get made available electronically, from all over the world just like this!

Just got back from 2 1/2 weeks in Fiji. Wow. What amazing, beautiful people we met there - the Fijian people are truly something special!

Internet service was pretty good where we were for the most part - so the email deluge isn’t too bad; though there are a bunch of deferred items for me to catch up on. The main things I didn’t read while I was away were all the gossip columns, Techcrunch and so on… and I didn’t really miss them that much to be honest. Got a lot to do now though - March month-end! Back to work!!

More creative misspelling perhaps? Check out the Techcrunch ad for “Pansonsonic HDTVs”.

My brother-in-law gave my wife and I a Nintendo Wii for Christmas yesterday! Totally unexpected; he got it a while ago by standing in line at Target at 6am in Phoenix, AZ to be the 74th out of 125 people that got one of them apparently. It’s a very fun system… we may have to get one for the new office in 2008 (location still TBD… stay tuned dear readers, all 75 to 120 of you!).

This is really funny actually. Thanks to Todd Sawicki for this one.

I am a fan of gadgets, no real surprise, especially watches - I love my Garmin Forerunner I got last year, though I am only so-so on my Suunto golf watch. But Michael Parekh found a new device that tracks how you are sleeping and can change when its alarm goes off to wake you depending on what your sleep-state is. Cool. Add it to the wishlist!

Almost new, an 80 hour (I think) Tivo Series2, could be yours if you live in the Bay Area and want to email me. I have three DVRs, and we only need one so looking to give someone a nice holiday gift. Email me at rob at the name of this blog dot com if you are interested.

I don’t know that it’s a “killer app” in the strictest sense, but the Discovery HD show, Planet Earth has got to be one of the coolest and most compelling reasons I can come up with to make the jump to HDTV if you haven’t yet. It’s almost hypnotic. Wow.

Happy 2nd Birthday Logan!!!!! We love you very much!

For the first time in a long time, I actually did some yard work today - landscaping and what not. And a couple of trips to Home Depot too of course! It was a lovely day in the Bay Area and I really enjoyed being outside getting some stuff done (over and above the usual computer work that I spend a lot of time doing of course!).

Another reason I’ve not been posting too much recently… “spring cleaning”!

I was tagged by Greg quite a while ago, and then Gary more recently and am finally getting around to doing this (sorry guys!). So without further ado, here are 5 things you didn’t know about me:

1) I grew up in Pretoria, South Africa and my younger brother, younger sister and parents all still live there, in the Cape Town area. It has its issues, but Cape Town is definitely one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
2) My favorite subject in high school was Latin! I won the Latin prize all five years… and made a bit of extra money selling Latin vocabulary notes to the rest of the class!
3) I love film and going to the movies — large popcorn, no butter.
4) When I was a kid, I was a crazy football (soccer) fan and clearly a bit of a dork too, since I used to simulate entire soccer leagues using dice and probability tables modeled off of real-world results.
5) Best for last, I have an amazing smart, talented, wonderful wife — and not only has she gone with me to see a rugby game, she even graciously endured watching (almost) a full day of a cricket test match! I am a very lucky man!

I am tagging Owen but he hasn’t updated his blog in a while…

I’ve started seeing TV ads for the very cool upcoming film, “The 300″. I’ve often been impressed with the selection of music for many of these movie trailers… but unfortunately the music is then not in the movie or on the official soundtrack. The music (also in the older version of the trailer I referenced on YouTube) for this one is for those who do not know it “Just Like You Imagined” from nine inch nails, from The Fragile (Left). Another great one was the Lord of the Rings (Two Towers) trailer which featured Clint Mansell’s theme from Requiem for a Dream. I was searching for this online and stumbled upon its entry in the “Trailer Music Database”. Of course! How could there not be something like this?

Click to enlarge

I really love this photo because (a) my wife took it and it was her first time on a golf course, (b) I hit the ball within a few feet of the pin on this particular shot and (c) well, it’s an amazing, beautiful hole/course on a stunning day! This was at El Tamarindo in Mexico. Wow!

Okay, back to work!!

For Christmas I was lucky enough to get the Garmin Forerunner 305 (after dropping some really big hints!) and it is really marvelous. My new favorite gadget and I hope, part of a trend over the next few years of fitness gadgetry and online software that will help many people get out there and get fit by making it more fun, interesting and interactive. I’ll come back to the Forerunner in a second…

I’ve always thought it amazing how un-interactive the fitness industry is. Now by “interactive” I don’t mean those silly “surf the net” bicycles that they briefly had I remember at my SF gym in 2000-2001 where embarrassingly the company went out of business and the gym had the bikes there for a few months with inactive web screens…. no I’m talking about ways to help people train with others across locations, save their workout information, track their progress, “compete” in a healthy way with their friends etc. Is it just the price of the technology that has been too high or has it been a lack of interest on the consumer end? I’m guessing that like so many things technology-oriented, the technology while promising in most cases just hasn’t had enough staying power even if it is very cool and has probably not found a home in companies that are not really tech-oriented.

I intend to write a lot more of my thoughts on this because I believe it will be a large and important trend — but I remember as long as 10-15 years ago at the gym riding a bike that was connected to others and I could race against my friends… I’ve not really seen much like that since in the gyms I’ve gone to (and I’ve been a member of a lot of gyms it seems :).

Now back to the Forerunner: I’ve never been a huge fan of running except when it comes to a group setting for a sport. When I was playing rugby and had to run myself over the summer, I didn’t really do as much as I should have, but in training situations with my friends/teammates I found it a lot easier. Similarly I find running on a treadmill very boring; at Dartmouth I would prefer running outside if it was 30 degrees (which was about my indifference point, below that…). I have some genetic predisposition towards running and athletics; as I’ve previously mentioned although I’ve usually been preoccupied with more cerebral pursuits, and so I think it’s sometimes a motivation issue for me. The Forerunner is great: at it’s most basic it’s a somewhat-oversize stopwatch, containing a GPS and wireless heart-rate monitor, which allows you to track where you’re running, where you’ve been and how your training is progressing along those elements. You can see how far you’ve climbed or dropped, and how your heart-rate and speed changes at all points. As an example - my first run near my house, I had a pretty smooth heart rate throughout the run but I saw it slightly spike at one point. I looked at the GPS of where I was running at the time and saw and remembered it was where I saw a barking dog that startled me! When you get back to your desk you can sync it up, plan your routes, feed it into a training plan and so on. There’s some third-party add-on software that I’m yet to explore that hopefully has some social-sharing aspects, but I’m guessing that this part of the mix is probably still ripe for development.

I’ve signed up with Traineo who rightly emphasize the motivation aspect, so perhaps a site like this is the home for it, but I actually see this as a rich area for social networking investment: the tech is still a bit expensive but as prices come down I’d love to challenge my friends in another city to a fair race across similar terrain, to monitor and encourage their training, and a host of other things I haven’t even thought of yet. Okay, enough of this I gotta go for a run…!

So I thought I would share this awesome trailer. March 2007… can’t wait!

I’m sure San Francisco isn’t the only place where you might hear offhand references at the coffee shop made to “cap tables”, “founders’ stock”, “participating preferred”, “web 2.0-esque” (shudder) and “crossing the chasm”; but certainly the times it happens per capita here are probably pretty high. I had an interesting chat with a couple of entrepreneurs (from the east coast) with some neat technology, where we were discussing an advisory role and they said that their head spins with all the ideas that get thrown at them every time they visit SF. Makes the flight home a real time of trying to reconcile all these thoughts and ideas, probably more interesting that watching the crappy movie sitting in coach. I find myself on east-west coast plane flights either watching the crappy movie (or now catching up on some TV shows on the video iPod), reading for fun or just plain staring at the seatback, thinking. We definitely don’t think enough, that much is clear to me. Ramble ramble over, it’s Friday evening!

I was running around changing my blog’s tagline quite a bit, putting in some movie quotes, lines from Robert Frost poems and other randomness, but now that I spent a bit of time whipping up my own header (yes I know it’s not great - for work I spend money to hire graphic designers except when it’s something I’m doing for fun, like this blog) I decided to fix on something for a bit. Where did the kilometer number come from, well all I’ll say is that it is with a bit of help from this handy tool. The meaning, I’ll let you figure out for yourself.

I mentioned to an Australian friend that I saw a former colleague of ours at ad:tech “arbing around”, and he at first thought the “arb” referred to “arbitrage” (something very familiar to me of course having worked at NexTag, Root Markets etc.). “Arbing” is South African slang actually, and it refers to someone just hanging out or wandering around, “putzing around” being a decent equivalent. Australians and South Africans sometimes have some similar slang or at least similar situations where slang is used and he immediately got it when I explained.

But I guess in a sense we laughed that perhaps in some areas, just hanging around and thus being able to observe and take advantages of opportunities that pop up could certainly qualify both as “arb” and “arbing around”…

Well, I also happened to take a vacation inbetween … which was great — but now I’ve finally (I hope) managed to get the upgrade to Movable Type 3.31 done from 3.17. Stay tuned!