vincent.yu.net.nz

I got two blue lines for my birthday a few months ago:

Suddenly, we had our little miracle that we deliberately kept to ourselves for a long while. It was something we longed to share with our family and friends but took the “safe” route and waited the 2 or so months before telling everyone.

I seem to feel this growing pressure to become this perfect father-figure role-model in the next 6 months. To be someone like my Dad who was always so fun and adventurous when we were kids. Or someone with my Mum’s intelligence, industry, patience, discipline, forbearance, wit, kindness, … I could go on.

There are quite a number of things that bug me too. It bugs me when people say we’ve got nothing to worry about as our parents would be willing to care for our child. I don’t think so: if I can help it our child will be raised by us, with our values, our morals, and our rules. Not anyone else’s; even grandparents’.

It bugs me that I may be too harsh on my kids given my low tolerance for insubordination and mediocrity. It bugs me that my kids may never be fluent in spoken and written Chinese. It bugs me that s/he may eventually kick my ass in tai-chi.

It bugs me that I don’t know if I should stop working and become a full-time Dad. I love the idea of being at home, raising our family, and possibly working from home; I just don’t have boobs.

At the end of the pregnancy a baby pops out, but that’s just the start of what I suspect is going to be one massively awesome carnival ride.

Still, I can’t wait to meet my little Paris(ite) [sic].

(I’ll keep this short: there’s a very small number who thought they should’ve found out earlier, or felt they shouldn’t have found out on Facebook, I have this to say: get over it; if you can’t be happy for us that’s precisely why we didn’t tell you in person. Now let’s move on.)

I’m slightly sunburnt and tired after attending (as a spectator) the CrossFit Sectionals 2010 for the New Zealand, Tasmania, and Victoria regions. The winners from this competition are eligible to compete in the Regionals in Sydney, and the winners from that can go to the CrossFit Games in California.

I took the easy route as a spectator.

Day 1 consisted of 3 “Workouts Of The Day” (WOD), and a gruelling Fireman Combat Challenge based workout finished off Day 2.

I had to chance to test out my Canon 24-70mm f2.8 L lens and Aza was kind enough to lend me his Canon 70-200mm f4.0 L; I even got to use my superwide 10-18mm! Admittedly I was a bit nervous carrying around about $5,000 worth of glass – but it made a huge difference! I would’ve loved to have two bodies with different lens for that quick switch; but I can’t have everything (yet).

The hardest thing was trying to be at the right place, at the right time – and just having to guess when the “right time” is. Artistically, when you have 50-odd people doing the same thing, how do you make the photos all look different? I didn’t want them to look like they came out of a cookie cutter.

I also had the chance to put Aperture 3.0 through its paces too. I loved the Curves adjustment and the brushes. That quick and easy editing ability made it possible to post my photos up within hours of taking them. I do wish I had more pixel resolution though – I’m still lugging around my Canon 20D with only 6.8MP. I guess it means that the files are smaller, which results in faster imports and less memory usage when editing.

Pictures are on my Facebook profile – or here: http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/2402820/1/CrossFit%20Sectionals%202010?h=0c774d

When Scott Kelby is right when hey says that all you need to build a photography studio is a thin strip of plastic. He never mentioned that it should be gold in colour, with a hologram of an eagle on it.

I committed to indulging my first paycheque into buying camera gear and managed to tick three things off my wishlist of stuff.

Wireless Flash Triggers: I got a pair of transmitter/receivers for my 430 EX II from Gadget Infinity – dirt cheap compared to PocketWizards. At the time, I had no idea that I was going to get…

…a Canon 580 EX II flash. So here I am, with off camera flashes, but I’m still working with a crap kit lens.

I fixed that last Saturday with a Canon 24-70mm f2.8 L USM lens.

So: yay! I’m a happy chap – and I need to get out there and take more pics!

What a month January has been for me.

We welcomed in the New Year watching fireworks under the Sky Tower – a pretty monumental effort for me, since I generally am asleep well before midnight.

A few days afterwards, our (first) dog turned 2 years old. Eskie has changed our lives tremendously. Back in the day during my lunch hour, I’d take 20 minutes to drive home to let him out, feed him, and play and train him for 20 minutes, then drive 20 minutes back to work. We love him to bits!

The 16th of January marked 3 months since joining CrossFit NZ, a gym that has completely changed my life. It’s more a lifestyle than a gym for me now (just like taiji). It’s something that I do Monday to Friday almost religiously to the point that it almost supplanted taiji as my way of life. CrossFit co-owner/coach Darren mentioned that we train first for function and form is secondary, then: “One day you’ll wake up and say: Shit! I’ve got abs!”

Shit, I’ve got abs!

On 18 January I started my new role with Navman – I kept this one pretty quiet but I accepted the role last year but chose to start this year – just so I’d get a longer “holiday”. It’s been very positive so far and I love the challenges that have been thrown my way. The paycheque is a good bonus too.

23 January marks five years since the first ever date that Holly and I had at the Tapis Rouge with Cirque Du Soleil. Five awesome years! I’d have never guessed that we’d buy a house and get engaged after 23 months, and get married within 3 years.

To top off January, we had the long weekend and celebrated Holly’s birthday by visiting SidArt (again) for dinner and having their delicious tasting menu with wine pairing, an afternoon in Piha with fantastic weather, and a filling birthday brunch with our closest friends.

Holly also gave me what I think is the world’s most awesomest birthday present!

I’ve got less the 12 hours until the new decade begins so I’ve decided to recap some of the positive things that I can recall over the past 10 years.

2000: Blissful Youth. Still in my early 20’s, I gained NZ residency and citizenship. I finally became an official Kiwi after living in the country for 11 years (almost half my life at the time). Y2K also saw me living in the States for a month on work matters for Trimble Navigation NZ; that was a fun time. I also managed to sponsor my patents to become NZ residents because of the military coup in the Solomons that year; that was part was pretty shit. Thugs entered our family home & assaulted my father. I still remember a phone call I had with my mum: “I had to clean father’s blood off the walls”.

2001: I moved to Auckland to start a new job in June. Then 9/11 happened and it really hit me how life is so precious and fragile. Somehow, I don’t think I really got the message at the time.

2002-2003: Dark Years. Didn’t realise it at the time, but they were dark. I increased in weight from 64kg to 74kg, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and eating out every night. I’d struggle to climb a flight of stairs.

2004: Liberation. I stopped smoking in February after months of preparation and ended 10 years of smoking. On Queen’s Birthday, I started my first class of wushu/Chinese martial arts. It’s a lifestyle that I still practice daily up until now. My fitness improved and my body composition probably did too. I competed in one event 3 months after starting.

2005: Wushu: I increased my wushu training to 4-5 times a week – 8-10 hours of training and ended up competing in 7 events. I met the girl whom I would eventually marry; I didn’t know it at the time. First date: VIP tickets to Cirque Du Soleil; and we’ve been going ever since.

2006: I turned 30; no big deal. I’m not sure what happened here but in terms of work, but I just plodded on day-in, day-out. In terms of wushu, I was gearing up for the Chin Woo World Champs in London (Chin Woo is the world’s 2nd largest wushu umbrella organisation) in August. Holly and I started saving for a house in January and eventually bought one in December. Two weeks later, we were engaged.

2007: I decided to “retire” from wushu to plan my wedding. Everything this year was focused on the wedding and we tried to have the wedding we wanted. Summer, beach, champagne, string quartet. Honeymoon: sun, sand, alcohol, and distance from everyone.

2008: Eskimo: we called him that because he looked like a polar bear when we first saw him. We shortened it to Eskie on the account that some find the word Eskimo offensive. He’s my first dog and our first pet. And we love him to bits! I discovered Taijiquan (or Tai Chi) later this year in August and I loved it. I decided that Taijiquan would be my way of life until I die (that’s the plan at least).

2009: I was made redundant in June. The timing was pretty good as I was starting to feel that my time at Symantec was approaching its maturity. I was happy. Mojo: we called him that, as a play on “Eskimo Joe”. He’s our second pet and we love him to bits too! This is the year of renovations: new carpet, new floors, house maintained, new dog, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I had more time to focus on myself for a change. I started training more in Taiji. I also started a thing called CrossFit – and I fell in love with that too.

More in 10 years time.

I’ve been trying to sort out new menu signs for the cafe and trying to switch fonts Helvetica to Helvetica Neue because the font weights are a smudge too heavy in Helvetica. Helvetica Neue offers a wider variety of weights, while Helvetica’s fonts just come out a shade too thick in print – as evidenced by last years menu signs, gift vouchers, and loyalty cards.

It’s nice that you get a bunch of nice fonts on the Mac; not so nice when Inkscape (which runs on X11) doesn’t quite get to use them. Helvetica Neue is provided in a .ttc file, which Inkscape just can’t use/read/see, which kinda sucks.

I had to jump through a few hoops to get Helvetica Neue running on Inkscape. I used FontForge to export all the weights from Helvetica Neue as separate

.ttf

files. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it worked.

Also, because Inkscape’s text editing/layout is pretty shit, I had to do all the editing in a different program (Apple’s Pages), and export as PDF, then sucked the PDF into Inkscape so I could apply text effects, then spit out a final .eps file for the printers.

I still managed to get most of the job done with free software, but each time I have to jemmy around shit to get it working, it reminds me why people pay thousands for Adobe’s products. I might just have to splurge and buy their suite sometime this year.

Back in my wushu days, we’d usually finish the class off with conditioning exercises like pushups, situps, or the dreaded V-situp. The prescription was usually something like 4 sets of 25. Our Coach used to say:

if you find this hard, it’s because you’re not doing enough at home

I’ve transplanted this idea to the stuff I do at CrossFit, the stuff I really suck at. Stuff like: running, double unders, burpees, and dead-hang pullups.

I loathe running, stink at double-unders, hate burpees, and hit a psychological barrier with pullups. That said, I’m gonna get friendly with these bad-boys.

So in an effort to improve these, I trying to do more of them on my rest days at home; this is my 5-4-3-2-1 plan:

5 Rounds for time of:
400m run
30 double-unders
20 burpees
10 pullups

My initial plan was to do this without scaling – but given my state of double-unders, I had to resort to the usual 3 skips per double-under scaling. Everything else is strict though (burpees don’t involve knees, and pull-ups are dead-hang without kips).

So that’s my weekend workout for the remaining 5 weekends of 2009 before mixing it up in ‘10.

I gave myself a 30 minute cap and I managed 4 rounds in 31:33. Looking back, I should’ve just finished the 5th round since I wasn’t in a rush to go anywhere. Next time.

One month on since starting CrossFit, I’m pretty much feeling sore almost every day; it reminds me of when I used to train wushu 5 days a week.

I re-tested myself with the baseline test that I did on my first day: 400m run, 40 air squats, 30 sit-ups, 20 push-ups, and 10 dead-hang pullups.

I even surprised myself. On 15 October, it took me 6:11, on 15 November I completed the test in 5:10. I managed to cut 61 seconds from my original time; a massive improvement.

I’ve since set myself fitness/strength/flexibility goals, along with lifestyle goals – like drinking less, eating better. It might actually work this time since CrossFit is now added to my list of obsessions.

Day 2 of our new floor installation.

The guys turned up on time and got straight into it. There’s not much to it really.

I went to the gym, and on my return discovered that they hadn’t really progressed much over the 2 hours that I was away. Apparently quite a few of the floorboards were damaged and they’ve been sitting around waiting for replacements to be trucked out from the Shore (to all the way out East).

So they carried on once they replenished their supplies. I occasionally popped down to have a peek at the progress.

On one occasion I noticed a huge gap between the floorboard and the wall. After talking to the installer, he explained that they apply silicone along the gaps between the boards and the undercut skirting boards at the walls. That was fine; except where the floorboard wasn’t long enough to even reach the wall. That’s not a gap – it’s a hole.

He looked a bit puzzled and admitted the board was cut too short – it wasn’t his fault, the other guy was working on that part of the floor. I’m glad they ended up fixing it by using a board that was cut to the correct length, but I wonder if they would’ve fixed it if I hadn’t asked about it.

I remember when I scheduled the installation that I insisted on being home, and I was re-assured that I didn’t need to be there. Well, here’s one very good reason you should always be around: quality control. Well that, and 7,000 other compelling reasons.

Overall, the floor looks great! The dogs are still getting used to it, but we love how it’s transformed our entire downstairs living area. One problem: I’m not sure how to photograph floors, but here’s my attempt:

Holly loves the floor too!
Whee!

So finally after much to-ing and fro-ing, we finally made a start on our new floors.

The story began about 2 months ago – after we got new carpet installed. We decided to get new floors also. It turns out it is difficult to find someone to do the following:

1. arrange a time to turn up
2. turn up and measure the place
3. give us a bunch of samples
4. tell us how much it’s going to cost for what we want
5. take our money and install floors

We had people fail at steps 1, 2, 3, and 4. We’ve finally found someone who got us to step 5. This is where we’re at right now. Thanks Flooring Direct and FloorScape.

We got the call yesterday asking if they could push our installation date ahead; they could install it today! This led to frantic activity in shifting furniture – everything ended up either in the kitchen, or in the spare room.

In getting everything safely off the floor, I wasn’t about to sacrifice my interwebs. I had to tape everything down to the ledge.

Securing all precious goods with tape

We did hit a minor snag with the particle board floor being uneven. As a result, they had to fill it in with an expensive filler and wait a day while it dries (the underlay is a moisture barrier, so drying is kinda essential). This sucked a little as I was hoping to see some of the new floors go down, but I guess we can wait until tomorrow.

That wet looking stuff is known as screed.

At the end of Day 1, all the floor prep is done. Tomorrow/Day 2 means laying down the actual floor. We picked a laminate floor (i.e. fade resistant, scratch resistant, kid resistant, Eskie-Mojo resistant) that looks something like this:

Mmm... walnuts