Owls Count

This past weekend I travelled down to Dorset again. The main reason was to meet my nephew, who is nine days old today. However, while down I decided that I would make it to the Poole Runners’ Boscombe 5k. My preparation was not great for this race – I finished my old job on Friday and the whole week had been busy, with me dealing with the hand-over and then giving a presentation on the final day.

On arriving at seafront there was a cold wind. The course is an out-and-back, so we were going to be running half the course into the wind. Then, with about fifteen minutes until race start, it became colder and started to snow. I did wonder why I was there at this point! Fortunately, it stopped snowing a few minutes before we started and the wind also lessened up shortly after we started running.

My legs were not as fresh as when I ran a PB last month. I completed the first half only marginally slower, but I was not able to maintain the pace on the way back. I finished in 20:25, which equals my second best 5k time. Not bad at all.

On Saturday I joined the SWJS – the south west junior orienteering squad – for a track session and 3k time trial. We did an good range of running drills and the group of us that had run the night before then paced laps for the others doing the time trial. It took a couple of practise laps to get the 90 second pacing correct.

Sunday started early. I wanted to fit a twenty mile run in and had to finish before my nephew, and his mummy and daddy, arrived for lunch. I ran a route through the villages close to where my parents live. A really good run and it is so nice to run out on quiet roads. Then there was time to have a quick bath before meeting my nephew!

Last weekend I travelled to the New Forest, to compete for my club in the south central and south west Compass Sport Trophy round at Hampton Ridge – the inter-club competition for small, UK orienteering clubs. (There is a Compass Sport Cup for the larger clubs.) In addition to the orienteering I wanted to extend the run to somewhere between 15 and 20 miles.

I did not make a good job of the orienteering. My Garmin track shows some of the doubling back I did, but manages to hide the couple of long routes I took – particularly the massive curve I did to the first control. The Garmin information also hides the time I was standing still, which was around four minutes. Definitely something for me to improve on!

My club had a good day and we qualified for the final. It was a close battle with the second place club – we finished 1 point ahead. It definitely helped that the area was so local for a number of our members, as we had around sixty people running.

After the orienteering I went for a run along the road to the north of the area. Six miles and then back to Sandy Balls, where I had a warm shower.

A few weeks ago I decided that it would be a good idea to backup all my photos. Currently I have over 4000 photos, which amounts to 6 GB. So the question was what was the best method? This task went on the todo list and I pondered the best way to go about this.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a link to Migrating 21k Pictures and Videos from Flickr to Picasa and realised that it provided a good method. Using two different providers means that I do not have to worry about local backup media dying and it also gives me the choice to move from one provider to the other as my main host in the future.

As I do not have a Mac, I used FlickrEdit for the download and that took about a day. The upload took a couple of days. At some point I will need to sort out the photo tags and geotagging, which did not move over using this method, but overall it was a fairly painless way of making the backup.