To summarise, in 2008 and 2009 it was pretty much all work – exceptional amount of work in 2008 (that followed an initial good start due to getting back into hip hop dancing) after a long period of being relatively dormant/lazy on the fitness end meant that I got quite fat, no energy to work out, and thus the evil cycle of working myself into a very unhealthy corner played out. To counter this, at the end of 2008 a first ride in the You Yang mountains with my trusted old Trek Y22 started a very strong passion for mountain bike riding which ended up with my health doing a complete 180 as I enrolled in a series of MTB races to have further motivation for my training. Along with the followed a change of diet & lifestyle, and thus 2009 became year of rejuvenation that will hopefully have set the tone for this whole new decade. At 36, health is not to be taken for granted and thus it will be an important topic to me.

HEALTH: Doing a 12 hour MTB race - Nov'09; Bright, Victoria. Temperatures around 34-35c...

This year the following topics are on my radar:

1. Follow smartphones, tablets and ebook readers – e.g. Android and Apple [mobility].
2. Programming – ColdFusion, and Java / Android programming [programming].
3. PC/Gadgets; hardware and software [tech].
4. Internet topics; e.g. Google Reader / Wave, Aussie Censorship [internet].
5. Mountain bike riding and other healthy exploits  – hopefully also hip hop/funkdancing [health].
6. Entertainment, including shows, PC gaming, HTPC [entertainment].
7. Everything else, including e.g. environmental [general]

MOBILITY HISTORY: The N85 and N810 were some of Nokia's highlights for 2008

Now, I have been blogging on funkdancer.com since 2000; whilst the older archives will stay lost, this site has never been limited to just one topic. So I will clean up the site, starting with structuring the categories list to be ordered under the master categories above. I will also ensure they’re RSS’able; thus if anyone wants to read what I write about smartphones and subscribe to my RSS feed, by limiting to selected categories they shouldn’t have to get e.g. mountainbike spam in their feedburners. I expect to refine the above list as I go along.

TECH STUFF: Waterblocking the NVIDIA 280 (XFX Extreme edition); this attempt didn't go to well...

Cheers all,
Jørgen

ps. On an admin note, I started off by upgrading Wordpress to the latest #2.9.1, which was pretty painless, and I must say that I really like the updates in the user interface on the admin end.

A little background might be in order:

I used to be very fit before and immediately after moving to Australia. Dancing, gym, climbing, and the like. Finally finding the partner of my life priorities changed, but after several years of slacking off I started paying the price. Bad back, decreased cardio/strength, you name it. So when seeing the availability of classes in a convenient spot (between home and work), I thought it was time to go back to the basics.

Boy, what a reality check… The difference between 2008 and 2002 is that I have gotten very slow, added several kilograms of “beer muscle” and have lost a lot of processing power in the CPU department – all of which are critical requirements for performing a hip hop dance routine! However, getting back into it, whilst a great challenge, will be good fun and also a very good character development task.

Having had back problems, I am starting to realize how much street dancing develops the core. Just about every move offers twists that exercise the core strength in one way or another; in fact, after a few weeks I have just about zero pain (except for being completely buggered after almost every session, especially the next day). I realise that not having danced for so long must have meant that my core strength went straight down together with the rest of my once quite-above-average physique.

Looking ahead, I am envisaging several weeks of getting slightly less crap at it every week. MMA is a great place, with a very positive vibe – and would welcome doing dancing to anyone normally stuck behind the computer. There is just no way that you can even begin think about work when trying to keep up with the instructors!