In my last post, I wrote about the Gyro classes that I attend. Well, the most bizarre thing happened. My physio, Shari, phoned me yesterday to ask if I was willing to be interviewed by Business Day newspaper. They are doing an article on Gyro, and they wanted to interview somebody who has benefited from it.

So, last night I was interviewed, and (get this), they are doing a photo shoot on Friday! A few minutes of fame – not for public speaking or music, but any publicity is of course good publicity!

Friday was the six month anniversary of my back surgery. It is difficult to believe that it is already six months. But then the time has really flown.So how has the recovery been?

Well, today I cycled 23km on my indoor trainer, which is the furthest  I have been since my operation (UI used to cycle 50-70km on the weekend).

My trainer is pretty cool; it is a TACX IMagic, which connects to my laptop. This means that I can cycle on one of several 3-dimentional virtual courses against virtual cyclists. Whenever I go uphill, the tension gets harder, and whenever I go downhill, the tension gets easier. I also have a couple of real-life courses. So I can cycle the Argus Cycle Tour and watch real footage in my lounge – great for winter training. It is pretty cool and really does makes indoor training quite fun!

The main difference between the indoor trainer and training outdoors, is that when you go downhill outdoors, you can stop peddling on the downhill, but on the indoor trainer you have to keep peddling all the time, otherwise you stop. This makes indoor training a lot more tiring, so my guestimate is that the 23km I did today is equivalent to about 40km on the road.

Technically, I am allowed to start running again, but I am not quite ready for that – I think I will stick to the cycling in the mean time.

Back to the recovery. Overall, I am much stronger than a few months ago. I am happily doing exercises now that I could not do several months before my surgery, so that is a very good sing. I do still get back pain, but not to the extent that I did before. In general if I do have pain, it is because I know that I have overdone something.

I have become far more aware of my back, from how I sit, bending correctly, being careful of heavy weights, etc. I am attending regular Gyrokinesis classes with Shari Rosenberg. Shari and her whole team are fantastic, and the classes are really helping me with my movement and strengthening of my back.

I have learned two things over the last six months. The first is to be patient. Anybody who knows me will know that patience is not one of my strongest points, but recovery takes a while – just one step at a time.

The second is that recovery is not a straight line towards improvement. It is continuous up and downhill process. Three steps forward and then one step back. However, the overall progress is forward, so I am very pleased.

(pic from here)

According to IOL, the South African Postal Service has been blacklisted by the mega online-retailer, Amazon.com. This is due to "Rampant theft by Post Office workers".

We have the distinction of being the only African country whose postal service is blacklisted by Amazon.com.

Remember "We deliver, whatever it takes."

Remember the saying - "Be careful what you wish for because it might become true". Well, look what happened when I was searching for SAA – South African Airways – contact details.

We should change the saying to "Be careful what you search for, because it just might be found". Perhaps I should refine my search…

Why is it that when I try to watch videos on YouTube, I keep getting the error “We’re Sorry, This Video Is No Longer Available”. I estimate that this happens to about half of the video’s that I try to watch.

According to their website “If a user removes their video, or if it’s removed for violating our Terms of Use, it will no longer be available in our search, in your favorites, nor via embedding within other websites.”

However, I have had some of my own video’s removed, which do not possibly violate their terms of use. In particular, one video is broken into three sections, part 1 and 2 won’t play, but part 3 will!

Is it just me, or are you having the same problem?

Update (15 Dec 08)

It appears that if a lot of bandwidth is coming from some IP ranges you get the error message. IE: The error is to do with the streaming and not with the video’s themselves. If you hit refresh a couple of times it should come right. I suspect that it has something to do with the limited bandwidth to South Africa.

I have had similar problems on some websites where they say that “your IP range is producing a lot of traffic, so please try again later”.

There is a great post on Seth Godin's website about how to get effective tech support. I love one of his comments "If you own a computer, back it up. If you don't, all bad things are your fault."