Geek

BCAA’s (Branched chain amino acids) have always had a place in my gym bag for about the last 2 years. A branched-chain amino acid (BCAA) is an amino acid having aliphatic side-chains with a branch (a carbon atom bound to more than two other carbon atoms). Among the proteinogenic amino acids, there are three BCAAs: leucine, isoleucine and valine. The BCAAs are among the nine essential amino acids for humans, accounting for 35% of the essential amino acids in muscle proteins and 40% of the preformed amino acids required by mammals ...

A cruft free collection of life changing, awesome tools, that will help you squeeze the most out of your Mac and OS X. Essentials HomeBrew - rock solid package management, think apt-get for your mac. Install software with ease example: brew install wget. There are others, but I’ve never needed to look further. tree - a tiny, but super elegant command line (CLI) program that recursively dumps the contents of a given directory, visually as an ASCII art tree. So good! Demo: ...

I suffer from list syndrome. A condition where you constantly feel the urge to quickly scribble down ideas, and stuff your pockets with these little yellow crumpled up post-it notes…mine seem to focus on two main topics, [1] of all the cool ideas that randomly pop into my head, and [2] technology related things I want to spend my “free” time studying. I really like the term “spike” coined back in the XP days: ...

This program is a 3-way split. A split provides balance across your workouts, and focus to major muscle groups in each workout. This is my foundation whenever I walk into a gym. Its the result of years of reading, advice from personal trainers, and tips from fellow gym buddies. I often blend it with new or different exercises to mix things up. Chest and Legs Dumbbell chest press Dumbbell chest fly Squat Shrug Leg press Horizontal row Lat pulldown Hamstring curl Calf raises Shoulders and Arms Dumbbell shoulder press Preacher curls Skull crusher Machine shoulder press Dumbbell lat raise Tricep pull down Dumbbell front deltoid raises Cable machine bicep curl Reverse fly Crunches Chest and Back Dumbbell chest press Dumbbell chest fly Chinup Deadlift Reverse preacher curls (forearm) Lat pulldown Cable chest fly Shrug Machine chest press T3 trap raise

Here’s my (growing) list of must read biographies of computing industry superheros. All of these books are based on real life stories and events, and despite my short attention span, I have found them all to be extremely captivating. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution by Sam Williams ...

Recently I migrated my hosted FunnelWeb ASP.NET MVC blog over to Octopress (a Jekyll based blogging framework) running on Amazon S3. This is a little personal reminder of how sweet it is to spawn a new post. rake new_post["title"] Edit newly created YYYY-MM-DD-post-title.markdown in octopress’s source/_posts directory rake generate cd public ponyhost push www.bencode.net Thanking Moncef Belyamani for his uber useful post How to Install & Configure Octopress on a Mac.

Microsoft (through the BizSpark program) at zero cost to attendees, organised exclusive “choice” Windows Azure training from Chris Auld, geek out resources for for a whole weekend of Windows Azure education, collaborated with some inspiring people, and left with a slightly inflated ego. Last month I was invited to attend the Azure BizSpark Camp in Sydney. Given minimal detail about the event, 7 small Australian startups pitched business concepts to Microsoft, and were selected to compete for the prize of 5G’s of cold hard cash, a sturdy glass trophy that could do some serious damage in a fight, and potential exposure to some real concrete venture capital investors (“VC’s” for short if you’re the hip businessy type) – i.e. people willing to throw cash at your business concept with the intent of making more money in return. ...

Firstly, I am not a doctor or qualified in a medical profession in any way, I am just documenting my personal experiences with this particular injury. Staying physically active plays a large role in my day-to-day routine. While I love to cut code and experiment with technology, it doesnt help me towards keeping a physically healthy body. To balance this, I mainly participate in solo sports (jogging and resistance training in the gym), this way I can exercise when I want, and how I want. ...