Category: Journal

Ever since I started going to the Lifestyles gym here in Liverpool I’ve avoided using the waggley stick machine, otherwise known as a Cross Trainer.

The reason I’ve avoided them is, in part, due to the way you’re kind of walking but not walking. That just looks and feels weird for a start. Mostly, though, I’ve avoided them because of the way those waggley sticks keep coming right back at you. Where I come from that’s fighting talk. Or, at the very least, mildly disconcerting.

I’m not the most athletic of people, and coordination isn’t my middle name, either. So, to have all my limbs moving at the same time, whilst I’m trying to concentrate on walking, but not walking. Well, it just made the waggley stick machine look more hassle than it was worth.

Graeme had told me that they were very good for you. You’ll burn more much calories than you will running, he said. Someone else told me that it’s very low impact – much better for you than running on the treadmill. So, with those comments in mind, I’d made a point of wandering near the waggley stick machine on each of my gym visits over the last few weeks. Each time I’d fail to pluck up the courage to actually use it.

Yet, on Thursday night, I finally summoned the bravery to use one for the final ten minutes of my gym session. I picked one that was at an angle to the mirrors in the gym, which made it kind of difficult to see myself. I figured I didn’t want to know how much of an assclown I would make of myself if I didn’t have the knack for making them go. I’d seen people going backwards on them, seemingly oblivious to the fact, and I didn’t want to be doing that.

Getting started in the right direction seemed to be fairly straightforward in the event, although looking down to see if I actually was going in the right direction brought my head perilously close to the waggley sticks. I reckon I was making awkward work of it, being unable to keep up a consistent rhythm for some reason, but after a few minutes I sort of got my head round it.

Courtesy of sister Hazel giving birth to her daughter Abigail earlier this morning, I am now an uncle. Which makes me feel quite old, yet unwise, for some reason.

Mind you, brother Andrew became an Uncle when our daugher Elisha arrived last new year’s eve, so he’s now a double uncle and he’s not sixteen until next week, so everything’s relative.

Anyhoo, congrats to Hazel and Ian on the birth of Abigail – hopefully she’ll be as much of a bundle of fun as Elisha has been for us in her first year.

Back at the turn of the year I was told my role at work would be coming to an end, which came as no surprise as things had stagnated towards the end of the previous year. Fortunately, working for a sizeable company meant that the situation didn’t lead to redundancy – like it did when my department was axed in my previous job down in London.

Although nothing happened immediately, by June I’d been moved onto one of the development teams, where I set about re-learning programming skills I’d long since forgotten. The trouble with spending the last eight years as a web designer/developer, is that it was pretty far removed from the programming I’d done at college and university.

php is quite a high level language, when it boils down to it – you don’t really care about things like memory management, for example, because it’s all handled for you. It’s also not strongly typed – if I declare a variable and initialise it as an integer, I can change it to a string later on if the mood takes me. Not so with C or most other programming languages, for that matter – I’ve never quite understood why php was like that.

So, as you can imagine, six years spent as a php developer hasn’t exactly sharpened my programming skills with regard to C. It’s led to quite a bit of frustration over the summer, due to spending most of my time picking through compile errors caused by syntactical nuancies. It goes without saying that I was starting to doubt if I could hack it as a “real” programmer, even though I’ve wanted to be a games programmer since I was dabbling in Sinclair Basic at the age of eleven.

Recently things have been going better, though. The principle programmer on our team has offered to mentor me, and that’s been invaluable. I think I’ve moved forward more since our first session two weeks ago than I had in the six weeks previous.

I still have a long way to go, and I’m sure the steep learning curve wont even out for a while. I still welcome the odd scrap of web work that comes my way, because the feeling of confidence that comes with really knowing what I’m doing is a welcome relief.