Dear Diary: The Eternal Ramblings of Trevor Watson

I managed to keep up my exercise routine over the holiday period this year, helped by some reasonable weather.

This week, I'll get back into my routine of 5/6 days of exercise each week as I have set myself the goals of:

• Run a 10k in under 40 minutes
• Run a half-marathon in under 1:30

Both are hard, but achievable if I can put in the work and steer clear of injury. I suspect, though, that it will be toward the end of the year before I get close to either target.

I also got chatting to a fellow runner a couple of days ago, who is a member of a local Triathlon club. This got me thinking again about attempting a triathlon. To start with, I would need to practice doing a reasonable bike ride, followed immediately by a run. Apparently, running after cycling is quite tricky when you start out because of the switch of usage of the muscle groups in the legs. I shall give this a go when the weather (read: not windy or wet) improves enough for me to make a go of it. The next thing would be to start swimming again. I've not really swum much since I was in my teens, so this will be the major challenge for me. The triathlon club do a swimming evening every Wednesday evening, so if I do decide to go ahead with this madness, joining the club might be a good place to start.

Anyway, for now, I'm focussed on improving my 10k pace ready for my first 10k of the year in early March. I'm hoping to get into the low 42 minute area in this race as it is pretty flat and partly on a track.

I'm back from my Christmas/New Year break today, and already I need a vacation!

Not, you understand, from work, but to get on top of the things I didn't manage to do over the holidays.

Aside from drinking rather too much alcohol, we managed to watch a few DVD's - my ratings are included:

Title	Score (1=Great, .. 5=Terrible)	Notes
Lord of The Rings - Return of the King	1	If you really want to criticise this, it is rather long, but still worth the watch
Underworld	1	Much better than I expected, and Kate Beckinsale is gorgeous in it. Even my wife enjoyed it and she's not a big fan of fantasy.
Anger Management	4	What a let-down! Although it had some funny lines and gags, most of it was just over-the-top and implausible. I'm actually dismayed that I spent good money on this - it will be going up for sale on Ebay some time real soon now!
13 Going on 30	2	A good comedy "chick" flick, but the ending lasted all of 2 minutes and was a tad confusing. Still recommended, though for viewing with your wife/partner and/or daughter
Starsky and Hutch	3	Too camp and not enough of a story. I think all of the gags were in the trailers, and the rest was just not very funny at all. It was great to see cameos from the "real" Starsky and Hutch at the end - I really wanted Starsky to leap over the bonnet (hood if you're American) of the car, but alas no. Snoop Dogg was good as Huggie Bear, but not a patch on the original.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl	1	Great family viewing with a highly entertaining (if a little slurred) performance from Johnny Depp

On top of all that lot, I decided to try to do some editing of our home videos so they could be archived to DVD. This proved to be problemattic. Firstly, I have a Sony DCR-PC105, which is a great little camera, but they skimped on the video editing software which was supplied (Pixela Image Mixer). Although you can control the camera with it through the USB connection, the editing functionality is very basic, allowing you to manipulate scenes (cut & re-order) to create a movie. Image capture was (at best) 640x480, and took no real account of the camera's capability.

I got rid of the Pixela software pretty quickly and tried the Windows XP Movie Maker software. This had a better UI, but was not up to controlling the camera and also didn't seem to be able to do full DV capture. Also, one of my problems is that I have a snow scene in which the white balance is off. I need to correct this, but neither the Pixela or Windows applications allow for colour correction.

So, I finally splashed out on a copy of Pinnacle Studio 9plus. I've only heard good things about Studio, and it appeared to do colour correction, so as the cost was pretty low, I thought it a worthwhile investment.

After installing, I discovered that the best way to get movies off the camera was to use Firewire, not USB. Those thoughtless people at Sony had only bothered to include a USB cable in the box, so I needed to order a Firewire cable. Then, I realised that although I have 14GB free on my PC's disk, that's only enough for just over 1hr of DV capture - certainly not enough for DV capture, editing and movie creation. So, I persuaded my wife to let me order a Seagate 160GB SATA drive too

So, now I just have to wait for the drive and Firewire cable to arrive, then I'll be ready to spend hours at the PC editing scenes, adding titles, transitions, menu's and soundtracks and dumping the movies to DVD-R for posterity.

On top of that, I have around 10hrs of analogue video (VHS-C) from our old camera, which although it really needs editing, will probably just be copied straight from the camera onto DVD-R through our Panasonic DVD Recorder.

Finally, I have some books to read: Touching The Void by Joe Simpson and The Flame of Adventure by Simon Yates (Joe's climbing partner in Peru); plus more DVD's to watch!

So that's why I need a vacation.