The other thing I decided fairly recently that I need to work on is my#

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:09:14 +0000

The other thing I decided fairly recently that I need to work on is my skating. Comparing myself against "skill level" charts, I find that I'm, well, all over the chart. I've been skating for everyday transport and regular street skates for most of the year, but never had any proper lessons, and don't spend a lot of time on them otherwise. So, demonstrating ably the ancient wisdom that "training to do X will make you very good at X but do nothing for your abilities at W or Y": I can go, I can stop, I can turn, I can surf tree roots, loose gravel, drain covers, white paint and small holes with flail^Wflair and style, and I can skate 12 miles on a Friday and still get to the pub before my friends (who have also skated 12 miles, don't start thinking I'm superhuman here). But: I'm entirely crap at the usual array of tricks (crossovers, spins, t-stops, backwards skating, jumps, slalom, etc etc) that would usually go along with that. So, I am resolved to spend at least some time each week practising this stuff, and not just the 20 minutes before the Friday Night Skate because that always turns out to be more like 5 minutes plus 15 minutes standing around talking to people. This is of course made a whole lot more palatable by having fixx0red my skates so they no longer make my the lump around my ankle bone swell up to twice its normal size.

I had feedback that my notcon blog was "good but totally out of character". It seemed pretty normal to me (though not about Lisp, granted), except possibly that I seem to have been getting all touchy-feely and confessional lately. Blame it on the weather: normal service will resume as soon as the novelty wears off.