For the past 12 months, I have been committed to improving my mental and physical well being via a dedicated weight training routine. Prior to this, I have never done any real *serious* weight training in my life.

There was approximately 2 years during University where a couple of mates and I would attend the gym regularly and focus on the most obvious muscle groups such as chest and biceps, but we definitely weren’t working out correctly. We would literally do bicep curls and bench press just about every time we visited the gym, focusing very little on any other muscle groups in our bodies. The result? Just about nothing - our arms and chest would swell up for a day or two after we’d hit them, but we weren’t eating the right foods and training correctly to make any proper gains.

Between 2006 and 2007 I had been working very hard on a web project to the point where I left very little time for my health and day-to-day well being among other things. I was feeling physically stagnant, boxed up and toxic. My focus in life had been way too much in one area of my life, without time for anything else, including my friends. The passion that I had for building web sites and starting a business had consumed me to the point that everything else didn’t matter.

For months I would cling to the mentality of “Its ok that I’m unfit now, I’ll just work even harder to get this project up and running, then once all the work is done, I’ll get fit straight after that.”. It was like hitting my head against a brick wall, the harder I worked on the computer, the less fit I became and the more toxic I felt. The work was never all done, there was always something else that “just needed fixing quickly”.

Pretty soon, I broke. I developed a temporary hatred for my work. I associated work with feeling terrible, not spending enough time with my loved ones and living a heavily unbalanced life. It was like a switch had flicked. I had not lost the passion that drove me so hard into the ground, I still had it. But I had picked it up and pointed it in a different direction entirely, I had learnt a critical lesson in time management, luckily quite early in my life.

I dug up some of the old memories of “working out” during University and couldn’t wait to get back into it, only this time, being about 7 years older, with a more developed physical base to build upon and more of a “do it properly or not at all” attitude. I knew I needed something to bring that well being and buzzing, energetic feeling back. Something that I could use to take me forward, lasting the distance through any number of personal and business challenges that I may be presented with throughout the coming years - there would always be more challenges.

I got a mate, also a qualified personal trainer, to write me up my first program and got started immediately.

That was approximately 12 months ago, and I can honestly say I have hardly missed a day of training since. The same passion that drove me into the ground is now driving me to keep improving my strength and well being. My lifestyle has changed for the better and I am truly addicted to the new routine, but not in a fanatical way. And you know something, my passion for my work has re-surfaced, but in a much more balanced sense.

I see my weight training as simply part of my normal working day - that is, the working day is not yet complete until I have exercised. I don’t get home until work AND exercise have both been completed. I also only train 4 days a week, which I have found to be more than ample for achieving the results and allowing myself plenty of time to rest and grow.

During the past 12 months I have witnessed my own state of mind lift to a much higher, happier and more confident level, as well as my body feeling a lot stronger, nimble and better able to deal with the random challenges that life throws up. In short, I feel like I am going to live a lot longer than I felt 1-2 years ago - and that is a good thing!

Although I learnt this lesson the hard way, its now absolutely a part of who I am. I can’t imagine life without exercise any more and I will never go back to my old ways. I feel I actually have a lot more drive and balance in my life. Its ok to fail, as long as you fail fast and hopefully young so that you can come back harder and stronger before you’re too old. I would seriously encourage any of you passionate and super-dedicated entrepreneur/developers out there who have been neglecting exercise to slap yourself in the face and really put things into perspective - it will improve your productivity and the quality of your work.

How long can you truly sustain the current cycle of continuously feeling weak and drained for?

In the way a plumber is unable to dedicate time to fix his own leaking toilet, I have finally launched a revised site layout for aaconsult.com.au.

Hopefully you will find this new design a lot easier on the eye, less cluttered and cleaner to read.

The entire design is implemented as a re-usable Wordpress theme, so if anyone would like a copy, please contact us.

More along the lines of the Getting Real approach to using the small size of your startup company as an asset, proudly displaying it, Dan and Chip Heath have posted some simple but effective marketing tips on the Elance blog.

If you haven’t read Getting Real yet, I would strongly encourage you to do so. I read that book and was fascinated that some highly successful people were swearing by the way I’ve tried to work all along! It really was a big reenforcement for the beliefs I’ve had around software development from the beginning.

Don’t take our word for it. Tim Bray, Sun’s director of web technologies sums it up nicely himself.

Its not like anyone ever really thought that Java was in the race.

Ever wanted to talk to the other drivers that you share the roads with?

Maybe you would like to:

1. Thank them for being a courteous driver.
2. Make an offer to purchase their vehicle.
3. Send them a social message or ask them out on a date.
4. Pass on a message related to road safety or their driving habits.

This is all now possible (and super easy) with communiplate. Go ahead and install it on Facebook.

Communiplate, let’s you communicate with other Australian drivers, simply by knowing their number plate.

The system simply asks for your number plate and registration state, as well as mobile number, before connecting you with the Australian communiplate network.

Once you’re part of the communiplate network, you can send a message to any Australian driver, simply by addressing the message to their number plate. Its dead easy.

There are two reasons we decided to use Facebook as the platform for the first version, rather than say our own stand-alone site:

• Ease of development: Building Facebook apps is simpler than building an entire stand-alone web site from scratch. That saves time and infrastructure hassle. You don’t have to build a login form, forgot password, register form etc. You get pre-authenticated users just ready to hit the GO button on your app!
• Virality: Facebook is already loaded with users just itching to try new things. Its the quickest way to get a large number of interested users out of anything currently on the internet and, of course, it is saturating the news lately. However, from there you can still build your own web site front end and integrate the two. Because you still own the data behind your Facebook app when you build one. In fact, it lives remotely on your own server, not on Facebook like it appears to to users.

We were dead right, because the take up already has been awesome. We have never seen this many users so quickly take up a new web application in the first couple of days. All of the Facebook infrastructure specifically designed to allow decent applications to spread virally, truly works. We think its the perfect platform to build so many modern web apps, even before you build your main web site.

This is only very early days for communiplate, we have another thousand ideas that you will see integrated into the application over time.