I won

This mornig I got a present :D

I won so many thing with my first triathlon race at the sea... This morning I got a Race Pack from nutricult.ro. I won this prize with the post I wrote after the race.

A lot of thanks to everybody who voted my story and some more thanks to Bogdan and Mihai :)

Song of the week #2

New year...

A new year, new statistics and new goals...

2011  was a good year, I managed to achieve some of my goals. After a near miss in spring where I got another 4th place finish I managed to get on the podium on my first marathon (80 km) after a grueling seven and a half hours.

In the summer I was at the sea where I finished in first place with my team on my first triathlon.

Stats for last year (about 3500 km, down from 5000 a year before and 4000 in 2009):

 - a few hundred kilometers on the trainer
 - a few hundred kilometers on the city bike
 - 1487 kilometers off-road, the clock is now at 7860

 - 1368 kilometers on the road, the clock is now at 5654 

I have only one goal for this year (involving a bike), to get as many kilometers on two wheels as possible and if it is possible I would like to win a medal :)

Chili con carne

As I said before I am trying to improve my recipe posts with pictures from the making of. One of my favorite foods, both to cook and to eat, is chili con carne. It is very easy to make this chili and it is very fast too.

The ingredients:

 - ground meat (I usually use mixed, pork and beef meat)

 - onion

 - garlic

 - carrots

 - red pepper

 - sweet corn

 - kidney beans

 - olive oil

 - tomato sauce

 - chili

 - salt & pepper, oregano, basil and bay leaves

For the topping I use sour cream, cheese and fresh onions.

 The first thing to do is to fry some onions in the olive oil. I used fresh carrots but it is faster if you cook the carrots separately in plain water.

Then you can add the meat, the salt and pepper, the garlic and the red peppers:

After the meat gets brown you can add the rest of the ingredients, first the tomato sauce to slow down the cooking:

Add the rest of the spices:

Then the corn and the beans:

While it cooks for about ten minutes you can prepare the toppings:

You can serve it without topping:

Or with the toppings which you like:

Bon appetit!

Song of the week #1

XAMPP, CodeIgniter and virtual hosts

This is a short tutorial for using CodeIgniter with XAMPP and setting up virtual hosts.

For developing web applications with php I use XAMPP wich is a free and easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. I used CakePHP for a few years but CodeIgniter is my favorite MVC php framework. 

It's very easy to install XAMPP, you just download it and than next-next-next. CodeIgniter is just the same, download, unzip and you are ready to go. The tricky part is to use virtual hosts. If you don't like to pile up all your projects in the XAMPP htdocs directory than you need to set up some virtual hosts.

I have dowloaded CodeIgniter and I've unzipped all the files to D:\temp\mydocs. To run the application I need to modify two files (XAMPP is installed on my C drive: C:\xampp\):

1. httpd-vhosts.conf from the apache (C:\xampp\apache\conf\extrahttpd-vhosts.conf)

after

NameVirtualHost *

  <VirtualHost *>

    DocumentRoot "C:\xampp\htdocs"

    ServerName localhost

  </VirtualHost>

add this:

  <VirtualHost *>

    DocumentRoot "d:\temp\mydocs"

    ServerName mydocs.local

    <Directory "D:\temp\mydocs">

      Order allow,deny

      Allow from all

    </Directory>

  </VirtualHost>

2. the host file from Windows (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts)

add this to the end of the file:

127.0.0.1       mydocs.local

After restarting apache I can run my project if I type http:// mydocs .local in my browser.

You can use whatever name you want for your projects (I like to use projectname.local), you only need to add the ServerName to your hosts file. You can store your project wherever you want, specify the location in the Directory.

Happy New Year 2012

YouTube Rewind 2011

See what the world watched on YouTube in 2011:

First real winter ride

Before Christmas I went out for the first real snow ride this winter. The forest was very beautiful and the ride was very cool. The snow was just perfect, not too frozen but not to wet eater. The bike was slipping a bit but I didn't fall. I was feeling the lack of outdoor training and although I had two sock and an overshoe my big toes got frozen.

We had a little photo shoot also and here are the best pictures:

And my favorite picture:

More pictures here.

On this ride I tested my Christmas present that I got from myself, a pair of hand warmers which were great so only my toes were cold.

Stats:

 - distance: 15,33 km

 - average speed: 12,7 km/h

 - maximum speed: 38,2 km/h

 - time: 1:11:59

Song of the week #51

Merry Christmas everybody!