For the month of November, I attempted my first 30 day challenge and it was to drink 2 litres of water daily.

I didn’t think it would have been that hard to drink 2 litres of water each day but I found it to be quite a lot of water to consume during a normal day.

What I did find was that it was really easily to consume the water in days that I attended the gym, where in some instances I’d do over three litres in a day but then over a weekend I’d do a bit less than 2 litres.

Over the course of the month I averaged 1.95 litres per day, so I didn’t reach the challenge goal. However, given that it was such a massive increase from my close to zero daily water intake, I’m actually going to chock it up as a success.

One thing that it didn’t seem to slow down was my coffee intake and I mentioned to Claire that might be one of my next challenges – no coffee or caffeine for a month, yowzer!

Wholly schmolly, I’m now officially 31!

My birthday started with with Claire, Hugo & Evie greeting me in bed. Hugo ran into the room and wished me happy birthday for the first time, which is more than a little bit special.

Claire found some beautiful paper and ribbon to wrap my presents in, it was a shame to unwrap them really but you’re forced to on your birthday – hehe. I was incredibly spoiled for presents from the family this year & received:

• a brown denim pair of shorts & a pair of nice shirts
• Steve Jobs biography
• Mission Impossible 3 & The Social Network on DVD
• Lindt chocolates
• iPhone dock

After presents it seemed reasonable to bring our weekend ritual of McDonald’s for breakfast forward a day, which while Hugo doesn’t understand days of the week yet – he was more than happy about.

Unlike virtually every other year, we broke tradition and didn’t visit Hogs Breath Cafe for lunch and instead made our way down to a new, local cafe called Luv-A-Coffee not to far from our place. Sterle, Lorraine & Jean joined us for lunch which was great, especially since Sterle was feeling under the weather. I’d only been there once before for morning tea but the coffee & cake was delicious. Lunch certainly didn’t disappoint, I had a ‘small’ serving of spaghetti bolognaise and it was more than I needed for lunch.

After lunch we rolled our way back to our place, enjoyed a chocolate cake that Claire made and Hugo decorated with purple sprinkles & fire fighting candles to top if off. The cake was really nice, Hugo & Evie certainly enjoyed it yesterday and today.

For the afternoon we stayed at home, watched Robots on DVD which is one of Hugo’s favourites at the moment and mucked around at home. Late last night I ventured out to the movies with Shea to see Tower Heist featuring Eddie Murphy & Ben Stiller which was a good watch.

A quick thank you to all my family, extended family & work colleagues for calling or sending me an SMS and also to everyone that dropped me a line on instant messenger and facebook as well – well wishes on your birthday are fantastic.

Onward and upward, 32 next year!

Since I started gradually losing weight over a year ago now, I’ve been on the look out for small changes I could make to my lifestyle that I felt I could maintain moving forward.

I’ve never been much of a water drinker across the course of the day, which I suppose is quite silly since the human body is over 50% water. I certainly drink my fair share of water when exercising but it isn’t a drink I think to consume throughout a normal day.

I recently attended a Franklin Covey training course and it was mentioned that it takes around 21 days to set a new habit. That reminded me of Matt Cutts, a famous Google employee among the online marketing world who regularly does 30 day challenges.

It’ll be the first time I’ve ever taken on a short term challenge like this before and it seems like a great opportunity to assess different aspects of your life and make some small changes around things that might have a meaningful impact, either short, medium or long term.

Tomorrow I’m going to buy a 1 litre bottle of water so I can easily keep track of how much water I’m drinking across the day. Just like I did with my weight loss, I’ll be keeping track of my daily water intake in Google Docs so I can see how successful I’ve been over the month.

As an added benefit, I’m hoping that increasing my water consumption will have the opposite effect on my coffee intake. I really do love drinking coffee, however I know I drink too much of it. So if drinking more water helps with reducing that at the same time, it is definitely a win win situation.

Steve Jobs
24 February 1955 – 5 October 2011

Adopted at birth by a Californian couple, Steve Jobs grew up in a middle class lifestyle. Destined to attend university as a result of a promise from his adopted parents to his biological parents, Steve attended a university that he couldn’t see the value in and was draining away his parents savings, ultimately dropping out in the first year.

While not realising it at the time, dropping out of university was going to be the most important and pivotal decision of his lifetime. It allowed Steve to attend university classes that he wanted to attend and ultimately lead him to meet Steve Wozniak, who he later founded Apple Computers with in his parents garage in 1976.

In the following ten years, Apple Computers had grown from two employees to thousands and was worth over USD$2b. In another amazing turn of events, Jobs was fired from Apple by the then CEO over an ongoing difference of opinion. Not being dissuaded from his passion, Steve Jobs managed to turn it into a positive by founding a new computer company named NeXT. Later in 1997, Apple acquired NeXT and opened the doors for Jobs to be reinstated as the CEO of Apple. The list of amazing things just keeps on going, like buying a small computer animation business from Lucus Films for USD$10M, which was later renamed to Pixar. Pixar has released a string of animated feature movies, is the most successful in the world, has received six Academy Awards and was sold to Walt Disney in 2006 for USD$7.4b. Apple computers is among the biggest in the world, of any type of business with a market capitalisation of over USD$350b, more than twice that of Google which currently sits at approimately USD$170b.

It goes without saying that Steve Jobs has had a massive impact on the computing and electronics industry. In his 56 years he has literally helped change the world and has been hailed by world and industry leaders as thought leading, visionary, one of a kind and much more.

I’m genuinely sad to hear that Steve Jobs has passed away. Not because I feel a deep connection with him or that I think that Apple is now at risk of collapsing but because through his ideas, determination and brilliance, he helped change the world. There are a small number of people that have lived on the planet that have had such a profound impact on the way we live our lives and it saddens me to think the world has been short changed on more spectacular advancements that we didn’t even think were possible, didn’t know we needed or that could exist.

Rest in peace Steve, the world is a little less bright with your passing.

One of the things that horrifies me, is that Australia has such a low organ donation rate. In fact, Australia has one of the lowest organ donation rates in the developed world.

There are around 1700 people on the organ transplant waiting list at any one time, of which the lucky ones wait as little as six months and the unlucky up to four years for an organ transplant. Last year there were only 309 donations across the country, which represents just under 14 donations per million people. If you were a betting man, you wouldn’t bother placing a bet with odds like that.

Most people don’t know the organ donation wishes of their family members and when push comes to shove, it is the last thing on a families mind when someone passes away – which is one of the reasons we have such a low organ donation rate. A lot of people assumed by ticking the organ donation checkbox on their drivers license that was sufficient, however it isn’t enough.

Medicare now allows you to register for organ donation online, it takes about 30 seconds to fill out the form. By doing so, the government will post you a form for you to complete, sign and return. The medical staff will still ask your family if they want to donate your organs and tissue, which they could object to – however the likelihood when you’ve specifically granted permission through the organ donation register is very unlikely.

I’d urge everyone reading this to take 30 seconds to complete the online organ donation registration form. You never know if and when someone in your family might need an organ transplant and with the current dismal organ donation rates, they could be waiting a very long time. Once you’ve filled out the online form, make a point of having a discussion with your family about your organ donation wishes and get them to join the organ donation register if that is their wish as well.

Become and organ donor today & save a life in the future.