It’s that time of year again, and the Cancer Society of New Zealand is actively collecting money to fund cancer research into cancer causes and treatments, providing support to people affected by cancer and other initiatives such as public awareness programmes.

More information is available at the Daffodil Day web site.

Chances are incredibly high that you know someone who has suffered or is suffering from cancer. If you haven’t already given to the cause, I urge you to make a donation.

Keeping on the Olympics theme, Usain Bolt absolutely set the standard in the 100m final early on Sunday morning NZ time.

It shouldn’t be possible to dominate an event that lasts approximately 10 seconds, but Bolt did just that. I think this picture sums it up nicely:

When running an Olympic 100m final, you are not supposed to have the time to realise that you’ve won and start to celebrate 20 metres before the line, whilst still setting a new World Record of 9.69 seconds. Incredible.

I don’t know if this is entirely accurate, but the New York Post has published an article outlining American golden boy Michael Phelps‘ diet, which apparently consists of 12,000 calories per day made up largely of foods that most people would consider to be “bad for you”. Here’s the breakdown according to The Post:

Breakfast: three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise; two cups of coffee; a five-egg omelet; a bowl of grits; three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar; and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

Lunch: a pound of enriched pasta; two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread; about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

Dinner: a pound of pasta; an entire pizza; and another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

According to Wikipedia, Phelps is 6′4″ and 90 kilograms, so clearly as a larger-than-average man who is also an elite athlete his calorie requirements are going to be very high. But 12,000 calories? Some loose math suggests that a semi-active man of Phelp’s size would only need around 3,000 calories per day to maintain his weight, so that’s some serious calorie expenditure to put down to training and muscle maintenance. It’s incredible to consider.

Regarding the choice of foods, it’s a given that if you’re going to consume 12,000 calories then a large portion of that is going to be made up of “bad” foods - (eating 12,000 calories of salad would be nigh impossible) - but still, foods like cheese, mayonnaise, extra sugar, chocolate-chip pancakes and pizza are hardly foods that you would normally associate with fitness freaks.

Whether the diet is quality or not, though, nobody is going to argue with Phelp’s recipe.

More on Phelps: The Age has some more interesting insight on Phelps’ genetic and mental conditions which may have contributed to his success.

I bought an iPhone a couple of weeks ago.

Turns out you can get them working on Prepay after all (even though Vodafone won’t tell you that), and with a new casual data rate of $1 for up to 10MB of data on any given day, I couldn’t resist.

The thing is quite brilliant, really. The touch screen is versatile but intuitive and you don’t need a manual to figure out how to use it. The iTunes service becomes far more appealing and interesting when you can browse it casually wherever you are. The App Store is already home to some very cool pieces of software (and some not so cool). Safari works very well, even if it’s missing the Flash plugin. The touch-screen QWERTY keyboard is brilliant. The camera quality is more than good enough, even with its complete lack of stability correction. Photo browsing is great and so is the iPod.

The phone has quickly become my TV Guide, my weather report, my morning news report reader, my Auckland city map book, my home stereo, my walkman and my car stereo… and - less importantly - my phone!