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Four days until the big run

In four days time, I’ll be doing the Birmingham half marathon along with a mate from work.

The gravity of what I have said I’ll do didn’t really hit me until earlier today, when we were looking over the route map and elevation.

13.1 miles it is and I know I’m going to feel every step. I’m both nervous and excited in equal measure.

I’m now starting to wish I had prepared more. The longest run I’ve done — at a steady pace — has been about 8 miles or so and since paintballing last weekend has given me achy muscles, I’ve had no option but to rest up.

I’m quietly confident that the cheering of the crowds and general good feelings of all involved will help me — and indeed everybody else — to make it through the race.

I just hope I have prepared enough.

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Twitter autoplays videos too! Bloody hell. Why bother with a play icon over the video if you’re going to make the choice for me?

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Bypassing Laravel’s CSRF Middleware on selected routes (from 5.1)

Laravel does a great job at protecting us from cross-site request forgeries – or C.S.R.F. for short.But sometimes you may not wish to have that layer present. Well with Laravel 5.1 you can very easily bypass this middleware, simply by populating an array in the following file:

app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php

Within this class you can add a protected property — an array — called $except, which will tell Laravel to use this middleware except for the ones you specify here.

A complete example could be:

protected $except = [
    'ignore/this/url',
    'this/one/too',
    'and/this',
];

So for those three URLs, the CSRF middleware would be skipped.

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Far Cry 4 was a superior game, but there is something about the atmosphere of Far Cry 3 that just can’t be beat.

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100 Albums #2 – The Wall: Live in Berlin by Roger Waters (and various artists)

A couple of weeks ago I went to see the one-night-only showing of Roger Waters’ The Wall at my local cinema. That performance rekindled my love for that album – indeed Pink Floyd in general.

Yesterday I revisted an older performance of the album, which was given at the Berlin wall at the time when it was being torn down.

Very apt.

This performance of The Wall is unique, in that many of the songs are performed by guest artists. My personal favorites of these perfomances are Bryan Adam’s “Young Lust”, Paul Carrack’s “Hey You” and Van Morrison’s “Comfortably Numb”.

For any fans of The Wall, this album is a milestone performance and must be experienced.