My first sub-30 solve: 28.28 seconds! Pretty Lights’ “Finally Moving” played in the background.
Clearly, this is well outside of my ~40 second average. Even with the benefit of the 28-second solve, the session average was over 40 seconds. Everything just came together easily: I visualized the cross perfectly and performed it in six moves; my four F2L insertions went off without a hitch and with minimal hunting; and I knew the OLL (#23).
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I got lucky with a PLL skip, which probably saved me 4 seconds. But, even if you throw in a 2-look PLL, I should have been below my previous personal best of 34 seconds (with best-recorded of 39 seconds).
I guess my recent F2L work is paying off!
adventures in cubing 
Nice to see the sub 30 time! Congratulations! One advice – use PrismaPuzzleTimer. Allows you to keep track of the scrambles as well. It also creates session history, which could be of great help to track your progress.
Here’s the speedsolving thread: http://www.speedsolving.com/forum/showthread.php?25790-Puzzle-Timer
Thanks! I’ve used Prisma and a few others. I’m actually partial to Andy Klise’s gqTimer (http://www.kungfoomanchu.com/#gqtimer), because it stores and graphs sessions using a google login. For this one, I was on my work computer and just kept it simple….