Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I was waiting on some information at work, and kind of stuck until I got it, so I headed off to meet up with Stephen and Jim for their regular 1:30 paddle starting at the Black Creek access. I got there just before 1:30, and there was no sign of them. I paddled a 10 minute warm up, and still no sign of them. So fine, I thought, I’d head up stream at a moderate pace, and either I’d get a nice long paddle at my own pace, or they’d catch me up. Usually when I paddle with those two, they end up going hard so I end up in the 150-165 heart rate zone, but on my own I tried to keep it down in the high 130s or low 140s. I wasn’t entirely successful at that.
As I reached about the 2 mile point the river turns, and I took one last chance to paddle out into the middle to look downstream, but I didn’t see them. Ok, long slow paddle it is. I decided to see if I could reach the 6 mile point before I turned around. Since I’d done about .75 miles in my warm-up, that would leave me 5.25 miles to return, and put me over 10 miles on the day. Mental arithmetic isn’t my strong point – I really should have aimed for a turnaround at the 4.7 mile point to reach the 10 mile goal. But I wanted a bit of a cushion because on the way up you’re following the banks pretty closely and ferrying across the river to keep out of the current, but on the way back you blast down the middle.
The current was strong, and the wind was also strong in places, but at least they were going the same direction. The current swirled and eddied, and a couple of times I found myself having to brace to avoid dumping. As I got higher and higher up the river, I was getting slower and slower. Once I decided not to ferry across the river to get on the inside because I didn’t want to be so exposed to the wind, and that was a big mistake because not only was it slow on the outside of the bend, but it was also more roiled up with eddies and swirls and other challenges. I wasn’t sure if I was getting slower and having to brace more because the current and wind were getting stronger, or if I was getting fatigued and making mistakes because of that, and I was a little worried about being out here alone if I was making mistakes. After one really hard brace, I decided I’d had enough and turned around at the 5.6 mile point.
Turning downstream, my speed immediately went up into the low 9s. I don’t think I’ve ever paddled that fast before. I was just flying down. And I was starting to think my problems before were really problems with the river, not my own fatigue. After 6.7 miles (1.1 miles after I turned around), I met Jim coming upstream. That was good, that meant I’d have company when I was most tired. Not too much later, we met Stephen and Julia coming upstream as well. Stephen wanted to go as far as the RIT dock before he turned downstream, so I turned upstream again and went with him. That added another half mile of upstream to my total.
Going downstream was uneventful except when Stephen and Jim did their inevitable sprint for the bridge at the end, I didn’t have the energy to raise my speed even an iota to try to catch one of their wakes. But the worst was yet to come. Where Black Creek comes out into the Genesee there is a hellacious eddy. Last time I hit it just right and it spun my boat and accelerated me into Black Creek. This time, I hit it wrong and dumped. With about 10 yards left to go, I dumped into the freezing cold water. I walked up onto the bank, and slipped in the clay mud and fell back into the water. But I got my stuff semi-organized, and Julia jumped out of her boat to help me wrangle my stuff on the shore, while Jim paddled over and helped me dump out the water. Fortunately the air was wonderfully warm, so I wasn’t too chilled.
I just checked my blog, and the first time I paddled 10 miles last year was May 30th, the weekend before the Tupper Lake 9 miler. I’d say I’m a bit ahead of that schedule this year.
Total miles: 11.16
Total time: 2:09
Year to date: 83 miles!
I was on a conference call, and I had to switch from my cell phone to Skype because the call was breaking up too much on the cell call. Yes, it’s a pretty incredibly sad state of affairs when Skype provides a clearer, less broken up signal than your cell phone!
Only 1 year and 6 months until this contract is over and we can switch to back to AT&T or over to Verizon.
Yesterday I went paddling with Jim and Stephen and Julia. It was warm and brilliantly sunny, and so I was able to paddle without a wet suit for the first time this year. What a difference it makes! I felt like I was getting 20 degrees more rotation on every stroke, and consequently a couple of inches more pull, and a couple of inches more glide. The Genesee River was still high and a bit swirly, but it wasn’t windy so we didn’t have the waves to contend with like we did on Saturday.
Jim was content to paddle along with us for a while, but then he decided to school us in how to use the current and the debris sticking out of the bank to our advantage. He took off, I tried to follow a few boat lengths behind, and Stephen held onto my wake. A couple of times Jim took a line right in close to shore over logs that were a little below the water line, because he had no rudder, whereas I took a line further out in the current around the end of the log because I have an under-stern rudder. I was surprised that Stephen didn’t take Jim’s line with his kick-up rudder because he probably could have gained on me, but maybe he didn’t want to lose my wake and have to pull on his own.
After a while we realized that we’d left Julia all alone and out of sight behind us, so we turned and went downstream with her. With the huge current behind us, I was paddling with long, long pauses and getting huge glide and still making 8mph. When we got back to Black Creek, Julia left us while we paddled up the creek a bit (to the bridge where the water was too high to go under) and back, then Stephen left and Jim and I paddled upstream and back a short way.
I recorded 8.15 miles on my GPS. Didn’t feel all that tired – I would have gone further but I have to work some time.
If you use rsync to backup your system, and the system you’re backing up to has different uids for some userids, it converts them as it stores! I just found this out because after restoring my xen1 backup, I’ve discovered that all my postgres files belong to 114, which is the uid of postgres on my home server, not on xen1.
This is going to make restoring all the xen backups a royal pain in the ass.
I tried disabling the RAID controller, and when I go to boot it tells me that I don’t have any drives. So I re-enabled it, and it told me I didn’t have any logical drives. Also, sometimes when I boot the RAID controller BIOS tells me there are no drives, and sometimes it shows me the drives. I tried yanking the RAID daughter card entirely, but it’s got a couple of plastic offsets that it doesn’t want to come off of, and I’m reluctant to try anything that I can’t undo at this point. So I’m using the RAID controller to create 4 “Arrays” of 1 disk each. We’ll see how that goes.
I was trying to tar a bunch of stuff off a USB backup disk onto the new machine, and it suddenly started throwing all sorts of errors and couldn’t read any drives, not even the root drive to find the shutdown command.
First thing I’m going to check is moving the drives around, because I accidentally put the two new drives in the third and forth slots instead of one and two, so I’m going to fix that. If that doesn’t help, then I’m going to just turn of the Adaptec RAID controller and try a software RAID. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Probably return the hardware and start again.
After last week’s warm sunshine, March had to tap us on the shoulder and remind us all who was in charge. It was about 37 degrees, extremely strong winds (gusting 17-29mph), and off-and-on rain. But Stephen and Jim were going paddling, so I went as well. I was delayed by something at work, so I texted them to tell them that I’d be half an hour late, so they agreed to circle back and pick me up, for which I’m grateful.
It’s been raining for a day, and I guess that caused some snow melt, because the Genesee River is at least a foot and a half or maybe two feet higher than it was on Thursday. The flood conditions caused swirling water, tricky currents, and lots of floating debris. On top of that, the winds were kicking up high waves in the other direction. I was definitely out of my comfort zone in the Thunderbolt today, but that’s a good thing – I need to get better at boat handling with this boat before the ‘Round The Mountain race. I got lucky that Small Swells and Long Lake were pretty calm conditions last year, but I can’t count on that for every race.
We started off down river into the wind. The fast current was definitely overwhelming the effect of the wind, but some of the waves were coming up on to the deck of my boat. Mostly I didn’t have too many problems handling the swirls and waves. We were doing 7.5 to 9.5 mph on the way down stream. We paddled all the way from Black Creek down to the Genesee Waterway Center.
When we turned around, we suddenly had a pretty strong bunch of waves coming from behind. I was definitely getting a bit of a ride on the waves, but even so I was having trouble going as fast as 5 mph, and I was definitely feeling the challenge. We got out of the waves and into the slower water near the inside shore, and the speeds increased a bit. We did a lot of that sort of reading the river and picking our way up through eddies and the like, and then ferrying over to the other side when the river curved the other way.
On one of those ferries, there was a very strong wind from behind, and so I was surfing and dealing with the swirls and currents, and I had to stop paddling and brace at one point – and just as I braced, I got a terrible cramp in my left foot. I’d had foot cramping problems last year, most notably during the last 3 miles of the Armond Bassett race. The cramp at this time was really bad timing. That’s the one time today when I felt most like I was lucky not to dump. But I didn’t, and I carried on to the end in spite of the cramp.
It was only when I got out of the boat that the raw wind and cold really started to hit me. My hands felt like claws as I was trying to get my boat back in its protective bag and back on the roof rack. The fact that there was a snarl of fishing line trapped in the rudder didn’t help. But I got out of there relatively unscathed and my nice hot shower afterwards felt really good.
Total distance: 7.22 miles
Total time: 1:18.
Don’t mind me, I’m just recording what I’ve done so far in setting up my new box.
Next steps:
Today was brilliantly sunshiney and “warm” (41°F), so Doug and Mike and I went paddling. We went up the creek, battling the current and the “suck water” low water levels. Since I’m in my slow fat Looksha (the same boat that this time last year I thought was too tippy to venture out in the bay), I was kind of holding everybody up, but they waited for me. After Ellison Park dog park, Doug was ready to turn back, but in spite of the fact that I was the slow guy, I wanted to go on. We ended up going nearly as far as the rapids that I’ve never managed to get up stream from, not even in a plastic boat. We probably would have gone all the way to the rapid, but there was a guy fishing and we figured if we turned back two hundred yards early we could avoid two encounters with his line.
On the way back down, we encountered a couple of guys in plastic recreational kayaks coming upstream. You have to admire the determination, because they didn’t have races and training goals to meet, they were just out enjoying the day. Doug warned them about the new law about having to wear a PFD between November and May because one guy wasn’t wearing his, and I think they were a little cheesed off about it as they defensively told us that he only had it off because he was in the process of taking off his jacket. After we were out of earshot, Doug mentioned that in a very short time the trout season will start and there will be more game wardens and cops around.
A little while later, we passed a canoer heading downstream. Again, not a racer, just a guy enjoying the brilliant day.
After we got back to the dock, Mike had to get going, but Doug and I took a short paddle out into the bay to look around. There is a lot more open water than last time, but the water level is at least a foot down from mid summer levels, and there are a couple of dangers lurking just under the water. Doug suggested we go out in BayCreek’s war canoe and put a marker or extension on the ones we can’t move.
We ended up doing a total of 9.68 miles in 2:07:26. Not exactly speedy, but not exactly fast conditions either. I was reviewing my GPS data from last year, and while I didn’t have the GPS until April, it’s clear that I’m way ahead of last year on fitness. (Another thing that’s clear is that I wasn’t really good about stopping the GPS at the end of a work-out. Either that or I ended a lot of workouts by paddling at 40 mph along city streets.) Last year the first time I did a workout of longer than 9 miles was the 30th of May when I did 10 miles to prove to myself that I could finish the Tupper Lake 9 miler that was a week later. I didn’t go to the “Round the Mountain” race last year because I didn’t think I could manage 10.5 miles in the middle of May. This year, I’m pretty sure that won’t be a problem. Surviving the kind of waves they had last year, now that’s a different matter.
The GoogleBox lives!
Yes, after 4 days of downtime, my illustrious yellow 1U server has been revived from the dead. After it died, I asked the colo provider to power cycle it, and they said it didn’t come back up. I asked them to yank the box, and I picked it up and brought it home. Expecting a power problem, I first tried yanking all the hard drives and memory, but even then didn’t get any beeps or other activity. So then, I tried yanking one of the CPUs. I must have gotten lucky, because removing the #2 CPU got me a couple of POST beeps, and when I put back the memory and the hard drives, it booted just fine.
I’ve had this box since January 2007, and the CPUs are dated from 2001, so I guess it’s time to replace it. I ordered a slightly newer box off eBay that has twice as much memory and 4 SATA drive bays. With two 1Tb drives, it will have much more disk space, but more importantly the empty drive bays mean that if I need to expand, I can add newer bigger drives when they become available. I’m considering using software RAID to mirror the two drives, because even 1Tb is bigger than what I have now and I’m not hurting for space. And with lvm, I can plonk in two new 2Tb drives when the time comes, migrate the volume groups to the new drives, and yank the old ones. All the remains now is to decide whether to build a new OS and get everything working on it, or just restore from a backup and continue the upgrade path.
While I had the box home for a few days, I took the opportunity to do a long-delayed upgrade from Debian “etch” to Debian “lenny”. I didn’t want to tackle that remotely because there was a significant chance (and it happened several times) that I was going to get it into the situation where I needed to intervene at the Grub stage, and I couldn’t do that remotely (because the cheap colo facilities don’t give you remote boot consoles like the expensive ones do.) The biggest hassle of this upgrade was that I had to do some messing around to get a console to appear, changing the boot options on the box itself, and also the getty lines in inittab of each of the guest “domU”s. The second biggest hassle was that I had to install “udev” on all the guests so that ssh could work. Also while they were home I took the opportunity to make a backup of the whole thing, including the guests that don’t belong to me. Normally I just back up my own. That should make setting up a new box a lot easier.
I got all the fixing and upgrading and backing up done early this morning. I brought my box over to the colo company office at 10:15. And waited. And waited. And waited. I had a “ping -a” running so I’d know as soon as it came back. And I waited some more. The business office is the other side of town from the colo facility, so I figured there would be some delay. The company that used to own those racks would let me go out to the facility with them, but these guys bought the business from that company and they’re anal about security and won’t let me go. Well, it turns out that their scheduled visit to the colo facility was at 10pm – nobody told me that, of course, until after I’d started panicing that they’d all gone home for the weekend without racking my box. But here it is – they racked the box, phoned me to say it was powering up, and now I’m connected again. Hallelujah!
Update: A few hours after I wrote that, I decided to quit and restart Chrome to free up some memory, and now none of the extensions I installed are showing up.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences with Google Chrome on the Mac. At the time, Chrome on the Mac was lagging quite far behind the Windows version. Supposedly now it’s all caught up, and so I’m going to revisit my previous complaints:
So over-all, it’s got a few user interface annoyances, but the really big sticking points have been taken care of by plugins. And I was happy. Until today. And that’s when I discovered that Google Chrome is utterly useless for a web developer – there appears to be no way to make it reload your javascript file that you’ve just changed unless you go to “File->Clear Browsing Data”, uncheck everything except “Empty the cache”, click “Clear Browsing Data”, and wait, and wait, and wait. In normal web browsers, you just have to hit shift-reload on your page and it will reload that page and all the attendent files, including CSS and JavaScript files. That’s it, I’m switching back to Safari (or maybe Firefox) for the page I’m developing.
Oh, plus the built in “Developer Tools” in Chrome suck in comparison with Firebug, but that’s apples to oranges since Firebug is a plugin.
Today was a gorgeous day, brilliant sunshine and warm, but a bit of wind. Doug, Bill and I met up at Bay Creek for a paddle on the creek. The water was a bit lower than last time, but it was more open. Doug’s Burn is in the shop getting fixed, so he paddled a much tippier Jet. Or is it the other way ’round? I can never keep the KayakPro boats separate – too many 17′3″ long boats, and their web site says one is 438mm wide and the other is 438cm wide, which probably is wrong. Bill showed up with a Romany sea kayak – his wife and daughter are in the Rough Riders club, so this is his secret other life kayak. Since he normally paddles a surf ski, I can’t blame him for paddling a more stable (and more importantly, one without a leaky drain in the cockpit) boat.
Doug was paddling a strange boat and was on a low intensity week, I’ve had sniffles and sneezes for a week, and Bill hasn’t been paddling for months, so we took it easy. On the way up, a Forge Racing canoer came paddling down, and barely managed to grunt out a response to our hellos. One of us made a remark about how unfriendly the Forge Racing guys, and wondered why Jason, a kayaker and a really friendly guy, hangs out with them. And a few minutes later, Jason came by in a canoe – and unlike the first guy, he had a friendly greeting for us and a smile.
We didn’t go all that far, and we didn’t paddle that hard. But it was a beautiful day, and we were in boats and with friends. And that’s what’s important.
I went erging again. I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear I didn’t bring my video camera. The last few times I’ve done a long “distance” workout, I’ve done half an hour straight, then for the last half hour I’d spend 15-20 seconds having a sip of water, paddle normally for the remainder of 9 minutes, then paddle very hard for 1 minute, repeat, then sip, paddle for the remainder of 8 minutes, and go hard for 2 minutes.
This time I tried doing the “9 minutes normal, 1 minute hard” right from the beginning. Given that I’d done a fairly hard 25 minutes on a rowing erg yesterday, that was probably a mistake. The breaks were often a bit longer than normal, because the foot brace on Stephen’s erg kept slipping, as well as having a few iPod issues. Everything was ok, but at the end I only got one minute and twenty seconds into my last hard bit when I just had this weird “I don’t want to do this any more” feeling. I wasn’t especially exhausted, and I didn’t stop because I was tired. I just didn’t want to continue any more. It’s kind of odd for me to get 59:20 into a planned 60 minute workout and stop then. You’d think that close to the end you’d just keep going.
I’m getting some major calluses forming on my right hand (the “control” hand) at the base of my middle fingers, and a bit of an open sore on my left hand on the top of my thumb. I’m not sure where that sore is coming from.
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YouTube Direct
Another technique work-out at Dan’s. The highlight of this video is that there is about a half a minute at the end of Dan showing me how it’s done.
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YouTube Direct
On Saturday I went to Stephen’s to erg, and on Wednesday I went to Doug’s to erg. I’m trying to emphasize the things that Dan and I worked on last Thursday, but it appears that I did a better job of it on Saturday and on Wednesday. Both times I paddled for half an hour non-stop, then started doing 9 minutes normal, 1 minute fast, and about a 30 second rest while I got a drink of water, and then went really hard for the last two minutes. But on Wednesday, my stroke rate was higher, my heart rate was higher, and from the video I don’t think I was rotating as well. Also, I tend to do a stroke-stroke-pause instead of a stroke-pause-stroke-pause, so I don’t know if I am, but I think I’m not pulling as hard on one side as the other. It’s too bad the erg doesn’t tell you whether you’re getting the same power on both sides – on the boat you’d know because you’d be going in circles.
