Back around 1991-2 era, I joined an on-line community. Or rather, I started participating in a Usenet newsgroup called alt.folklore.urban, the core membership of which was turning into an on-line community, pretty much before the idea of “on-line community” had been invented. We cognoscenti called the newsgroup “AFU”, and the core of the core were known as “the hats” or “old hats” (or later “Best Mates”). One of the first “old hats” was a guy named Phil Gustafson. He was funny, he was smart, he made wicked puns, and he was part of the memes of the group (one of which was that Phil would “rearrange your diodes” if you didn’t behave). He travelled to all the real life meet-ups (which at the time were almost always on the west coast) and it was frequently his descriptions of these meet-ups that had the rest of us rolling in the aisles and wishing they’d have some out this way.
Continue reading “Phil Gustafson, diode re-arranger”
Author: Paul Tomblin
This time I think it was the cache…
As I wrote about in 2007 in articles and , back in 2004 I wrote a cache for part of the product I was working on at Kodak. In the first release to QA, I made sure that area of the code got tested thoroughly, and they found a bug, and fortunately I got it fixed before it went out to the customers. But to my chagrin, my boss and other people on the project got it in their heads that somehow any problem anywhere near that part of the product must be the fault of my cache, even though time and time again it was proven that there were no further bugs in that code for the following 3+ years.
Now flash forward to the product I’m working on now. We have a “go live to the very important customer” happening in just a few days, and we’re supposed to be in code semi-freeze. But the “Performance Project” just put their performance cache into the product, evidently without giving the local QA much chance to test it before it went to the customer’s QA. That seems just a little bit dangerous to me. But no matter, they assure me they’ve written tons of unit tests. So what could possibly go wrong?
Today the customer called up saying that they’re setting up a new client on the admin site, but every time they go to the “branding setup” for that new client, they see some other client’s branding setup. This branding consists of things like the client logo and some “terms and conditions” text and the like. Since they’ve got literally hundreds of QA people hitting this site, I naturally wondered if they weren’t seeing some interaction between multiple people messing with the setup. But after hours of poking around on their site, one of my peers and I (neither of us members of the “Performance Product”, I might add) are convinced it’s the performance cache. Evidently if you use one browser to look at one client’s branding, and then use a different browser to look at the branding of the client who hasn’t been setup yet, you see the branding from the client that you’d looked at in the first browser. Somehow the cache is reacting to the absence of information in the database for a client by pulling up information from some other client out of the cache. That’s not good.
Hopefully that will get fixed, and hopefully somebody will set up a test plan that actually tests what the cache does not just on a cache miss, but also on a database miss as well. And hopefully the important customer won’t think we’re all a bunch of idiots for not testing this properly.
What goes up must come down
A few weeks ago I was feeling great. I was erging longer and longer distances every night, feeling good and not feeling any pain. I was up to doing 3 sets of 2000 metres, at pretty good speed and not much pause between then, and I had every expectation that I was going to increase the number of sets and distances continually. But then I started doing some extra stuff with Dan, trying to build up my core and other muscles and other things I’d need for the up coming season. But instead, I ended up overdoing it (due to the strange slowness of the way my body responds to pain, I never feel it when I’m overdoing it, only afterwards).
The next day, my shoulder was a little bit sore when I woke up, but I attempted to go paddling with the guys, but ended up falling in at the dock (due to using a different boat) and not going, but by evening my shoulder was killing me. And it kept feeling bad. I tried icing it, I tried stretching, and I tried taking more Aleve than usual. Nothing has really helped.
Yesterday I had a massage from my favourite massage therapist, and then a few hours later I tried a tiny bit of erging. By tiny bit, I mean less than a minute. I felt a tiny twinge, so I stopped. And a few hours later, it was back to feeling really bad.
My enthusiasm and optimism for next season has pretty much evaporated now.
Training on the erg
Because the weather is turning bad, I’ve been turning to the erg to do most of my training on. I’ve been doing a lot of kayaking, trying to build up the distance I could go on it. When I first started using the erg, I was disappointed that I could only seem to go a very short distance on it before my muscles got tired, like 500 metres a few days after I’d managed 4 miles (6.5km) in a kayak. I think a lot of that is due to the fact that in the boat, the wing paddle “kicks out” on its own, assisting you in getting your rear arm up in the air ready for the next stroke, whereas with the erg you have to lift it up yourself. Also in the erg there is some resistance at the rear part of the stroke where in the boat your paddle is fully out of the water and just “following through” with no resistance. (Hey, here’s an idea – why not use an electromagnet instead of a fan for resistance, then you could trigger it to remove the resistance when your paddle stroke hits the part where you’d normally have no resistance?)
Anyway, Dan said not to be discouraged, and if I could only do 500 metres to do 500 metres. So that’s what I did – I did 500 metres the first day, the next day I did 500 metres, rested until my heart rate was down under 100 bpm and did another 200 metres, and so on until I was doing 5 reps of 500 metres. Then I stepped up to 600m, doing 3x600m the first day, 3×600 plus a bit the next, 4×600 the next, and so on.
Two nights ago I did 5x700m. Last night I did my 5x700m but when I hit the end of the last 700, I just hit reset on the computer and did another 700m without stopping. It felt good to do that.
It’s a definite trend that I don’t feel as sore and tired at the end of the third and subsequent reps as I do at the first two. I’m starting to experiment to see if I can do some stretches and the like so the first two don’t feel so bad. Another thing I might try is doing a couple of short reps to warm up, then doing longer ones.
One interesting thing about this is that I’m having more trouble with the shoulder that didn’t get operated on than the one that did. On Friday I’d had a really good work-out, thought that maybe next day I could really step it up (to 1000m at a time or something like that) but I woke up the next morning feeling like I’d torn my rotator cuff. I had to take two days off erging, icing and gulping down Aleve and Tylenol (and missing out on two days where it would have been nice to get out on the boat) but by Sunday night I was fine again. Again this morning, I’m a little sore in that shoulder – not as bad as last Saturday, but still enough to worry.
My goal is to be ready in spring to race again. That means this winter I want to be able to do some very long (over 16km) LSD (long slow distance) erg sessions, and also keep my speed up through interval work and fartlek, again on the erg. I’m starting to feel like this might be possible. I’m even working on improving my technique – I never had a forward lean, mostly because my big fat gut gets in the way, but I’m working on that. I’m also trying to stop splaying out my legs and keep them down the center of the boat, but I’m having some anatomical problems with that.
Notice anything missing?
Last night somebody stole my roof rack. The Yakima rack was nearly 12 years old (except the new q-towers, which are only a few months old) but it might be worth something to somebody. The really annoying thing is the v-rack. The only people who use v-racks are kayak racers, and it’s unlikely anybody will use this – more likely they’ll sell it scrap for less than what it cost me for the ropes to tie it down.
I’ve phoned a few aluminium recyclers, but nobody has seen it yet.