Category: Revelation

Progress

For the last several months I’ve been trying to slowly build myself back up after the surgery. I paddle once or twice a week, and generally I do one “long” (for values of long that seem ridiculously short to me) continuous go at first, and then continue for as long as I can doing paddle/rest/paddle/rest. Sometimes I have to stop because my shoulder is sore, sometimes because my muscles are tired, sometimes because my aerobic system is worn out, and sometimes it’s all three. Up until last week, my maximum “long” stretch was about 1.25 miles, and my total distance was generally around 3 to 4 miles with a lot of stops.

Last week, I was off work, so I actually managed to get out 3 times. I also started getting much more diligent about doing the stretches and exercises my physiotherapist prescribed back when I was still doing that. And I went to see the massage therapist I was seeing a couple of years ago about my shoulder and neck.

On Wednesday, I managed to paddle 1.5 miles, take a quick drink of water, and keep paddling to a total of 2.5 miles, and then do stop/start paddling for a total of 4 miles. That’s the first time all year I’ve seen two miles in less than 11 minutes per mile. (Oh yeah, did I mention that my speed compared to last year also sucks?) So that was pretty good.

Today, I did even more. I managed to paddle 2 miles, take a quick drink of water, and continue to a total of 3.2 miles, and then do stop/start paddling for a total of 4 miles. That’s 3 miles in a row at less than 11 minutes per mile! That’s real progress!

Ok, granted both times my shoulder was pretty damn sore afterwards, but I’m so tired of waiting for the pain to go away before I start getting fit again. I have an appointment with the surgeon next week to see why it’s taking so long, but I suspect he’s going to tell me to stop paddling.

I’m making progress, and I’ve got the erg so I can keep going all winter. Here’s hoping I can bring the endurance up to the old level and then start bringing up the speed.

My new system

Back in 2007, I build a new box, mostly to act as my home server. It’s been a pretty decent home server, and I hadn’t really seen the need to upgrade it. But recently, my laptop, which has been my “everything desktop” machine was showing signs of not having enough RAM for everything I do with it. Mostly because every few days I’ll notice that Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Client (RDC) is grabbing absurd amounts of RAM – I’ll notice things getting slow, see that RDC is using 1 Gb of RAM, then look back in 2 minutes and see it’s up to 1.2 Gb. Since the laptop is topped out at 4Gb of RAM, there’s nothing more I can do about the lack of RAM, except stop trying to use it for my work and my personal stuff.

So I hit on the idea of using my home server as a home desktop. I’d used it once before when my laptop was in the shop, and so I knew I could open a VPN and remote desktop into work. There were only two problems with it – it had less RAM than my laptop, and it couldn’t support 2 monitors. So I had a few choices:

  • Max out its RAM (I think it could support 8Gb) and buy a new video card
  • Replace motherboard/RAM/CPU/Video card with something more modern
  • Buy an entirely new Linux computer
  • Buy a Mac Pro

Unfortunately, the Mac Pro is *way* expensive. A new Linux computer would cost a hair over $1000, but an equivalent Mac Pro would be over $2500. I decided to re-use the old box’s case, power supply (more on that later) and disks, and just replace the motherboard, RAM, CPU and video card. I spec’ed out a bundle from my go-to supplier, J & N Computer Services:

I also bought a second LCD monitor, this one a 24″ ViewSonic to go with my 24″ Dell. The bundle from JNCS was about $745 and the monitor was about $170.

Frankly, the extra CPU is probably not all that important, since I’ve never been CPU bound before and I didn’t see that becoming a problem. But you can never have too much RAM, and 16Gb has me thinking that I might be able to run my development environment, Websphere and Oracle here instead of RDC into work. Maybe I can even run a VirtualBox or two.

Anyway, I got all that home and was setting it up, and discovered that the “connector conspiracy” has been at work again. The old power supply had a 20 pin, two 4 pin and one 6 pin power connector. The smaller ones are all pairs of +12VDC and ground. The new motherboard required the 20 pin and one of the 4 pins in the main socket, and then an 8 pin connector in the auxiliary socket. The 6 pin connector was keyed so I couldn’t use it in the 8 pin socket, and there were dire warnings about not running it with just the 4 pin. So I ran down the road to FrozenCPU and got a PC Power and Cooling “Silencer Mk II” 650W supply to replace the CoolerMaster 500 that probably would have been perfectly adequate for the job if the connectors lined up.

Anyway, as is my custom, here’s a comparison:

Old Machine New Machine
Processor 1 64 bit dual core Intel Core2 Duo E6320 1.82GHz 4MB cache 1 64 bit Quad Core Intel i7-2600K LGA-1155 3.4GHz 8MB cache
RAM 2 1Gb DDR2-800 RAM 4 4Gb DDR3-1333 Kingston RAM
Disks 2x500Gb SATA-II, 2x1Tb SATA-II 2x500Gb SATA-II, 2x1Tb SATA-II
Ports 6xUSB 2.0, 2 Firewire, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Serial, Parallel, 6xSATA-II, Audio, Video 2xUSB 3.0, 12xUSB 2.0, 2 Firewire, GigE Ethernet, PS/2, 2xSATA 6Gb/s, 4xSATA 3Gb/s, Audio, Video, DVI, Display Port, HDMI, etc.
Fans 2 12mm case fans, 1 7mm heat sink fan, 1 12mm power supply fan 2 12mm case fans, 1 7mm heat sink fan, 1 12mm power supply fan

After I got it set up, I discovered a couple of problems.

The first problem was trying to get the second monitor set up. The “non-free” drivers in Ubuntu didn’t support this video card. I had a hell of a time getting the binary drivers from the nVidia web site to load – basically instead of just running the “.run” file that you download, I had to extract it with “–extract-only” and then run it and run it again with the “-K” option, or something like that. Whatever I did, it was a mixture of black magic and cargo culting, and it eventually worked. I had to borrow the HDMI cable off the DVD player, but we use the DVD player so infrequently that we hadn’t noticed that the cable had fallen off and had cobwebs on it.

The second problem I discovered is that a /tmp partition sized for server use isn’t big enough for interactive use – especially when you watch youtube videos (it appears to cache them in /tmp). Fortunately I used lvm, so it was possible to resize the partition. The only problem was figuring out how to boot in single user mode so I could do it without /tmp being in use.

I’m still trying to figure out how to set up the VPN tunnel to work. I copied the config files I use on the MacBook, and I copied the setup I used back when I used the Linux box to VPN into our old location in Genoa, but I couldn’t get it to work. Eventually I got it so I can open a VPN using the command line “sudo openvpn –config ~/ovpn/dmr.ovpn”. What I need to do next is figure out how I can simultaneously open a second VPN to Genoa, because our SVN server lives there and I want to be able to check stuff from there.

I also had a bit of a problem with the remote desktop client. When I first set up things, I’d open the remote desktop client “full screen”, and it would only take up one of my two screens. But I made a few minor changes (or so I thought) to my configuration, and now when I specify “full screen”, it covers both screens, which I don’t want. Fullscreen other apps only takes up one screen. So again, I resort to the command line.
rdesktop -g '1920x1080' -D -r sound:local:driver:oss -r clipboard:PRIMARYCLIPBOARD 10.255.120.119
Unfortunately that usually ends up on screen 1 instead of screen 2, so I have to do some tricks to make it work. Also, every now and then cut and paste stops working in the session, even within Windows. In that case, I have to use the Task Manager, find the “rdpclip.exe” process and kill it. That gets cut and paste working within Windows, but unfortunately kills cut and paste between Linux and Windows.

Last night I upgraded Ubuntu from 10.04LTS to 11.04 to see if it would help the rdesktop and some other minor issues. We’ll see.

Empire State Regatta

Today I went to a kayak race. Not, unfortunately, to race. I was there to act as time keeper.

It was a fun time. The weather was awesome, the venue was pretty good, and the organizer pulled out all the stops in terms of providing food, drink and entertainment. The only problem was the turn out. Basically we got the local paddle community, and Scott Stenberg up from near where I work, and that’s it. Nobody from the Adirondacks and nobody from out of state. That’s too bad.

Last year the same organizer ran a race, which was unfortunately the weekend between the 90 and Long Lake. But in spite of that, he had a huge crowd. But because he was a first time race director, he was completely overwhelmed and didn’t get any real results, just a list of boat numbers and their finish times, and didn’t have any real prize presentation. Every paddler wants to see proper results. I don’t know if this is an unfair stereotype, but it seems to me that canoers care more about prizes than kayakers do. I dont know if that’s why people stayed away this year, but I’m sure it’s a factor.

Any way, this year he’s doing it right. Results up quick, and some nice prizes. Hopefully, word will get out that the problems from last year were fixed, and the crowds will come back.

It gets better

I grew up in rural Canada during the 60s. The Civil Rights movement of that era was just a distant rumble that didn’t penetrate in the consciousness of a young boy on a farm outside of Schomberg, Ontario. I think I heard when Martin Luther King was killed, but I had no idea who he was or why that was important.

So learning about it later, I have always wondered if I had been in the thick of it, would I have been on the right side. Maybe not marching to Selma, but at least not bad mouthing the people fighting for justice and freedom. And maybe, just maybe, offering them praise, monetary support, votes and doing whatever slactivism I could muster up. I mean, it seems to obvious now which side was the right side, but would it have seemed that way then?

And so I find myself looking at the current fight that’s going on by an oppressed minority, demanding the rights that they should have had from the beginning, and I think of it as “our” civil rights campaign, even though it’s not my civil rights I’m fighting for. It’s a chance to do something, so that in ages hence, I can say “yes, I did the right thing”. And so I am. Thanks to the New York Senate for finally passing this marriage equality bill. Thanks to Messiah Lutheran Church for becoming a “Reconciled” congregation. Thanks to the many ways, small and large that we’re winning this battle. We got to keep chiseling chunks out of the stone of ignorance.

I’m back, baby

I paddled for the first time since my shoulder got bad, back in October. I didn’t go far, but that wasn’t the point. It was a chance to see how fit I am (terribly unfit), how fat I am (again, terrible – I couldn’t do up my PFD), how bad my shoulder is (not as bad as I thought based on experiments on the erg), how badly my technique has fallen apart (not bad at all), how bad my balance in the boat is (pretty bad – I nearly dumped several times and the boat was wobbling back and forth like a crazy thing).

I was also checking out the fit of my old rack on my new car. I originally bought this rack for my 2001 Corolla, and with the replacement of a couple of “Q-clips”, it has been on the Corolla, the Prius and now the CR-Z. It’s a little beat-up looking and the bars are ridiculously close together, but it’s on strongly enough that I can grab them and rock the car back and forth. I tied down my surf ski on top, and it actually held on pretty good, but then again I was only going a short distance on slow roads. I wouldn’t want to go anywhere other than Baycreek until I get my V-bars.

The last thing I wanted to check out was my new “million dollar” idea. I bought a coffee maker at the garage sale last month, and I cut out the “bubble pump”, a tiny one-way check valve that allows the hot water to flow up out of the reservoir into the grounds. I attempted to fit it in the venturi of the ski, figuring that would allow water to drain out at speed like it’s supposed to, but not to flow back in when you’re stopped, which is a pain in the ass at the start of a race. Unfortunately, I didn’t glue it in right, and water was flowing in around it. Even worse, it came out towards the end, and when I was getting out of the boat, I managed to lose it overboard.

Oh, that’s another thing I had problems with. When I finished, I approached the dock, and realized I was on the bad shoulder side. So I spun around (which unfortunately involved back-paddling on my bad side). But when I approached the dock, I still thought it felt a bit high. So I went to the other dock, the one the rental boats go in and out of. It’s much lower. I did my usual “sprawl onto the dock as the ski leans over on its side” ungraceful exit, but at least I ended up on the dock and not in the mucky water.

Overall, I probably paddled a little more than a mile and a half. I purposely didn’t bring my GPS because I didn’t want any incentive to go further or faster than I should. I had to rest a lot, but mostly because of how out of shape I am, not how sore my shoulder is. It feels easier in the boat than on the erg – last time I tried the erg, I was barely able to do 1000 metres (0.6 miles) in 200 metre increments. I’m going to try taping over some of the holes in the fan on the erg to see if reducing the resistance makes it more life-like at the slow speeds I’m paddling these days. But I tried to keep a good technique going while I was paddling, and I think that part at least hasn’t deteriorated too badly.

Man it feels good to be back.