Category: Revelation

Surgery scheduled

I’ve got my shoulder surgery scheduled for February 3rd. The doctor says that if things are good inside the shoulder, I could be looking at 1 week in the sling, and only a month or so recovery, but if things are as bad as they were for Vicki, it could be 3 to 4 weeks in a sling, and up to 6 months of recovery. So there is a slight chance I might be racing (although not as well prepared as I was this year) by the end of the season, although I’m shelving plans for the 90 even if things go perfectly.

And in related news: The Onion.

Interesting, but I’m not sure I understand it all

Namebench is a program that analyses DNS lookups to see if your DNS settings are optimal. My results are here. They recommend that I use my ISP’s DNS server, but they also show the main reason I stopped using my ISP’s DNS server – that innocuous “NXDOMAIN Hijacking” notation beside the entry for that DNS server means that if you mistype a domain name, it takes you to your ISP’s search page instead of having your browser tell you that you mistyped a domain name. I HATE that, “with the power of a thousand fiery suns” as Vicki would put it, because it breaks things, usually in ways too subtle for ordinary users to notice. I run a DNS server on my Linux box (on 192.168.1.2) because it won’t do “NXDOMAIN Hijacking”, and also because I believed it would be faster. One other reason for running my own DNS server is so I could reach computers on my home netwrok via a system name rather than via an IP, something that was probably more important when I had multiple Linux boxes that I needed to be able to ssh into than now, when I basically only connect to my Linux box and (more rarely) into my MacBook Pro.

If you look down the page to the graph “Response Distribution Chart”, it shows that for the first 30% of the responses, my home DNS server is *way* faster than the competition – I guess that means that things that it’s already seen and cached, it returns at the speed of the local network. But the graph trails off pretty quickly, and by the time you reach 50% of the responses, it’s slower than most of the other ones – I don’t know why it would be slower than “Internal 192-1-1”, which is the DNS cache on my router, but I suspect that’s because the router will just ask my ISP’s DNS server when it doesn’t know something rather than reaching out to the broader internet.

What I should do now, I think, should be to set up a DNS server on my colo box and see how it compares.

Random updates

I’ve been tending to write lots of short updates on Facebook instead of long posts here. So here’s a few updates.

My shoulder hasn’t been improving with physiotherapy, although I have regained my range of motion. Friday, Saturday and Sunday it was so sore I couldn’t even do my physio exercises. Worse still, on Saturday it was both shoulders that hurt. The therapist and I did some stuff on Tuesday to see if we could figure out which of my exercises is doing it, but I suspect it’s none of them – although driving for an hour and 45 minutes seems to make it worse. Oh well, I see the doctor in the first week of January – maybe I can get on the surgery list fast.

A few days ago, my project manager Nikola asked me when I was coming in to work. He didn’t say why, but I figured I knew it was one of two things. It turned out to be the good one of the two – he asked me if I would like to become a permanent employee. As a contract programmer, the permanent offer can either be awful or it can be awesome. On the plus side, permanent employment can have benefits, paid time off, sick leave, 401(k), and a sense of belonging. With Vicki wanting to retire in a few short years, a job with benefits will probably be a good thing. On the other hand, a permanent offer can mean lower wages, no paid over time, pathetically short vacation time allowance (US companies think nothing of offering a 50 year old senior developer 2 weeks paid vacation, or even worse, 15 days “time bank – which means you only get your full vacation if you manage to not get sick or you drag yourself into work and spread germs), putting up with sometimes annoying corporate rules (although that doesn’t appear to be too bad with this company) and if you don’t accept it, they drop your contract. So I’m waiting to see the offer with mixed emotions.

On the other hand, today I was a bug fixing *machine*. I had a ton of bugs assigned to me, some because the guys who normally take care of those areas weren’t around. And today I knocked off 5 of them, which is pretty amazing when you consider that I spent at least an hour filling in the various stuff that’s required to progress the bugs through the horribly inefficient bug reporting system. (I’ve suggested FogBugz, or at least Bugzilla and Jira.)

The drive home kind of sucked – freezing rain/sleet which didn’t stay on the windshield, but which did accumulate on the windshield wipers requiring me to stop a couple of times to clear them off. At least the roads were well sanded and slurried.

That was worrisome

For reasons I don’t remember, I did a “mdadm –detail /dev/md0” on my home Linux server and noticed that the RAID was busy quietly rebuilding itself. That prompted me to try the same command on my dom0 on my colo box, and what I discovered there was even worse – the second disk on my RAID-1 (mirror) was marked as a “spare” and some other status that indicated that it wasn’t rebuilding, and the mirror disk was marked as missing.

I removed the second disk from the RAID and re-added it, and it went to the status “spare, rebuilding” and the RAID status was “active, degraded, rebuilding”, and some hours later it was back up and happy.

During that time, I discovered that there had been a few emails about SMARTD problems and RAID problems, but because I had set up exim wrong, they weren’t getting delivered. I tried a few things to get exim set up, and then when they didn’t work I decided that since I know how to set up postfix just fine, I uninstalled exim, installed postfix, and got it configured in less time than it took for the RAID to rebuild.

The fact that the RAID degraded in the first place gives me pause, but the fact that I was able to recover it without any downtime makes me happy that I choose to do a RAID in the first place. I’ll keep and eye on it and maybe order a replacement disk or two so I’m ready if something fails again.

Consider those goals met

On October 13th last year, I posted about my goals for this year, and beyond. In that post, I expressed the goal of doing 650-700 miles of paddling this year. I just checked with Garmin Connect, and it shows that since January 1st I’ve paddled 759.25 miles, including 76.17 miles of races. That does not include a few workouts here and there where I forgot my GPS, or a short gap where my GPS stopped uploading to the computer and I had to buy another one. If I do the “Last 365 days” instead of “Since January 1”, that ups my total to 945.8 miles. I’d say that constituted a pretty decent base.

I also said I’d like to join a pit crew to see what it’s like at the Adirondack Canoe Classic (aka “The 90 Miler”). That I did, and I helped out Sue and Liz as they took care of Doug and Mike at the 90. Granted, I didn’t go to every pit stop, mostly because I was trying to get a decent paddle in each day myself so I could see what it was like, but I was there at the finish to help tired paddlers out of their boats and take care of their boats for them. And in spite of seeing these guys staggeringly tired and bloody and nearly puking, I’m sure that I want to try it next year. I just hope my knees can stand up to portaging.