Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I’ve created a Google Calendar for paddle races in the North East NY, and Ontario and Quebec, in the hopes that it will be useful to other paddlers in the region. Please let me know if you find this useful, otherwise I won’t bother next year. Also let me know of any races I’ve missed or any mistakes.
You can add the calendar to your own (if you use Google Calendar) by clicking here and clicking the plus sign at the very bottom beside the Google Calendar logo.
Last week some time some people on the LUGOR (Linux Users Group Of Rochester) mailing list were discussing Time Warner’s new tiered bandwidth pricing plan and naturally the question came up “how do I measure the bandwidth I’m using if I have multiple computers behind my router”. Somebody mentioned the “Tomato” firmware for Linksys WRT54G routers as having some nifty functionality, including graphs of bandwidth use, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Last Wednesday I downloaded the firmware and attempted to install it, but each time I got a message telling me that the firmware upload had failed. So I thought nothing of it. Sunday, my router rebooted because of UPS problems. Monday, I noticed that I couldn’t reach my home web server. So Monday night when I got home from kayaking I logged into the admin console for my router, only to find it’s now running Tomato. Tomato evidently managed to grab all my settings from the old firmware except the port forwarding. But I quickly fixed that, and now I’m getting nifty graphs of bandwidth use. Nifty.
Tonight the kayak team met to do interval training. We were doing 5 sets of 0.5 mile interval with 10 minutes recovery between. The 10 minutes gives you plenty of time to paddle upstream to the start of the 0.5 mile section, drink some sports drink, and let your heart rate recover a bit. The GPS is awesome for this, since it will automatically stop the timer when you hit 0.5 miles, and then count down the 10 minute recovery.
One of my goals tonight was to keep my interval times consistent, and having constant feedback on distance travelled and time helped a lot. My times were 3:57, 3:58, 3:57, 3:58 and 3:56. It doesn’t get much more consistent than that. Sure, my times were about 40 seconds slower than the other guys on the team, but being heavier puts me at a huge disadvantage, especially in shallow water. And besides, I’m not really “A team” material, I just like hanging around with them.
It wasn’t until afterwards that it struck me that between the half mile paddle up, the half mile interval down, and the warm up and warm down, I paddled 6 fairly fast miles. Last year, even at the end of the season, a fast 6 mile work out was pretty long. So I’m making progress. My two goals for this season were to beat 20 minutes in the Baycreek 2 time time trail, and to finish the 9 miler at the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta. I’m not sure about that 20 minute goal – I have a feeling I’ll be striving for that one all year. But at this point I’m feeling like I could probably enter one of the early season 7-10 mile races and have a hope of a not too shabby finish. Maybe I should look at the “Round the Mountain” or “Tupper Lake 9 miler”?
Last night was the third Sunday in four where my UPS has woken me up with beeping. Each time, it seems to suddenly decide that while the load is unchanged, and the charge percentage is unchanged, the projected lifetime in the event of a power loss has suddenly changed from 100 minutes to 0 minutes. This is more than likely an indication that the batteries are failing, and it’s time to replace them. The UPS does some sort of self test once a week, and evidently this one does these tests at 1:30am on Sundays. There doesn’t seem to be any way to turn off these tests or reschedule them.
I spent a hell of a lot on this UPS, wanting one with a lot of capacity and which had replaceable batteries, because my previous one hadn’t let me know that the batteries were getting old until our power went out one day and the charge hadn’t lasted long enough to get down to the computer room to shut down my servers. I can’t remember what I paid for it, but the current equivalent model retails for around $600, so it was probably up in that range. Replacement batteries seem to be around $50 with $20 shipping, and plus then I’d have three small lead acid batteries to dispose of somehow.
On the other hand, I’ve migrated a lot of the things I wanted a Linux server for from my home to my colo box. I’m starting to question if I even need a 24×7 server in the home. Maybe rather than spending all that money on a UPS, I should just move the last remaining things (the mail server and the personal web pages) to the colo box and shut down my home server. It’s a shame to trash a $600 UPS for want for $60 in batteries, but maybe I can eBay it.
Yesterday, the team was supposed to do a 5 mile workout – either on the bay or up the creek. But the weather utterly sucked – the temp was barely above freezing, and there was wet snow in the air. No thanks.
Continue reading “Long kayak workout”