Weight loss brag

I ordered some new kayaking gear, and I’m going to use a picture Vicki took of it as an excuse to brag.Skinny me
Last year, prompted in part by a discovery that I was too fat to ride on the zip line at Whistler, B.C, I decided to get serious about weight loss. That was the wake-up call, but the motivation was the realization that if I ever wanted to get back paddling after my shoulder recovered, the only way I could make sure I didn’t re-injure it immediately like I’d done after the first surgery was to start off being lighter than I was before I injured it in the first place. So thus began the journey.

Vicki and I have done Weight Watchers before, but before it was her idea and I didn’t really care that much. This time, I had motivation, and the Weight Watchers iPhone apps make it so much easier to to charge of your own diet. And after 12 months of counting points, thinking “when I hit this milestone, I’ll reward myself with a big plate of wings” and then not “rewarding” myself (or on one occasion, “rewarding” myself and then feeling sick afterwards), I can proudly say that I’m lighter now than at any time since about second year university. The kayaking clothes pictured above are size “L”, after decades of wearing XL, 2XL or XLT. A few weeks ago I bought some jeans with 34″ waist and discovered that they’re a little loose. I was wearing a 40″ waist 12 months ago.

When I was kayak racing in 2010, I weighed 240-250 pounds. When I had that revelation in Whistler, I was 275. As of yesterday I was 208, and I’m thinking I could get down to 200 if I keep this up. I have loads of “fat clothes” that I’m hoping I’ll never have to wear again. I think Men’s Wearhouse is going to make a fortune off me.

The story so far…

So I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit in favor of Facebook, but good things have been happening.

Last week I went out and paddled 10 miles, for the first time since 2010. I felt really good and didn’t have to stop and rest at all, and more importantly I wasn’t horribly sore the next day. To me that felt like “I’m back” and I’ve started thinking I might have a racing “career”, or at least a year or two, ahead of me.

Unfortunately, a few days later I tried it again with much worse results. This time I went out expecting cool temps and overcast skies, but as soon as I hit the dock the sun came out and the temperature soared, and I “died” on the way home. I ended up frustrated, sore, and with a horrible sun burn. My shoulder is telling me that maybe 10 mile grinds are actually a bit too much for me at this stage in my recovery.

Meanwhile, Epic Kayaks announced a new V10 Sport. My V10 Sport is old and battered and has had many owners. The new one has some nice features and I’d be proud to paddle a bright shiny new boat. But then I got thinking that instead of buying pretty much the same boat as the one I’ve already got, why don’t I buy something faster? So then I started thinking about the Epic V12. I went and paddled one and found it twitchy as hell, but definitely something I could master over time. But meanwhile, I also thought if I was going to get a new boat, instead of trading up my V10 Sport, I should probably get rid of my old Looksha, since I never paddle it any more. So I took a free listing on paddling.net figuring that as a fairly specialized kayak I’d get more interest from a specialized crowd than you’d find on Craigslist. But Craigslist allows pictures and a longer description, so I figured I’d give it a try there before spending money on a premium listing on paddling.net.

And that’s when I found it. There was a listing for a Think Legend for what I’d consider a dirt cheap price. The pics looked good, and the guy said he’d reduced the price from a previous listing. A bunch of reviews said that the Legend is nearly as fast and less tippy than the V12. It seemed like too good to be true. So I made the arrangements and drove off to take a look. The owner lives on the river in Cato, NY. He’d evidently bought it because it was one of the fastest kayaks in the world, but not realizing how much more skill a faster boat takes. He was pretty impressed by my ability to keep it upright and drive it at a fairly fast pace. And I can feel that someday I’m going to e pretty fast in it. So of course when I came back in and he helped me carry it up from the dock he asked if I wanted it back on his rack, or on my roof rack. I wanted it on my roof rack.

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Why I want to punch Microsoft in the face

Ok, not the company, just anybody who was ever involved in their web browsers.

I’m writing a web application. I’m trying to make it modern with good UX (User Experience). Sometimes my boss’s decisions go against that desire, but I do what I can. Real world requirements aren’t always as straight forwards as the stuff you read in “Design For Hackers”.

So this week, I did a new part of the app. It was finally working the way I wanted to on real browsers, so then I turned to IE testing. It didn’t work right on anything older than IE 10. After two days of screwing around, I had a workaround that worked ok on IE 8 and 9 – it didn’t look too much worse than it does on real browsers, just different. That’s good, because the boss says that IE 8, because it comes on Windows 7, is the corporate standard and I don’t have to support IE 6 or IE 7. So I upload my test code to their server and clicked on the link, and it looked like a dog’s breakfast. Turns out that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that when something is on your intranet, should run in “compatibility mode”, which basically means it acts like IE 7.

IE is supposed to recognize a header, “X-UA-Compatible”, which is there so the web developer can tell the browser which version of IE it’s written for, but because Microsoft are a bunch of idiots, they decided that the “use compatibility mode on the intranet” setting should override this. I can’t think of a single reason for this, other than sheer idiocy.

On StackOverflow, a user offered up a “simple” workaround – all you need to do is get every web server on the corporate intranet except yours to change to serve up a “X-UA-Compatible” that specifies compatibility mode, and then the sysadmins to change the default setting on the Active Directory servers (and probably Citrix as well) to make sure people’s logins allow the setting from the web server to take precedence over their login settings. That of course pre-supposes that you can even find every web server on the corporate intranet. And find their owners. And get those owners to sign anything without 12 years of running around making business cases and getting manager approvals. And then get the web servers actually configured that way.

I think it would just be faster to wait for every computer in the company to be replaced by one running a better OS. Or the heat death of the universe.

So off I go to try to find a work-around that works on IE 7 as well.

Upgrades are never easy

Debian stable just updated. Usually when Debian drops a new “stable”, it means its bombproof as hell and tested out the wazoo. This time, I’m not so sure that is true.

First candidate is a virtualbox that I use to keep some client data on an encrypted partition and safer than just leaving it on my desktop machine.

First attempt threw some errors about problems with “default-jre” and “openjdk-6-jre”, but I don’t use java on this virtualbox so I just removed them.

Second attempt gave a huge problem because of some conflict between CPAN installed Perl modules in /usr/local/share/perl/5.10… and the new 5.14 modules. It seems to me that the installer should just remove /usr/local from the Perl paths and ignore any locally installed stuff.

I tried removing that directory manually, but by that time the install was so screwed up that I actually went back to a clone I’d made of the virtualbox and tried again. This time I removed the JRE stuff and moved /usr/local/share/perl out of the way. The upgrade went much more smoothly, except the screen goes totally blank for a long time during the upgrade, and when it’s done the reboot prompt is showing empty boxes instead of letters. Fortunately I guessed correctly as to which box was the “ok” button.

After it upgraded, I discovered that Postgres 8 was marked as deprecated, so I did a pg-dumpall, removed it, imported the dump into Postgres 9, and all was well, no problems. Then I had to get RT working again, so I used aptitude to install as many of the packages as I could that formerly had been in /usr/local/share/perl. The only one I couldn’t find a deb for was Plack::Handler::Starlet, so I let CPAN install it.

Once that was up and running to my satisfaction, I figured it was time to move on to my linode. The linode hosts my navaid.com databases and a bunch of mailman mailing lists, and not much else. Remembering the Postgres 8 to 9 thing, I made sure to pg-dumpall before I started. There were no files in any local perl directories, and no jre, so I was good to go.

As it was updating, I saw it removing the Postgres 8 version of postgis. Oh oh, I thought, that’s not good. I’ve discovered in the past that you can’t simply recreate a postgis database using a pg-dumpall dump. So after the upgrade, I of course tried to install postgis for PostgreSQL 9, and once again panicked as it dragged in a ton of X11 crap I don’t need. Then I tried and failed to do a restore of the dump file. What I ended up doing was

  1. creating the database user for that site
  2. creating the databases for that site
  3. running the scripts that come with postgis for creating the spatial functions
  4. coping the pg dump file, and cutting out anything related to other DBS, and cutting out the drop and creation of these DBS.
  5. running this cut down version of the dump file
  6. making another copy of the dump file that includes all the other DBS, including the drop and create commands and running it.

Everything seems to be running now.

Some time I’ve got to go on and upgrade my xen host and guest oses on my colo box, but I’m really reluctant to do that one because if something goes wrong, I’ll have to drive in and try to fix it while standing in a freezing cold server rack farm.

Man, that felt good

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So in the last week I’ve paddled three times with other people, for a total of 15 miles. That’s probably more than I paddled the entire month of August last year. And it felt so good. Not just to be out paddling, but to paddle with friends and re-experience the camaraderie and fun.

My shoulder is pretty sore after each paddle, but the recovery the next day is pretty encouraging. Yesterday Dan and I worked on a change to my technique that kept my hands lower to keep pressure off my shoulder – it used different muscles in my core, and they hurt while I was paddling and they feel quite tired today. I’m going to keep at this to see if it helps.