BOFHJournal - August 2014

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29/08/2014 [17:10] A good day, today. Marred only by two disagreements on what charity I should be donating to after having been nominated by someone doing the ice bucket challenge (themselves choosing not to donate to the standard recipient). This decision was also made after seeing that the standard recipient is trying to trademark the ice bucket challenge name/action/whatever so that other charities can't use it. This seems like a monumentally bad idea for a variety of reasons, not least of which is greed. Anyway, I've donated to a charity, not done the challenge, and gotten back on with my life. Today I've mainly been tidying up a few things, waiting for deliveries of parts for server maintenance on Monday, and doing a very fast 8K run with Rachel, who cycled over at lunch time for a bit of fun. I was expecting a nice gentle run, as she is wont to do most of the time. And I even said words almost to that effect when we started (but not quite). Rachel responded by trying to do a run that "wouldn't slow you [me] down". She succeeded, but we both suffered for it! Not that I haven't run faster, for longer, this year. But not this early into restarting my training from no running at all between April and the end of July. Anyway, a good leg and lung stretcher. Now all I have to do is make it home on the bike in one piece, and be ready for the last parkrun I'll be doing in a while owing to rowing training starting again and me being away. This weekend, as I said, will be parkrun, then the boat house barbeque once I've sent Rachel on her way to Africa for a few weeks. Sunday is boat house maintenance day, which will be a rather long one as I doubt many people will turn up. Then it's Monday again. Have a good weekend, and I hope the weather's not quite as cold and windy for you as it is here.

28/08/2014 [17:25] Happily, my back ache seemed to have gone by the time I got up this morning. That might have had something to do with the two 400mg ibuprofen tablets I took by mistake last night (was intending to take two 200mg tablets). Anyway, after last night's very easy tub rowing (for a new cox) I wasn't feeling too bad anyway, but I was fine enough this morning to do morning exercises without any issues at all. The issues started when I got to work to find another server with ECC errors, a failed RAID battery, and numerous other hardware problems (most of them fixable without needing to open a support call, thankfully). Then when we headed over to derack some old SPARC kit we found that the suspended ceiling was holding up about a litre of water from a leak in an airconditioning feeder pipe, so I had to wait around for over an hour and a half before being told (I had to make the call) that someone wouldn't be out for another hour. I came back to my desk and went for a 6K sprinterval session, which calmed me down somewhat. A coworker ended up being the person who went back to deal with the engineers. Which was nice. This afternoon I've mainly been replying to service engineers about getting parts delivered for tomorrow... although I won't be doing the maintenance until Monday morning. I'm going to head off now and reward myself for getting through today with a quick erg and then home, hopefully to get the washing up done before Rachel arrives.

27/08/2014 [17:35] After a rather great (read: tiring) evening of erging and core I was actually quite looking forward to running a gentle-ish 10K at lunch today. Only to somehow twinge my back in a it'll-be-better-in-24-hours-with-rest kind of way somehow doing my morning exercises. Disappointing. But given how much I did yesterday, probably for the best. As it is all I'll be doing today is a gentle row in the tub with someone to help break in a new cox. I managed to fix a false positive on some RAM ECC errors which didn't clear after yesterday's DIMM swap, but now have three other servers which're complaining about memory problems. Did we have some excess of cosmic rays in the last few days? They're all still within the bounds that the manufacturers will say means they won't be worthy of replacement memory sticks though, so I just have to sit and watch the error counters slowly tick up. That's about it, really. Hopefully 24 hours of mostly rest will see my back twinge go away and I can get back to running and erging tomorrow.

26/08/2014 [17:15] I'm back, after a rather great long weekend (bank holiday Mondays make everything better). Friday evening was pretty good. Even if I can't really remember what it was I did other than go and see Lucy at the cinema. I can now say that it is a film I have seen. Other than that... well, I'm still rendering an opinion. Saturday morning was fun. After some stretching I managed to do a parkrun in 19:18, which is me beginning to return to form somewhat after the long break I had from running at all. Someone I used to regularly beat got an incredibly new PB of 17:55, which totally blows my old PB of 18:46 into the dust, so I've got a lot to work on there if I want to get back into contention with them. However I doubt they could row as well as I can. You can't be slave to two different masters and expect to please them both. After running there was some relaxing, and also some eating. Then more eating at a friend's yearly barbeque. After a considerable amount of meat-eating I went home and managed to convince myself to try and be even more sociable by going out with a few rowing friends (who admittedly I haven't seen in a good few weeks now). Fish and chips, then one drink in the first pub of the night and I was ready to go home. So I went. This meant that I was in good shape to get up on Sunday morning and be out on the path - running that is - before 08:00. There was plenty of dew (melted frost, potentially, given how temperatures dropped nationwide that night), which meant by the time I got to one of the more grassy sections I was in danger of getting very wet feet. Given I hadn't run the distance I was aiming for (a half marathon) in a very long time I opted to turn around at 9K, thus making it an 18K run, which was more than enough. Again, more food, rest, relaxation, and then Rachel in the evening, back from her running holiday in Cornwall. More food, television, etc. Monday, being a bank holiday was all about the rain. We stayed in, didn't really exercise, watched a lot of Breaking Bad, and generally relaxed. It was good. I don't actually think it stopped raining all day. Which was good in its own way as it gave a proper excuse for us not going out (except for Rachel heading to Tesco briefly for Stuff). Today has been rather OK, as working days go. A shortened week, two support calls (one Dell, one Oracle), both of which seem to be being dealt with at more than the usual snail's pace, plus some easy-to-fix issues, have meant that its been a less than terrible way to ease back into things. I even managed to do 6K of sprintervals at lunch time without any significant injury flare-ups, which is instant win in my book. I'm going to round off the day with a nice 6K UT2 erg and then head home for lashing of food, I think. Hopefully tomorrow will be just as good as, or better than, today.

22/08/2014 [16:00] So owing to someone being a complete muppet it appears that the power to the server room downstairs (where our switch is that controls comms into and out of the building) has been lost pretty much at the same time as the fire alarm went off. This means I might not be able to push this update to the site until much later on today. I took the entire day off exercise yesterday. Did I mention that? I think so. Yes, but I still did morning exercises, as I did this morning, too. Today though I managed to drag myself away from the annoyance that was trying to get a tiny little Tomcat application that was working on 5.5.27 on one server on 7.0.55 on another. Could I get it working? No. An entire morning and about half an hour of this afternoon wasted trying to move it to a more modern installation on another server. In the end 30 seconds of yum installing the 5.5.27 version on the new server and it was working. Sometimes newer isn't always better. This weekend I'll be running parkrun (tomorrow morning), then possibly coaching a 4+ crew, then doing a stackload of washing and washing up that's accumulated this week. Sunday... well, I don't know what I'll be doing on Sunday. But I do know that Rachel will be coming back to town in the evening, and then we'll be doing whatever fun things we can think of on the bank holiday Monday. So, as such, I'll see you Tuesday. I might just slope off now and publish this update from home this evening once the power's back on.

21/08/2014 [16:15] Last night's 10K went pretty well, in case you were wondering. I didn't break any records, but neither did I break any parts of my body. A little bit of stretching beforehand meant that the usual painful part of my anatomy only twinged for about 100m or so, then went away for the remaining 9,900m, which was good. I probably should have stretched a little more, but after I got back I showered and then found myself perfectly placed to give some coaching to a women's 4+ that was going out with a brand new cox (never coxed a fine boat before in her life). By the time I got back with them from the outing I really didn't feel like going to the pub, so I went home. At which point I found a message telling me that I shouldn't have gone to the pub and no-one was there owing to the person organising the evening having only just gotten home due to getting lost on a cycle ride that evening. So, that worked out pretty well in the end. Today is a rest day for me. That means no exercise at all... other than morning exercises, which I try to do every morning (other than weekends as I usually have something exercise-related first thing anyway). As a result I've actually washed almost every piece of exercise-related clothing (and associated towels). Even the stuff at the boat house. It's waiting for me in the washer at home, so I must remember to take it out once I get home from my haircut, which I'm heading off to get done in just a few minutes. Tomorrow's Friday. There should be something fun for me to do at work, hopefully, a run at lunchtime of some indeterminate length, then I might even see if I can get to the cinema after the working day is over.

20/08/2014 [17:05] So mostly today I've been working on trying to get some dive computer software working for one of my colleagues. It turns out that the best way for this to happen is to upgrade his entire workstation to an OS that actually has some modern libraries on it. So, at some point I'll be reinstalling with RHEL7, rather than the RHEL5 he currently has. Probably tomorrow. Otherwise it's been the usual fight to get rid of red lights on our monitoring systems and generally try to keep the place ticking over. Our team leader comes back tomorrow after a few weeks away, so there's every chance he's going to go off on one about something or other that we've done while he's been gone. I'm pretty much as prepared for that as I can be, I think. Rachel arrived later than expected last night, which gave me just about enough time to go and do a sneaky 6K erg at the boat house before getting home only about 30 seconds after she arrived. She left for a solo running holiday in Cornwall this morning, but after some train issues only managed to leave Paddington at around 12:06. Hopefully she'll still be able to do her first day's coastal running and find her way to her bed and breakfast (only seven miles or so) before the sun goes down tonight. As for me, I'm off in a little while to do a quickish 10K along the river and then head to the pub to belatedly celebrate someone's birthday. There might even be some core exercising in there somewhere, too.

19/08/2014 [17:45] Mostly today I'm celebrating doing another run (8K) that was 99% pain free. The first two dozen steps or so I seemed to be too tight in the upper hamstrings and there was pain, but as soon as I worked out what to relax the rest of the run was perfectly fine. Looks like I still need to work on some way to isolate the top of my right hamstring and get it warmed up, but otherwise that's another run banked. Which is nice. It looks like yesterday was my day off this week, so tomorrow I'll either run again or do an erg or two down at the boat house. Or possibly both, as I intended to do today, but got caught talking to one of the friends I'll be staying with when I head off on holiday in a few weeks. I've got 75% of the presents I'm giving to those people who're putting me up/putting up with me. It's just the chocolate to go, which I obviously won't get until closer to the day of travel. Workwise there's been some back and forth about a Drupal development site we're exposing to the rest of the world, and how firewall, SSL, and other things were going to be handled. I think it's pretty much all dealt with now... until my team leader comes back and shakes everything up so that it can be done properly/his way. I won't mind. Rachel's on her way here in a little while so rather than this evening's erg I'm going to head home and see if I can't get the house in some sort of order.

18/08/2014 [17:40] I had an awesome and extremely tiring weekend. I headed down to London on Friday evening on unpacked trains with a book and sweets to eat. So that was always going to be a good start. Indian delivery food and downloaded television followed, which wasn't going to put much of a dent in my enjoyment either. Saturday morning was parkrun with Rachel at her home event. She beat me again, which I'm both pleased for her about, and hopeful that I'll be able to catch and beat her in the future. I'm not so sure though, as she seems to have improved every time we run together. Which is awesome. Anyway, it was only two seconds, although I think we both could have sprinted more and that could have made a different in either direction. We went to the gym afterwards. A normal session of about two hours, which I think was a bit longer than she was used to. We wandered tiredly in the direction of a greasy spoon for a deliciously filling fried breakfast (although she didn't eat nearly enough of anything other than toast), and then perhaps inadvisedly had a 30 minute Chinese massage before heading home. I'm happy to report that the morning's exercises didn't seem to affect my running injury at all. Although I did do a fair amount of stretching both around them, and later on in the day. The remainder of the day being mainly about watching the rain and being happy to be indoors. Sunday morning we got up early again and ran for about an hour and a half with Rachel's running club. Lots of ups and downs, which I'm not usually used to where I live, and at a slower pace too. Amazingly my injury again failed to put in much of an appearance, which was brilliant. Hopefully doing regular stretching and stuff is starting to have a noticable effect. If nothing else this should be a positive influence on me keeping doing them more and more often and regularly. Naturally, after such a long, hard run, the afternoon was mostly spent on the sofa either watching things or getting very close to dozing off. I had to get up horribly early this morning to make it to work in time, but managed to do so owing to on time trains and borrowed bikes. I've managed to put in a full and useful day of work, including one bit of work that required a meeting, but still may end up with my team leader tearing the outcome to shreds and substituting his own (likely better) solution. We'll see on or after the 21st when he returns from holiday. For my part I'm off home and thence to Tesco to restock the kitchen. No exercise for me today after three days of exercise in a row. We'll see what tomorrow brings before Rachel arrives in the evening. She's off to Cornwall for a solo running holiday on Wednesday, so it'll be nice to see her before she heads off.

15/08/2014 [16:55] Circuits last night were fun. I don't think I worked up quite as much of a sweat as I could have done, but that might be because I'm fitter than the last time I did them. Not sure. Anyway, after that it was still nice to get home and have a steak dinner before a moderately early bed. This morning had morning exercises and perhaps not quite enough stretching of the things my physio told me to stretch. That's probably why the run at lunchtime today was quite painful earlier and for a little bit longer than on Wednesday. I'll do some more stretching this evening. This weekend I'm down in London, so it'll be parkrun there, some gym, some Chinese massage, some running with a running club and hopefully some relaxation here and there otherwise. Also, plenty of food, and maybe even some reading and other enjoyable things.

14/08/2014 [17:45] One of the perils of cycling to work is that when the heavens really and truly open you're stuck at work, unless you want to get absolutely soaked. I might, in a bit, but right now I'm hoping things will get a little better, weather-wise, before I head off. In the meantime I can tell you of the very little I've done today. So, I've done very little. The closest I got to some serious work was almost opening up one of our dev environments to the whole internet because of the limit we have on static NATs. However, in the end I had a talk to my Ops and Network managers and we've decided to have the developer who wants this thing accessible to an outside contractor come in and talk us through things so that we can do the minimum in terms of exposure. I went for some physio last night. The guy was extremely muscular (runs the gym the appointment was at). I don't think it's the most pain I've ever been in, but at times I think it got quite close. I've some new exercises to try (and an inner tube to butcher for certain strapping reasons) so hopefully those, in conjunction with my attempts to keep my pelvis in the right place as I run, will enventually produce dividents in terms of not hurting myself when I run (or even turn my hips in certain ways when I walk). I think I'll head down to the boat house for circuits this evening, rather than go home. I broke and ordered delivery pizza last night, so I should do something to make up for that. And now looking at the weather I think there's nothing for it, I think I'm going to get soaked regardless...

13/08/2014 [17:00] A day of ups and downs. Downs were having to get out of bed this morning when I really wish there hadn't been a need to. I didn't sleep 100% well, but it was still a good night nevertheless. The weather's been nice, if a little windy, so that's an up. Work has been light today and I've had to get out of my chair a fair amount which today was a good thing in terms of stopping me from getting stiff from last night's moderately easy 6K erg, followed by lots of stretching and core work. Stiffness also potentially coming from my 10K run at lunchtime today. I got the same horrible pain at about 300m in, but then seemed to be able to control it by doing some active work with my pelvis positioning (not allowing it to tilt, like I've let it do for the past few decades). This allowed me to complete the run feeling almost normal. I'm just about to head off to see a new physio this evening in the hopes he'll be able to verify if I do have proximal hamstring tendinopathy. Or something else entirely. No boat house visit for me this evening. After I've had my poking and prodding done I'm off home to do such things as washing up, and putting the washer on.

12/08/2014 [16:25] Rerigging of the fleet last night went nice and quickly. I think we had pretty much all of it done by 19:00, which was great. I went home and had a nice evening of not doing very much before a fairly early bed. I also did a little bit of stretching in the hope it would help whatever's going on at the top of my right leg around the back. Still a bit sore this morning, but additionally in the lower back area. Although I put that down to some heavy lifting yesterday evening getting boats off the trailer. Anyway, I've booked a physio appointment with a view to the person I'm seeing probably becoming a fairly regular person to see. I really want to get whatever's going on dealt with, even if it takes a few months or more. Current internet self-diagnosis points towards proximal hamstring tendinopathy, but obviously someone with some actual qualifications needs to take a look. I do wonder slightly if it's something to do with all my bow side rowing, but I'm pretty sure the fact that I've done a lot more erging than rowing (which is a symmetric movement, and my left side doesn't hurt at all), and that for the most part I push straight back down the boat should mean that it hopefully isn't. Although thinking about it I do splay out my right leg during the stroke when in a boat. I wonder if that's put more strain on it than the left one? I'll find out tomorrow, I guess. Nothing but a bit of deracking and air-conditioning engineer minding today. Which is why I'll be heading off as soon as I get a phone call to lock up the server room once the engineer has finished as much as he can for the day. I imagine I'll be the one to let him back in again tomorrow. After that I might go and do a 6K erg or something, then head home and try and get the house in some semblance of order for Rachel arriving.

11/08/2014 [17:40] An excellent weekend of racing, with plenty of relaxation and sun between it all. Saturday was a lazy morning (in that I got up at 07:30, and then didn't really do much). Then a drive to Peterborough to get ready for the first race (mixed 8+ heat). We did enough to come second, but were pretty sure we could have won it (we didn't need to). A short time later we had a straight final in the 4+, which we won (first pot of the weekend, and a point on my racing license). Then it was the mixed 8+ final which we disappointingly again came second in, to the crew that we'd allowed to win in the heat. Not too disappointing though, as the regatta's more about fun than anything else. Drove home again and got a reasonable night's sleep. Sunday I only had one race, a single mixed 8+ final over 500m. Drove back there in plenty of time, having been told that the remains of Bertha had set back the racing somewhat. It didn't really hit much here in town, so it was something of a surprise to discover the effects it'd had in Peterborough. In any event, the winds were still pretty high by the end of the day when we got on the water. A rather strong tailwind made the event short and incredibly messy, but as I was at stroke I decided that we were going to do the whole minute and a half or so at rate 40 or better... and we did. I'm not sure everyone was ready, but it certainly was a bit of a giggle. We won, got our pots (no points) and may have broken a course record. After driving home and doing a bit of boat unloading, those of us that were left went to the pub owned by one of the rowers, had dinner, watched some news on television and headed to our respective sleeping places for the night. I was all set to sleep in a little bit later this morning (07:30 or so), do the morning exercises, and then get to work on time. Only there was an air-conditioning issue which meant I got called at 06:20. Although someone else dealt with it in the end I decided to get up and was in work at around about 07:00. Which means I should have probably gone a while ago, but I don't need to be anywhere before 18:00, which is why I'm going to be leaving in a few minutes instead. We're rerigging the fleet we took to the regatta tonight, then I'm going home to eat lots and try not to obsess about the minor amounts of excess around my waist. Normally as I run I tend to burn off that tiny bit that I don't like, only I don't seem to be running much at the moment. And every time I do I get aches and pains which make me worry and reticent about running the next time. I did 8K at lunchtime today and although everything was brilliant to start with, about 300m in I got excruciating pain somewhere around my right sitbone (probably something adductor-related) and actually had to stop for a moment before carrying on. Once I started holding my pelvis in probably a better position it didn't really bother me again, but I'm also sure that I may be close to getting right ankle achilles tendenitis again. The whole right side of me (limbs-wise) really doesn't seem to be too happy. I wonder if it's something to do with the side I row on...

08/08/2014 [14:05] Derigging and trailer loading last night for the regatta this weekend went pretty smoothly. I managed to get home, watch some television, have a proper meal, go down and make sure everything was loaded and tied on correctly and still make it home in time to watch a film before going to bed. I think the previous day's exertions in the morning has caught up with me by this morning though as, although I was awoken by the rain and the radio, I went back to sleep and didn't actually get out of bed until just before 08:00. No exercises this morning and disappointingly no run at lunch time today, even though I wanted to get that gentle 6K in. I've been getting that very occasional pain in the top of my right leg again in the gluteus maximus, so I thought it would best to rest it and all of my leg muscles for the rowing tomorrow and Sunday (weather allowing; it looks like it might be pretty atrocious on Sunday at the moment). There was a little bit of air-clearing yesterday which doesn't seem to have had - as yet - any repercussions or negative comeback from those involved. We'll have to see what the future brings, but given what the state of play was anyway there wasn't anything to be lost, and almost certainly nothing to be gained either. Why engage in it then? Because it'd been part of my day-to-day life for a considerable amount of time and an opportunity presented itself. Yes, I'm being deliberately hyperbolic. So, today I'm the only person in the office in either of my two teams (Systems or Networks) so I've been doing a lot of stuff that's normally handled by other people. Thus far nothing seems to have gone terribly wrong, exploded, or both. I'm getting out of here at around 14:30 to do some troubleshooting at another server room and then I'm getting away from work entirely until Monday. So if you chance to look in on my via the web cam, I won't be there. Have a great weekend.

07/08/2014 [16:55] All things considered this morning's outing wasn't too bad. I still think there are some issue we need to work on, and in general we don't quite row the same way (despite being in a boat together (mostly) for almost the whole regatta season), but we should do OK, I think. Unless there are some really, really good crews there. Even so, it's just a bit of fun at the end of the day. It was a shame to have to get up so early after having had so very little time to relax the night before, but last night's mixed 8+ outing wasn't too bad either... once people got used to me stroking the boat and the "men's stroke". Again, we'll have to see what happens on the day, or in the case of Peterborough's two day regatta, days. Annoyingly, one of the servers I racked up yesterday seemingly has a power fault already. I'm going to have to go and cold power cycle it tomorrow to see if that clears it. If not it may be either a PSU or even a motherboard replacement. Not that the machine is down at the moment but it's certainly not happy about some voltage or other right now. And that means a red light on our status system, which we can't have. I'm in the office on my own tomorrow, so I'm very much hoping that nothing goes wrong. I might even try to leave a little early and go to the cinema given how early I got in today. Oh, and I did some other work, but nothing really exciting enough to tell you about.

06/08/2014 [17:20] Another day of usefulness. After last night's extremely hot 6K erg I was a little worried about getting up early this morning to do 10K from work. It seemed to go fairly well, in that the time I got was about par for the course (literally, pun intended) when I uploaded the data to Endomondo. Although it was rather a lot of effort, which means I'm capable of being fitter, and it being an easier run for that time. Still, it did mean I got to have a second breakfast around 10:45 when the sandwich van arrived. After a psychology study over lunch (free money, sort of), I came back and with the help of my team leader got two machines racked in two different server rooms, the power and networking sorted out, and even logged them in our asset and rack management applications. Given I was only told they and the Oracle guests they're hosting needed to be ready for Monday a week ago, I'm quite pleased that things went as smoothly as they did. I even got to reawaken my Oracle VM Manager knowledge which needed a serious amount of dusting off. I can go back to working through the massive backlog of tabs I have open in Firefox (mostly technical reading) for a few days now... although I do need to do something about the helpdesk calls which're open for the Networks team, given that's just me this week. Mixed 8+ outing this evening. I'm back at stroke as we're using the M1 boat that I've been stroke for for most of this season. Hopefully there won't be too many complaints, as I said yesterday. Even if there are, Rachel will be at home when I get there to help me feel better about everything.

05/08/2014 [17:20] Last night's 4+ outing was... a little worse than I was expecting. I don't think we can blame the continual and serious stroke side lean entirely on the boat. There's someone really not doing the right thing among the four of us (I don't think it's the cox). Given it goes away somewhat at higher rates I guess it's not too much of a problem. We'll have to see. The mixed 8+ is now going to be stroked by me as we're taking a men's boat rather than the women's. Not quite sure how the increased weight is going to go down with the women (of the boat, not them). I'll have to be very careful about my stroke now or suffer thw wrath of those not used to how I've been rowing all season. It does move me out of harm's way on a number of levels though, which is nice. Today has actually been really productive for me getting to work by 08:57. I've managed to remember how to use Oracle VM Manager enough to get the guests I needed to get built built. Tomorrow I should hopefully be able to move both physical servers into their final resting places (one in one server room, one in another), get them registered in our various asset and rack tracking systems, and even get the right UPS software on them. The rest of the day has therefore been taken up with trying to get Oracle to register the new CSI we'd paid for so that I could legitimately use the Oracle VM Server and Oracle Linux guest instances that I'd installed. I think I've managed it now... except that it turns out that we're already at maximum usage, so we're going to need some more licenses adding before very much longer. Which could be a real arse. For now though I'm off to do two short ergs and then head home. I don't have time to run at lunchtime tomorrow, so I'll be doing a 10K before work, when hopefully it'll be a little cooler, too.

04/08/2014 [17:15] Quite a full weekend! Rachel arrived on Friday, which is always a good way to start things off. We did parkrun on the Saturday morning and there was a bit of torch-passing as she beat me by two places and about two seconds. She swears I'll be faster than her again soon, but I have a feeling this could be the point at which she starts to outstrip me. If nothing else she's doing a heck of a lot more running than I am, and I'm still plagued by sharp spikes of pain in my right groin whenever I run (more on that below). Anyway, once we'd finished she ran back to finish with her friend and then we all did a slow loop of the big lap together before I went home and they went off to do fun things for the rest of the day elsewhere. I managed to shower, have lunch, finish off a film, and even head into town to collect some contact lenses before I found myself nearly falling asleep in Waterstones reading a book. As a result I decided to cycle home and ended up popping into the boat house to see why the doors were open. Nothing untoward, just some ergs being repaired, so I went home. Rachel arrived later on in the evening and we ate and generally relaxed. Sunday morning was moderately quiet until I had to head down to the boat house for a midmorning mixed eight outing in preparation for a regatta next weekend. It actually went a lot better than anyone had been expecting, I think. Certain aspects of it were slightly problematic for me, but I'd like to think they can be improved on with time. Soon after I got back, Rachel returned from a run/swim/run session (she's more active than me, I'd say) and we had some lunch and then in no particular order went to Tesco, enjoyed a quiet afternoon, stretched, napped, and watched some downloaded television. I believe it was baked potatoes with all manner of good things on them for dinner. The usual morning routine this morning, including exercises. Got to work and settled in. Ran 6K at lunch time, the first 20 strides or so eliciting some seriously painful spikes of discomfort at the inside top of my right leg, despite stretching first. I'm deeply thankful they went away or I would have had to have stopped within 100m of starting. As it was the run went fairly well, considering I went the 'hard' way around the loop. Same again Wednesday morning before work and Friday lunchtime. Then I'll change the Wednesday run next week to be a 10K, and keep the other two at 6K the following week. Anyway, tonight is an outing in the 4+ I'm also in for the regatta, so I should probably head off and get myself in some kind of shape for it.

01/08/2014 [17:25] Nothing happened today. Well, I set up two servers ready to be built with Oracle VM Server on Monday, but honestly that's about it as far as work goes. Thankfully I got to do it in the prep room across the way, rather than having to rack the machines up in two different server rooms first, but they're still going to need transporting at some point in the near future. I also have to remember how to deploy Oracle VM guests with VM Manager too... Last night I fully intended to do circuits and yoga at the boat house, but just before circuits started I ended up jumping into the tub to help a brand new cox learn how to be one. She's a friend of one of our pre-existing rowers, so it seemed like a good opportunity to gain a cox for the long term (rather than someone joining and then deciding it wasn't for them) as I'm sure the rower has been going on about rowing for ages and hasn't soured them to the idea. So, by the time the tub (a wide, two rower boat with room for two passengers/coxes) rowing was over the yoga was well into the session, so I just showered and went home instead. Tomorrow I fully intended to make it to parkrun, and then, well, I don't quite know what I'll do with the day. Rachel's coming over this evening, doing parkrun with her friend and will then be back later in the evening/Sunday depending on what happens. I've sort of lost track of the sequences of events which can take place this weekend. I do know I have a mixed 8+ outing on Sunday morning at some point, but that's about it for rowing. I'll probably try to go for a run on Sunday afternoon if at all feasible (tiredness and weather and potential running injuries pending). I think that's everything.