BOFHJournal - October 2014

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31/10/2014 [16:40] It'll be November when I next write this journal (and I'm off on Monday, so well into it by then), so it must be time to remark on how quickly the year is passing by again. Not that I mind as I really want to get to December and my trip to Finland with Rachel. Anyway, today was a pleasant alternative to the last couple of days. I got up and did morning exercises, and then haven't done any more exercise all day. It got to lunch time and I... just didn't get up and go for a run. I have to say, I think it was a good thing for me. You can't always live by a routine. I don't think I'll be running over the weekend, but I'll be taking my running stuff just in case I have the chance. It'll probably be good for whatever's happening in my right shin to take a few days off, anyway. Work has mainly been all about doing all the small sysadminly tasks that I haven't been able to do all week in one big lump today. That and catching up with email and RSS feeds. I'm now off to catch a train to my grandmother's 100th birthday party/weekend thingy. I'll be seeing immediate family as well as, I imagine, the whole extended family. It's going to be... interesting, as I haven't seen some of them in getting on for two decades. Many of my cousins are (happily) married, and have children. I'm sort of the failure in that regard. Still, I would imagine I'm having a bit more fun and am in better shape than most of them at this point. Maybe. Anyway, back on Tuesday. Have a good weekend.

30/10/2014 [17:45] Incredibly, we did it. The upgrade is done, and everything seems to be working as it should. Don't ask me how. We had issues every step of the way. From a missing JVM in the database (as well as missing .jar files) to extremely problematic Windows client installation issues, we had it all. But it's all done now and I can finally go back to the other stuff I was doing that I've had to put on hold for the last three days. Just in time for Friday, when no-one in their right mind ever starts anything new. I managed to squeeze in a 30min AT erg this morning, too. For being shattered before I even got on the erg, to only be 10m behind last week's season's PB wasn't too bad. I didn't quite nail the stroke rate quite as well as usual, but it certainly seems to indicate that perhaps my stamina is improving a little. I'm going to head to the boat house to collect some kit from this morning, then go to the pub and actually socialise for an evening. Its been a while since I did something sociable. Tomorrow currently doesn't look all that bad. I don't have any exercise planned for the morning, there's a gentle 10K at lunch time (I hope), and then after work I'm heading to my parents' for the weekend from which we'll go to celebrate my grandmother's 100th birthday (rather than doing Fours Head of the River Race on the Tideway).

29/10/2014 [18:00] Another incredibly frustrating day. However, just before close of play I was the one who managed to work out what the blocker was and fix things. This was both immensely satisfying, and deeply annoying that the consultant hadn't been able to work out before me what the issue was. We basically wasted most of a day, again. Just like yesterday. Still, at least now, if the consultant spends this evening doing his job, we'll have a bullet point list of things to do tomorrow to move from the old system to the new system without too much down time. Hopefully now it's just a case of upgrading one of the DNS/DHCP clients, stopping the server software, doing two DB exports, two DB imports, starting up the new server software, starting up the upgraded client and seeing if everything works/talks to each other, and if it does, upgrading the other client. Then having a damn good test of everything and then maybe a coke and a bit of a break. That would be nice. However, given how things have gone thus far this week I find it highly unlikely that things will indeed go without a hitch tomorrow. Up until now we haven't really touched anything which would affect either the live/old system or our users/infrastructure. This changes tomorrow. We're also rebooting Windows DCs, which is never a wonderful thing to do. In other news though, I had a good 8.6K run at lunch time, with Max. He's getting fitter, slowly but surely. I'm just pleased that for the moment I'm still a better runner, even if he is a stronger cyclist and probably rower as well. Swings and roundabouts. Anyway, the run was good, even if I think I am running on some kind of minor shin splinty thing. We'll have to see how that goes. If nothing else I can take a bit of a break after the half marathon in a few weekends from now. It's the hard 30min AT erg tomorrow morning. I may have some company for that, which would be nice. Then the final day (I hope) of work on this software upgrade. Then I can go back to all the other work I've had to put on hold to do this thing. Yay.

28/10/2014 [17:25] Urgh. What a day. It started well, with two 6K ergs on my own. A good way to get over another broken night's sleep and to wake myself up without too much unpleasant exertion. Then I got into work and did the load balancer upgrade in record time, and without any issue, which was lovely. Unfortunately, once the consultant came in to start the DNS software update the wheels came off the day somewhat. The cooling in the building is broken again, so even though it's cold outside, the air temperature was close to 28degC indoors. Then there were problems with the install of the new software. Initially it was thought to be down to database user confusion, then database access confusion, then missing dependencies for the linking of the 32-bit Oracle client on a 64-bit machine, then eventually, it turned out to be because the software installer writers didn't seem to ever have tried to run SQL scripts on remote Oracle databases (thus necessitating the use of the "as sysdba" argument to things. In the end even though we'd run the script by hand as required, we still had to let the installer bomb out and run things manually to get the database ready for use. After that things went a bit more smoothly, although there was still the issue of the missing Tomcat keystore for the SSL certificate (another thing we had to do by hand). After that the authentication against our Active Directory actually went the most smoothly, amazingly. That leaves us with installing the auditing software tomorrow and a test DNS/DHCP database export (from the old system) and import (into the new), along with a similar process for the auditing data. I sent the consultant back to his hotel at around 15:30 so we could both take a break as I think tomorrow could be a long day. I am, however, enforcing a proper lunchtime break tomorrow so I can go for a run. No more exercise for me today. Although I am going to head down to the boat house to collect some dirty kit from this morning. Then it's home to do washing up, and maybe some actual relaxing. Tomorrow morning I think I sort of get a lie-in, surprisingly. I'm sure I'm missing something.

27/10/2014 [16:30] All things considered I had a pretty good weekend, thanks for asking. Saturday morning saw Rachel leaving for Kenya, so I was awake early enough to got a good breakfast eaten and digested before taking Max for a run around the half marathon course he'll be doing in the first quarter of next year. Despite his protestations that he wouldn't manage 1h45m I eased him around the whole course in a little under 1h39m, which I thought was pretty respectable. I enjoyed it immensely for not being much of a push at all at any point, and therefore leaving my nascent right leg/hip joint issues firmly down in the barely noticable range. Which was nice. In the afternoon I finally dug my mountain bike out of the shed and did some much-needed maintenance on it, including a trip to the bike shop to get some pedals taken off some cranks, and then to the hardware store to get some replacement nuts and bolts to reattach toe clips to said pedals. I broke and ordered pizza in the evening because I could, and I was lazy. Sunday was meant to have some exercise in it, but it ended up being a complete rest day, unless you consider going to Tesco and back to be exercise. After a lazy morning and lunch, Tesco was almost the highlight of my day until I settled in after getting back and read a book from cover to cover. That's something I haven't done in a very long time and I felt all the better for it, even if I did eat a few too many sweets. I blame Rachel for hiding them around the house before she left and then leaving a note telling me that they were there to find. That's something I've done many time for other people, but I can't currently recall ever having been the recipient of a treasure hunt myself. I'm sure I have been, but I'm sad to say I can't remember. This morning I managed to finally start doing morning exercises again. Then it was a cycle to work in some of the warmest October weather I've felt in quite some time. The morning's work mostly involved second-guessing myself about the preparations for this week's DNS software upgrade. I'm pretty sure something's going to go wrong over the next three days. I just hope it's not something big. Happily the worst that can be affected is DHCP stuff... I think, so our outward facing services shouldn't be affected by anything that goes awry. The lunchtime run was a fast 6K on which I managed to leave Max behind, sadly. I'm sure his speed/endurance will increase quickly, given he's 12 years younger than me and in many ways a lot stronger and fitter. He's certainly better on a bike than I am. Anyway, the run was good and as far as I can tell I'm again none the worse for it, injuries-wise. We'll see when I get up in a few minutes to head to the boat house for Monday evening weights. Tomorrow morning I've got 2 6K UT2 ergs, and then I have to get into work to do our load balancer upgrade, which should go as easily as it always does. Although I never count my chickens until they've hatched these days. Then it's day one of the consultant/DNS software update!

24/10/2014 [17:10] Mostly today I have been doing a lot of reading about the software I'm going to be helping install with the consultant Tuesday to Thursday next week. That and going for a 6K run and hoping my right leg wouldn't fall off. The run was supposed to be with Max and Rachel, but events conspired against us. It doesn't matter though as I'm doing a half marathon distance tomorrow morning early on with Max instead, once Rachel's left for the airport to head to Kenya. I can't really think of anything else important that's happening this weekend, if I'm honest with you. I think Sunday could be a day off... unless I go for another cycle, which would be quite nice. Still no rowing outings until Fours Head happens next weekend (when I'm at my grandmother's 100th birthday party). My pay came in today, so I settled one and a half of the two debts I had outstanding. I can do the remainder over the course of the next month's pay or so. I guess that's it for today. Not a terribly interesting day in terms of things I can talk about, other than I get to go home to Rachel who worked from home at my place today, which is cool.

23/10/2014 [17:30] The morning erg was hard. I honestly thought at one point I was going to get a new PB. The effort was hard, I thought the splits were pretty good, and I was consistent, for the most part. Only in the end it turns out I was fairly well off the pace the whole way through except for one part about 14 minutes in. The graphing we have on Google Docs is definitely helping me identify where I need to work on pressing on the power a bit more. Anyway, after that it was a slow cycle into work and a day of getting things ready for next week's DNS software update. I'm sort of leading it, so I should get my head around everything that's going on a bit more than I already have. Among the things I did today was clarifying with our chief DBA that the new Oracle database is set up correctly. After a bit of back and forth it looks like it is. Anything that doesn't quite work out right should be solvable during the three days the consultant is here, I hope. No other exercise today after the last few days' worth of exertions. I do have a run tomorrow lunch time though. Hopefully with both Max and Rachel (who arrives this evening and is working from (my) home tomorrow). She's back off to Kenya on Saturday so we get to squeeze in a bit of time before that happens. In other news, my landladies came over yesterday afternoon to check some damp patches on the chimney breast, and leave me a new rental contract. What they also left was the front door standing open until I got home at 18:00. Thankfully no-one had ventured inside, at least to steal anything, but it was a bit of a shock. They only left the back door open for a few days while I was away last time. Hopefully they've learned their lesson now and won't be doing it again.

22/10/2014 [17:40] Finishing off the Observium weathermaps was mainly what I did this morning. Lunchtime's 6K of sprintervals ended up being 14K of steady running with Max, incorporating a fair amount off off-road running and even a proper, actual hill. There's not so many of them around here. This afternoon has mainly been about bemoaning the lack of snacks here in the office and wondering when I could go home and finish the last of the brioche Rachel brought for me to apologise for being late getting to my place on the weekend. Absolutely no exercise this evening for me as I want to have a fighting chance of at least getting to the 30min AT erg tomorrow morning. Whether or not I actually complete it, or get a reasonable distance is uncertain at this point. Happily, Rachel arrives tomorrow evening, I don't have any outing that night, and she's staying until Saturday morning. This makes me happy (as I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph).

21/10/2014 [17:30] I've just spent the entire day doing network weathermaps for use with Observium. While it wasn't a hard job I'm still pretty proud to probably have 99% of our switches and routers now mapped out, with links and things. Not only that but I worked out how to get the hover/mouseover graphs to work too, which is pretty cool. It did mean that my postponed run from yesterday lunchtime didn't happen this lunchtime either, but I'm going to go to the boat house for the second time today (two 6k UT2 ergs this morning), and run perhaps 10K from there. I might even have Max for company. Tomorrow is going to be all about catching up with the 1001 other things I let slide today. Most of them weren't important, but given I had to walk over to the other server room with a Symantec engineer this morning to replace a hard drive in one of our appliances, and then deal with the fact that an LED didn't turn the right colour (necessitating about an hour of troubleshooting which I'm still not entirely sure resolved the issue), I'm a bit behind on somethings I'd prefer to be up to date on. Anyway, it's blowing a gale outside, so the cycle is going to be interesting, and the run perhaps more so. I guess so long as it doesn't rain it'll be fine though. Resistance training, yes, that's it.

20/10/2014 [17:00] No rowing at all this weekend. And actually no rowing at all on the water this week coming or at the weekend then, either. This is because I can't go to the Fours Head of the River in a few weekends from now, so I'm not in any crews. I'll be at my grandmother's 100th birthday party instead. As a result of no outings this weekend I went for a run on Saturday morning with Max (who isn't rowing at the moment either, but for other reasons). 20K later I was moderately dead (Max didn't do as far, or as fast), and having eaten too much, too soon after the run, too quickly, really didn't feel all that awesome. I went home, but instead of napping ended up going back to the boat house to say goodbye to a rower who's heading off to Barcelona in a little while. Only she wasn't back from her race (rowing) so I drifted off to Cormac's for an evening of table top gaming, Star Wars, and pizza. Sunday morning I went for a 50K or so cycle ride with Max in blustery conditions, which made things a lot harder than they should have been. After a shower, lunch, and a sit down I was able to get to Tesco and back such that I could settle in for the rest of the day and await Rachel's arrival. She'd run a slow half marathon with someone in the morning, and then socialised in the afternoon so she didn't arrive until late. I was about done with socialising having had a friend up from London on Friday night to attend a seminar on Saturday morning so a bit more time to myself was good. I had intended to go running at lunchtime today but just wasn't feeling it after the weekend's exertions. I've got weights as soon as I leave work this evening, and I can always go running tomorrow lunchtime after tomorrow morning's erg if I really want. Otherwise today I've been working on network weathermaps, going into town to dismount surplus wireless kit, and doing all the odds and sods that a sysadmin has to do on a Monday.

17/10/2014 [16:05] Another outing cancelled last night. I can't say I was terribly distressed as I'd done the 30min AT erg in the morning and just didn't feel like doing anything else hard. It also meant I could go to the boat house and do some maintenance tasks and still be home in time to clean and tidy a bit for Rachel's arrival. Which I duly did. And that meant that when she did arrive we could simply sit down and have a nice bit of dinner whilest catching up on some downloaded television and catch up on our days. This morning was going to be my only lie-in day of the last ten days or so. However, now that I don't have any outings this weekend (but I do have a long run and a long cycle for each of the two days) I can stay in bed a little longer then too. Even as late as 08:00. This morning only ended up being until around 07:40, but that was more than long enough for me to enjoy it thoroughly. It's also rather mild, weatherwise, here at the moment so I ended up cycling to work in T-shirt and shorts as if it was the middle of summer. Work has been excessively dull today, surprisingly. Although at 16:10 I am off to move a significant chunk of our outlying connections onto another switch while my Networks team leader does the other end. That'll either go well or it won't. If nothing else we can always go back to the original link again... I think. Then I'm off home to do a last bit of tidying before Fi arrives for a short overnight stay before she attends a seminar in town for most of tomorrow. I'll be going for a long run (20K, I hope) with Max, unless he kills himself on the erg this evening, which I'm told he might be doing right now as I write this by his girlfriend. Then there'll be some brunch with friends and an afternoon of I don't know what. Sunday morning remains as yet unplanned, but Sunday afternoon should be a nice 50+ mile cycle with lots of other rowing friends in time to get home and cleaned up before Rachel arrives late afternoon after running a half marathon, again. Then it's Monday.

16/10/2014 [17:35] So not only was last night's outing cancelled (which was great as it was absolutely hammering it down), but it looks like tonight's outing has been cancelled as well. I'm still going to head down there to get my kit, stick some labels on things and take a look at a broken floodlight, but otherwise I should be home in time to clean and tidy the house a bit for Rachel's arrival, as well as start preparing the spare bed(room) for Fi's arrival and overnight stay tomorrow. Today started with a 30min AT erg though. It didn't go too badly, although to look at the graph of power output afterwards I definitely faded too much right after the start and never quite got as high as my all time recorded PB. Still, it was a lot better and a lot more consistent in terms of power build and maintaining the effort than the last two weeks' ones. Roll on next week! Work wise I've been putting ducks in a row for tomorrow and next week, which currently looks free for me to get on with a few of those things without interruption (although that certainly won't be the case). Between now and then though there's a fair few days, and this evening, which I should get on with enjoying.

15/10/2014 [17:25] After finally figuring out how to get a decent image on my new viewing device at home (who knew that what you named a source/input would affect the image quality?) I was able to get to bed at a moderately sensible time. This meant I could get up this morning not feeling all that bad for another broken night's sleep. Cycling to work in the extremely mild morning air at 06:40 (but still a fair amount of mist/fog) I met Max for our morning run. Annoyingly my Garmin GPS watch refused to get a lock, so I'm going to have to ask Max for his Polar watch's .gpx track once he has it downloaded. I'm pleased to report that my right shin gave no problems whatsoever, which is fantastic. However, the old pain/injury in the top inside left of my right upper leg/hip returned after about 11K, which was deeply annoying. It seems to have gone by now (not that I've gotten up and walked around much today), so that's a positive at least. I'm concerned that immediately following any long run/race I'm going to be extremely hobble-y for a while, though. Stretching doesn't seem to help all that much either. I'm considering going for some proper gait analysis to see if it's something that has an 'easy' fix. Rowing tonight on the water. The weather looks reasonably OK, so that should be interesting given I'm with a much less experience group than I normally would be. Then tomorrow morning it's the 30min AT erg again. I'm hopeful that not doing weights tonight will mean that I have a bit more left in my legs to improve my distance on the last two weeks of doing it. Work has been a collection of small tasks, most of which have been achieved. I've also upgraded our Nessus scanner, sorted out an Oracle Client install's requirements for our upcoming DNS software update, and read a lot of things on my RSS feed.

14/10/2014 [17:45] A pleasant morning on the erg doing two 6K UT2 pieces with company. Although, I did manage to pull my back very slightly turning to one side whilest taking a few strokes to see if everyone else was in time. I probably shouldn't have done that. I'm hoping both it and my shin splints, or whatever it is, have gone away by tomorrow morning by the time I arrive at work early to do a gentle-ish 15K run with Max. We'll have to see how that goes. In the meantime I have this evening off from all exercise, and a chance to plug in a new HDMI cable into the cheap LCD television I've bought from Cormac. It's a bit bigger than the widescreen monitor I was using previously. And now with this cable I should be able to ditch the under-monitor speakers and use the internal ones. So long as HDMI works as advertised and I can convince the PC to use the sound output on the video card rather than its internal one. Anyway, that's tonight. Work today has mainly consisted of a trip to our brand new, not yet completed data centre (which we'll barely have access to, annoyingly, but at least someone else gets to manage all of the infrastructure, etc.), and starting the process of drawing lots of weathermaps for Observium. It's actually a lot of fun, if a little repetitive. However, the end results are pretty nice.

13/10/2014 [17:00] Some stuff happened over the weekend. Most of it was standard, much of it isn't worth reporting. Things of note were that I had good outings on Saturday in both a 4+ and an 8+ (that I was stroke for), and rowed as a sub in a women's boat on the Sunday. Sunday evening was spent with Rachel at her place, and I came back this morning in torrential rain, which means I'm still waiting for my shoes to dry in the corner of my workspace. Thankfully work has only been the usual Monday status quo recouping. So I've had time to book my winter holiday with Rachel, and the harder parts of my Christmas train travel to and from my parents'. The middle to end of December is going to be extremely busy. And I don't think I'm going to be spending much of it at home. Better pack my running stuff! For now though, it's time to brave the elements again and head off for a weights session. Tomorrow morning is another early one, but this time only for two 6K ergs at UT2. Practically still having a lie-in! Oh, and another thing to note, I don't seem to have any outings next weekend at all. So that could be a time to see if my shin splints have gone away and I can get in a longer, but slower run, perhaps.

10/10/2014 [13:50] Last night's outing was pretty good, all things considered. Not that it started terribly well, but once we got used to each other and started getting things in time it was quite a nice outing. I got home just after Rachel, so we had a fairly long amount of time together at the tail end of the day. I slept weirdly and had some very odd dreams, coupled with having absolutely rock hard calves in the morning from the exercises I've been doing recently. I definitely need to have a big stretching session this evening, I think. The morning has mainly been about doing weathermap graphs for Observium and dealing with 1001 small issues with servers dotted around the place. Speaking of things being dotted around the place, I'm now going to be spending the entire afternoon cycling all over town looking for old wireless access points and deciding whether the replacement ones will be wall, ceiling, or free standing (it affects the type of aerial the replacements will have). In many cased we don't even know where the current WAPs are, so it could be a pretty long afternoon. The weekend has a lot of rowing in it, I hope. No running though until I'm more sure about my potential shin splints in my right leg. Other than that I don't think there's much more to say other than Rachel's working from home today so I definitely want to get home fairly sharpish. Oh, and we might be only a little while away from having worked out where we're going for a winter holiday. More on that another time, perhaps.

09/10/2014 [17:30] A mixed day of stuff, if I'm honest. After last night's weights session this morning's 30min AT erg was even worse than last week's, disappointingly. Still, I had company, which is far better than doing it on my own. Cycled into work and got on with the day. Over lunch I went with Cormac to see the house he inherited and have a look at how it has been split (back) into two separate dwellings again (his sister got the other half). This afternoon I have mainly been trying to clear errors and warnings off our Big Brother/Hobbit monitoring system and getting Oracle Linux VM guests to boot into 3.8 UEK kernels. As far as I can tell I've be moderately successful at all of the above. Now it's time for me to head to the boat house and hope the torrential rain we had earlier stays away and the wind dies down a bit from the gales we've had on and off all day, too. Rachel's here this evening (hurrah), so I've reason to hope the outing is both productive and short. Currently my calendar is clear for tomorrow, so potentially it could be a 'normal' day. Although I won't be running as I'm still not sure about my right shin.

08/10/2014 [16:55] Naturally, now that I'm doing fairly well at running and my high hamstring tendenopathy seems to be under control, it appears that I might have shin splints in my right leg. I don't know how bad it is at the moment, so I'm just not going to run until the weird pain/discomfort/feeling has gone away. I don't think it's going to be a problem to do rowing/erging and weights (weights this evening), but otherwise, no running and plenty of exercise to strengthen my calve muscles. I got up earlyish this morning so I could replace a hard drive, which went perfectly smoothly. I went to a Red Hat technical seminar on OpenStack over lunch rather than going for my run (free lunch didn't make up for missing going running), and this afternoon I've been trying to get the phone line at the boat house fixed whilest waiting for the working day to end. Now it's weights, dinner, and television (downloaded) before bed. Tomorrow is AT erg in the morning, work, an outing in the evening and then, hopefully, Rachel.

07/10/2014 [17:30] I seem to be doing pretty well on energy considering what I've been up to in the last day and a bit. Yesterday afternoon was pretty quiet, with me on the sofa watching my email and generally trying to calm my stomach down a bit. The evening was pretty active though. This morning Rachel had to be at Heathrow fairly early, so we were both awake before 05:00, which wasn't pleasant. I still managed to get a little sleep and then be at the boat house in time to do my 3x6K UT2 ergs though, then be at work and put a full day in. Everything seems to have gone reasonably smoothly here today, which is why I'm about to escape into what looks like a clear but cold and windy autumn evening of rowing on the river before food and an early bed. Tomorrow morning I'll be replacing a hard drive in one of our Oracle DB monitoring servers, hopefully not upsetting the RAID5 setup that's in there as I do it. Then there's an 8ish K run at lunchtime with Max, and around all of that a day of likely work-related housekeeping with regards to various projects and things that I have on the go at the moment. Probably top of the list is getting a Weathermap plugin working in Observium. We'll have to see how that goes.

06/10/2014 [12:45] Certainly a varied weekend. Saturday morning was a terrible outing with four other people, one of whom was a new cox. Not really her fault, we weren't rowing particularly well. After that I spent a lot of the day doing housework-related things, but still not managing to do everything I wanted to. Mostly though I tried to relax in preparation for the 10K the next day. By the end of the day though all I really wanted to do was go to bed. Up the next morning after a not totally amazing night's sleep I left early so I could get to the 10K race. The weather, after the Saturday rain, was perfect, so I was hoping for a good time and dry conditions. In the end other than a bit of sticky mud here and there they were, and I managed to post a time about fifteen seconds faster and a few heart beats per minute on average slower than last year. I also came second (up from eighth last year), which was nice. However, the afternoon was pretty stressy as I had some personal issues which'd started on the Saturday evening. Thankfully I think I've managed to make a start on clearing things up, but it's going to take time. Rachel arrived in the evening and given the temperature drop and the nights closing in I decided to cycle to the train station and meet her. I had thought about taking her out to dinner, but we opted for food at home instead. I don't know if that was a bad idea or not because I had the worst night's sleep in a long time last night. All through the night I kept waking up with stomach upset, as well as my usual inability to sleep a whole night through at the moment. As a result I'm going to head home in about fifteen minutes (despite the rain) and see if I can't feel better by tomorrow morning.

03/10/2014 [17:40] Last night's outing didn't go especially well. I was just glad to get back, out of the boat, and home. I don't really remember going to bed, but I know I was in it this morning when I got up for morning exercises. Got to work and prepared for the developer to come in. To his credit he was here right on time and we got down to work pretty much straight away. There were, as we expected, plenty of showstoppers, but we ploughed through slowly and steadily, making changes and tiding things up as we went. After getting a fresh pair of eyes on things right at the end we were able to get all three versions of the new beta/dev application up and running alongside the current versions. This is good as it means the developer can continue refining the beta versions and uploading to make sure things work in our environment as well as his all the way through this service's lifecycle. We're also on up to date versions of tomcat and Java, so updating those in the future won't be all that hard either. There's lots of things I need to document for apache, tomcat, the applications themselves, etc. All that's for Monday though. For now it's a case of logging my mid-afternoon (after the developer had gone) run, getting home, doing housework; washing up, cleaning, etc. and then relaxing for the evening. I've got rowing on Saturday morning (although only one outing I think, as the river's in use for races later on), then a 10K cross-country race on Sunday morning, followed by an early lunch with friends, I'd imagine. That'll mean Tesco's on Saturday, I guess. Rachel might be able to make it here on the Sunday afternoon. If not then probably on Monday instead.

02/10/2014 [17:35] I did my first 30 minute AT erg this morning. Not an entirely pleasant experience, it has to be said. And I've been hungry for most of the day. Not too destroyed body-wise though, which bodes well for my fitness coming back up to where it was earlier in the year. I certainly didn't feel like going for a run at lunch time, though. Which is good as I had a burrito with Cormac planned instead. Couple that with a bacon baguette this morning after I'd finished wiring up one of our custodians so he's no longer accessing us via Virgin Media but is instead on our internal network (drilled hole, fibre/copper transceiver, two single mode SFPs, a long spool of Cat-5E cable, and a crimping tool), and I feel like I've eaten more than my fair share of food today. Still, I think I needed it. So that was this morning's work. This afternoon's work was finally catching up on the backlog of email and other work-related things which have been pending since I got back from California. Now I have a Firefox with about forty open tabs I need to work through next. Something tells me that won't be happening tomorrow as that's when I've got a developer here all day pushing out a new beta of some management and payment software that really has to be live by the end of the day (at least in beta). Here's hoping I've got all of the Tomcat stuff up and running as much as I can beforehand. I'm sure I'll be able to give you a debrief at the end of the day tomorrow with how things went. For now though, I'm back off down to the boat house. Last night my bank party duties turned into more of a coaching role (with someone else being bank party). I have no idea if the guys in the 4+ I was shouting at got much out of the experience. I'd forgotten how hard it is to coach a crew when it's pretty much pitch dark outside and you're cycling down the side of the river trying not to hit people who don't have any lights on (cyclists and runners/other pedestrians). Anyway, outing for me tonight and then home, food, some downloaded television and a moderately early night.

01/10/2014 [17:40] And October. Already. Seriously, I've said it umpteen times, but this year is going by far too quickly. Still, nothing wrong with that so long as I'm doing quick things/keeping up with it. I'll admit I didn't start the day off particularly well, by going back to bed to doze rather than get up and get down to the boat house at 06:00 to do some ergs. I think that given I'm doing a 10K race on the weekend (running) it would be better to conserve my energy for the 9.2K run I did at lunchtime instead. I'll probably get up to do the 30 minute AT erg tomorrow morning though, as that's a bit more... I don't know, up my street in terms of cardio and strength fitness. Also I'm not running tomorrow lunchtime (although I will be doing an outing in the evening). This evening I'm bank party for a crew, so I only need to turn up at 18:30, which is why I'm still at work now. That and I've been trying to make a dent in my RSS feed, which grew rather a lot while I was in California. Hopefully a few hundred articles a day and I'll be back up to date in a week or so. Possibly more depending on how much work I have to do. I've got a site visit some time tomorrow which could take a few hours, but it's splicing cables, wiring things up, and plugging things in, so that should be fun, at least. Last night's outing was actually pretty darned good. For four people who haven't rowed together in that combination before, and it being in the dark, and almost the whole outing being done square blades we actually did pretty well. Not amazingly, but not too badly either. I was quite tired by the time we got back, even though everything was pretty low rate. So that must mean I was trying quite hard. The coaching was good, which did surprise me slightly, but maybe I shouldn't have been. The work stuff seems to be ticking over fairly well now, which is a great relief. I've got one more day of checking over everything I've done in preparation over the course of tomorrow, and then it's Friday and we see if we can get the new beta application up and running with the developer. That's going to be an interesting few hours or so.