BOFHJournal - June 2017

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29/06/2017 [16:45] Not much done today. Spent most of it working on things for other people, and a bit on things for myself. Got some paperwork filled in for the house purchase, made some phonecalls to surveyors about stuff, and changed a hard drive in a server at one of the data centers. Didn't quite manage to get everything I wanted to do done because of meetings which got in the way, or people just not responding with any real sense of urgency. I did get a run done before work which, other than some achilles issues, wasn't too bad in terms of my moving from petrol power (carbohydrate burning) to diesel power (fat burning). It wasn't fast (even though it felt fairly quick) but it was continuous. I'm off to Rachel's tonight, and then we ahve tomorrow off as it's her birthday. We'll be back at mine some time tomorrow and then spend the weekend there doing all kinds of planning for August bank holiday and things like that. See you on Monday.

28/06/2017 [18:30] Went out to the pub with Cormac last night to celebrate his new job and ended up watching water pour in through the roof of it, which was interesting. Went home around 19:15 and had a good dinner, although it didn't fill me up at all and I ended up having to have two toasted bagels to make up the difference. I do wonder if it was a lack of carbohydrates that I was craving, rather than anything else. Just before bed I sat down and gave my back a good twist both ways (as I used to when I was rowing regularly). This yielded a series of loud pops/cracks, and everything felt a whole lot more loose and flexible afterwards, and the ache was a lot less. This gave me a lot of hope for the morning In the morning I was actually a good bit less tight than the day before, although things have stiffened up a little over the course of the day. I managed to get in a 10km run at lunch time at a reasonable pace, which also seemed to help somewhat as well. Most of the day I've spent watching the first day of Henley Royal Regatta on a peripheral monitor whilest getting my work done and gathering quotes for a beetle infestation survey on my new house. Although it turns out, after speaking to the awesome person who did my Homebuyer Report, that I can get a survey for free from a place (who'll do both the beetle infestation check and the damp check in one go). That saves me a chunk of change I could happily be spending on bookshelves at Ikea later on. Anyway, I've spent far too long here after watching the race (which my club won) so I'm off home. Hopefully without being rained on too much.

27/06/2017 [16:45] One slightly out of form deadlift and I'm not exercising today. I managed to tweak my lumbar area/lower back and it's not feeling too great. This was last night, so I gingerly made my way home and got dinner cooking while waiting for Rachel to come back from her run. We had a lovely evening together without any serious discomfort on my part, and then went to bed. I slept well too, so I don't think I've done too much damage. This morning Rachel headed back to work and I went into work, stopping off to book my bike in for a service next Monday morning as it turns out I've already managed to go through two sets of brake pads for my disc brakes. I honestly don't think I'll be getting disc brakes again, they're just too un-user friendly when it comes to maintenance. Anyway, that was that. At work I finished getting the new NFS server ready, and with help from a colleague went through the various hoops to get the SAN share the old NFS server was sharing out moved across to the new server, and ran the various scripts required to unmount, readdress and remount the share everywhere that required that doing. Over lunch I turned off the server for what might be the last time. My back has been behaving itself for the most part, although I haven't really been getting out of my chair to do things for most of the day so I don't quite know how bad it is. As it has been raining (with thunder and lightning now and then) for most of the day I don't feel too bad about missing a run, but if I don't get to do something before the end of the week I'll start to feel a little peeved. Especially as I'm at Rachel's from Thursday evening to some time on Friday and we want to run before having brunch at her favourite close-by cafe. Then there's obviously parkrun on Saturday. Anyway, I'll be heading off soon to brave the elements with Cormac to go and celebrate his new job (offer) in town. Not sure I'll have any alcohol, but I might indulge in a Coke, or maybe even a St. Clements. I also have to screw my courage to the sticking place at some point before the end of the day and send an email offering (what I see as) very little money for a heap of furniture and things to the people selling me their house. I don't know why, but I'm very nervous about insulting them. I'm told second hand furniture and white goods lose their value quite substantially, but I really don't think what I've been told to offer is very much at all.

26/06/2017 [16:30] A hale and hearty hello to you on a Monday afternoon. I had a great weekend, thanks for asking. It started on Friday evening when I got home after a weights session at the boat house to find Rachel there. This offset the fact that she kept on working until gone 19:30 (she works too much because she cares a lot about what she does). The remainder of the day was lovely though. We went to Tesco then rather than at any time over the rest of the weekend when we assumed we wouldn't have much time free. This proved to be the case as we were late to get up on Saturday morning (missing parkrun) and had to only do ~8km of running before getting home, clean, having breakfast, and then getting out to the train station to meet Rachel's parents who were visiting for the weekend. Once they'd arrived we had a coffee next to the station and then walked to their B&B about a mile and a half away. As they couldn't check in we settled for leaving their bags there and went to town to have lunch at a Patisserie Valerie. Following that Rachel and I cycled to the new house while her parents took a taxi. We met at the local parkrun venue before walking the 500m or so to the house. There we met the sellers, who tried to sell me pretty much the entire contents of their house (I've settled on a few things), and I asked a few more questions about it (like where the stopcock for the mains water was, how the shower was heated, and things like that) before we went back to the park, had an ice cream, and a chat about the place. I then cycled both bikes home and put a wash on while Rachel walked her parents back via the river. They took a taxi back to their B&B for the rest of the afternoon before we got cleaned up and cycled to meet them and go out for dinner. Sunday morning we had a lazy start before meeting the parents one last time to walk out to a local orchard/outdoor cafe for lunch and a few drinks in the sun (and showers). The walks there and back were slowed somewhat by Rachel's father having some minor leg issues, but it was nice to take things at a slower pace for once. As we got back to the B&B afterwards I got texts from my family saying my mother had been in hospital with some issues, so I called to get up to date and stop myself from worrying quite so much. Everything's... 'OK' I suppose, but it's not great. It also might mean that Rachel and my parents might not meet for the first time after all in two weekends from now. We'll have to see. I just want everyone to be well, really. Especially for Kenya in a few months from now. Rachel's parents headed back on the train in the early evening, as we headed home ourselves to do a bit of housework, prepare meals, and try to have a bit of alone time before the end of the weekend. This morning I left Rachel working from home to go and get a contact lens checkup, pay in a tiny interest cheque on a closed account, and then get to work. I've actually had a pretty useful day thus far. I've made the NFS server ready for switchover tomorrow, upgraded Red Hat Satellite to 6.2.10 with apparently no issues (I still took a snapshot of it, first), cleared a lot of issues off our Hobbit monitoring system, and dealt with a failed power supply in one of our Dells (or at least got a new one coming, which should arrive before the end of the day... I hope). This evening I'll be going to the boat house to either do some erging, or some weights. I'm not sure which is more important at the moment; building leg/back muscle/power, or getting back on a erg. Either way I'll try not to be too long so I can get home and see Rachel. I also just realised that I didn't bring a towel with me, so I might have to go home post-exercise to shower, rather than at the boat house. We'll see if there's a spare clean one there that I can use. That might also dictate how sweaty I get (weights: not so much, erg: lots and lots).

23/06/2017 [16:20] Got home last night and got the house tidied a bit before Max and Rachel arrived. Max significantly earlier than Rachel who obviously had to get out of work and then make her way here by train. In preparation I did as much of the dinner set up as I could, as well as going to a newly opened Co-Op to see if I could win £100,000 by buying £5 of things. I bought the things (nice things to drink) but didn't win the prize. A shame as it could have almost halved my mortgage (which would have been nice). When Rachel arrived we made dinner and ate it out in the back garden, which was lovely. As it was reasonably late by the time we'd finished dessert the end of the day rolled around pretty quickly. I apparently went out like a light whilest Rachel was still drinking her mint tea in bed and reading. This morning everyone was a little groggy, but Max went on his way fairly early, with me leaving around 08:20. Rachel's working from home today and intended to stop at 18:00 (I hope). As a result I'm going to head to the boat house for a bit of a weights session before I go home. With luck I'll get home around about the time she finishes up. At work today I've been building more VMs, working with the head of the web team to get some of his scripts moved across to a VM I built for him to replace one of the very old Xen guests I've been wanting to decommission for years, and generally doing a bit of cleanup on a firewall ruleset to make things just a little more efficient. Over the weekend Rachel's parents are in town and after she and I have done parkrun (hopefully not at race pace), we'll get cleaned up and then head into town to meet them. After lunch in town (I imagine) we'll be walking to my potential new house for a viewing during which time I'll negotiate with the sellers as to what furniture and other things they want to sell me in a separate sale. Whilest they do have some nice stuff I'm interested in, I certainly won't want everything they're hoping to sell (they're moving to Tenerife, so probably don't want to ship a lot of things). This is probably the one place I have a bit of power. Hopefully all I'll be doing tomorrow is making a list of the things that I like the look of so I can then leave and do some calculations. I'd prefer not to spend masses. The parents will be staying until Sunday, I think, so we'll do something else fun with them then, too. Chances are they'll be leaving some time in the afternoon, so we'll get Sunday evening to ourselves. Amazingly, Rachel's decided to stay and work from (my) home on Monday, too, so that'll be wonderful for me (and her, apparently). Anyway, I think that's it for today, as this week. Next week there'll be optician appointments, Red Hat Satellite upgrades (with snapshots taken first), all manner of fun with linux, and a short week (I have next Friday off).

22/06/2017 [17:10] It's a good job Max and I didn't plan on running before work this morning as we both apparently woke up absolutely shattered. Probably something to do with my weights session and him cycling 122km yesterday morning in the blazing sun and then doing a strength and conditioning session in the evening. In any event he headed off to work very early and I got into work in time to make sure all the servers in a rack still responded to ping after being moved from their old switch to a new fabric extender. There were a few issue with the port lists not being as up to date as I'd thought, but everything worked in the end. Over lunch we did get our run in, which turned out to be a fairly gentle 11km or so with a light wind and significantly reduced temperatures over the previous days. Otherwise today I've been creating more VMs, planning the replacement of services offered by old servers which need retiring both for OS as well as hardware support reasons, and wishing for the end of the day so Rachel will come home.

21/06/2017 [16:45] I went for a short run last night just because I wanted to have another cold shower (it's hot here at the moment) and wanted a more valid reason than just because I'd cycled home. That went fairly well, despite the temperature. Then I had a nice shower, dinner, and relaxed for the evening. This morning I woke in plenty of time for a nice medium-distance run, and was doing really well until I realised I might be getting a blister on the side of my left little toe, and a recurrence of the callus on the same foot. Suffice it to say it's not all that enjoyable to walk on that foot, despite the rest of me feeling pretty good. I've spent most of the say sitting down, so my foot's had plenty of time to rest, but I don't know how much fun it's going to be to run tomorrow morning. Other things of note today were Cormac having a job interview this morning and getting offered the job this afternoon, which is great. I'm really pleased for him. Now I'm off to the boat house for a weights/strength and conditioning session, with Max arriving using one of my spare 'station bikes' from my house. He's staying tonight and tomorrow night (when Rachel will be here too), as part of his and Stacey's ongoing itinerant lifestyle.

20/06/2017 [16:50] Hot again last night. Luckily I was at the boat house doing a rather fun weights session and there were fan, and tap water. As a result I was fairly OK. The house was quite warm, too. As a result I had a fairly protein-rich evening meal, with even more to drink. Sleeping wasn't pleasant, but I managed it. As I knew I had to be up early this morning I kept waking in the small hours due to a combination of my brain preparing for that, the heat, and the light leaking in around my curtains. In the end I got up a little earlier than I would have done, did a slightly shorter set of morning exercises (favouring my slightly pulled lower back from last night's weights), and cycled to the first data center as gently as possible so as not to arrive as a sweaty mess. The work went as planned, although it took somewhat long than it was supposed to. Once everything was done there I headed to the second data center and repeated almost everything again. This time I had a computer to pass the time with, so I was able to get some money paid to my conveyancer, catch up on personal email, and see what people were up to online. Everything went fairly well there too, so I was able to actually get to my desk around about midday. This then meant I could head out for my lunch time run as planned. It was blazingly hot, so I ended up not running as fast or as far as I wanted to. This was probably a good idea as it kept me from overheating too much. Since coming back from a very powerful cold shower I've been fighting with database replication, and generally keeping up with all the other things I didn't manage to do this morning. I'm about to go home, and might consider doing a fairly short run along the river to justify having another cold shower afterwards. That and I want a huge snack, so earning it would be a plan.

19/06/2017 [17:00] It appears that we're suffering something of a heat-wave at the moment, so obviously I am melting, somewhat. Max was here on Friday night and into Saturday. He got up early and went swimming, then did parkrun with me (beating me by a good 30 seconds), then went for a 3 hour cycle. I felt like something of a poor relation in comparison. I still do, if I'm honest. This was compounded by the run with the local triathlon club on the Sunday morning when I was grateful to drop into a slower group (ostensibly to run a shorter route home with someone who had an injury). Rachel, who'd arrived on Saturday afternoon after Max had left needed to run some more after we finished that, so did a moderately fast mile around a local green space, with me panting to keep up behind her. I'd like to blame this degradation of speed/fitness on my reduction of carbohydrates intake, but really don't think I can. I'm getting slower, I really am. And I don't know how to reverse this trend. I know they're both younger than me, but I honestly thought I'd have a bit longer before my performance tailed off like this. Maybe I'm just in a bit of a slump, physically, in which case I hope I come out of the other side soon. Max and I did a short erg on Friday evening after work. It wasn't too bad, but I'm pretty sure the power loss I noticed on the bike ride was evident on the erg, too. This could mean the rowing racing this year might not be quite as fun as it was last year... As a result of the above I'm off to the boat house this evening to do some leg work in the hopes I can build some power back into them in the next month or so. There'll be no run tomorrow morning as I'm in work early to cold reboot a server that's had its out-of-band management card stop working, as well as firmware patch two servers (one at each of our two remote data centers). This means the run will be at lunch time, when I imagine it will be blazingly hot. Anyway, other than all that guff I've paid for my home buyers report on the house I'm hoping to complete on, done some ordering of a few things online, and had confirmation of some of the marathon trip logistics Rachel and I were working on over the weekend. I'm going to leave now and see just how hot it is outside. If it's not too bad I might go for a run tonight instead of going to the boat house.

16/06/2017 [16:00] Rachel had to leave early this morning for a breakfast event in London. Sadly she wasn't able to the the train she wanted from London last night so we had maybe 45 minutes less evening to enjoy together. However, to maximise time together last night and this morning I ran slowly to the station so we could bring both of my 'station bikes' back last night. This meant that they were both home and she could cycle her usual one there this morning (rather than having to run, and therefore have to leave earlier). I've been working on small things again today, as well as helping to diagnose some VMWare host/SAN issues we had this morning. In a fit of madness, given I'm hosting Max again tonight we've decided to go to the boat house this evening and reacquaint ourselves with what an erg is, and I might also be convinced to attempt some squats and other weights-based exercises. Not too much, too many, or too heavy though. There's parkrun to be done tomorrow morning. After that Rachel will arrive when she's done with everything she needs to do at her place and we'll have the remainder of Saturday and all of Sunday together. That is when we'll do the logistics I think I mentioned previously, rather than last night, when we really didn't have the time (or the inclination). We might also go and do the local triathlon long run on the Sunday, as it could be quite nice to do something active with other people. Otherwise there'll be Tesco shopping for the continuance of my low(er) carbohydrate diet, and possibly a bit of belonging sorting as the first bit of preparation for packing for my move (months away, yet).

15/06/2017 [17:25] Rachel's coming tonight! Hurrah! I've missed her this week quite a lot, so it's great that she's coming to see me this evening. I'm going to head to the station fairly shortly on foot so that I can cycle back the extra bike that's there for various reasons. That means she won't have to run to the station and get hot and sweaty tomorrow morning. Speaking of hot and sweaty, I did a 10K run this morning and got quite warm. Still, I had a protein shake and a lovely fruit smoothie when I got back and that seemed to fill me up until lunch time. Most of the day has been spent doing small tasks of various kinds, so I'm glad to be heading home right about now. There was a chance of running again today with Max at lunch time, but he got busy. This was probably a good thing for my achilles. Lots of logistics happening tonight, hopefully. There's a small amount of stuff we need to get sorted/a handle on. Hopefully that'll happen whilest we're waiting for dinner to cook, and then we can have the remainder of the evening as relaxing time.

13/06/2017 [16:50] Big news of the day is that I've signed, PDF'd, and emailed off my mortgage application and direct debit mandate. One step closer to completion, which probably won't be until early September at this rate, owing to the seller having to give their tenant notice. Frustrating, but that's the way things go. Hopefully it'll mean my investments will have a few more weeks to increase in size (rather than crashing due to political machinations with regard to who's in power, and the whole EU thing). Otherwise, I ran this morning despite some minor discomfort in my left achilles, had a rather tasty smoothie for breakfast, continued to enjoy my large, varied, and low-carb lunch, and worried whether or not I'd closed and locked the back door. I should go home now and see if I've been burgled or not.

13/06/2017 [17:35] Not a huge amount to report today. House stuff continues at a glacial pace with a few confirmations for mortgage stuff and visiting the house again to look at things I might buy in a separate sale. Ran a nice gentle 10K with Max at lunchtime. Fixed a few things, upgraded a few bits of firmware in preparation for next Tuesday morning. Nothing too exciting. Then again, getting to the point where I think/hope I have a bootable USB stick with the right firmware on to do VMWare ESXi servers with no optical drive was a bit of a journey in and of itself. Hopefully in the future I'll just use the shorter, more simple method to get to a point where I have something that works.

12/06/2017 [17:30] I had a simply smashing weeekend, thanks for asking. Max and Stacey turned up on Friday evening, which was fine. We had a rather nice dinner out in the garden as the weather was so nice. On Saturday morning I went and did my local parkrun whilest they went and did their own things on bikes. Then in the afternoon we went to a friend's wedding about 45 minutes away, stopping off for ice lollies on the way as it was so hot. The venue for the evening reception thing was rather nice, but reminded me somewhat of my own wedding venue back in November 2010. Sevenish years ago, and in some ways it doesn't feel all that long ago at all. Still, a huge amount of life has happened since then. And, hopefully, a huge amount of (good) life stuff is still to come. In any event, I went for a long walk and a sit somewhere beautiful to reflect on what went on back then, and in the fifteen or so months after that. But anyway, you don't want to read about that, you want to read that Max and Stacey aren't huge on partying into the small hours either, so we headed home at around 22:00 and were all the happier for it. On Sunday morning Max convinced me to come out on the weekly mass ride. We ended up in what I would have considered one of the faster groups. They all on carbon bikes with drop handlebars and cleats. me on my mostly aluminium bike with toe straps and trainers. I managed to keep up with them for a good two hours or so, but as a long distance runner I just didn't have the leg power to take me up any reasonable hills. On the flat I could keep going all day, but they dropped me on every hill after two hours were up. Max took pity on me and lead me home over the next hour or so as we left the group (looping back every ten minutes or so to make sure I hadn't collapsed, which was a little galling). It was a 101.5km day, which isn't bad for someone like me, I think. Honestly, I didn't feel all that tired when I got home, and certainly don't today. Either I'm beginning to get fat-adapted, or I had more left in me than I thought. In any event, it turned out Rachel had arrived back from here girly weekend five minutes before we got home, so that was brilliant. She went for a run as she hadn't exercised all weekend, Max, Stacey (who'd been for her own cycle) and I had some lunch, and then Rachel and I went off to a hotel for the night (a birthday present for Rachel from this time last year we only just got around to using). We had a simply smashing time at the hotel, relaxed, caught up on each other's weeks and weekends, had a wonderful dinner, went back to our room and had a relaxing evening, and then slept the whole night through. This morning Rachel just had time to take advantage of the breakfast in the hotel before she had to cycle to the train station and head to work. I could have another cup of coffee, read the paper, and then head to work in my own time (the hotel was here). Happily, for a Monday things have been fairly quiet at work. I've built a server, solved a lot of MySQL installation and configuration Ansible bugs, and even ascertained that the Red Hat Satellite stuff I did last week is not only still working, but seems to make the publishing of Content Views go a bit faster, too. Which is nice.

09/06/2017 [16:40] I'm not going to talk about the General Election. There's nothing I want to say, really. What I can talk about is going to see another house at lunch time and deciding that the one I've put an offer in on is probably still the best of the bunch I've seen, which is nice. I'm thinking about whether or not to get a home buyer's survey at the moment. Workwise it has been a remarkably quiet day, with just a bit of Ansible work, some fiddling with this and that, and keeping MySQL replication going here and there. Frankly, even though I'm on the cool side of the building it's still remarkably hot and stuffy in here, so I think I'm going to go home and get the house ready for Max and Stacey who're here this weekend. We're all going to a wedding on the weekend. Rachel will be elsewhere but arriving on Sunday in time for us to go to a hotel for the night (a birthday present she was given last year we've only just got around to using). See you Monday, after a large hotel breakfast.

08/06/2017 [18:45] I should have gone home ages ago, and I'm not sure why I haven't. Anyway, the big news of today is that I had an offer accepted on a house I'm interested in. This is big news. I'm 50% happy, 50% trepidatious, or whatever the word and/or spelling is. I've still got a viewing tomorrow lunchtime, but it's likely I won't get that house, even if I put an offer in. I'd be happy in this one. Probably very happy. It's a smidgen further away from work (about ten minutes more by bike), but otherwise it's all good. More news as I have it. Rachel arrived in good time last night and we had a lovely, healthy dinner before relaxing for the evening. She had to leave early in the morning, but that meant I got up and did my morning exercises rather than lay around and wish she was still there. Work today involved getting Satellite's databases (both MongoDB and Postgres) cleaned and tidied up internally. I claimed back about 28GB of disk space, I think. Things are also running a lot more smoothly too, maybe. I did a 10K run at lunchtime and got rained on a bit. That may be why my corner of the office smells a little damp this evening. I think I'll take the day off running tomorrow (especially as I have the house viewing at lunch time), and think on where I am with regard to houses. I've asked for a quote from a building surveyor, as that's the next step, and the first one that's going to cost me actual money.

07/06/2017 [17:15] Today has been and OK day. Nothing much going on on the house front other than confirmation of my viewing on Friday lunchtime. Other than that I got up this morning at 06:30 despite waking an hour earlier and deciding not to run before work. Max got up to prepare for his cycle ride and I couldn't legitimately stay in my bed when he was up and doing my washing up. I only did a very slow 10K (probably one of my slowest ever), but it felt good and I kept my heart rate fairly low. At work I've been doing lots of helping people with stuff with regard to their server and workstation setups, dealing with a mass of email about things I have to do in the future, and enjoying the remarkably varied and relatively huge lunches I'm eating now that I'm trying to seriously drop my carbohydrate intake. Rachel announced that she was going to come and see me this evening. Unfortunately it's going to be pretty late in the day, and she's going to have to leave the usual early time in the morning, but it'll be lovely to have her around, even if for most of the time we're together we'll be asleep. All we have to do now is figure out what to have for dinner!

06/06/2017 [16:20] Max was over last night, so we went for a very slow run to help with his rehab of his achilles tendon issues. Honestly, it was nice to go out and do something so short and so gentle. We're probably going to do something similar again this evening as he's here for two nights. Had a great dinner last night with very few carbohydrates, and am looking forward to similar again tonight, although perhaps without having a toasted bagel for supper. Maybe I'll have it as soon as I get home tonight instead, rather than just before bed (they need eating before they go off/stale). I was up early and into work before 08:00 this morning so that I could get a live tier one service patched and rebooted before 09:00. In the end I wasn't allowed to start work until about 08:30, but still had everything patched, firmware updated, and rebooted before the deadline because of the preparation work I'd done the day before, thankfully. I then had some more patching and updating to do at around 09:45, but this time I didn't get permission to start until around 15:30. Luckily I had all my ducks in a row again, so that got done within about two minutes. In house news I'm feeling nervous about the house I've got an offer in on. Not that they'll refuse, but that they'll accept. So much so that I've arranged two more viewings. One for this week and one for next (when Rachel can come and see a place I've seen once before). Now I'm hopefully the people selling the house I've offered on take their time considering my offer. They've asked me to pay a bit more and take all their white goods and furniture off their hands too. I'm not sure about that, given it'll all be second hand. We'll have to see. Right, I'm off home as I was in early. See you tomorrow.

05/06/2017 [17:20] Back again, and with a lot to tell you as quickly as possible so I can get home and let Max in (and we can go for a short, slow, run). On Thursday evening I met Rachel at the train station after her train was late. Luckily not too late, so we were able to get food and the train with a minute or so to spare once she'd arrived. The trains to my parents went smoothly, as did the drive to the house late at night. On Friday morning we drove to my brother's house, met my nephew, then drove on to North Yorkshire to spend the late morning and lunchtime with my 102 year old grandmother. That went quite well. We then drove back to my brother's, had dinner as an extended family, then drove back to my parents again. Lots of travel. On Saturday morning Rachel and I did parkrun with my father, then went camera and running shoe shopping with him and my mother. Back at the house we did some more research, then sent him and my mother out to get the one he wanted. Sunday morning was mostly about getting to the train station and getting trains home again. Sunday afternoon was taken up with going to Tesco before it closed, doing a cycle on the busway so we'd done something active with the day, and then collapsing on the sofa with a takeaway curry which we richly deserved. The shopping at Tesco was my first foray into low carbohydrate diet eating for fat-adaption. That meant today's breakfast and lunch were different to what I've been eating for the last few decades. Thus far everything seems to be going OK, but it has been less than a day at this point. More updates as time goes on. Workwise I came back to find a solution to my Satellite issue of stuck repository sync jobs. Or I did until I tried another synchronization and it stuck in the same place. I ended up being able to cancel a repo sync I didn't need any more... which turned out to be the whole issue all along (verified by Red Hat as a SHA1 vs SHA256 repodata issue). We'll see how things go overnight, and then I'll consider it fixed (although other things aren't) tomorrow. Max staying tonight, and I've got patching to do early and during the day tomorrow. I don't think I'll run before work, but do it at lunchtime instead. Unless I wake really early, and it looks like it'll rain during the day. Max is staying tomorrow night too.

01/06/2017 [16:30] I've tried multiple things to get the running-but-not-finishing repository synchronization tasks in my Red Hat Satellite installation to go away in some supportable and sane manner that won't leave problems in its wake. Thus far nothing seems to have worked. There are some other options I could try, but I certainly don't know enough about what would be happening behind the scenes that could mess things up. I've opened a support call with Red Hat (my first!) in the hopes that they'll be able to offer me a supported way of dealing with them. Disappointingly (sort of) I'm not in work tomorrow, so anything they come up with I won't be able to action until Monday. In other news, I retired a VM today, which is always good news. I also went and saw my current favourite house with Shaun (third visit). He couldn't see all that much wrong with it other than a few cracks here and there that a surveyor would be able to put any worries about to bed. Plenty of potential, as and when I'd saved up enough money to realise any of them. Anyway, long story short I've put an offer in on it. Chances are I've either offered way too high for a first offer, or it's going to go up past the level I'll be happy with. At this point I'm not sure if I'd mind if I didn't get it or not. I think I would. Anyway, I'm off home now, and thence to the train station to await Rachel coming in from London. After that we get more trains to my parents, arriving very late tonight. In the morning they'll be driving us to my brother's house, where they'll babysit my nephew whilest the three of us then drive to see my 102 year old grandmother for a few hours. She's... getting on a bit now, so it's probably useful she meets Rachel sooner rather than later. Once we've done that we'll drive back to my brother's, have dinner with my parents, and then drive home with them. Saturday morning we'll hopefully do the local parkrun with my dad (or at least, at the same time as him), then do something with both of my parents for the rest of the day. We'll get trains home again on Sunday and have the remainder of the weekend at my house before Monday morning. At which point, hopefully, I'll have something sensible in the way of a fix for my Satellite installation, I can get the repositories synchronised properly, and push out that week's Content Views. We'll see.