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June's Journal
August's Journal
31/07/2018
[17:15] After feeling like I failed on Sunday's long run I got up at 05:00 this
morning and made myself do the full 21.1K of a half marathon before breakfast.
While I managed it without feeling like I'd come close to death, and I made sure
I wasn't running "too fast" it really didn't feel all that easy, despite
relatively cool temperatures. It also rained for much of it, although nowhere
near as heavily as just after I got home. I think I'll be OK for the half
marathon distance on the Vanguard Way this weekend, but doing the full marathon
distance in what might be quite high temperatures definitely isn't on the cards.
Not considering some of the contours involved. Anyway, after having done the
run I got myself sorted and headed into work, picking up a dropped wallet on the
way. A quick post to the local Facebook group and I've got the owner coming by
this evening to collect it from me. So that's nice. Over the course of the day
I've done a fair bit of useful mini-tasks, driven over to one of the server
rooms with Cormac to change a hard drive, move a server within a rack to make
room for some networking equipment, and reclaimed some hardware which was
heading to the great WEEE Disposal center in the sky. I'm now going to pootle
home on the bike and spend some of the evening fitting the lock and mudguards
for Rachel's bike which arrived today.
30/07/2018
[16:50] A lovely weekend, with a somewhat disappointing patch towards the end of
it. Saturday was pretty excellent as we decided not to get up and do parkrun,
opting instead for a leisurely breakfast of pancakes, blueberries and maple
syrup and some gentle pottering around. After that I convinced Rachel to let me
buy her a new bike (rather than a second hand one, or continuing to use one of
my frankenbikes). We toured two bike shops and a second hand bike shop and
eventually settled on a fairly cheap hybrid that I think will stand her in good
stead for more than enough years. We cycled it home rather than going into town
to do other things as we didn't have a lock that she was comfortable using with
her new pride and joy. After going to Tesco and having a very late lunch we
then took the new bike for a marathon (literally, 42.2K) spin and got utterly
soaked by the weather breaking while we were miles from home. We powered
through it and made it home safely to have our first hot showers in weeks
(given the temperatures recently). Rachel then made an absolutely delicious
dinner before we retired for the day. On Sunday we got up moderately sensibly
and pottered around a bit waiting for the weather to clear up a bit before
heading out for a run. We'd planned on 18-22km at a moderate pace, but I
really wasn't up to it and we slowed down substantially after about
10K, with me dropping to a walk at 18K. We walked a few hundred meters or so
and then Rachel headed off to run the rest of the way home (about three K). I
couldn't stand not keeping up with her and managed to keep her in sight until we
arrived back at the house. This feeling of an increasing lack of running
fitness is starting to worry me somewhat. It can't just be a sudden feeling of
my age, or me taking a bit of time off to row, or going to the gym... can it?
In any event I'm going to try and run a gentle 21.1K or so early tomorrow
morning before work in the hopes that that'll give me some confidence to enter
the Vanguard Way Marathon on Sunday down in Croydon. Otherwise it'll be me
doing a unofficial half marathon and then waiting a few hours for Rachel to
finish the full. The weather looks like it may be heating up again, which
doesn't bode well for me doing the full distance and/or enjoying it... It would
be an understatement to say I'm deeply disappointed with how my running is going
right now, and how much I'm lagging behind Rachel. I don't even want to be
better than her, just able to comfortably keep up, and match her when it comes
to parkruns and races, like the upcoming 10K we have at the end of September.
After tomorrow's run I hope to actually start doing some sprint sessions again,
although it looks like the heat will be returning again, which isn't going to
help. Maybe I'll just do them anyway. I'll go to the track, start small, and
bring a bottle of water. That might do it.
27/07/2018
[16:45] Happily, Rachel arrived in one piece (albeit a bit melty around the
edges) last night, and we had a lovely quiet evening together. Then around
02:30 the heavens opened and there was thunder and lightning and all that stuff.
I might have slept through it, only we had the window open in an effort to bring
the temperature down a bit, so I was awake for about an hour until things
subsided somewhat and the rain died down. As I was leaving for work I noticed
that one of the gutters (which hasn't had to do anything for over six weeks) was
leaking at a join. This is probably down to it being removed and replaced when
the soffit ventilation holes were added by the EWI people. I've left a message
about it, but might call again next week to ask whether the message was
received. Over lunchtime I ran in about 30degC sun and heat without too much
issue (a simple 6K) and then spent plenty of time in the shade and then in a
cold shower. I have forgotten to drink anything more this afternoon, but I'll
fix that before I cycle home, and then once I get home, where Rachel will spend
a further hour working before we relax for the evening.
This is our first weekend in a while where we haven't had to do anything or be
anywhere specific, so we're going to spend it hopefully getting Rachel a new
bike for this end of her train rides, going to Tesco, probably running a bit
(although not too much as it is far too hot for me), probably doing parkrun (at
which Rachel will beat me by a significant margin, as per usual) and maybe just
sitting around and relaxing in each other's company. Then it'll be Monday.
26/07/2018
[17:10] I paid off the final tranche of money for my EWI today, after having the
foreman for the job around last night to make up a final snagging list.
Hopefully all those bits and bobs will get done in the next week or so. None of
them are show-stoppers, but it's nice that they should/will be done. It's still
close on too hot here at the moment, but did rain for about ten minutes this
afternoon. This just seems to have raised the humidity rather than doing any
good otherwise. Still, we'll see what the first rain on my house post-EWI has
done to it. I'm expecting a bit of white to have washed off, but we'll see.
Plenty of tiny bits of work today. Just enough to keep me busy, but slightly
too uninteresting to tell you about. I did go to the gym at lunch time where
the air-conditioning wasn't working, and the music continues to only be either
the left or right channels of stereo, rather than both. It makes for some very
slightly off-sounding music.
I'm heading home now to get the house and dinner ready for Rachel, who'll be
with me until Monday morning (yay!). Of course, I'll be coming to work
tomorrow, but she'll get to work from home somewhere a little cooler than her
office in London. Hopefully it'll be a bit more pleasant for her.
25/07/2018
[17:15] The heat continues here. I managed a run at lunch time, but I'm not
breaking any records at the moment, and certainly not getting any sprinting
done. Inside of work I've done a few useful things, but not really anything of
note. I've had two meetings about patching, and the Satellite server, and laid
the groundwork for future changes to how we do things here. And finally I
created a VM or two and passed on some runes as to how to get them patched and
ready to do useful things.
Honestly, I think that's about it. I'm now going to cycle home gently so as not
to be a sweaty mess when I get there. Then I will make a start on considering
what changes to make to my diet to lower the amount of carbohydrate I'm
consuming. I think it's time, considering how little exercise I'm doing
compared to marathon training season. Or when I was rowing.
24/07/2018
[17:20] It's just stupidly hot now. Far too hot to do anything sensible. I
went to the gym at lunch time rather than run in the heat again like yesterday.
I will give it a go tomorrow, though. Probably nothing more than a steady
session, though. I really would like to get some regular sprintervals in, but
it just doesn't seem like a good idea.
With my colleagues back the firewall issues that plagued me yesterday have been
handed off to someone else. They had some troubles initially, but things seem
to have settled down for the most part, which is relieving. I've spent the day
working on all the things I wanted to get done yesterday, but couldn't because I
was fire(wall) fighting.
Last night I got a bit more fence painting done, and I might even do a bit
tonight, too. Then I'll wait a few days and go back to the first colour and do
the second coat where I think it might be required (in each of the colours).
I think that's everything, for today.
23/07/2018
[18:10] It has been something of A Day. I came in this morning after knowing
there'd been some network issues over the weekend to find that one of the
firewall pair was in a weird state and we were pretty much (more on that later)
failed over to the other one. On the advice of a colleague (not at work, by
phone) I opened a support call given that the normal firewall person also
wasn't in today and had been uncontactable when the initial issue happened on
Saturday (and apparently fixed itself after a few hours). The engineer I spoke
to had me do a few things and, after I'd jumped through a few hoops to get him
access via a desktop sharing application he diagnosed that there seemed to be
some issue with one of the pair of interfaces used to create a bonded link over
which the sync/HA/heartbeat traffic went. After going over to physically check
the link (which turned out to be active, as far as I could see) I reseated the
cable and was rewarded with what can only assume is the down previously-primary
firewall trying to take back dominance and having a knock-down, drag-out fight
with the secondary/failover firewall. This caused further network disruption
until they settled down into how they'd been when I got in this morning. During
the process I did manage to briefly log back into the firewalls and noticed that
the CPUs were pegged at 100% usage, which wasn't good. During that time I
couldn't get enough access/time to manually fix anything, so that was
frustrating. Also all inter-VLAN traffic was down, so everything we had on the
network stopped working, too. Eventually everything started working (at first
thing this morning status, so still failed over and the bonded interface not
working, but services on the network accessible) so we had another go and in the
process downed an interface on a switch which both locked me out of bringing the
interface back up again, but also cut off a whole load of servers again, which
was both mortifying and deeply problematic. I had to run about half a mile with
one of the network techs and a laptop to get the port back up again by
connecting directly to the switch in the server room. Off the back of that
experience I told the support technician we wouldn't be doing any more work
today. Tomorrow my colleague who knows more about everything will be back and
he can take over once I've briefed him on everything that's taken place,
including all of my mistakes.
In the middle of all of that, when things seemed to be OK, I went for a run on
what turns out to probably have been the hottest day of the year. I had planned
to do some sprintervals, but that would have been stupid, so I just did a 6K run
instead.
Over the weekend I did parkrun, and it was too hot again. Then rushed around to
get to London in time to meet Rachel and her parents and go to the Olympic
stadium to watch some athletics for the afternoon. That was lovely, if a little
hot. We then took the train back to Croydon for the night and had a hot night's
sleep (mostly). Neither of us wanted to run in the morning so we actually had a
lie-in, for the first time in what felt like months. After we were up and about
we relaxed for the morning and then got a train to London so she could head off
to Ramsgate and my back home. I spent the afternoon doing the Tesco thing and
then painting bits of fence (more to do this evening), and then Rachel arrived
late into the evening after being driven back by a colleague. I arranged to get
dinner takeaway just before she arrived and we were able to sit down together
for an evening meal before a bit of television and bed.
Rachel ran to the station this morning (quite a way with a heavy bag) and I
cycled in to discover... well, all of the above. I'm going home now to do a bit
fence painting and then collapse in a heap. Tomorrow I expect to be subjected
to sarcasm by my colleague, but at least there's a greater chance of things
getting fixed, rather than messed up more by me.
20/07/2018
[16:30] Achieved a passable result last night in the rowing. Not what we were
hoping for, but the crew we were chasing did better than us before we could do
better than them. Them's the breaks. Still, it means tonight's row
could be nice and short, which would be helpful as I'm gripping far too
tightly with my left hand and after about 500m I'm having trouble feathering the
blade well. Things weren't helped last night by us having to take a different
boat owing to another one of our club's crews doing so well they got to race
twice. That meant we were in an unfamiliar boat, and the person two ahead of me
splashed a lot of water over my hands and the blade handle, which made it
slippery too, meaning I gripped it even more tightly. Anyway, we're hoping to
get the right boat back again this evening, but who knows.
When I got home last night it was to a pretty-much-completed house in terms of
EWI and associated external modifications. The electrician seems to have wired
up the new external switches backwards (so they're in the opposite orientation
to the other switch next to them for their lights to be off), but otherwise
everything looks done. I need to spend some time looking in the shed to see if
the right colours of fence paint were left by the previous owner, otherwise I'm
going to have a bit of an issue getting the large tubs those types of paint
normally come in back from the DIY stores.
This weekend I'll be doing parkrun, then dashing home, getting cleaned up, and
then cycling to the station to get to London in time to meet Rachel and her
parents to go and watch some athletics at the Olympic stadium. After that we'll
head back to Croydon for the night (just Rachel and I). On the Sunday morning
we'll go for a run (hopefully it won't be too hot) and then Rachel goes to
Ramsgate and I go home (depending on trains, as usual). If I have the paint in
the shed I'll do some painting and then welcome Rachel to my freshly EWI'ed
house late on Sunday evening after she gets a lift back from Ramsgate.
Surprisingly quiet at work today. My most major pieces of work were taking a
snapshot of my Red Hat Satellite VM and then applying a puppet server update to
it (with the usual morass of warnings and errors which seem to be
non-fatal), and then working out some firewall and NAT rules to enable an
external service to talk to one of our internal ones. Otherwise, pretty quiet
in the office, and in work in general.
19/07/2018
[16:45] We just about managed to come out on top in the racing last night. It
was hard work and I messed up my stroke again during the hardest part
of the row. I really need to work on that so as not to cause the boat problems.
I think it's down to lack of practice rowing, and therefore over-gripping the
blade's handle and then getting cramp. That or just being too unfit. Either
way, we managed to do what we needed to. At work this morning I got
notification that my replacement outdoor light switch had arrived so contacted
the foreman for my EWI work to find out if it could be fitted tomorrow. It
turned out not, as the electrician would only be on site today. Cue me cycling
home again to leave it and a snagging list (what small things that had been
noted as still needing to be (re)done) for the foreman and the electrician
respectively. As I was leaving, the people reinstating the fencing, gate, etc.
arrived, so I had a good chat with them about the snagging, as well as getting
them a coffee and tea before I left. It does wonders for the quality of your
job's work if you treat the professionals with courtesy and whatever limited
generosity you're able to give. Apparently, if all goes well they might even be
finished with 'everything' by the time I get home this evening. I did mean to
ask them to change the location of the retractable washing line, which they've
mounted in a slightly odd location, but I might just leave it as is as I doubt
I'll use it much. I haven't yet.
I'm off home now to have a snack before the penultimate night's racing, then off
to the boat house, rowing, showering, coming home, having a late dinner while
watching an episode of something on Netflix, and then bed. I might take my
cheap GoPro knock-off with me tonight and mount it somewhere on the boat, but
we'll see. There's not much else to tell you at the moment, other than it
hasn't rained here in quite some time (which is sort of nice), and we're due
some soon. Hopefully not before next week, though as I've rowing tonight and
tomorrow, and then stuff on in London over the weekend.
18/07/2018
[17:00] Aside from a poor practice start from me last night (my first in this
particular boat, and my first in an 8+ since this time last year) we had a
pretty good (read: short) row last night, which was useful for me considering
how out of practice I am. There's a hope that tonight's row will be similarly
abrupt, but we'll have to see how things go. When I got home last night I found
a few issues with the EWI finishing touches to the house which I've started
writing down on a "snagging list" that I can reel off when I'm asked if there's
anything that still needs doing. I was calling/emailing someone whenever I
found them, but I think it'll be far less annoying for those people I contact if
I wait until the end (when many of them may be resolved anyway). One thing I
noticed was that the external lights had been wired back up to the switches
incorrectly, and one of those switches was now broken. I've ordered a
replacement switch, which should arrive tomorrow (so be ready to install on
Friday), but I may be the one who has to install it. I'm not sure how the
wiring should go, so I may have to ask.
Work-wise today has been another quiet day, thankfully. A few useful things
done, again, a period of busy in the mid-afternoon, and then a server and its
KVM guest decommissioned (firmware patched and prepared for a new life). I'm
off home for my pre-rowing snack, and then after rowing dinner and bed. More on
this evening's events tomorrow.
17/07/2018
[16:45] Nothing much going on today. Did the usual things to keep the place
going. Hopefully when I get home this evening for a brief turn around and a
snack pre-rowing I'll have found some more work done to my house, notably that
all the electrics have been reinstated. We'll see. Otherwise I haven't really
got much to tell you about today. I hope you had a good one.
16/07/2018
[17:30] It was an interesting weekend, to say the least. Saturday morning
started with a hot parkrun which I aimed to do in a certain time, and came
within about five seconds of my target, which was good. Then as I was doing
some housework I was interrupted by a neighbour who pointed out that the EWI
installation had in fact covered over all of the soffit ventilation to my roof,
so I had to send a quick email asking for the installation company to come and
make some new holes so things were OK. After that I got a train to London and
met Rachel at the hotel we were staying at. After going for a nice but
surprisingly small meal at Bodean's we tried to get an early night so as to be
able to get up and run 20K at 05:05 the following morning. Owing to one thing
and another we ended up doing different legs of the London Relay than expected,
but still managed to get the running done. We weren't alone, and my achilles
tendons (and then my right groin) gave me a lot of woe from about 3K in, but in
the end I decided to tough it out and get the run done. The pace went down
markedly in the second 10K owing to one of the people we were running with, but
that was fine by me. After the run we headed back to the hotel, showered, and
then had a large breakfast. Wandering out after that we ended up going to
Stratford to explore how to get someone with impaired mobility from St. Pancras
to the Olympic stadium and all the way to their seat. That solved/sorted I got
on a train home (which didn't leave for ages due to a missing driver, and then
stopped at every blade of grass on the way home). I swapped the bike I'd been
using as my daily and station bike for my other spare which Rachel had been
using and then cycled home. The end of the day was mostly about dealing with
passwords and LastPass before having a quick Chinese takeaway for dinner with a
terrible film.
Today I waited at home until the foreman of the installation company arrived and
we discussed the things I needed doing (as well as the ventilation issue) and
then headed to work on my new bike (finally!). If I'm honest a lot of the day
was spent tightening up my web site users' security, and not getting to the gym
at lunch time. I'm about to go home and see if the plumbers have done anything
to the house today, and see if I have any passport photos so that Rachel and I
can buy a joint railcard this weekend coming. Also, leave out all the light
fittings for the electrician tomorrow, and go to Tesco for the week's shopping.
Lots still to do today!
13/07/2018
[16:10] I got home last night to find that the scaffolding had been removed from
the house. This was more upsetting than anything else as I'd asked them to tell
me in advance so I could get up on it and clean the upstairs windows without
having to pay someone to come along with a ladder. They've promised to clean
them for me, but I don't think that's going to happen. The house does look
pretty good, even without the fencing having been redone or all of the plumbing
and electrical bits having been put back. Hopefully all that'll happen next
week. I feel pretty pleased with it, and especially that it all got done with
pretty much zero rain getting in the way or in any places that would have been
unhelpful. I would like some around the end of next week to wash away some of
the dust and detritus that's around, as well as proving that everything is
waterproof.
At work today we had a PSU failure in something I don't normally administer, but
have managed to get a new one ordered for. That should arrive on Monday. I ran
in this morning to collect my station bike as I rode my new one home last night,
so there's that, too. Otherwise the day has been pretty much a case of keeping
things running with a few judicious spins added to plates here and there, and
otherwise keeping out of trouble (by which I mean starting anything important).
This weekend I'll be doing parkrun, then very briefly attending a barbeque
before heading to London to meet Rachel. We'll be spending almost a full night
in a hotel before getting up very early in the morning to run two legs of the
London Relay. After that we'll get back to the hotel in time to shower and
still make breakfast, which I imagine we'll demolish. After that we might use
the hotel facilities a bit and then go our separate ways as she has social
things to do and I need to be at home for Monday morning in case I need to talk
to either the plumbers/electrician/carpenters about house stuff. So, we might
not even be together for 24 hours, which is a bit of a shame. Still, while
we're together we should have a lot of fun. I might not make it back to my
Tesco before it closes on Sunday afternoon, but that probably won't matter, and
I've become used to going on a Monday evening instead.
I think that's probably about it. I'm going to head off, and see if I can't get
a bit of vitamin D before the end of the day.
12/07/2018
[16:40] After plenty of false starts, delays, and other issues, I final have a
complete bike ready to cycle home this evening. In the end I had to resort to
the workshop here to hacksaw and drill a few bits and pieces, but everything
fits and, I think, should keep me safe and dry in the wet, too. Well, dry from
road water anyway. I'm just scared to leave it anywhere that isn't home or work
now, so I will definitely not be leaving it at the cycle park at the train
station for a while. Not until I feel a whole lot less precious about it. I
might not even park it at the boat house for the evening races next week,
either. Although it should be pretty busy there, so far less likely to be
stolen than usual.
Workwise I got some stuff sorted with Red Hat about a bug I've been seeing with
the new version of Satellite, solved a few people's issues with various things,
and even signed up to a Red Hat Forum in August in London. This morning's early
rise and cycle to work meant I could get four servers upgraded to a slightly
less neolithic version of PHP, so that was good, too. Tomorrow's the first test
of an automated patching script (being run manually tomorrow) which we hope to
push out to many servers in the future.
11/07/2018
[17:05] They've put what I think is the last coat of render on my house. It
looks... pretty good, if very white. When I got up this morning someone came
round and started doing the mastic around the edges of the windows and doors.
That should hopefully hide a good few bits of missing render I noticed in a few
places. I guess in a day or so they'll be putting the over-sills on all of the
windows, putting back the last bits of guttering that needed to be modified, and
hopefully, hopefully doing the right thing with regard to my side gate. We'll
have to see about that. At the moment I can't honestly say if the house is any
cooler in the heat at the moment. And obviously the jury is still out on how
much warmer it's going to be come the proper cold weather at the end of the
year. I'll be booking out the IR camera from the council again some time in
December/January to see what differences are visible with regard to external
wall temperature.
At work today I've filed a bug report about my Satellite issues, and then
upgraded it to a support call to see if that progresses matters. I also put the
final touches to a VM I built quickly last night, prodded people about disk
space on various servers, went to the gym for a short workout, and peeled some
stickers off my bike for something to do while I waited for things to happen on
some servers.
Now I'm off to have a rowing outing for the first time in a year, if not more,
via Evans to pick up some stays for my pannier rack so I can fit that tomorrow.
With luck the inner tubes and tyres will also arrive tomorrow or Friday and I
can cycle the bike home, finally.
10/07/2018
[17:55] Today was a somewhat better day. But not 100% awesome, by any means. I
got in semi-early, but not as early as I would have liked owing to the EWI guys
arriving just as I was wheeling my bike out of the gate, and therefore me going
back to make them cups of tea. At work I started the Satellite 6.3.2 upgrade
and attached the toe clips/straps to my new bike while I waited for it to do its
thing. There were far more errors in the log files than I'm comfortable with,
but I have to hope that the process was successful. There have been all kinds
of new and interesting error/warning messages in the log files since the update
too, possibly just because I've been stressing the software out by doing the
client side software changes using it. The bottom line is that I've managed to
get everything done on that side bar two servers. One because I have no idea
where it is and it's possible it's sitting in a store room somewhere rather than
powered on (which it definitely isn't) and the other is such a busy server that
its ext3 filesystem can't cope with doing 'yum' commands which rebuild its cache
at the same time as the massive amount of I/O it has to deal with as a load
balancer. I've asked a colleague to deal with that on Thursday when it can be
failed over from for a few minutes and the relevant commands run.
At lunchtime I managed to squeeze in a 30 minute erg, which seemed far harder
than the last one I did for only a few more meters of distance, but them's the
breaks, I guess.
Other than that, I went via Evans last night to order some extra long supports
for the pannier rack for the new bike so it'll actually fit. I've also ordered
slimmer tyres and, after a few hours of not remembering I didn't have them,
inner tubes to go with them. Also a bell or two for this bike and the other
station bike I have that Rachel's using at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able
to collect the supports tomorrow evening on the way to the boat house for what
may be the only rowing outing I have before the races next week, and the tyres
and stuff will arrive either on Thursday or Friday. Only a few more days of
having to cycle the station bike with a chain that slips whenever you put down
any power at all. I may walk to Tesco this evening rather than deal with
loading it down with shopping, such as I can given the poor pannier rack it has.
09/07/2018
[15:35] I've had a really poo day, and I don't really want to talk about it all
that much. Nothing terrible, just a series of annoyances when it should have
been a good day due to my new bike arriving. There are issues with the bits and
bobs that go on it, my trains back from Croydon were terrible this morning, and
the major update of Satellite I started went horribly wrong when my
workstation's graphics card went nuts in the middle of it all. Luckily the
latter was saved by me doing a snapshot of the VM beforehand, so I can try again
tomorrow, but still. I'm off to get a haircut shortly, which might help my mood
by cooling me down a little. However I don't get to go home on my new bike, and
therefore don't get to go to Tesco with the new pannier rack this evening.
This weekend was nice, if a bit too hot. I did parkrun with Max and Stacey,
then had them round for flapjack and cool drinks. Then I went to Croydon to see
Rachel. On Sunday morning we ran in the heat and then marshalled for her local
Race For Life event. The afternoon was mostly spent trying to keep cool.
That's it, I'm afraid.
06/07/2018
[16:40] Sadly, Rachel's been having train disruptions in her train travels north
(via going south) today. I hope things have gone more smoothly since she got on
her second train. We had a nice evening last night, although it was fairly
subdued owing to some of the conversation topics we covered. This morning I
headed off to work and left her to have a nice relaxing morning in bed, although
we now realise that getting an earlier train would have been sensible, if we'd
known just how poor the timetabling still was.
At work I did a few things, but nothing really of note, had lunch with everyone
in the office at a local pub, and then gently sweated in the office for the
afternoon catching up on a few emails and watching a bit of the Henley Royal
Regatta online.
This weekend I may be rowing in a boat, but still haven't had confirmation. If
I'm not then it'll be parkrun in the morning with Max and Stacey, with them
coming back to my house afterwards to have flapjack and cookies that Rachel
baked this morning before she left (she's so wonderful). Then I'll head to
London to meet Rachel coming back from her parents. On Sunday we'll go for a
run in the morning, then marshall at a Race for Life event local to her. If I'm
rowing on the Sunday morning then I guess I won't be meeting her on Saturday,
and may not make it to her on the Sunday. We'll have to see.
05/07/2018
[16:20] The last of the early mornings for now. One server to patch, and one
repeat issue of it not booting after a firmware update (solved by going into
the BIOS and reconfirming all the settings). Since then there hasn't been all
that much to do other than downgrade a few servers' version of Puppet via
Ansible and go and do another 30@20 erg at the gym (improvement of just under
100m on Tuesday).
Rachel arrives this evening, but won't be staying for the weekend after all due
to family issues. I had considered going with her, but I think it's something
better done without me.
Tomorrow I may consider doing the big Satellite upgrade from 6.2 to 6.3, but
then if anything goes wrong overnight I won't see it until Monday, so I may wait
until then instead.
04/07/2018
[16:55] A reasonable night's sleep was had, even though I did wake early again
due to either heat or light pollution. In the end I just got up and was ready
to offer the EWI people tea before going to work. At work I managed to see my
club's boat not manage to make it through to the next day at Henley Royal
Regatta before cycling out to get some documents witnessed/verified/whatever by
my friendly solicitor. That took the place of any lunch time exercise, which
was a bit annoying, but I probably needed the break. Otherwise today there was
some bad news from Rachel that I can't do anything about, but is still
distressing, and preparations for tomorrow's patching of the last server in this
round of OS patching. I've also been told that my new bike and all its bits
will be arriving on Monday (after having been teased that it might arrive
tomorrow). Disappointing, but not all that bothersome in the grand scheme of
things.
03/07/2018
[17:10] Saw Rachel off this morning after a slightly better night's sleep due,
in part, to going to Homebase last night and picking up some blackout curtains
to make the bedroom just a little bit darker during these summer months. It was
still far too hot (something I hope the EWI eventually helps with a bit), but
far nicer for us to be together than apart.
At work I've had something of a placeholder day in terms of getting things done.
Things have been done, but not really anything of any import. I did go over to
one of the server rooms and do a major set of firmware updates on a server which
is currently between services, and everything seemed to go well on that score.
I also went to the gym at lunchtime today rather than run and did a 30 minute
erg instead. Something I haven't done in a very long time.
02/07/2018
[17:30] It was Rachel's birthday weekend, so I tried to do all kinds of things
that Rachel would enjoy. We didn't do anything amazing, but we did do some fun
things. Saturday morning was parkrun, which resulted in her getting her fastest
time of the year, and me trailing behind her by a good minute and a half, then
there was food and lots of relaxing and reading in the sun, followed by Indian
food for dinner. On Sunday we made the slightly ill-advised decision to get a
train away from the city and run back to it along the river. It was a bit too
hot for me and we ended up having to walk bits and bobs of it rather than having
me collapse with heat exhaustion. Still, I survived, we had a lovely time
(relatively speaking) and then there was the chance for ice cream while we
walked to retrieve our bikes from the closest train station. After that we met
Max and Stacey and a few others at a local pub before going home for a roast
dinner.
We had another moderately poor night's sleep last night, owing to both heat and
light in the bedroom, so we're going to go home from the swimming pool this
evening via Homebase to buy some blackout curtains to see if that helps. Not
that I'll be swimming, I'll be relaxing on the grass and reading whilest Rachel
swims for England. One day I should have some proper swimming lessons so I can
do front crawl properly and maybe enter a triathlon or two.