Running is therapy

I haven’t posted a training log in a while, and thought it might be time.

I was up till about 1:30 last night and woke up at 6:30 this morning. So on 5 hours sleep I was feeling a little washed out today.

I knew I had a 4 miler that I needed to do, but I kept putting it off because it was so hot and I was so tired that I thought it might be miserable.

Nope. Best run I have had in weeks. I felt great the whole time. It was one of those runs that causes you to fall in love with running in the first place.

When I got back, a certain 2 year old was hogging the shower, so I had to cool my heels at the PC. I figured no better time than the present to switch to using connect.garmin.com.

I think it’s a pretty sweet little app now. Motionbased was such a dog.

Anyway, here is my run.

Happy running!

About 2 (?) months ago I stopped wearing my orthotics to see if that would help my heel. I think I can say unequivocally that it has. I am running a consistent 20 miles per week, and my heel (though not entirely healed) feels better than in has in a year.

However (you just knew there was going to be a however didn’t you), my hip (remember my hip? the whole reason I started wearing orthotics in the first place?) is starting to feel the same way it did when I went to get orthotics in the first place.

It’s not quite as bad as it was then, but it’s bad enough that I know I have to start wearing the orthotics again.

I plan to try wearing them only when I am walking around, and not on runs, at least initially.

I also hope to put up a marathon training post soon, as well as my schedule.

I am working on a post about the wireless ap I built using FreeBSD, but in the mean time I thought I’d post on a few personal items.

First, I am hacking away on various at home projects, not the least of which is the aforementioned wireless access point. That was a blast, and I hope record the steps I took in decent detail for the post. In fact, I am connected to my lan via said ap right now.

Eventually it will be my only access point, and router, but I am planning a vacation for July (to a beach house with no net), and I want to take it with me. I plan to use the GSM modem I bought as the wan interface, and the atheros card I put in there on the lan side. To that end, I thought I should get the ap working first.

Running is going ok. I am not at my peak performance. I decided about a month ago to try an experiment. I stopped using my orthotics to see if that helped my heel pain. And while my heel does feel a little better (at least I think it does) my knees have been aching a lot in protest to the new gait I am sure I have developed.

So I am sitting here currently with ice packs on my knees, eating advil.

And one of my cats has flown the coop… No not gone off to college, though that would be great, he has gone to live with my girlfriend. I am slowly, moving my dudes to her place so they are not so alone all the time. And Alex needed dental surgery, so while he was under, I had him declawed. I don’t advocate declawing, and hadn’t gotten my guys declawed. However, Shelly has 2 cats, neither with claws and furiniature that doesn’t look like it came out of a frat house, so we decided to get my guys done. When Alex first came home I thought I had made a huge mistake and felt pretty awful about having it done, but a week later, he seems just as happy and healthy as ever. So in the end I am cool with it.

Well, it’s time to take the ice off my knees, so I will see you all later.

Happy catting!

I really do. So after spending a pretty frustrating day trying to get a development environment in windows set up, I finally got to the part where I was going to put postgres on the machine.

Easy I thought. Those guys do good work. And they are cool enough to autogen you a password.

Um. wtf.

Sometimes virt-manager (over a less than optimal link) will be unusable. Never fear, it’s simply creating an ssh tunnel, and then connecting you to vnc. No reason to let it have all the fun.

First find out what port the vnc server you want to talk to is listening on

  root@vm.foo.com:~# virsh dumpxml dns | grep graph
    Connecting to uri: qemu:///system
    <graphics type='vnc' port='5904' listen='127.0.0.1'/>


There we see it’s port 5904, now tunnel that port over ssh

  ssh -L 5904:localhost:5904 root@vm.foo.com

Then open the vnc session in a viewer

  npowell@malaise:~$ vncviewer localhost::5904


Cibatta bing. You in!

Hallo.

I haven’t said much as of late…but it’s because I have been busy…busy as a bee!

I am into so many things now it’s just sick, so many things in fact I don’t even have time to talk about them.

I bought a grill and have been hacking away at grilling recipes. While enjoying the fruits of this labor.

I have been chugging along with FreeBSD as my home server/Asterisk box and that’s been loads of fun.

I bought the book The Book of PF. What a great read. You can get most of the actual text here, but for text this long, I much prefer the book format.

In my career I have always managed to avoid networking, in favor of 10 million other things. What a mistake. PF is super interesting, as is networking in general.

I have made a bit of a truce with Java and have been hacking around a bit on that. I am sold on Ivy for dependency resolution. The power of code reuse via jars is awesome, maintaining the classpath is not…Ivy fixes that.

I still loathe xml.

Big changes on the personal front, as I am planning to start moving my cats to my girlfriends house. She already has 2 cats, so with my 3 along for the ride, we’ll have 5 cats under her roof. That should be interesting.

I am running about 20 miles a week. I continue to have heel pain, but I run anyway. The pain isn’t bad enough to change my gait, so I just run anyway. I might go to PT…we’ll see.

Ok, that’s enough for now.

I left work around 5:30, drove back to Carlisle and and still had time to pull a 4 miler at the barracks before dark.

Sweet mother of mercy I hate the dark.

I like that guy that misses trash day by like 1 hour, and then leaves his bag at the curb for the week.

I like him, because it’s like he stands for something. It’s like he’s saying: “I stand for more flexible meanings for ‘Garbage Day’, and I am going to live in world with that flexibility.”

Things I have been into lately…

1. I have been running a fair amount for the last month. Averaging 14-17 miles a week. My heel feels pretty good and overall I am healthy. It will soon be time to think about something a little more regular

2. FreeBSD. For some odd reason I have been bitten by the *BSD bug and have been making vm’s of them, and have been reading the Handbook for FreeBSD. The documentation is fantastic. Although it is a little dated. Most of the partitioning guide talks about multibooting OS’s that no one would still be using.

3. Shooting zombies online in the game Left4Dead. So much fun. Highly recommend it.

4. Went to Hollywood Casino with my girlfriend and her parents. We had a lot of fun. However the smoke was a little much to bear. I had a headache from it yesterday. I was actually a little surprised to see that they allowed smoking. The really stupid thing is that it’s this huge open air building, and there are non-smoking sections. Cheers to the fun, jeers to the smoke.

5. I have been attempting to get into Robert Jordan’s first book in the Wheel of Time series. So far, it’s not taking. I need to sit down uninterrupted for a few hours and get into it.

6. Work is going well. I have been virtualizing a lot of stuff. Setting up Nagios, and hacking on some Google Maps for a customer app. We also started migrating our directory server from FedoraDS to OpenDS. My LDAP skills were non-existent before hand, and now I can at least get around on it.

I think that about sums up my life at the moment. I am sure as soon as I publish this, I’ll remember something else.

K, later.

I never used them, but I did just hear about them on The Consumerist, and thought some of you might be interested in it:

http://www.freelancersunion.org/insurance/index.html