Running is therapy

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!

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 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

Guilty as the next person of shoving all kinds of superficial crap in my “self-actualization” shaped hole, I thought this article was great.

Well, to be fair, all the major providers of phone, cell and television seem to suck. But this morning I am pissed at Comcast.

My cable bills are over 100 dollars a month for internet and television. If I have watched 12 hours of television this year, I would be very surprised. To that end, I decided to get rid of cable. However when you do that, and just have them for internet, they raise the fee for internet 17 dollars a month. Or you can keep the same low rate (which is still like 50 dollars a month) and get basic cable for 18.

I use Comcast for internet because I don’t have a land line, and didn’t want to pay for a line I’ll never use. But I am paying for cable I never use as well.

After I get a bill or two to see what it will cost me per month, I am going to call the local DSL provider. If I can save even 1 dollar by switching, I will.

If not for the vegetarian diet shrinking the brain, think about how crazy smart I would be.

Exactly.