Running is therapy

If you find that Capistrano is hanging when you are attempting to deploy, adding:

set :synchronous_connect, true


to your deploy.rb file should fix you right up.

I have been pretty open about my editor use over the last few months. I switched to emacs a while ago, then was trying Open Komodo, etc.

Then I became a consultant. It was cool at first, I have computer mojo, I am into this stuff, I decided to keep messing with my tools. I was spending a lot of time getting Open Komodo, or Gedit to a usable state. Once in a while I was popping back into emacs to see if I could make a go of things.

Then it happened. I realized, oh crap, I really am a consultant, and they really are only going to pay me for N hours on this, I actually have to get this done.

And like a little boy running for his mothers arms, I folded like a lawn chair. Hello tabbed terminal with 4 instances of vim going. For the last several weeks I have been using vim, and vim alone. I really do hope this is temporary, because I think there are things that other editors offer that I’d like to take advantage of. And I like to push myself into new things and ways of thinking. I hope that I have a long and satisfying life with many editors.

Oddly, when restarting Bind 9 on Ubuntu I noticed it would tell me it restarted OK, but in fact wouldn’t be running.

npowell@chihiro:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart
* Stopping domain name service... [ ok ]
* Starting domain name service... [ ok ]
npowell@chihiro:~$ ps aux | grep bind
npowell 23418 0.0 0.0 2880 800 pts/1 S+ 09:16 0:00 grep bind


Also, Ubuntu’s penchant for breaking up absolutely ALL the logs is a little annoying (maybe they got this from Debian, I dunno). Nonetheless, if you look in the daemon.log, you will see the error

root@chihiro:/var/log# tail -n 9 /var/log/daemon.log
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: starting BIND 9.3.2 -u bind
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: found 2 CPUs, using 2 worker threads
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: loading configuration from '/etc/bind/named.conf'
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: listening on IPv4 interface lo, 127.0.0.1#53
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: listening on IPv4 interface eth1, 192.168.0.1#53
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: listening on IPv4 interface eth2, 192.168.1.1#53
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: /etc/bind/named.conf.local:14: undefined ACL 'wtf'
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: loading configuration: not found
Apr 28 09:16:06 chihiro named[23411]: exiting (due to fatal error)


I made up that error, but you get the idea. Why it returns ‘OK’ when it didn’t start, I do not know.

Sometimes life throws us a curve ball. Hell sometimes when we know they are pitching at us, they throw that curve and it knocks you right on your can anyway.

That happened to me this weekend. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unable to make the race at Lehigh. It was very disappointing.

In the grand scheme of things, this will pass…but it still sucks.

Welp, that’s about it. I mean, I have two more weeks till Lehigh, but that was the last long run.

I followed a very similar plan to what I did to prepare for Hands On House Half, a little over 6 months ago. Comparing this long run to the same one I did then, I have improved. I am for sure faster, and I felt pretty decent afterward, although for a couple of hours there my legs got pretty stiff. The heart rates are similar but these 12 miles where done at a 45 second faster pace.

So, what is the plan?! I don’t know honestly. At this point, I think I am going to run a 9 minute first mile and see what happens.

My neighbor Heather and her soon to be husband Brad came along for the ride. Heather is really doing well, very cool. And Brad is apparently the fastest cyclist of all time, as he kept taking off on side roads and beating us to the next intersection. It was nice to have all the company. I remember a lot of lonely runs when I trained for HoH.

So that will be it. Taper for two weeks, break 2 hours at Lehigh, and then get ready to fun run for a few months before I begin training for Harrisburg.

I am currently planning to take a week off after Lehigh so I can rest this knee that has been giving me problems. I will ride the bike and hit the hiking trails and long walks I think, but no running for a week. Then I will come back from that and if I still have pain, off to the doc I go for some x-rays.

Motionbased Link

1 Mile splits: 9:53, 9:35, 9:32, 9:37, 9:42, 9:44, 9:31, 10:01, 9:42, 9:51, 9:54, 9:47

Some stats:
Distance: 12.02 Miles
Time: 1:56:58 (pace: 9:43)
Average Heart Rate: 148 bpm
Calories Burned: 1711

As usual I am busier than people that are only moderately busy. Work is going well, lots of interesting work to do to keep the mind ocupado. Personal life is good, and always an adventure.

I want to document 3 recent runs, and one walk.

04.07.08 – Monday’s run. Loop and half with Bill and Rebuck. It was a good time. Turned in an OK pace of 9:15.

04.09.08 – Wednesday I cruised out to near Messiah College to meet up with another friend named Bill. He runs the loop we took a lot and wanted to know how far it was. So I fired up the Garmin. We stopped at 5 miles as he usually stops near where we stopped and walks the rest of the loop to cool down. It was fun, even had some x-country action. Plus it’s always nice to spend time with him.

04.11.08 – Friday was an “extra run”. Since my long run for the week actually fell on Saturday of last week, this week was shaping up to be a low mileage week. Couple that with receiving my new water bottle from amazon on Friday, and I was bound to run.

I only wanted to do a few miles, just enough to make sure having the water bottle strapped to me didn’t totally suck before I took it on my 12 miler today. It was ok. I don’t think wearing a water belt is ever going to be something I enjoy, but it will be a necessary evil when training for Harrisburg later this year. I suppose I will just have to get used to it.

What I found really bothersome is all the accoutrements I am now trussed with. I have orthotics, a knee brace, chest strap, wrist GPS, and now a belt. I think one evening when this current plan is over, I am leaving all that at home, including my shoes and I am going for a run.

Well, it’s time to prepare for the last long run before my taper begins for Lehigh. Happy trails!

Just in the interest of standing on the shoulders of Patrick…and a bunch of other people…


npowell@delilah:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
324 ls
266 cd
243 clear
105 svn
100 ssh
80 vi
58 sudo
24 cp
21 rm
19 ll


ll is an alias to `ls -l`. I started off on Red Hat and they always included that by default. Kind of boring. I am surprised that clear was not the top spot, as I type it by reflex constantly.

I will miss you.

A while ago, I switched from Vim to Emacs. I did this for a couple of reasons. Mostly I was hoping to learn elisp which would enable me to make the editor do what I want, and avoid frustration with limitations. You can do similar things in vim, but vim script is uglier than home made sin. I wanted to avoid that if I could.

I didn’t exactly throw myself into elisp, and as a result had trouble making it do even minor things.

Yesterday I got to spend some time with David. He’s the only person I have ever met who is more chronically dissatisfied with software than I am.

We discussed some of our frustrations with emacs, and by the time the conversation was over, I had decided to play around with some other editors and see what is out there.

To be more specific, I don’t want just an editor; I actually do want an IDE. I have eschewed them in the past, but after using Eclipse and RadRails and most recently ecb with emacs, I really want a decent file browser. I’d also like integration with version control and perhaps some other things. Most of all, I want to script it in a language that I know, or could know pretty easily. I’d also prefer that language not be Python (that’s right, I’m a hater :).

This led me to looking at free IDE’s.

Recently it appears ActiveState made their Komodo Edit editor open source. I installed that last night and played with it until about 2:30 in the morning. It’s actually quite cool.

At this point I have only done a small sub set of tasks in it, so I am unprepared to give it a ringing endorsement, but it’s quite usable.

One of the things I find frustrating with IDE’s is the editor portion is usually quite poor. OpenKomodo has a vi mode which gives you access to a lot of the vi(m) commands you already know. That is clutch.

I still have a lot of things I want to explore, but so far I give it a Nathan Powell “Not horrible” award. I will try to put together something a little more coherent later. I just wanted to scratch out my first impressions here.

P.S.
I think I have found a bug though. In using Visual Block Mode (in command mode: C-v) the cursor highlights properly, but when you operate on the region it behaves like Visual Line. That’s too bad, as I like that feature in vi(m) a lot. Maybe I am mistaken and if you know what I am doing wrong, please leave a comment.

I am still slugging away at the schedule.

I ran 5 miles on Tuesday, and 5 miles tonight. Tuesday I went pretty fast. I felt like I was pushing the pace, and in the end did not have a great time. Tonight however I ran how I felt. And it went well.

Strangely it was beautiful Tuesday night yet I made myself unhappy by going to fast. And tonight was cold and rainy and I had a great time.

Now, about this pace. I was attempting Tuesday to push the desired race pace for Lehigh Valley. I nailed the average pace right on the head. For me to run a 1:55 at Lehigh I need to run 8:46’s. I ran 8:42’s on Tuesday. It felt hard, it felt like I was pushing. This leads me to believe that it might not be the best idea in the world to go out at 8:45 for the half.

I don’t know, I’m not sure. If you have advice I’d love to hear it.

I am moving my long run to Saturday this week to accomodate Eric. He, Bill and myself are going to do 11 miles in Newville, should be a blast.

Tonights 1 mile splits: 9:42, 9:30, 9:42, 9:22, 9:29

Motionbased link

Some Stats:
Distance: 5.00 Miles
Time: 47:47 (pace: 9:33)
Average Heart Rate: 148 bpm
Calories Burned: 712