I have never had any intentions of running a triathlon in my life, I am not all a good swimmer. One length of the pool has me gasping for breath if I attempt any sort of decent speed. This is why I was planning on one or two off-road duathlons this year (mountain biking/trail running), one of which is the Xterra EX2 race in Rocky Gap, MD.

So what happens tonight? Less than 2 hours ago I attended a Xterra informational session headed by 2 locals who placed 2nd and 5th in their age group at world's last year in Hawaii. I won via raffle a free entry into the Sport level Richmond Xterra East Championship. Well, tecnically my wife, who has no desire to do any of this crazy outdoors stuff I started, won the entry but I am using it. Then they raffled a Pro level entry, which I won, but I passed it up since I already had the Sport via the wife.

The entry is non-transferable and my name has already been sent to the race registrars to send me my forms. I guess I will be running my 1st triathlon come June. Time to start hitting the local rec center pool and get working on that swimming.

The wife and kids have moved up the DC area so we are one happy family again as of Jan 6th. We went from a ranch to a 2-story so the kids were (still are) fascinated with the stairs, running up and down and up and down and up...They even refused to use the downstairs bathroom because they wanted to use the stairs to go to the upstairs bathroom. Of course, mom and dad were sick of stairs after 2 days of moving boxes up and down.

Apparently their mother instituted a morning rule where no kids go downstairs until after 8am since they would wake up before her and run downstairs to play (they are 3 and 5).

Situation:
My son (the 5 year old) wakes up between 7-7:30 normally, before his mother

Problem:
He wants to play, but can't go downstairs until 8am.

Solution:
Press the buttons on the alarm clock to make it say 8am. It is now ok to go downstairs.

I wish that solution was applicable at work :-)

In light of my near accident yesterday (asshole turned on his blinker and tried to do a 3 lane change without bothering to look over his shoulder, I happened to be in that 3rd lane. I locked the brakes, laid on the horn, and he refused to look at me as I passed him) here is something all DC drivers could use:

Road Rage Cards. Range from a nice "Pay Attention!" to angry "Wake the Fuck Up you Idiot!"

Oh, and said asshole was driving a mini-van with the wife and kids in it.

After a particularly less than ideal ride last week, the bike was pretty dirty. Dug out the cleaning brushes and proceeded to get off most of the dried mud, enough to stop interfering with the mechanical operation of various parts. While I was doing this, I came across a manufacturer sticker on the frame that had some rather small print. In this small print it basically states that this model bike is not meant for activities such as jumping, downhill racing, and aggressive off-road riding. (emphasis mine).

I find this ironic that I now find this label after I have had to replace parts broken during my rides. For the last 4-5 months I have been riding well above the style my parts were designed for, as in often and trying things the more experience riders do. This might explain why I have dumped roughly $300 in parts on this bike in that time frame.

So now I have a sub-par bike, with an excellent set of rims, hubs, tires, rear cogs, and pedals. A friend is upgrading his much higher quality bike with an even higher quality crankset (front gears, crankshaft and pedal arms) and letting me have his old one, so I will have a new one of those soon also.

I will be using this bike in a duathlon in July, possibly another in Sept., and maybe a 12-hour team endurance race (most 10 mile-loops in 12 hours), we'll see how this "not meant for...aggressive off-road riding" holds up. The wife had already agreed that I need a better quality bike (she saw the last repair bill) so it is a matter of keeping this one in working condition long enough to save the money for a decent one ($800-$1000).

Tomorrow someone is being fired. I know this, the whole office knows this, she does not. That is what is pissing some of us off.

Don't get me wrong, in the opinion of most of us she deserves to be fired since she has been here for months yet can't do the very basic entry level tasks she was hired to do, much less be a viable strong member of her team. She has been on "probation" due to poor performance for the past few weeks/months.

She is a contractor, has a government team lead, who has a goverment department lead. The department lead works directly with our company's program rep for personnel issues. These are the ONLY people who should have known about her being fired. Yet one of those three (and pretty sure not the company rep, too smart for that) gossipped about privileged personnel information that should have never gotten out until the employee was pulled into an office and told in person. Now she gets to show up at work where we all know she is going to be fired and watch her get called into the office and get the news.

She is a pretty cool person so I am feeling really bad for her even though she does need to go.

I am wondering what kind of recourse she could have and if anything could be done to the leads who violated their privilege. If it was me I would filing a complaint in writing to the highest corporate people I could about the actions of the government on this contract, as well as hitting a few high ranking govies who are over these people, and finally the Office of Personnel Management. I'm sure nothing would get done in the end, but I would have some satisfaction that I made life difficult for some people for a little while.

Get back to the fitness level I was at (or better) when I left the Marine Corps back in 1999.

That means one year to lose 7 years of bad habits and sporadic attempts at getting back into shape. I am by no means an out of shape slob (5'10", ~170 lbs.), but I have been dissatisfied for some time with my conditioning.

Now, we all know people who every year make a similar resolution (get in shape), but I have given myself goals in the form of various events to milestone myself:

March/April 2007:
BackYard Burn Spring series (4 races over 2 months, I am running the 5-mile series)

May 2007:
Rocky Gap Adventure race (trekking, orienteering, mountain biking, kayaking)

July/August 2007:
Cranky Monkey Mountain Bike race series, beginner class.
This one is iffy, depends on how much I improve on my turns and downhills at speed. Last time I tried to go fast on a twisty course I hit a tree, not something I would like to experience again.

Sept 2007:
Venture Quest Adventure race. (trekking, orienteering, mountain biking, kayaking)

Oct/Nov/Dec 2007:
BackYard Burn Fall series (4 races, I will be running the 10-mile series this time)

Note: The 1st link to the calendar has accurate dates, the individual event links have not been updated with 2007 dates

The common feature of all events: All local to me, and all of the ARs have a solo category. The 2 ARs are also "sprint" ARs, not 24-36 hour endurance events, so gear-wise they are a little more affordable since I pretty much have 90% of the required gear for them. There is an AR in April, but no solo category so I will probably volunteer for the event, although I have some friends that might run it with me since they would use the sprint AR as a warmup for an endurance one they have later in the month.

My goals for each event are basically:
1. Not to get a DNF (did not finish)
2. Not to be DFL (dead fookin last)

After using 2007 as a nice warmup year, I will probably repeat all the local events with the intent to seriously compete, and probably enter some endurance ARs to see how I do. The hard part right now is getting the wife to understand that training requires allowing me to take time to go out and run/bike, and that not all of use are as lucky as her and get paid to work out (she is a fitness/aerobics instructor). The plus side of that is that most of the parks/trails systems I would be training in are family friendly so she and the kids would be able to do outdoor things while I workout, she has already agreed to that idea.

Let's see how the After Action Report in 2008 turns out.

Happy New Year fellow Slashdotters!

By virtue of the fact that I am the only sysad not taking that day off, I get to come in at 5am in order to upgrade a number of our SANS with a newer OS. The boss decided that since the network would be down for a bit anyway due to the network team upgrading IOS on the switches and routers, which means all the databases and websites will also be offline, that our team has a perfect oppurtunity to do these long awaited upgrades.

So I will be getting back into town around midnight or so and come in super early.

My lucky day. No stress, just about 200 servers attach to these SANS...

I'll skip ahead to the results:

Tree : 1
Cyclist: 0

I was actually in NoVA this weekend so I decided to take advantage of the great weather (mid 60s in Dec) and lack of recent rain to hit a trail in Maryland I had done once before on a night ride. Total length of the main trail is ~9.7 miles with lots of nice long hills so I knew I would get a good workout. I also bought a bike computer so I can start getting some metrics on how I ride (speed, distance, average speed, etc) since I want to start getting into bike races and adventure racing.

This trail is very easily from a technical point of view, smooth hard packed dirt with only 3 log obstacles on the whole main trail. You can really fly down the hills and need to be good at cornering at speed. Since the last time and only time I had been on this trail was at night with a rather fast paced group, I figured I wouldn't have any problems in the daytime. Wrong.

The aforementioned match between the cyclist and the tree occurred .2 miles into the ride as I came around a sharper than I expected corner and understeered right into one of those trees that is placed in such a way that you MUST take the turn right or you hit it. I hit it. It was about 3 inches in diameter.

One of the cardinal basics in mountain biking is if you are about to wipe, you DO NOT attempt to save yourself with arms, legs, etc since you have a much better chance of breaking something if you do. I was lucky in the following points:

1. Even though I stuck my arms out, I managed to catch the tree and use the arms to absorb my body's impact.
2. I hit the tree as perfect as you can head on with the tire just sliding by it, so the impact was near center on the handlebars so there was no twisting of the bars which would have sent me and the bike flying off somewhere.

Basically, it was a head on hit @ about 15mph, the tree won (only lost a small chip of bark from the bike's impact) and the bike and I bounced back about 2 feet and fell to the ground (off the side of the trail, so I didn't get run over by anyone). The amazing part is my shoes didn't even unclip from the pedals, so I was still attached to my bike laying on the ground. However, my brand new computer was about 3 feet down the trail since the tabs on the mounting bracket snapped on impact.

The computer still was in working condition however, if I had some zip ties on me I could have tied it back onto the bracket so the sensors connected. That is where I got the .2 miles into the trail and the 15mph stats from, they were the last settings on the computer before it flew off.

I went on to finish two laps of the trail (roughly 20 miles) with only two more incidents: front wheel washed out on a pile of leaves and this time I just rolled with it, and a badly placed (in my opinion) log on a rolling section where I somehow managed to not endo but rode a front wheelie until the wheel washed out and I slid into the hillside. Both the other 2 wipes happened on the 1st lap, and on the second I caught a killer 2nd wind and flew through the latter half on an endorphin high. I wanted to attempt a 3rd lap but wisely didn't. My legs have that nice "damn good workout" feel to them but my upper body is sore from both the wipes and 20 miles of bouncing around.

Unfortunately with the winter weather I think I am just going to be a weekend warrior on the bike since the weekday night rides are getting too damn cold and I can't afford the right clothing, but I am going to start taking advantage of the free gym at work to cross train as well as work on my running since I am going to enter a trail running series in March.

Bikers==cyclists, not Hell's Angels bikers

A cold front blew through DC area last night after a fairly nice day in the mid-50's. I had planned on doing the regular mountain bike group ride since it was slightly warmer day than the one 2 days earlier (when it was in the 20's), so was already at the park and geared up before really noticing how cold it was. On a warmup ride before the group shows up, my fingers went utterly numb after only about 10 minutes of riding, which is when I realized that I had COOL weather gloves, not COLD weather gloves. Previous to this ride I had good enough clothing to ride in the mid-40's and be ok. One of the seasoned veterans happened to have about 4 pairs of gloves on him (why, I do no know) so I borrowed a better set of gloves for the weather. Luckily I had just bought a heavier jersey on the way to the park so my upper body was doing ok except during a wind gust, and tights always seem to keep the legs warm.

When we finished at around 8:30pm, another rider's car thermometer showed it at 32 degrees! As a side effect of the cold, I somethings had shifting problems, especially after crossing some streams, and the springs on my pedals really didn't want to let my shoes clip-in like they were supposed to. I however managed to clear some tricky areas where I have consistently lost my rear tire so my skills are definitely getting better.

Of course, now I have more gear to buy and spend money on:
- Wind breaker, was told that would have been a better purchase than my new jersey
- A real set of cold weather gloves
- A set of tires with a tread pattern that can better handle being wet and sometimes muddy

Saw the new Bond with the wife on Friday night. To sum it up: Damn Good Movie.

The writers did a good job with the dialogs, plenty of good quips in typical Bond fashion. I really like that they de-emphasized all of the techno devices that ran rampant in the last few Bond flicks (invisible cars anyone?) and went back to a good plot that had a nice number of twists.

Highlights (that are non-spoilers):
-- Great running chase scene near the beginning with a lot of Parcour in it, turns out the chasee is played by one of the founders of free running.

-- Not a lot of emphasis on violence/gunfights, but when they are there, they are intense.

-- Both the Bond women are 10+ on the scale (wife says Bond was up there too, something about having a nice butt)

Was rather interesting that they are sort of re-writing Bond, supposedly this details the "creation" of 007 yet is placed in modern Post-Sept 11th times. No SPECTRE anywhere.

So once again, IMHO, Damn Good Movie. Will definitely buy when comes out on DVD. Daniel Craig is still no Sean Connery, but is better than Pierce Brosnan, definitely much better than Timothy Dalton.

Contents of some emails that just passed through my inbox....

From: "one of our DBAs"
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:10 PM
To: "sysad"; DBA Group; Webmaster
Cc: Admin (UNIX)
Subject:RE: Rp needs to be rebooted

On which box?

"dba name"
_____________________________________________
From: "sysad"
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:05 PM
To: DBA Group; Webmaster
Cc: Admin (UNIX)
Subject:Rp needs to be rebooted

Because we needed to install a patch for the soft partitions.

DBA's:
Please let us know when Oracle has been shut down on the box so we can reboot.

Thanks,
"sysad's name here"

Apparently reading the subject line is not this guy's strong point.

I've learned to hate at least 2 types of employees in the last few weeks.

The security person. Not the technical security person, he is a former sysad/webmaster so is technicially proficient and also willingly helps with tech issues relating to security. I'm referring to the security policy person, whose sole job it seems is to tell us what we CAN'T do because it might violate a particular DOD regulation. For once I want a security person who says "well, that would be against policies x, y amd z, but let's see how we can solve your problem within the regulations or if we can waiver it."

The person who always says why she CAN'T help you out. "Oh, you need to call for that issue" "Sorry, I could fix that but it is 's job so you should tak to her". I seen this particular person spend more time telling people why she can't help them than I have actually seen her doing productive work.

I always used to think that people exaggerated when they talked about how government employees were (I am on a mixed contractor/government contract) but now I see they were not. My last contract we had about 6 different companies working together between primes and subs, and positions were shared out between companies so that no one team of people (planners, techs, administrative) was solely on company. We had a policy there of "one team one fight" and we all worked together with mainly no corporate rivalries.

This current place you are constantly reminded that you are a contractor. GS types get nameplates on their cubes, contractors don't. GS types get preference for compressed work schedules (9 by 40) over contractors. Apparently before I worked here, contractors could not park on the compound, so had to park in a commuter lot off base and take a shuttle in to work from there adding up to 30 minutes on each end of the workday.

I guess I can sum this post up as "I really should have taken my counter-offer and stayed where I was".

It starts with one tiny street, but eventually Ethelred will take over the world!!!!

Not sure whether this is a good thing or not...

First off, why am I not surprised there is no journal topic for "Fitness" on slashdot?

As for the journal subject, I don't mean painful as in aching muscles or overworked tendons. back in August I started up mountain biking with some friends/coworkers who had been doing it for a few months. My friend bought a new whamp-a-dyne bike so I got his older one off of him for $200. Only ridden about 5 or 6 times at this point. As of last Saturday I guess I can say I started kayaking. Same friend bought a kayak since him and some other guys signed up for one of those outdoor adventure races (orienteering, hiking, climbing, biking, kayaking). His training partners were all busy so my first kayak experience was a 6.3 mile cove route in about 20-25 knot winds and 1-2 foot waters. More on that. Back to the bike, the first 2 times I rode I didn't necesarily fall hard, jsut enough that my legs were bleeding from the various thorns or roots I managed to land on/in. The last 2 or 3 weeks of serious riding I have been doing I don't really fall anymore, although the foot does hit the ground for balance on hills or logs.

Now to recap my weekend:

Did the aforementioned kayaking on Sunday afternoon. After 2 hours you would have figured I would learn to quit scraping my thumbs on the side of the kayak when I paddle. Pulling nylon fibers out of scrape wounds is an experience everyone should enjoy :-) Surprisingly the next day I was not at all sore where I expected to be, just worn out like after a good workout.

Monday afternoon went riding. Somehow a tab or something broke off in my rear gear cassette, so basically when I went to coast the cassette would catch and knock my chain into a lower ratio'd gear. This made getting up a hill after a downhill pretty much suck since I could never get in the gear I wanted. After 6 miles of this I can justifiably say that this was the worst ride I have ever had, as in the whole time I was wishing it was over. FYI, once you go in the trail, you pretty much have to go the whole way. Hence the 6 miles.

Replacement cassette: $25 installed, not too bad.

The above endeavors are all back in Chesapeake since I go home on the weekends (wife and kids haven't moved up to DC yet)

Tuesday I got off work early because I wanted to do a nice long ride since it is getting pretty dark around 7pm. I of course now had rear gear problems due to the new cassette. Luckily another rider stopped to help me look at it and put a temp fix on the prob that would let me ride the rest of the day. Happened to also be the owner of a bike shop so i was going to stop by after the ride to get it looked at by his techs. Not five minutes later the real pain kicks in. There is a small roller-coaster/whoop-d-do section on top of a hill that I usually ride the brakes on. Today I decided to take it a little faster so went easy on the brakes. Oops. I completely left the ground on the 2nd of three rises and landed basically perpendicular to the slope of the 3rd and last rise. Basically the bike stopped, I kept going the extra 3 feet into the ground. Took a minute or two to get up, during which time if anyone had ridden that section we both would have been toast since it is sort of blind until the last minute, and my bike an I were occupying the landing zone. After getting up I realized that (1) my knee was missing a nice chunk of skin and (2) my front wheel got slightly bent from the impact. Basically I had to limp/walk out of the trails, luckily it was only about 1/2-3/4 mile to the parking lot.

However, I got a good deal at the bike shop. Brakes and derailers tuned up and front wheel put back in shape for only $30.

So end result of the weekend:
$55 in bike repairs on a $200 bike.
One limping sysadmin with scarred hands.
One wife who thinks I am crazy.

So been on this new job exactly 3 weeks today. No real training program, no real "hey this is how we do things" document. Just 8 admins, 4 of us less than 6 months here, and about 200 Sun servers with a mix of Xserves and some Linux systems for good measure, and a whole directory of "HowTos" labeled and categorized with no real sense of order.

So what is the first system I build (rebuild actually)? A critical system that is 1) the batching system for the computer room operators, and 2) the main backup server for a library/archival system that has a 400 tape silo/robot attached to it. Completely lost 90% of the shared objects on the system, after 3 hours trying to recover boss decides to reload the system and come back up from tapes. Except it is decided to also upgrade the system while we are at it. And of course, the guy who has never built a system here and also has about 0.1% experience with Solaris 10 gets to be the stuckee, because of all the late shift crew (leave at 5pm) I apparently have the most clue.

OS load went fine, basic system software went fine, Backup software (Legato) installs fine. Note I said INSTALLS fine, not WORKS fine... This is Friday @ 8am (started Thurs @3pm) after I stayed 2 hours late and came in 2 hours early.

We then spend 2 complete days (Friday and Monday) on the phone with Legato cursing them out because when they went from .1 to .2 of their software, they dropped the Motif gui and went to a Java web-app interface for the management piece. The problem is the management console:

1. Doesn't like being routed through a proxy
2. Being behind a NAT
3. Being behind a firewall
4. Being on a DOD locked down system.

The company's FAQ of course says to disable all of these things if you can't seem to connect. We managed to get around it by installing about 20 extra packages we usually don't install just to get a browser installed on the local system (this is a very stripped system load) so we could just forward the console. This isn't the kicker, most of those 2 days were spent trying to get the backups restore because nothing seemed to want to work with this new software, as in "Hey, I can see your entire catalogue of indexed backups, I can't seem to ACCESS them to restore from"...which we had problems with even before the crash.

So, the reason I am upset now is just as I was powering off my system tonight my boss asks if I can stop by his cube. So I ask if I he means stop by on my way out and he kind of hems and haws. End result, now that the phone suppport with the vendors got us access to our backups, I get to miss my mountain biking plans and spend another 1.5 hours after work fixing this stupid server still. And never did get to finish it, since I couldn't find a certain key set of files in the backups and had to leave because I am not on the after-hours access list for our area. This all because I stayed an extra 5 minutes late to finish a trouble ticket a DBA had put in right at 5pm.

So now I got a boss who is extremely upset since it MUST be my fault that none of the key files exist on tape in the last month or so of backups, and we have REALLY IMPORTANT PEOPLE who are now upset that this system has been down for a total of 5 days now, even though it was the boss' call to not work over the weekend. And tomorrow has forecasted rain, which means the trails are closed, either officially or by unwritten rule (don't ride on muddy trails so you do't ruin them).

Someday I'll get back on that bike.

PS. If anyone is considering buying Legato as a new backup/restore system, DON'T! I used to think Veritas' interface was terrible, at least is was a local java app interface, not some Web Service wiz-bang non-functioning beta release that apparently never got tested outside of a lab. I'll post some excerpts of our phone conversation with 3 different reps if I feel in the mood later.