Roadrunners again last night, and a fairly brutal set it was too, made all the harder by the wind and rain. We were doing 4 sets of 4 x 600m, with a pace increase in each set. By the end of it my legs were tightening up nicely, and my hobble was coming on a treat. I was supposed to be having a sports massage immedaitely afterwards, but unfortunately it was cancelled at the last minute.I'm really glad I got to finish the set, as many people left early due to the appauling conditions. I really, really need to up my mileage (I keep saying that, don't I?), as my endurance is nowhere near the point it should be at.
I think Mondays are going to get harder, as a new outdoor circuits class has started (Bootcamp), and its at the same time as I normally run, so the plan is to run earlier, and then do Bootcamp immediately afterwards. If that doesn't kill me in short order nothing will. I've been signed up for a multi-terrain race in October called Commando Challenge, which looks like a great laugh, however its a team thing, and I don't want to let the others down, so have to knuckle down and start improving the distance and strength.
Geek wise, I've "invested" in a couple of new board games. Pandemic is a co-op game for 2-5 players, where the objective is to cure 4 diseases ravaging the earth. Its gotten good reviews on BoardGameGeek, and looks like a good alternative to Settlers of Catan for an hour filler slot. The other game is called Agricola, and is comically all in German (the english version is not out yet). In this you have to build up a farm in a set number of turns. I've given it one solo playthrough so far, and there is a lot of depth to it... I need to engage the other lads and give it a proper playthrough to see how good it is in practice.
On the work front, I'm now full time on the new project, and I've been given a few areas to work on. Its all very new, and its going to take a bit of time to get my head round the documentation style and project structure. On the plus side I've been blagged a window seat (views not great, but can't complain). They do have proper kitchen facilities here, which means proper tea for once.
SPeaking of work, I really should start doing some...
Thursday 29 May 2008
Monday 26 May 2008
Gateway Gaming
In a spectacular example of romantic gestures I've been introducing Gill to non-standard (ie not available in Woolworths) board and card games. She already has some geek crudentials (is a programmer, has completed a version of Final Fantasy, is member of a D&D group), so thought I may as well go about increasing her geek license.
I've started with the better, less violent games at my disposal, and I've been using Fluxx, Settlers of Catan and Carsonnone. Settlers has the added bonus that I'm completely shit at it. Shes taken to them extremely well... Fluxx was broekn out during a powercut, and once the concept was grasped it went down well. Settlers was pcked up even quicker, and has actively been asked for since then, and Carsonnone was played for a couple of hours today, again with a large degree of success.
Its some way from cracking out Starcraft and getting her to butcher the opposition, but its not completely out of the question :-D
I've started with the better, less violent games at my disposal, and I've been using Fluxx, Settlers of Catan and Carsonnone. Settlers has the added bonus that I'm completely shit at it. Shes taken to them extremely well... Fluxx was broekn out during a powercut, and once the concept was grasped it went down well. Settlers was pcked up even quicker, and has actively been asked for since then, and Carsonnone was played for a couple of hours today, again with a large degree of success.
Its some way from cracking out Starcraft and getting her to butcher the opposition, but its not completely out of the question :-D
Thursday 22 May 2008
Sprinting sessions
Roadrunners last night was a brutal session. After a normal warm up (gentle run for about a kilometre, and some drills) we had to do a flat-out 800m, with a target of beating the time we did 5 weeks ago. I managed 2.21, which is a whole 4 seconds off my time, so pretty chuffed with that.
We went on to do about half an hour of something called "Bus Stops", where teams of 3 run with 2 people on the track at once, with one resting. Our team consisted of 2 similar paced runners, and one slower person...I was unfortunately the lead person when I was on track with the slower guy, and so ended up doing both my laps at full pace, while the others got a rest on one lap...
...and if that wasn't enough, we ended up with about 20 minutes of 200m relay sprints, which very nearly killed me. The problem with those is that there was another team of 3 with _very_ similar pacing to ours. It ended up with us racing them round (quite naturally we won :-) )
I'm really enjoying Roadrunners...its a very different challenge to anything I've done before, and its making me push myself a lot harder. I did the Woodley 10K at the weekend, and by my standards did fairly badly, going off too fast, and burning out halfway round. I was chatting to some of the other runners about how their various races went, and blaming one fairly quick guy I tried to stay with at the start (my fault really...I knew he was way faster than me). I have 6 weeks until my next race, and my focus in that time really has to be stamina and endurance, as that's where I'm really letting myself down at the moment.
Regarding the graphing stuff, I nearly have it working (just need to fine-tune the data ranges, then add in some file selection and image scaling options), at which point I'll be able to add the running data onto these posts. I consider this to be cool in a geeky kind of way...
We went on to do about half an hour of something called "Bus Stops", where teams of 3 run with 2 people on the track at once, with one resting. Our team consisted of 2 similar paced runners, and one slower person...I was unfortunately the lead person when I was on track with the slower guy, and so ended up doing both my laps at full pace, while the others got a rest on one lap...
...and if that wasn't enough, we ended up with about 20 minutes of 200m relay sprints, which very nearly killed me. The problem with those is that there was another team of 3 with _very_ similar pacing to ours. It ended up with us racing them round (quite naturally we won :-) )
I'm really enjoying Roadrunners...its a very different challenge to anything I've done before, and its making me push myself a lot harder. I did the Woodley 10K at the weekend, and by my standards did fairly badly, going off too fast, and burning out halfway round. I was chatting to some of the other runners about how their various races went, and blaming one fairly quick guy I tried to stay with at the start (my fault really...I knew he was way faster than me). I have 6 weeks until my next race, and my focus in that time really has to be stamina and endurance, as that's where I'm really letting myself down at the moment.
Regarding the graphing stuff, I nearly have it working (just need to fine-tune the data ranges, then add in some file selection and image scaling options), at which point I'll be able to add the running data onto these posts. I consider this to be cool in a geeky kind of way...
Friday 16 May 2008
Busy Day in the Office?
Had a bit of brainwave last night... A couple of days ago I hacked together a basic graph to post up here showing heart rate zones. I also recently posted up a graph that my Polar gear kicks out showing various statistics. I suddently realised that there was nothing really stopping me from taking the raw Polar data and shoe-horning it into Google Graphs to come up with a dynamic online graph!
I've spent the morning studying the Polar file formats, and hacking out the bits I need, and it now looks like I have a prototype script up and running. At the moment there are a couple of assumptions regarding data ranges, however its not the hardest thing in the world to put in some proper validation. Once thats done I'll have a script that can accept any file from my Heart rate Monitor, and output a nice and pretty graph onto a webpage.
Click here to see the script in action...
I've spent the morning studying the Polar file formats, and hacking out the bits I need, and it now looks like I have a prototype script up and running. At the moment there are a couple of assumptions regarding data ranges, however its not the hardest thing in the world to put in some proper validation. Once thats done I'll have a script that can accept any file from my Heart rate Monitor, and output a nice and pretty graph onto a webpage.
Click here to see the script in action...
Twitter Woes
Been doing a little fiddling to ijy.cc last night, and noticed that twitter.com was down...
I've redone ijy.cc so that rather than having to deal with backend security myself, now I use a number of high profile online services, and instead pull in the content from them into a single "digital footprint". The end result is that my page is currently dependant on;
I then grab the RSS feed for each of these sites, do some fairly simple data manipulation, and throw it into a fairly simple XHTML/CSS template. Its very easy for me to maintain, and also to chuck the stuff out to other places (for example, my Blogger blog also posts to MySite on lack-of...
Twitter being down has the effect of killing ijy.cc, as I haven't bothered with any kind of cacheing, and PHP4 (which 34sp is running on) does not support timeouts on the PHP function running in the background capturing the RSS feeds ( file_get-contents, for those who care... ). So I thought I'd do a bit of checking to see if the Twitter downtime was a common occurance, or just bad luck...
Turns out that they have been struggling for about a year, ever since they "went big" in March '07. So much so that a monitoring site made their downtimes public and gave free access to their downtime reports. I know within my company that our targetted uptime for customer facing systems is in the region of 99.8 % over the space of a year (and if we get anywhere near that everyone starts running round like headless chickens), so 98 % average, and dips as low as 92 % is fairly shocking. Of course, I haven't seen the other feeds go down as yet, however they are all backed up by Googles frankly imposing infrastructure, which suffered a whole 7 minutes of downtime in 2007...
...that said, how can Twitter actually make money to fund their horrendous bandwidth and data centre costs? While their page rank is not massive, behind all that you have loads of user-developed apps throwing data too and from them...it must all add up to one fat pipe somewhere. Becase of the nature of the service (small messages, accessible freely from many 3rd party apps) selling advertising is going to be very hard, unless you plan of irritating your entire userbase by doing mass broadcasting. I really see how they are going to struggle to make money, as quite simply people are not visiting their online real-estate, so they aren't getting the eyeballs. It seems that general internet opinion is that like many other big names out there now (google, facebook, skype etc etc) Twitter can plan a business model once they have the userbase...I suppose we'll have to see, but right now I'm a little skeptical.
Of course, all this doesn't help me much... I like the concept of Twitter, and it fits in with the theory of how I've set ijy.cc up. The box will stay for now, and I'll have to live with Twitter's unreliable uptime, however if it stoops too much worse I may have to look at either a technical solution (cronjob-ing and cacheing the feed, which is what happens on lack-of), or looking for a more reliable alternative to fill my top right-hand corner...
I've redone ijy.cc so that rather than having to deal with backend security myself, now I use a number of high profile online services, and instead pull in the content from them into a single "digital footprint". The end result is that my page is currently dependant on;
I then grab the RSS feed for each of these sites, do some fairly simple data manipulation, and throw it into a fairly simple XHTML/CSS template. Its very easy for me to maintain, and also to chuck the stuff out to other places (for example, my Blogger blog also posts to MySite on lack-of...
Twitter being down has the effect of killing ijy.cc, as I haven't bothered with any kind of cacheing, and PHP4 (which 34sp is running on) does not support timeouts on the PHP function running in the background capturing the RSS feeds ( file_get-contents, for those who care... ). So I thought I'd do a bit of checking to see if the Twitter downtime was a common occurance, or just bad luck...
Turns out that they have been struggling for about a year, ever since they "went big" in March '07. So much so that a monitoring site made their downtimes public and gave free access to their downtime reports. I know within my company that our targetted uptime for customer facing systems is in the region of 99.8 % over the space of a year (and if we get anywhere near that everyone starts running round like headless chickens), so 98 % average, and dips as low as 92 % is fairly shocking. Of course, I haven't seen the other feeds go down as yet, however they are all backed up by Googles frankly imposing infrastructure, which suffered a whole 7 minutes of downtime in 2007...
...that said, how can Twitter actually make money to fund their horrendous bandwidth and data centre costs? While their page rank is not massive, behind all that you have loads of user-developed apps throwing data too and from them...it must all add up to one fat pipe somewhere. Becase of the nature of the service (small messages, accessible freely from many 3rd party apps) selling advertising is going to be very hard, unless you plan of irritating your entire userbase by doing mass broadcasting. I really see how they are going to struggle to make money, as quite simply people are not visiting their online real-estate, so they aren't getting the eyeballs. It seems that general internet opinion is that like many other big names out there now (google, facebook, skype etc etc) Twitter can plan a business model once they have the userbase...I suppose we'll have to see, but right now I'm a little skeptical.
Of course, all this doesn't help me much... I like the concept of Twitter, and it fits in with the theory of how I've set ijy.cc up. The box will stay for now, and I'll have to live with Twitter's unreliable uptime, however if it stoops too much worse I may have to look at either a technical solution (cronjob-ing and cacheing the feed, which is what happens on lack-of), or looking for a more reliable alternative to fill my top right-hand corner...
Thursday 15 May 2008
It can't be good for you...
Roadrunners last night, and another really hard session. It was touted as a "bleep test for endurance running", and it really did work out like that. We had to do 400 metre laps, with a 60 second recovery between each one. You started at your 10k pace (so a 1.38 lap for me) and then each subsequent lap had to be 2 seconds faster... I was running with Harry from work, and we managed to surpass both our expectations, and get down to a lap time of 1.14 before finally failing on the 1.12 attempt.
I reckon that from fresh I could have achieved a faster lap, however as we slowly got faster and faster I could see my heart rate staying high throughout the recovery period, and the last 3 laps we were starting while I was still well over 160-bpm (for reference, my resting heart rate is about 50, and the highest I've ever recorded myself is at 190, while more training is done about 170-175, with race pace at 180'ish...I normally recover pretty quickly down to 120-130). I'm really enjoying the RoadRunner workouts...they are a very different type of training to anything I've done before, and really challenging.
I've got the Woodley 10k this weekend, so after circuits tonight it will be rest and recouperation until Sunday. In theory I'm playing cricket immediately afterwards, which may be an interesting challenge (I use the word "play" in a very loose role...I can't bat, I can't bowl, and whenever I'm in the field my body goes onto autopilot and moves out of the way of highspeed cricket balls...)
Once this weekend is over I really have to step up my distance runs. I reckon 2 runs of 10 miles a week should do for now. One will remain on Monday, and teh other will have to fit in at the weekend, and I suspect that as the temperature rises its either going to be very early morning or stupidly late at night. It will be hard work, however I need to hit the targets...
I reckon that from fresh I could have achieved a faster lap, however as we slowly got faster and faster I could see my heart rate staying high throughout the recovery period, and the last 3 laps we were starting while I was still well over 160-bpm (for reference, my resting heart rate is about 50, and the highest I've ever recorded myself is at 190, while more training is done about 170-175, with race pace at 180'ish...I normally recover pretty quickly down to 120-130). I'm really enjoying the RoadRunner workouts...they are a very different type of training to anything I've done before, and really challenging.
I've got the Woodley 10k this weekend, so after circuits tonight it will be rest and recouperation until Sunday. In theory I'm playing cricket immediately afterwards, which may be an interesting challenge (I use the word "play" in a very loose role...I can't bat, I can't bowl, and whenever I'm in the field my body goes onto autopilot and moves out of the way of highspeed cricket balls...)
Once this weekend is over I really have to step up my distance runs. I reckon 2 runs of 10 miles a week should do for now. One will remain on Monday, and teh other will have to fit in at the weekend, and I suspect that as the temperature rises its either going to be very early morning or stupidly late at night. It will be hard work, however I need to hit the targets...
Monday 12 May 2008
Summer Running
I've been a bit lax since the half marathon, and my mileage has dropped right off. Joining Reading Roadrunners has made me realise just how much I need to do in order to meet my own targets. My weekly mileage is about half what it needs to be, and my weight is slowly, slowly creeping up.
I've got a 10k run this weekend, and I'm fairly certain I'm going to do badly, as my stamina has taken a real hit in the last couple of months. I'm slowly starting to build the distance back up again, and at some point in the near future I plan to add a second long run into my weekly schedule, probably at the weekend. I think both my weekly long runs need to be at least 10 miles in distance, however I'm not used to running in warm weather, and its a real struggle. On the plus side it does open up the river route in the evenings.
When I do my training runs I wear some Polar gear that measures heart rate, altitude and running speed. This in turn kicks out an interactive graph that lets me see how well I did or didn't do. Here is tonights, and it shows that I covered about 13k in an hour, and kept a fairly steady pace throughout. The heat really made it a struggle, and I've imbibed about 2 litres of liquid since then. Hopefully the pain now will translate into improved performance later on in the year...
I've got a 10k run this weekend, and I'm fairly certain I'm going to do badly, as my stamina has taken a real hit in the last couple of months. I'm slowly starting to build the distance back up again, and at some point in the near future I plan to add a second long run into my weekly schedule, probably at the weekend. I think both my weekly long runs need to be at least 10 miles in distance, however I'm not used to running in warm weather, and its a real struggle. On the plus side it does open up the river route in the evenings.
When I do my training runs I wear some Polar gear that measures heart rate, altitude and running speed. This in turn kicks out an interactive graph that lets me see how well I did or didn't do. Here is tonights, and it shows that I covered about 13k in an hour, and kept a fairly steady pace throughout. The heat really made it a struggle, and I've imbibed about 2 litres of liquid since then. Hopefully the pain now will translate into improved performance later on in the year...
Failure to Sunburn
Just had a great few days away in Jersey. We flew out on Thursday, and failed to die in a burning pool of oil (I'm not the greatest flyer in the world). As luck would have it this weekend was Jerseys "Liberation Day" celebrations, and our hotel was right in front of the square where all the celebrations were taking place. The Hotel (Pomme D'or) is actually featured in many of the photos of the event, and it looks like all the speeches etc. were done from the roof of its lobby.
I knew that the channel islands were occupied, however I didn't know that they had been under occupation for a year after France was liberated, or that they were basically turned into concentration camps, and forced labour ran the place. There was a display at the Hougue Bie (forever known as the Huge Bee), which was very stark and shocking, and really brought home what had been done on the islands during the war.
I won't go into all the stuff we did, the photos cover that far better... We were really lucky wit the weather, with just a small bit of rain on the Thursday evening, but other than that it was glorious sunshine, and it was only generous applications of factor 30 (sunblock by Dulux) that kept me from burning to a crisp. Its a lovely place, with a strange mix of English, French and Mediterranean styles. There are no big roads, and everything goes at a fairly leisurely pace. High points were;
Some letdowns;
Can't really think of any others really...pretty good sign over all!
I knew that the channel islands were occupied, however I didn't know that they had been under occupation for a year after France was liberated, or that they were basically turned into concentration camps, and forced labour ran the place. There was a display at the Hougue Bie (forever known as the Huge Bee), which was very stark and shocking, and really brought home what had been done on the islands during the war.
I won't go into all the stuff we did, the photos cover that far better... We were really lucky wit the weather, with just a small bit of rain on the Thursday evening, but other than that it was glorious sunshine, and it was only generous applications of factor 30 (sunblock by Dulux) that kept me from burning to a crisp. Its a lovely place, with a strange mix of English, French and Mediterranean styles. There are no big roads, and everything goes at a fairly leisurely pace. High points were;
- Mont Orguiel Castle - very well displayed, and a real warren of a place
- Durrell Wildlife Park - AKA the zoo. Gorillas and monkeys all over
- The hotel - really nice place, and got us into a room at 9am, which was much needed
Some letdowns;
- Elizabeth Castle - Compared to the Mont very basic, and not really done to its best
Can't really think of any others really...pretty good sign over all!
Wednesday 7 May 2008
Early Morning Insanity
We're off to Jersey tomorrow morning...early tomorrow morning. _Very_ early. The taxi is picking us up at 5am, and as far as I can work out we'll be there before 9...
Fingers crossed that I manage to get some sleep, or I'll be a useless liability at the airport, and I'm not the greatest around planes anyway. Once we are there it should be a good laugh however...we are there for 3 nights, and the weather is finally starting to have a summer-theme to it. This will have been the first proper holiday I've had for a long time, and the first one with Gill as well... I'm quite looking forward to just kicking back and relaxing a bit.
In other things, my motorbike Matilda has been sorted out for summer, with a new chain, clutch cable and working rear brake (oops). The last few days have been good, and I've had the chance to just enjoy screaming round on her again. Really need to give her a clean though, shes a dirty little minx right now. I also need to get to work on the house, and finish off the sections I've started. Really need to sort out that leaking roof as well...
...however right now I should be getting back to work. Expect photos over the weekend (yes, I'm sad, and am taking my laptop).
Fingers crossed that I manage to get some sleep, or I'll be a useless liability at the airport, and I'm not the greatest around planes anyway. Once we are there it should be a good laugh however...we are there for 3 nights, and the weather is finally starting to have a summer-theme to it. This will have been the first proper holiday I've had for a long time, and the first one with Gill as well... I'm quite looking forward to just kicking back and relaxing a bit.
In other things, my motorbike Matilda has been sorted out for summer, with a new chain, clutch cable and working rear brake (oops). The last few days have been good, and I've had the chance to just enjoy screaming round on her again. Really need to give her a clean though, shes a dirty little minx right now. I also need to get to work on the house, and finish off the sections I've started. Really need to sort out that leaking roof as well...
...however right now I should be getting back to work. Expect photos over the weekend (yes, I'm sad, and am taking my laptop).
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