Zman's Diary

BEST. MEAT. EVER. (and Blueberries)

zman — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:07:00 GMT

J & I popped out to Cle Elum last Friday - we were helping out with a race series called Street Scramble. You never know what the traffic is like so we headed out early and arrived with enough time to eat. Cle Elum isn't a very big town so its always hard to know which restaurants are the ones to eat at. Boy did we luck out.

After driving around we settled on Mama Vallones which serves mainly Italian food but has some steaks and prime rib. I decided to get the 8oz prime rib which was around $20 or so. Seems like a bit of a cheap price so I was not expecting the menu claims to hold up:

Indulge yourself with some of the best prime rib you'll ever taste. The Midwest Angus beef is aged a minimum of 21 days. We prepare each rib by expertly trimming excess fat. We season with our own homemade seasoning salt. The ribs are then roasted in our special ALTO SHAMM Prime Rib Oven for a controlled period of time then served to you at its best-almost fork tender and very juicy.

But I was wrong. Damn that was probably the finest prime rib I have ever had. I'm used to picking the fat and chewy bits out (too many Vegas buffets - I know its my own fault).

Now you know The ZMan loves to rant and reserves his praise only for the very best. So if you are ever in Cle Elum and you enjoy eating a nice bit of cow then remember that ZMan's Food Guide gives Mama Vallones 250 stars!!! (out of a maximum 256 - I'm a geek what do you expect)

And while I'm in a praising mood I feel the urge to also point out that Blueberry Hills Farms at Lake Chelan gets a spiffing 200 stars for their blueberry pies (and big points for a funny menu and website). Just the thing you need after doing a Triathlon.

Network Solutions - why do I hate thee?

zman — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:09:00 GMT

Its not just because they think there is something special about domain registration that they can charge more than anybody else. its because every time I have had to deal with them they treat you like they are used car salesmen.

I'm helping a friend transfer a website and domain and I suggested that he use godaddy for the registration and the hosting since its a nice tidy way to do things at a great price. However this meant dealing with Network Solutions. To make sure all the emails went to us I logged into the NS account and changed the contact details to my friend. Immediately NS locked the account because this is 'suspicious'. Even though we had all the right credentials they lock it down for a MONTH.

So now when we try to transfer to GoDaddy even with the right transfer code NS refuse to do the transfer. We can either wait 30 days or, no surprise, we can call them. Of course calling means sitting on hold for a long time and then when you get through you end up talking to salesmen who want to do anything rather than let you go. No surprise suddenly the registration price is a lot cheaper and they will kiss your ass until you give in. This doesn't help since we have already paid GoDaddy to do the transfer. Even worse they can't take the lock off until they 'escalate' which can 'take up to 3 days'.

The REALLY stupid thing is that requiring the phone call doesn't provide any extra security - I've already used the credentials to log into the site and update everything so there is nothing they can ask that wouldn't be available to someone who was trying to steal the domain. SO its pretty obvious why they do this.... retention of customers... sadly its having the opposite effect because it just further convinces me never to use their services and to tell people I know of their craziness.

Honest People and Dishonest People

zman — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:57:00 GMT

2 years ago I lost my wallet. I wasn't 100% sure where I lost it but I had been to 2 parks in the Seattle area. There was less than $50 in there but it did have my drivers license and my green card so I was a little concerned. After half a day of retracing my steps and talking to park rangers I gave up. A couple of days later I went and got a replacement license but found that a replacement green card was $300 so I decided to put that off for a while. A week later I get a phone call from the park service - someone found my wallet in the bottom of a trash can in one of the parks. All the paper money had gone but the ID was still intact.

Of course this meant that I now had 2 valid drivers licenses. They have the same number on them and the dates mean they are both still valid. It turns out its handy to have 2 copies. I can keep one in my wallet and take the other with me for ID when I go running.

About a year ago I did exactly that - went for a run and since I needed gas I took my credit card and tucked it in the pocket with my ID. After I got home all I had was the credit card. The license must have fallen out when I took the card out to pay for gas. I called the gas station and nobody had handed it in. Since you can't actually cancel your license I just had to suck it up and watch out for an ID theft which thankfully never happened.

Today I got a nice letter from a chap at the Seattle Sheriffs department with my missing license. Yes a year after it went missing a postal worker found it in a mail box in front of the gas station where I guessed I had dropped it. I can't believe its been floating around on the ground for a year so I am guessing that somebody found it and dropped it in the mailbox a year ago. It must have dropped to the bottom and was only found eventually by a postal worker who looked carefully.

So to the person who stole my money 2 years ago - YOU SUCK

To the person who found my ID, the postal worker who handed it in, and the police officer who mailed it back to me - YOU ROCK.

TRI-ing it again [groan]

zman — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:28:00 GMT

Those of you paying attention will remember last years triathlon at Lake Chelan. Well it was such good fun (well maybe the wine tasting) that J and I heading out there with some other runner friends for a repeat.

Triathlons vary quite a bit. Seems like the Olympic, Half Iron and Ironman distances are fixed but the sprint distance varies by the mood of the race organizer no matter what wikipedia says. This year had a longer bike ride and the swim was in a different place but it didn't seem like it would be too different.

Last year this was my 'comeback' race after 6 months of injury and recovery - I had plenty of time to practise swimming, biking and was running in pretty fresh legs. This year I think my swimming has been good, not enough bike and its been a while since my last race so my running should be better and stronger..... notice I say SHOULD!

The weekend went well. Saturday was an early start to get to Chelan to see M head off on her Olympic distance triathlon and D & M (different M) on the 10k. Great performances all round including 1st in his age group for D and M barely missed breaking 3 hours in the triathlon. Then some relaxing for the afternoon and racked our bikes ready for an early start the next day. We've herd rumours of the elite or wannabe elite moving bikes if they think they deserve your spot so we rack way at the back where nobody else wants. We go down at 9pm to check and they are right where we left them

7:30am Sunday we head out to set up our transition bags to find out bikes are not where we left them. Some wankers have decided that they are more important than us and moved ours about 6 bikes down in the rack so they can get the position at the end of the row. These bikes are nothing special so its hardly anyone who thinks they are elite. Seems we should have taken the advice and locked our bikes in position. These losers never show their face before and were VERY fast in removing their bikes after the race. I debate letting both tyres down or disconnecting the brakes but that would lower me down to the level of the pond scum that did it in the 1st place. Next time I am taking a cheap bike lock with me and if you move my bike I am going to lock YOURS in place and write the combination on the back of the ladies bathroom door. See how fast your transition is when you have to fight your way past a bunch of women with full bladders.

Before you know its 8:15 and we are off to the start. J has decided its warm enough to not need the wetsuit but I like the extra confidence and most people swear it makes them faster. I don't see how I can improve on last years stunning under 17 minute swim (it usually takes me nearly 20 in the pool) but I'm figuring my run should be a bit better and hope to improve on the transitions.

As usual I start at the back to avoid all the feet and walk the 1st 20 yards while everyone else flounders around like salmon in their death throws. At the 1st buoy I choke down a big mouthful of lake water which throws me a little but I've got a nice even stroke going. There's a buoy line under the water to follow for the middle section though most people don't seem to care and are all over the place. Around the final buoy and I can see the beach. I've not pushed hard this time because I remembered being totally wiped last year but when I get out of the water my watch says 14:04... Yes that's not a typo almost 3 minutes faster than last year. D&M on the beach with the cowbells for me to show my watch to - pretty stupid really as they can't read it as I run by.

Transition feels better than last year. I only had to dry my feet once and I am about to put on my helmet when I hear the cowbells - I wonder who they are ringing them for when suddenly there is J. She started 5 minutes behind me in the women's wave and she is already out of the water. Stunning swim for her too. So I get out her way and jump on the bike. Right out of the start its up hill and I already regret not training more. Once again my computer is not working - that's 2 years in a row - so I just have to try to pace myself by effort. My fast swim has put me in front of a lot of fast racers so I am being passed by guys with stupid pointy hats and solid carbon fibre wheels. They are very encouraging even though they are all thinking "how the hell did a guy on a mountain bike get in front of me". Eventually the passing stops and we get to a short but very evil hill. I go down the gears and then get out of the saddle so I don't have to use granny gear. Quads are burning so bad and I think I'm only about quarter of the way there. Thankfully a nice downhill the other side and suddenly my excess weight plus a heavy bike is worth something and I catch up towards the guys in front of me. Sadly not for very long and then the women (who started 5 minutes behind me) catch up and start passing me. I passed nobody this year :-( Eventually the turnaround point comes and my legs are feeling rough. I've been in my highest gear a lot of the way though so I think I'm doing OK. The ride back seems easier and I see J coming the other way. She's less than a mile behind I reckon. I get back home in 47 minutes so even the extra mile means I was a lot slower than I thought. But I don't think I could have gone any faster.

Dash through the transition and out on the run.... Holy Smokes Batman... I had forgotten this special kind of dead legs. Once again we start up a hill OUCH. I keep running and I'm right around 9:30 at the 1st mile. Not too bad but I can't make my legs move faster. At least they are moving which is more than some folk. At least I pass a few folk here. I'm not feeling too tired just jelly legs. Turnaround and on the way back see J again. Still about a mile behind me so she's having a great race. My legs never really recover but I hold the 9:30 pace and manage to stay under 30 minutes. Even the little sexy outfits and abundance of lycra isn't helping me here. At the last bend there is a big crowd and ALL of them seem to shout my name due to the magic Andy shirt. M&M are on cowbell station #1. Running down to the finish line even the guy on the microphone reads it and calls out my name and somewhere in the crowd is D with cowbell #2. I have no clue where but I could hear them loud and clear dude. Total time 1:37:42.

Lets compare the years shall we? (this is where it gets boring folks!)

Swim	min/100yd	T1	Bike	mph	T2	Run	min/mi	Total Time
00:17:22.900	00:01:59.2	00:05:37.540	00:37:42.920	20.4	00:01:42.920	00:28:10.030	00:09:05.2	01:30:36.31
00:14:17.900	00:01:38.0	00:05:03.000	00:47:28.700	16.6	00:01:37.400	00:29:15.100	00:09:26.2	01:37:42.1

Last year was a 20k (12.4 mile bike) this year was a 13.1 mile bike. Correcting based on speed that would add 1:58 to the 2007 time for a total of 1:32:34 so I was still 5 minutes slower. But STUNNING swimming improvement and I felt very very easy. Transition 1 was a little quicker but still sucks. The bike bit me hard for some reason. Last year I was surprised to average over 20mph but this year I was shocked to have dropped that much speed. T2 about the same and then I even lost a minute on my run. Heck that's what I'm supposed to be good at!

2007: 11/13 in my age group
2008: 8/10 in my age group
So that seems about the same - I am a year older but I ought to be fitter too.

Swim: 2007 5/13, 2008 6/10 - 3 minutes faster and further down the field!
T1: I don't even want to talk about this. I'm on the last page of the results here. Pathetic.
Bike: 2007 13/13, 2008 9/10 - so much slower but an improvement on place? Odd
T2: 2007 6/13, 2008 7/10
Run: 2007 4/13, 2007 7/10 - amazing the difference 1 minute makes.

So some room for improvement if I want to do better at this in the future. I (WE) really need new bikes - ours are so heavy and I run out of gears at the high end fairly often. Please Santa?

Twitter is NOT........

zman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

A way for you to chat 1 on 1 with a buddy...... there are already plenty of applications for you do that.
A way to notify us of your blog post.... this is a well solved problem
A discussion area.... there are much better places to do this
A place for you to let us know every time you belch, fart, perspire or breathe... I wish there was a limit to # posts per hour for those people who love the sound of their own twitters

Phonebooks are a waste of paper

zman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:29:00 GMT

I just got my new copy of Dex and it went right into the recycle bin. What a waste of money charging advertisers (I'm pretty sure all the yellow page directories are paid for by ads), chopping down a few thousand trees and paying some guy a lot of salary and gas money to drive round the entire town delivering them. Internet usage is fairly prevalent these days so it seems that its about time for phone books to become an opt-in service. Print them for the people who want them.

What's really sad is that the French worked this out many years ago by giving people a free 'online' terminal to access Minitel in exchange for not getting the white pages.

They didn't even bother sending me the small phone book which at least has the advantage of fitting nicely in my car. Yes I know I contradicted myself there but while I am pervasively online at home I'm so far resisting the urge to be online the rest of the time by paying an addition $30 a month on my phone. Bad geek!

I'm officially a Northwesterner

zman — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:46:00 GMT

It took almost 12 years but since I now own a Subaru Outback with a Yakima rack on the top I think I qualify as someone 'from around these parts'. I really should get myself a recumbent bicycle and some hemp underwear I suppose.

Pemco did a whole series of ads on this subject - thankfully almost all of those don't apply to me. Here's a good competiton... Which of those stereotypes do you think apply to me? I would say 2 of them apply and one of them used to apply.

Hard Drive 'End of days'

zman — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:14:00 GMT

Was it really only April when I last had to talk about drive failures and backups. Well here we are in May its happened again. Different machine, different hard drive and a more spectacular death.

Yesterday afternoon I had several very odd 'hangs'. IE would just stop responding and lock up for several minutes. Outlook emails would pause for a couple of minutes before they would send and downloading new email was taking forever. I rebooted a couple of times to try to clear it and it kept happening. I did notice on reboot I would get a strange 'strangulated' noise from the computer. I tried to listen to where it was coming from but it would last less than second and everything was working.

Finally last night it just got crazy. Nothing was working. Everything was hanging and I couldn't open the Storage Manager to see if there was a hard drive problem. So I opened to case up and pulled the drives out and rebooted. No noise... dammit not sure which drive is failing. There's no clicking or ticking that I am used to but then a sudden thump and the machine hangs. Won't reboot properly either. So I pull the power on the data drive and now it reboots. Dammit.

So once the traffic cleared this morning I headed off to Fry's again to get me a new drive. While I was waiting I took the opportunity to reinstall Vista as I had hit my limit of OS crap. Right now I'm copying all the files from my server backup to the new drive. 138,578 items - 3 hours it says!!! Man I have a lot of stuff.

My backup software doesn't cope with open files and I don't always remember to close outlook when i go to bed so I think my email backup is a couple of days old which is a big shame. The old drive is deader than a dead thing. It doesn't even appear to spin up. So time to try the quick feezer trick to see if I can get that one PST file. Otherwise I can live with a few missed emails.

Suppose I need to check if the drive is under warranty too. At least I might get a spare out of the deal.

Where do they put all the bits?

zman — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:06:00 GMT

I got a new GPS unit last week in the REI sale. It came with a DVD of all the TOPO maps of the USA and a 128Mb microSD card. Well that's pretty small these days so I popped down to Fry's to get a bigger one.

Its simply stunning to think that this has 4Gb memory. I don't even see the point of buying anything less than 4Gb at the moment because its so cheap. When I think of all the 16K ram packs from the ZX81 days its really quite stunning. J was equally impressed and its not like her to be impressed by small things . I feel like I could be a spy or something and fill it with secret blue prints and then smuggle it inside a button or something very James Bond. Heck its totally swallowable though I don't suspect the manufacturing covers stomach acid and I don't facy the idea of finding it.

The real problem now is what the hell do I do with the 8Mb, 16Mb CF cards I have sitting around. I think I have a 512Mb microdrive that I paid a small fortune for 10 years ago. I need to find a hobby where the price of things goes UP not down.

DRM vendors thanks for shutting down...

zman — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:14:00 GMT

[Wow 2 posts in one day and neither about running!]

There are a lot of people out there who hate DRM with a passion. I'm not one of them. I understand that its a necessary evil in a world where most people will get something for nothing if they possibly can. Though I disagree with some of the high profits and salaries that some entertainers and entertainment companies get there is a reason we all lock our doors at night - to stop people taking what is not theirs. The entertainment industry is no different other than its far easier to steal content than it is to take my TV.

However this doesn't mean there are not some parts of DRM that annoy me and I just had to spend my valuable time working around some of this. You see I supported MSN Music when they first went live and I purchased my 99c tracks from them. I was a bit annoyed when one day I tried to go to the site and was told they were shutting down. They sent me over to Urge which was mildly annoying. They promised that the DRM validation that happens would continue to work... but for how long? Since Urge is owned by MTV I figured they were a pretty safe bet for the future. Of course I was wrong and at some point Urge was shut down and we were all sent over to Rhapsody. At least my login from Urge works there but wait a moment whats this? I need to download the Rhapsody player? I cant use them in Media Player where all my other music is. No I don't care if there are workarounds.... you just lost my business.

In the last month I got a Zune - mainly to try out the XNA Game Studio development platform but since I've never had an Ipod it was an opportunity for me to join the cool kids. Zune software has to be installed to sync which is pretty annoying again but at least it picks up my media library.... well almost. Ripped CDs are there but nothing from MSN Music or from Urge. Woo hoo for DRM. So I can't sync my DRM songs to the Zune from Media player because the Zune team and the Media Player team have some sort of ongoing feud to ensure there are multiple ways to do everything in Windows. AND I can't sync my songs from the Zune software because it doesn't understand any DRM other than the Zune store stuff.

Now I could spend half a day finding out if I'm an idiot and there is a way to do this but the easiest way was to burn all the DRM music to multiple CDs and then rip them all back in. Now Zune is happy and all works again with my songs.

Of course the chance of me buying stuff from Zune Store is pretty low expecially since Amazon appears to be happy to sell me unprotected MP3s and I suggest you do the same. The Zune pass stuff is vaguly interesting but there are so many 'just another $9.99 a month' things out there for me to spend my money on and thats more then I generally spend on music anyway.

Digital paper still isn't good enough

zman — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Today I got an email from the ACM regarding the ACM queue magazine I get as part of my membership. Seems that they are not going to print the paper copy any more. The reasons they give sound like they paid a marketing consultant to come up with them:

"In response to a growing demand to offer a richer, more robust online presence"
"in response to a changing business environment for specialized print magazines"

Whilst I can appreciate the first point its certainly no reason to drop the print issue. The second point I suspect actually means "we are not making enough (any) profit on this 'free' magazine even though its usually full of paid ads". Now I certainly don't see why any business should continue to make a product if there is no money in it for them but this is one of those times that you should just come out and say it.

The problem, for me, is that for me magazines are some of the few times I am away from the computer. I spend most of my day in front of one of my machines so in bed, in the little boys room, on a plane etc are the places where I catch up. Whilst I could take my laptop to those places its not as portable as a paper magazine (and you can't tear it up into little square if you are out of toilet paper!).

I've seen a couple of magazines go this way in the last few years so I suspect its a trend which is going to catch on. Several of the magazines I read regularly are already offered in a digital version though oddly enough like e-books very few of them are offered cheaper. For example Reader Digest Paper costs $1.25 per issue. Readers Digest Kindle Edition costs $1.25 per issue. I doubt if electronic delivery can be more expensive that physical delivery and I'm sure that the electronic copy has all the same ads so where is the savings to me? Come on Amazon make it worth my while if you want me to pay $400 for your Kindle.

Even worse it appears that every magazine publisher wants you to read the magazine THEIR way. Some I have tried have their own viewer applications, others let you download PDFs of the magazine which are great if you have a 17"+ monitor to read it on. Amazon appears to have a proprietary format which means that right now there is almost no magazines or newspapers available. I suspect the range of books is equally a small percentage of the total out there though it looks like they are somewhere around 80k books which should be enough to keep people busy for a while.

The final failure point for me is a lack of color. Magazines add a lot of value with diagrams and images and right now there's no color devices out there. Hopefully this will change soon - there is speculation on several. Sadly its hard to see all of these in one place to know what form factor is good and what display size will work for you. Resolution and contrast are improving over older models but we are still a long way from the paper printing so having a screen that is smaller than the average current book doesn't cut it for me. I'm so tempted to order a Kindle but my gut feel is that it will annoy me and not give me $400 worth of value.

A quick trip to Vancouver

zman — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:34:00 GMT

Time for another running story - with tales of lycra and nasty smells abound.

For the second time my running group headed North from Seattle to the frozen wastes of Canada and a the city with one of the worst traffic systems I have ever seen. I swear that they randomly change which streets are one way and which are not every time I visit and with no turn lanes and badly synchronized traffic lights you need to ensure you are on the correct side of the street if you intend to get anywhere.

For those long time readers you may remember that Vancouver was the site of my 1st marathon 2 years ago. Yesterday I was running the shorter half marathon. Its only been 3 weeks since my 50k and although I am recovered well day to day pushing my legs too hard in a race increases injury risk and, as I found, finds all the aches and pains that are not really recovered.

Last time in Vancouver it rained heavily but we awoke Sunday morning to a clear sunny day. As usual an early start so we walked down to the start around 6am and checked our bags and went to the start line. Vancouver is a nice race and generally well organized but they have no pace markers at the start line so everyone including the walkers decides its OK to stand near the front. It took me 6 minutes to cross the start and I was passing walkers for 2 miles. Come on marathon organizers PLEASE put up big signs asking the walkers to start from the back.

Considering the potential of tired legs I was not sure if I should go for it on this race but after the 1st mile I was doing pretty well so I figured I'd just keep going. The sun was out and directly on us so it was warming up. But the really odd thing was that I could still see my breath and the air seemed chilly. Lots of twists and turns so sunglasses on and off and on and off again. My pace started well and seemed pretty even for the 1st half of the race 9:38, 9:05, 9:08, 8:59, 9:07, 9:04 and hitting the half way point at exactly 1 hour. I was quite surprised that it had gone so well. If I could keep up this pace there was a pretty good chance of running sub 2:00. I'd not got to the only hill yet but things seemed to be going well. But it seems that my body had some other ideas. Right after the half way point my legs seemed to remember the 50k.... it would seem that an hour was all they were prepared to give me for free and they started feeling heavy and I started to slow. Miles 7 and 8 were 9:30 and 9:58 (though mile 8 I think had a water AND gu stop in there so its not quite as bad as it looks).

Right after mile 8 begins the slow climb up and over the Lion's Gate bridge. Exactly at the time my legs need something more optimistic. Oh well - its not that big or long so I shorten my strides and use my considerable marathon experience to get me up there... you know what this means right? Yes its time for more "ZMans's rules of Lycra"....

From Seattle 2007 we already have one and the hill in Vancouver has contributed 3 new ones...

Underwear: There are 3 kinds of underwear allowed under lycra shorts - granny/big pants, thong/g-string, nothing! If you must wear regular underwear that cuts your buttocks in half remember that whilst its tough to see the problem in jeans or a skirt the lycra shorts will accentuate your now very visible 4 butt cheeks and anonymous marathon runners will mock you. This shall be known as a muffin-butt.
Color: Grey/Silver looks the best if you can pull it off. Black is best if you shouldn't be wearing lycra but insist on it
Gender: If you have the ass of the average 55 year old guy then you need to switch from lycra, lose some weight or wear a longer shirt. Dude you got me moving up the hill faster than any of the cute lady bottoms today just so I could be past you!!!
Length: Shorty short lycra pants are a little 'cheeky' but can be quite hill inspiring on the right people. Sadly it appears that not many of those people run at my speed in races. Folks not everyone can be Daisy Duke. Here's the test: Wear your shorts one day and show 3-4 of your close male friends. Watch their reactions.... it should be pretty obvious if you should inflict that on several thousand people.

So back to the hill. I'm huffing and puffing my way up and seeing my sub 2:00 race disappear and coming to terms with it when I hear someone call my name. Its S from my running group who is having an awesome run. She seems as shocked to see me as I am to see her. After a pretty breathless conversation about being close to 2:00 pace (a HUGE PR for her) I let her know that my legs are very heavy and I am going to be no use to help pace her in to the finish and tell her to get on and go for it and off she goes. My legs are very jealous. Approaching the top I see she has taken a short walk break and I am catching up. I'm glad of someone to chase to take my mind off things so as we go down the hill my extra weight gives me a bit of an advantage and I catch her around mile 9.5 after putting in a 10:11 mile - my slowest of the race.

The down hill has been very kind to me and I'm feeling pretty good again. We are slightly off 2:00 pace but I start to convince myself that between the two of us we can do it. So I keep up the pace and S comes with me and we hit mile 10 in 8:32. Everything is looking good and we need to run a 27 minute 5k to break 2:00 which means its going to be close. Then the flat runs out and the very slightly up hill whips my legs into submission once again. I can tell I'm slowing so I tell S to run her race and go break 2 hours while I start to play those mind games that happen at the end of a race.

I keep her in sight for a short time and then I blink and she is lost in the crowd. Mile 11 is 8:51 and mile 12 I slow back to 9:30 when I take a slightly extended water stop. At mile 12 I decide that if I REALLY push it I can still do a respectable time so I ignore the heavy legs and knock out an 8:08 and scream down to the finish. It feels really good passing lots of people and for a minute I wonder if I will catch S but I never see her till after the end. My final time 2:01:06 which I think is my 3rd fastest half if you don't include my crazy split in Seattle. (S by the way was just slightly over 2:00 - an awesome time and 10+ minute PR for her).

We head off to meet the crew. D finished his 1st 8k and got 2nd place in his age group! Out come the cow bells to cheer in the rest of the gang. 1st half marathon finishes for A, C and M - 2nd half and a PR for J even though she's not been feeling great all week. I think a PR for M (a different M - there are too many people I run with called M) too. Finally Coach N running the full and finally finishing Vancouver which for various reasons has eluded her. She ran the 50k with me 3 weeks ago so no surprise she found this one quite hard. I'm glad she recommended I only ran the half!

After the race some beers and great fish & chips at an English pub and a chocolate waffle for dessert afterwards. Mmmmmmm

Oh and I missed blogging about the smells. I passed a couple of guys who just stank.. now I'm not one who thinks you should shower BEFORE a half marathon but jeez people there's no need to hold off for a week. This is a crowded sport near the start. J also found a couple of stinkers on her run.

And finally my favourite guy was a guy who had 'Happy Star Wars day - May the 4th be with you' on his T-Shirt. (For those who didn't click the link its goes to 'Wookie-pedia')

The luck of the British

zman — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:03:00 GMT

Yes I know its supposed to be the Irish but I'm not sure what is lucky about a country famous for a Potato Famine. While the big data drive was in the freezer I booted up the server to see what shape the rest of it was in and to my surprise I found that I was so lazy that I had left the databases in their default location on the C drive. So I have lost none of my databases.

This evening I headed off down to Frys to get some new storage hardware. I got a 1Tb Sata hard drive for $199. That's just amazing to me... I remember paying 3-400 pounds for a 10Mb hard drive for my Atari ST in 1990 and I never filled that up.

To solve the problem of backup up the backup machine and to keep a safe copy I also purchased a external 1Tb drive for $189.

Took no time to get them installed. Now I need to find some software to do backups. I don't care for image based ones - I just need something that copies files. I suppose I can do it with a robocopy script but that sounds like more work than I want when I'm sure there is a shareware product out there. I used Second Copy 2000 for many years so I should give their new version a look see. All I want is some UI and a tool that only copies updates and doesn't steal too much CPU or disc time.

The final bit of luck was opening up the music folder and realising that due to some (Vista?) magic the folder was marked for sync which means that all my ripped music was actually stored locally somewhere too. A simple copy back up to the server and that was all fixed.

So all I lost was my old backups - no problem since I dont need them and have a new one now - and the ReplayTV movies which are not important... maybe those will show up on the frozen drive in the morning.

NICE!

Is it important enough to back up?

zman — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:29:00 GMT

I admit to being a smug bastard when it comes to backups. I've managed to keep backups of all/most my data intact for close to 10 years now. At its worst I would copy the important stuff onto floppy once a month or so but for the last few years I had regular backups copying data to a server. Sure it didn't cover me in the worst case of a fire but in those cases I have backups of photos with my family in the UK.

When people tell me they lost data due to hard drive crashes I would say "at least it wasn't important stuff" and they would say "yes it was" to which my response was always "If it wasn't important enough to backup then it couldn't possibly be that important".

Well today it looks like you can all be smug back to me....

A few months ago I notice my home server making a funny clicking noise and when I rebooted it wouldn't come up. I switched my backups to a USB drive while I got round to fixing it. Turns out the hard drive is toast (and 6 months out of warranty). I've tried it in 2 machines in a vain hope I could get to it.

No worries eh? I've lost nothing important?

Well it seems that at some point I decided to copy all my ripped CDs and downloaded music to the server since that was where the big hard drive was and so I could access the music from multiple machines. Of course that meant that there now was no backup of that data. I still have all the CDs so all is not lost other than my time. The downloaded music are from the now defunct MSN Music and the now 'merged with Rhapsody' Urge so I have no clue if I can ever get those back. Thankfully I burned a few of them to a CD for a road trip so I think I may be saved again.

Also on there were a load of movies that I had collected using my Replay TVs and stored using DVArchive. Again a shame but nothing I can't eventually get back from TV or rent from NetFlix.

But the real flaw in my system and the one I should have known better because I spent 10+ years of my career making sure other people did it right is my SQL Server. When I set it up it was really there just to help me play with websites or restore backups. It wasn't for production usage. But at some point I installed AxoSoft OnTime as a trial and then I started using it to store important things and I never set up any kind of backup.

So everyone after 3...... 1-2-3.... "It couldn't have been important otherwise you would have had a backup"

The data on there is certainly not important enough to warrant paying thousands of dollars to some data recovery team to get it back but its a serious pain in my ass.

Right now the hard drive is in my freezer even though I think that 'urban myth' only works in certain cases and the click, click, click head move of death doesn't seem to be one of them.

[edit: Seems like I am lucky and got away with it even without the freezer trick]

How to be annoying at a conference

zman — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:26:00 GMT

Last week was the annual(ish) MVP Summit here in Seattle and as a regular observer of idiotic behaviour there was no shortage of things for me to watch out for.

When there is free food its there for you to stock up your hotel room with. To the MVP who was loading his bag and pockets with candy bars and potato chips. I know you are out of pocket because Microsoft only covered 4 nights in a nice hotel and fed you for 4 days and made you pay your own airfare but seriously how much candy will you have to steal to make up the difference.
See the silver thing sticking out of the wall in your hotel bathroom - its called a shower and some people (that means you!) need to use it every day. Conferences are places where lots of people are in very close contact and when we have to sit next to you on the bus or in a talk its pretty rough. (Thankfully this wasn't a problem with the DirectX guys I spent most of the time with)
Its pretty obvious they are filling all the buses every day. So sitting on the inside seat, putting your laptop bag on a seat, pretending to be asleep are just plain rude. Though I guess if you know you smell bad you were probably saving someone from a rough bus ride.
Stop asking stupid and long questions to the keynote speakers there is a limited amount of time and though you will disagree IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU even if you did get an MVP award.

If the previous 3 people have asked about sharepoint and groove then sit down - the rest of the room doesn't want another one
Nobody cares about where you are from, when you started developing or how much you want Steve Ballmer to kiss your ass
Get to the point.... when your question takes 5 minutes and the speaker answers in 20seconds you should get the hint that maybe you went on too long.
If you are smart enough to have written your question down in advance then read it and shut up - don't read it and then keep reiterating the same question 4 more times.

Its the MVP summit people - not a celebration of Canada day. Guys we love your enthusiasm but its getting a little much when you take over the keynote question time with your marketing stunts.
Conference organizers - try to get internet access sorted out. You know exactly how many people are coming and its a geek conference so assume 90% of them will be trying to get online.

Make sure you put the session evaluation questionnaire on the internet where nobody can access it because the connections are so slow.