BOFHJournal - April 2015

1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

March's Journal
May's Journal

30/04/2015 [16:55] Last night's outing wasn't super terrible, but it leads me to believe that unless something magical happens we're going to get soundly beaten at the regatta on Sunday. I'll be trying my hardest, as will everyone else in the boat, but not counting me (who will only be on a second outing since February, the first being last night, so I'm definitely not rowing at my best) it just doesn't feel like the crew has the togetherness, strength, or preparedness/maturity to put in a useful performance. Not, as I said, an issue per se, as we'll still all try our hardest and it'll be a very useful experience for everyone, including the very novice cox, but there are going to be some very strong, well-drilled, and experienced crews racing... and we're not one of them. Such is life. It's also going to be a very long day with an early start and a late evening. We'll just have to see how it goes. I don't think the weather's going to be all that great either, but it might brighten up. We've one more outing this evening, which I'll try not to coach from the boat again like last night, and then we'll see what happens. I've asked everyone to come down a little earlier so that we can get off the water a little earlier than last night. This will hopefully mean I get to have a little bit of an evening with Rachel before she goes away to India for a week on Sunday. We'll have to see what happens there, too. Nothing going on at work today. It was actually quite dull. Although I did have a useful conversation with my operations manager about systems management and stuff. Something interesting might come of that in the future.

29/04/2015 [17:20] So last night's erg went as well as could be expected. I picked a 2K split time equal to one which would have gotten me my 2K PB and tried to stick to it for the duration of the Widowmaker session we did. I managed to maintain it for all but the hardest/later sprints. I'm definitely not built for sprinting at the moment. Had we been doing a 3 hour erg I'm sure I would have been up there with the fitter rowers, but right now I'm just not adapted for rowing/erging. This may make tonight and tomorrow evening's (I'm not needed to sub into tomorrow morning's) outings interesting. Frankly I think more than anything else it's my hands that're going to suffer the most. At least it doesn't seem to be raining, as that would really cause my hands to be a complete mess. As it is I'm going to Wallingford Regatta on Sunday after two outings with the crew I'll be racing with (M2), and probably nursing a few pretty unpleasant blisters. Still, the chances are we'll only be racing once (over the 2K course) so I'll just tape everything up and deal with the seven or so minutes of unpleasantness that may occur if my hands aren't up to this week's rowing. We'll see. Nothing much out of the ordinary happening on the work front today. I managed to get a purchase order done on a day that the secretary doesn't normally do POs, which was a fairly major achievement, but other than that its just been the usual grind. Nothing much happening tomorrow other than my second outing of the week in the evening, then Rachel being there when I get home (which will be awesome). Hopefully the hard drive I ordered will have arrived, but I doubt it. It looks like a lovely evening outside at the moment (a complete change from earlier on in the day when it was hammering down with rain). Here's hoping it stays like that while I'm messing about in boats again.

28/04/2015 [17:05] I'm back from London. Rachel did really well in the marathon. A huge PB, and other than the usual aches and pains her feet are fine, and I'm sure that by the middle of the week she'll be fine and dandy. I also think her marathon was harder than mine, so I'm of the opinion that she might have gone even faster if she'd done the same marathon as me. Anyway, I headed to London on Saturday and met her and her parents in the evening. Walking around was pretty tough for me although at some points my shin was fairly relaxed. We headed back to Croydon after a last big carbohydrate meal for Rachel. In the morning we both headed back into London for the race. After parting company at London Bridge I checked us into our hotel for the evening and then made my way out to Canada Water to watch her run past at the 9 and 11 mile points. She was right on time, which was great to be able to work out when I needed to be where after I realised that. However, waiting around at the first passing point I got pretty cold. Moving on from there to the second, and then heading back onto the Tube to Canary Wharf I got a little lost and wasn't able to see her at one of my anticipated points, instead having to stand with makeshift earplugs right in front of "the loudest point on the route"'s speakers. Rachel didn't hear me, let alone see me. I moved on and made it to the 23ish mile point and was able to get a good photo of her looking strong as she passed before making my way to St James's Park and finding her shivering and stiff with her finishers medal and goody bag. I was able to guide her back to the hotel her parents had been staying it and we got some food inside of her before too long. After that it was just a case of getting the Tube to our hotel and her into the jacuzzi in the spa for an hour or so before a dinner and a moderately early bed due to us both being absolutely shattered (oddly, I think perhaps me more than her). Monday was a day off for us both and started slowly with a leisurely breakfast, a wander around an outdoor shop or two to get me some new shoes (I hadn't realised just how bad the ones I were wearing had gotten, despite achilles rubs from walking across London the previous day), a massage in the hotel's spa for Rachel while I reintroduced myself to the erg (more on that in a moment), and then a visit to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum. Just time for a nice mid-afternoon lunch kind of thing and then we headed back to Croydon for a late afternoon of watching stuff and a delivery curry. I had to be in work fairly early this morning so I was up and out of the house for around 05:55. After some ticket refund failure in Croydon I tried again once back here and was able to get it done, thank goodness. Long story, not worth telling. By the time I got to work though (on time for what I needed to do) someone had already done it, which sort of meant I could have had another few minutes in bed, but frankly it was quite useful to get the trains I did from a rush hour point of view. Now it's the end of the working day and I'm going to be heading down to the boat house for my first proper rowing training session since the beginning of the calendar year. I'm starting with a session called the "widowmaker" which is going to be deeply unpleasant. Honestly, I'm not sure it's going to be a good advert for how fit I was leading up to the marathon (if the erg I did on Monday is anything to go by), even though I know running fitness and rowing fitness are quite different with regard to how the body remakes itself. I just have to bully it into being ready for a regatta this coming weekend (unless I'm not going, I don't know), and be able to deal with the rather short window I have to try and get back into the top boat before Henley Royal Regatta without injuring myself. Here's hoping!

24/04/2015 [15:25] Another day, another small incremental improvement in my shin muscle. I did another watt bike session last night. A little further, a little faster. All seems well there. I'm just waiting as long as possible before I get back on an erg again in case it's not good for my shin. All change on Tuesday next week though. Sadly, this'll be after the training camp which started yesterday and goes all the way through until Sunday, but that can't be helped. I needed the time off. This weekend it's Cormac's birthday. Hopefully we'll do something fun tomorrow before I head to London to meet Rachel and her parents for dinner. Sunday it's the London Marathon and I'll be aiming to see Rachel a good few times on the route if things go according to plan. Then there'll be a meal with her and her parents again, then we check into a nice hotel for her to recover for the evening and night. I've booked her a massage the following day (Monday, which we have off like last Monday for me), and then we'll go back to her place for the remainder of the day and I'll wait on her hand and foot. Tuesday is therefore a bit of an early start for me, but hopefully I should be able to get to work in time. It's possible I may not, so have set up the thing that needs to happen for someone else to deal with if necessary. Anyway, that's about it for me for this week. A short one, with another short one to come. I'll let you know how everything turns out when I'm back on Tuesday.

23/04/2015 [16:25] Shin feels a tiny bit better again today. I guess this is how it's going to be; small improvements every time I get out of bed. It's pretty disappointing that I'm not 'fit' enough to go to the rowing training camp which started today and which goes on until Sunday afternoon (although I would have had to have left on lunch time on Saturday to get to London for Rachel's marathon the following day). The weather is perfect (perhaps a little too hot and sunny, people are going to get dehydrated and sun burned), and although the accommodation has been messed up a little, everyone should still have a great time. Still, I imagine my body does actually needs a proper week off before I throw it into the deep end with rowing training. Although to be honest I'm not entirely sure how successful I'm going to be this year with the rowing. I feel like I've probably missed too much training at this point to be a useful rower (especially in the top boat, which is where I'd prefer to be). We'll just have to see what happens from next Tuesday when I officially get back into things. It was an earlyish start today for PHP updates to the main live web servers. Everything went perfectly, and I was done by 08:15. Since then its been another one of those bitty days. I haven't walked around as much as I should have to keep my shin loose, but I did get some resistance band material from the physio yesterday, so I've been using that while I sit at my desk. Rachel's here this evening, so I'm off early to get a quick 40 min or so done on the watt bike before popping to Tesco, then going home to try and make the house at least a little bit more presentable.

22/04/2015 [18:55] I'm not sure why I've stayed so late at work. probably because Rachel is too, I don't know. Anyway, I wasn't in early this morning, but I did spend the whole morning patching and rebooting servers. Theoretically, the patching process I started in December of last year is now over... except that most of the machines that've been patched are now almost as out of date patch-wise as they were before I patched them given how long things have taken. I'll have to start all over again very soon. On top of that my left shin wasn't all that much better this morning either, so other than the cycle to work (and last night's 30km on the watt bike) things haven't been great when I've been using it to get around. I headed to the physio at lunch time today and had the equivalent of a meat tenderising hammer used on it (physio's fingers and full body weight), so I'm going to see how it feels to walk on when I get up from my desk to go home as soon as I've done this entry. I've also done a lot of planning for watching Rachel do the London Marathon this weekend. Whether or not it all comes off we'll have to see, but I'm going to try, given how well she did at cheering me on in Manchester. Right, I guess that's it. I'm in for 08:00 tomorrow to do some upgrades of PHP and stuff, but otherwise it should be a fairly standard day. I'll do another watt bike session in the evening at a deserted boat house as pretty much everyone will be at the training camp, which I almost wish I was going on.

21/04/2015 [17:10] I'm back! And with a new marathon personal best. But also a horrible, horrible case of shin splints (hopefully nothing worse than that) back in my left leg. I'm basically crippled at the moment. But anyway, let me tell you about the weekend. Things weren't going well gastro-intestinally for most of the time between Friday and Saturday evening. I was beginning to worry so much I thought about medicinal solutions to the problem. On top of that my left shin was aching gently, which made me worry about how bad it was going to be on the run itself. So anyway, I got to London on Saturday around lunch time and met Rachel at Euston where I was sitting out on the grass, eating lunch. The train to Manchester was fine, although we'd been allocated seats sitting opposite each other so had to sneak into some 'airline' seats and balance the laptop on the tray table to watch things. Being at my parents with Rachel was lovely. Everyone got on really well, and it being a race weekend for me meant that everyone was trying not to stress me, which made for a very calm and relaxed evening for the most part. Dinner was just what I needed, too. Sunday morning (after a moderately poor night's sleep) went mostly smoothly, although it turned out that we hadn't left in time to get to the car park at the football ground before the roads closed, which meant that my expensive car park ticket was useless. It also meant that my father had to drop Rachel and I off short of the race village and then spend over an hour and a half looking for somewhere to park. He managed it, and even saw me twice on the route, which was smashing. I saw my mother twice, too, which was great as well. She stayed close to home, but I ran past her twice at around 11 and 16 miles. Rachel was awesome though. She managed to get around on the tram (and run about 5km) so well that she saw me seven times (the last time running alongside me for a significant amount of time). She also saw me walk twice and stop once to stretch out calf cramps, which was a bit disappointing. I've still yet to run a complete marathon, which bothers me probably more than it should. In any event I'm very grateful for all the support I got from everyone. Happily, even with the worries about shin splints and stomach issues, walking and stopping during the actual race, and discovering I'd bled through my sock and stained my right shoe with a blister, I managed a new PB of 3:10:46. Quite pleasing, and probably a good reflection of my training plan (although I think I could have gotten at least 3:07:00 if I hadn't walked or stopped at all. After the race I ended up in the medic tent getting my foot dealt with and then hobbled to find Rachel and my father. As the car was so distantly-parked Rachel and I went home on the tram (beating my father back) and I spent the rest of the day relaxing and feeling my shin splints begin to return in force. We stayed the night and got a leisurely train home on Monday around midday. By this time my shin was almost unwalkable on, even if the rest of me felt moderately OK. Things have just gotten slightly worse or stayed the same since then. Walking from Euston to Kings Cross was a nightmare, cycling home from the station just about OK, shopping in Tesco possible only because I had a trolley to lean on, and the stairs at home a real problem. Rachel did her second last run before London this coming weekend, and I sat on the sofa and tried to do some massaging of my leg. Things were just as painful this morning, with cycling into work being just about tolerable, but staircases and a lunchtime walk being rather uncomfortable and causing me to lean heavily on bannisters and walls when my leg would give way. I haven't taken an ibuprofen today, but I might tomorrow if the discomfort is just as bad. It's frustrating as other than this injury I feel almost completely ready to resume rowing training. I feel like the race was a 95% success and I'm pleased (I am, really), but not totally over the moon. Maybe next marathon I'll manage to run it all and achieve my maximum potential. I guess I did this time too, but I think there's a few more minutes in the tank, somewhere. We'll see where I end up next year, perhaps... Hopefully with the wonderful Rachel running with me. For now I'm off to the boat house for a gentle watt bike session in the hopes that'll loosen up my shin a bit before tomorrow lunch time's physio session.

17/04/2015 [17:10] After meeting Rachel at the train station we cycled home via getting a few small bits and bobs to eat at Tesco. Then there was food, and relaxing. Disappointingly, I didn't sleep very well and woke some time around 03:45, whch wasn't helpful. Hopefully the next two nights will be a lot better. My calf/shin wasn't feeling excellent, but massaging it a bit - and getting up and walking about now and then - seemed to help it a little such that I was able to run for 30 minutes fairly gently (as far as I was concerned) at lunch time. I ran down to the running track about five minutes from my workplace and went around it a half-dozen times or so, then ran back to work again. My last run (or exercise of any kind) before Sunday morning's marathon. I'm trying not to think about it, to be honest with you. I imagine that would lead to tension. Which is absolutely what I don't want if I'm going to be able to get the distance done. The shin/muscle ached. But I think not enough to stop me getting through the first 8km or so, at which point it should have relaxed somewhat. I'm still debating taking ibuprofen beforehand, as I did last year for a different injury when running Paris. I guess I'll see on Sunday morning. Anyway, I'm off now. Home for the evening, then bed. A gentle morning tomorrow, then on the train to London to meet Rachel, and a second train up to Manchester and seeing my parents. I'll be running Sunday morning, recovering Sunday afternoon (I hope), and then coming back home on Monday. No work until Tuesday morning, when I'm patching one virtual machine first thing. Not too stressful, I hope. See you all next week, hopefully with some good news as to how my race went...

16/04/2015 [18:05] Almost nothing went on today. Well, not after 09:00. I did a whole load of patching and updating from 07:00 onwards. Then basically that was it. Keep things ticking over, tried not to stress about the marathon, stared at the fabulous weather outside and checked the weather report for Manchester on Sunday (initially raining, now not). Rachel arrives in an hour or so, so I might go and meet her at the train station. I've been trying to roller and stretch my calf all day after last night's physio session, which went really well. In fact, for most of yesterday everything in my calf felt great, but this morning it was really unpleasant. We'll have to see what it feels like every morning. Especially on Sunday morning.

15/04/2015 [16:30] A morning of confusion brought on by the names of servers and their guests having too-similar names, plus some people not having listened during meetings involving them. Eventually it was all sorted, and I've been able to get pretty much all my prep work for tomorrow morning done. I'll be starting work at 07:00 tomorrow, which is a bit poor, but necessary though, sadly. I ran at lunch time. Only 5km, but possibly faster than I should have done. The thing is that slower seemed to make my calf ache more. I'm not sure why. In good news, I think I might have found a pressure point that seems to help relax the muscle tension (or whatever it is) in my shin (splints)... at least for a little while. It's still a pretty much unknown how things are going to go when I'm running for three-plus hours. I've got a physio session this evening at 17:00 (which is why I'm leaving as soon as I post this). Hopefully the physio will be able to confirm that it's 'just' a shin splint that I have and nothing bone-related (like a stress fracture), and maybe even provide me with a few exercises or some sensible advice on what to do between now and Sunday.

14/04/2015 [17:25] This time I was supposed to be in early, so I was. No great shakes there. However, both the two DB boxes I updated, and the four servers I upgraded PHP and MySQL on also went perfectly, which was rather nice. I had an email to deal with which left me on edge for most of the morning, but I think that got sorted satisfactorily, too. Over lunch time I cycled to the boat house and had the fire alarm people sort out the fire alarm panel issue (turned out to be two flat batteries). The weather's been lovely, so that wasn't any real hardship. This afternoon I've mainly been doing small things. Nothing exciting. I'll go home shortly and have a drink of something cold in the back garden and read my book for a little while.

13/04/2015 [17:15] So, now I'm older. Another year passed and maybe something to show for it. I'm still here, still moderately happy, and still mostly fit and healthy. If I were to look back on the last 12 months I'd have to say I haven't done too badly with what I've been given, and what I've achieved for myself. I've got a year (or a few days fewer than a year at this point) to see if I can't do something just as good or better again. Running this marathon next weekend faster than Paris (so not walking would be a big improvement) would be a good start. The problem is that my left shin definitely has some kind of shin splint thing going on now. I'm 90% sure it's not an actual stress fracture, which is a small mercy, so I guess so long as I don't do anything stupid (like run a marathon) it should be OK, and heal eventually. Although not until after this weekend, I'm sure. Anyway. Friday was excellent. Rachel arrived on Thursday evening and I didn't work on my birthday. There was breakfast in bed, and a few presents, then we eventually decided to see if I could still actually run after having had almost a week off from it. Well, five days. The answer turned out to be "yes, mostly." It appears that it now takes a good few km or so before things relax in my shin and most of the discomfort/pain goes away, and during that time my gait is not what you'd call symmetrical, or any kind of graceful. I limited the run to about 7km or so, and hoped for the best for the following day's long run (the last of my training plan). There then followed a quick lunch, and then we headed out into town for a birthday present of a hot stone massage (my first). That was certainly an interesting experience, and one I hope did me lots of good. Following that, given it was my birthday, we went to a local Patisserie Valerie and had four different kinds of cake between the two of us. Suffice it to say we were a little over-full afterwards. What better to do than pop into a book shop and buy a book? I think we headed home after reading for a bit as the cafe in the book shop was closed. We visited a pub on the way home, but people didn't arrive much before the time I had to be home to Skype with my parents and brother (and his son). That didn't matter as we wanted a quiet night in anyway. Dinner followed, which was tasy. To be honest, the food was delicious all weekend, mainly due to Rachel being awesome in the kitchen. Saturday I did my last long run (only 16.1km or so) and Rachel did her own thing for the hour and a bit that that took (including making an amazing cheesecake). She also went to Tesco without me, which was most annoying. The Oxford/Cambridge boat races were on, so we watched those, weeded the back garden (which hadn't been done since well before Christmas), and then Rachel made a rather delicious curry. All in all a rather excellent day. Sadly, Rachel had to go to a wedding on Sunday, but also wanted to get a long run in before she left town. This meant she got up at a silly time in the morning so she could run 15 miles. Duly having done so (whilest I had a bit more of a sleep, and also made her a packed lunch) she got on a train and left. This meant I was able to head down to the boat house and cycle 16km or so on the tow path with a women's crew who're aiming to get to Henley this year. Once that was done there was lunch. And then, even though it was supposed to be a rest day, I rattled around the house wishing I was doing something. I'm not sure what I ended up doing, but it filled up the afternoon and evening, although not particularly satisfyingly. I probably ate too much chocolate. I had it in my calendar that I was supposed to be in work early this morning. So I got up early, did all my morning exercises and other morning stuff and got into work for about 07:45... Only to find that I didn't need to, although I do need to tomorrow morning. It wasn't too frustrating though as I was able to get on with catching up on everything that'd gone on on Friday and over the weekend with my servers. Disappointingly though that meant I was all caught up by late morning. As a result I was therefore able to schedule a visit from the fire alarm people to the boat house tomorrow lunch time (a rest day) to fix the intermittent fault our unit has. I also went for the first of my last three runs before the marathon this coming weekend. Again, my shin wasn't very happy with the experience, but even without a painkiller (which I took afterwards) it was tolerable after a few km. I'm just as concerned about my cardio-vascular fitness at the moment, which feels like it has taken a hit for some reason. I guess I'll have to see how it goes at this point. Not really anything I can do other than keep myself ticking over now and hope for the best on race day with regard to my whole body. No weights tonight (or at all this week, obviously), so I should head home and perhaps binge-watch four episodes of Game of Thrones.

09/04/2015 [17:55] Still no running, and I'll admit I'm starting to get a little concerned now. My shin seems better sometimes, but not at others. And I'm sure the first time I go running on it it's going to be pretty painful afterwards. I just have to decide whether or not I do my sprintervals session tomorrow or save myself for Saturday's long run. Right now I just don't know. In other, better, news, the server I reinstalled yesterday continues to behave perfectly, including the software I reinstated on it. Other than having to downgrade the PHP from 5.5 to 5.4 to eradicate a zombie processes issue with rrdtool I'd have to say that (modulo not being able to replace all the disks) everything is awesome, in that regard. I'm not in tomorrow. This is because it's my birthday and I really want the day off. So there. I'll see you all on Monday when I'll obviously tell you about how the weekend went in terms of what I did, and the nail-biting saga of my running injuries. Also that I went to Tesco. Rachel will hopefully be arriving soon, so I should head off and try and make the house look at least a little presentable.

08/04/2015 [17:15] I did an hour on the watt bike last night in lieu of my 13km tempo run that I should have done. Whilest it just didn't feel as hard work as the run, it was 37.4km, and I was certainly sweating somewhat by the time it was over. I'd like to think I put a fair amount of effort it. It just wasn't a run, with me carrying my own weight. Anyway, I'm sure it kept my cardiovascular system up and running. Naturally, for me not having done much hard bike work in a while I got a horribly sharp pain in the area below one of my glutes, but that went away by this morning, which it how it urually works. Happily, my shin(s') pain is slowly beginning to fade, too. Chances are I might be able to run on Friday, which would be a great relief. This morning I decided it was finally time to reinstall that server where apparently two disks in a four disk RAID5 set decided to go at the same time (and I managed to rescue one of them, but there were odd issues from then on). Annoyingly, replacing all four disks with four different matching ones (one of the first four being replaced with a larger but slower one) resulted in RHEL's installer being unable to work happily when trying to write filesystem inode tables and journaling information. I was pretty sure it was a RAID hardware issue until I put the three original disks back (leaving out the larger, slower replacement) and rebuilt onto those. Then everything seemed to be fine. Odd, but acceptable. Since then I've been back at my desk rebuilding the Nessus and Observium setup that was there before. Other than the Weathermaps in Observium I think everything's back up and running, which is nice. I'm going to head off and do a quick weights session shortly, then it's another evening of relaxation. And then it's the last day of the week for me, hurrah! A very short week this week, I'm pleased to say.

07/04/2015 [16:45] A long Easter weekend. And one of mixed fortunes for me. Friday, worried about my shins, I went on the watt bike for my sprintervals session and came away thinking perhaps I hadn't worked quite as hard as I should have done for that kind of thing. Perhaps I did. In any event I felt I'd given my legs the time off they needed to be ready for the long run on Saturday. The remainder of the day was spent on relaxing, a bit of tidying, a long Skype call with my parents and generally not thinking about work at all. Smashing. Rachel arrived around lunch time, and after a Tesco trip we had some lunch and digested a bit (it turns out not quite enough) and went for our runs. Mine a relatively short 15 miles to Rachel's 20 miles. While my run felt measured and steady, I ended up feeling significant discomfort-tending-to-pain in my left shin/calf afterwards. Rachel potentially hadn't waited long enough for her run and came away with a rather nasty cramp. While I don't think her cramp will repeat itself, my shin continued to become more and more uncomfortable as the weekend went on, leading me to think that I could have something as problematic as a stress fracture (but obviously I have no proof of this). Sunday, therefore, was a very relaxed day with no exercise at all. This lead to a minor improvement in my leg, but a migration of the discomfort from what felt like the calf muscle to the shin bone itself. Or not. Oddly, it's not that easy to tell where the problem is. On Monday we went to London so Rachel could run the Regent's Park 10K. The weather was rather nice so it was a fun day out. She did very well (both overall and especially in her gender) which made me very proud. I couldn't have run even if I'd wanted to (and I did), but I did get to be bag-holder and position-shouter for each of her laps. We had brunch in London before heading to the British Library for a quick look at an Arctic exhibition and the 'treasures' room. After that it was back home and relaxing for the rest of the day. All in all a rather good long Easter weekend, especially as we cooked and baked a lot of rather lovely food (although in most cases I simply assisted). This morning I got up and discovered that my shin is only barely noticeably better than previously, so I won't be running today either. Potentially I may not run at all this week. However, I will be going to the boat house straight after work to put in a watt bike session as a replacement 'tempo' run. Here's hoping that very soon I'll be back on my feet... I've got a marathon to run in twelve days.

02/04/2015 [17:30] I finally have my hair cut. Just in time for Easter, and probably not being able to run tomorrow after last night's fairly quick, but I thought fairly relaxed, run. The ache/pain in what I thought was my left calf, I think is actually in my shin, and is therefore almost certainly shin splints. Again. Today's a total rest day so it's getting the rest it needs. Just perhaps not enough if I do sprintervals tomorrow. We'll see how that goes. So yes, haircut at lunch time. The morning and afternoon were spent decomissioning and deracking the last of our SPARC/Solaris boxes. We are now a linux-only shop. This is probably classed as "progress". Happily, for the moment at least the wind has dropped/gone. However, I don't imagine it's going to stay like this. Here's hoping though. Frankly though I'd rather it was hammering down with rain, snow, hail, whatever... but that my legs were OK to run on. I'm off now for Easter. Back on Tuesday. Between now and then there might be as many as three runs, Tesco, time with Rachel, a trip to London to watch Rachel run a 10K, an exhibition visit, and maybe some other stuff I haven't even thought of yet. I hope everyone has a good time.

01/04/2015 [17:00] Happy April. The wind seems to have dropped in strength a bit, finally, which should make cycling a little less fraught. I'm considering running this evening because "why not?" Not much happening at work, which is good, although everyone's back in today so even if the world ended (from an IT point of view) we'd have it covered. I was going to do that server reinstall today, but various things meant that I didn't. That's about it, really.