BOFHJournal - February 2015

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27/02/2015 [16:35] I'm rather surprised at how calm I am concerning my blister/callus/corn or whatever it is that I have been unable to run on, and indeed walk without limping on since yesterday morning. Perhaps because it's a soft tissue thing, and therefore could heal enough to run on by a week on Sunday for the half marathon. Maybe because Rachel was over last night and she's very calming. I don't know. In any event, I spent some time today trying to (and eventually succeeding) track down a podiatrist I can see on Monday (which I have booked off with Rachel anyway). I also went to Boots at lunch time and got what I hope will be some things to ease my issues between now and whenever things get better. I'm OK probably not doing another long run before next weekend, but I should get out and do something. I'm going to do my sprints on the watt bike at the boat house as soon as I leave work today just to give myself some cardio workout. Nothing much went on at work today, which was pleasant. The weather was lovely, which was a bit annoying to be stuck indoors (other than the cycle to town at lunch time to get bits and bobs). I'm off now, and not back until Tuesday morning, hopefully with good news about my foot.

26/02/2015 [17:45] Well, today started a whole lot better than yesterday, but got progressively worse. Before that though, let's go back to last night. I left work early and made it down to the boathouse in time to meet Max and get our run in. Owing to us both feeling awesome and full of energy we managed to go over our planned distance and squeeze in 16.4km before getting back. I blame Max for us going just a little too fast. In any event I had to stop twice for two different kinds of nature call. This is a little worrying given the long races I have coming up that won't have private little places for me to do that kind of thing. Anyway, once I was back at the boat house and all cleaned up I was able to do the coached erg with the W1 women. A little frustratingly, the boyfriend of one of the rowers (who's actually a reasonable coach, sometimes) wanted to get involved, so I just took a back seat rather than try and overrule him. For the most part it worked, although his participation completely scuppered my plan for the session. I got home and had dinner, but went to bed with an upset stomach, which didn't bode well for this morning's early morning run. After another too-early wake up (02:55, followed by too-light dozing) I got up at 05:10 and went with two slices of toast with Nutella. Either that wasn't enough or - more likely - I was tired from the evening before's run, but by 20km I was barely hanging on (it felt like) so I shortened the route from 28km to 24km and made it back in one piece. While I'm tired, but not too achesome, the callus on the side of the ball of my right foot has gotten progressively hotter and more sensitive (tending towards deep throbbing before I took two ibuprofen), despite my only taking a small amount of dead skin off, and there being no fluids of any kind coming out of the area. Obviously I'm running in a way which causes my foot to build up a callus (and have for as long as I can remember, literally decades), but this is the first time (the last couple of months) that it has been this bad, and today is the first time it has ever been this painful by quite some way. Right now I'm not confident I have the ability to run on it tomorrow, but I'm also not sure I'd be any use at sprints after the last few days. Perhaps I'll make tomorrow a rest day, as well as, perhaps, Saturday, and do my long (29km!) run on Sunday. I have Monday off (ostensibly to rest and recover) with Rachel, so I can do my 8.1km tempo run with her... if my foot's OK. Not being able to run because of a soft tissue injury is much more galling than an actual joint issue. That's definitely far more information than you could honestly want to know about what's going on with me and my body at the moment, but if I don't write it somewhere I'll never have anything to refer back to in the future when this kind of thing comes up again. Anyway, home time, to wait for Rachel to arrive.

25/02/2015 [16:35] Sadly, today started off as a complete non-event. I made my lunch last night after a reasonably good upper body weights session, went to bed at a sensible time... and then couldn't sleep past around 03:00. Every half an hour or so I'd roll over and look to see if it was 05:10 (get up time to get to work to do my run). Come 05:10 I was tired, fairly grumpy, and really not in the right place mentally to run ~27km. To cap it all off it was very slightly spitting (not even light rain). After standing at my window for a minute or so I just went back to bed, feeling like a guilty failure. Of course I didn't manage to sleep any better afterwards, but I got up at just before 08:00 and went to work. Work has mainly been about doing the last few things with the two new servers I built yesterday afternoon. Pretty much everything I can do has now been done, so we'll be racking them up tomorrow if there's an opportunity. Then they should be pressed into service hopefully fairly soon, rather than just sitting there, twiddling their metaphorical thumbs. That should enable us to decomission at least two, if not three older servers. In an effort not to be a total wimp out with regard to exercise today I'm meeting Max at the boat house after work and we're going to run along the river a fair way and back before I do a coached erg with the women this evening. Hopefully I'll be able to leave work a little early so as to get the run done, have a shower, and replace some calories. By which I mean right now. Second attempt at a proper long run tomorrow morning, when Rachel does her one to work. I really really hope it's not raining, but I think it might.

24/02/2015 [16:50] Lots happened today. I arrived at work for around 07:40 to find that we'd had a major power cut at one of the server rooms in the small hours. My team leader had been in and gotten most things running again, but there was plenty of things still to get working again and generally tidy up from an IT point of view. Worryingly the UPS didn't seem to have done its job. Anyway, we're hopefully getting someone in to look at it as part of the after action report recommendations. Whilest I was trying to get things up and running again I was simultaneously patching fifteen servers and trying to reboot them whilest someone else was doing network maintenance which interrupted my connections. Amazingly, everything I did seemed to work. That meant that by 09:00 all I had to do was go over to the server room affected by the power issues and reseat a PSU to get rid of the last hardware issue on the monitoring system. Which was good. Over lunch I didn't do anything but shift two new servers upstairs, and eat lunch. After only doing 20 minutes of exercise yesterday lunch time and nothing in the evening I already have a weird low-level guilty feeling. This is an indication that I'm right on the edge of overtraining (as my ankles, shins, and calves will also attest to). However, I'm going to do the weights I should have done last night tonight instead, but not push too hard in case I get up the enthusiasm to do my mid-week long run tomorrow morning before work (05:00 alarm). Can't do it in the evening as I'm coaching the women in an erg, to see if we can sort out their timing points once and for all. Or at least make a start on doing so. I've managed to set up the two new servers as far as I can for the time being. Now I have to hand them over to someone else to set up the new NVME SSDs they have, which is a little frustrating as I'd like to have done that bit of configuration myself. Still, it's only a small thing. I tried going over to Chrome from Firefox today, but have come to the conclusion that I'd rather have the occasional crashes that I get with Firefox than the lessening of functionality that I get suffer from when using Chrome. Also, we've been plagued with more power cuts all over town over the course of today. I'm really hoping they settle down before tomorrow, and that nothing bad happens again tonight.

23/02/2015 [17:15] Mainly the weekend was about exercise. After Rachel left on Saturday morning I went out and did a nice quick half marathon distance, then had a big lunch, went to Tesco, and chilled out. Sunday morning I coached the women's crew (neither they or I were particularly good). After that I went to the pub with a few of the captains and coaches and had a natter and a burger, then went home, grabbed my running kit and showed two people around the half marathon course (one lap) that we'll all be doing in a few weeks from now. It was raining and pretty grim, but moderately enjoyable nevertheless. After that I was able to get home just before Rachel arrived back in town. We had a nice quiet evening of television and delivery Indian food before a moderately early bed. This morning I was able to stay in bed until moderately late in the grand scheme of things, but still get to work in good time. I've negotiated the start of patching of the second last tranche of servers which are wickedly behind with their updates, done a few small bits of work, run a pretty fast 5.1km tempo run over lunch time, and am just about to leave for a little bit of weights at the boat house before a hopefully very relaxing evening. Tomorrow is a complete rest day for me, which I really need given I've run for the past four days in a row (even if yesterday wasn't all that fast). Bits of my legs ache in a not very good way (rather than the good way which just says "I've been used a lot") so I think it's time they had a bit of time off from running. Today's usage wasn't all that high (only about 20 minutes), but it was pretty hard going.

20/02/2015 [16:40] Friday! Awesome! After watching some of the 5K tests last night at the boat house (following a far too short weights session) I got home in time to find Rachel had finished the washing up and was well on the way to finishing making dinner too. She does far too much for me, I think. Anyway, I did my part by helping cheer her back up again over food and television. I didn't sleep altogether well, but as I didn't have to be up first thing in the morning I was able to enjoy the morning in bed a little more than usual, which was nice. Work today has been fairly bitty, disappointingly. I wasn't really able to get into anything fully, but I could tidy up a few loose ends here and there, make a purchase on Sport Pursuit, and get this week's sprintervals session out of the way at lunch time. Trying to sprint for a mile (1600m), then jog brokenly for 400m before doing the same thing two more times, is pretty hard. I think that on average I did a little better than a few weeks ago (23 January), so I guess that's a positive. I'm going to head home pretty much on time today and try to tidy the house a little before Rachel comes back again. Neither of us have to doing anything terribly early tomorrow morning, so we might actually be able to enjoy this mythical 'lie in' people keep mentioning. At least until 08:30 or so. On Saturday I'm doing my weekend long run, and hopefully watching films or similar with Cormac and others in the evening. Then on Sunday morning I'm coaching, having a coaches meeting which probably won't go very well, then running a very very gentle (for me) 10K with Stacey and Max to show Stacey the half marathon course she'll be running eventually. Then Rachel turns up towards the end of the day. Obviously somewhere in there I'll also need to get groceries for the week ahead, too. I hope you have a good weekend doing whatever it is you do when you're not at work and not reading this.

19/02/2015 [17:05] Last night's run was pretty darned good too. For being 27km+ anyway. I was certainly feeling it towards the end, which doesn't feel like it bodes well for needing to run another third as far again in the marathon itself. But anyway, that's still a little while away. Not having to run this morning meant that I could get up a little more relaxedly than otherwise, have a shave (long time coming) and still roll into work at a sensible time. Some hardware maintenance and then a whole pile of mini tasks is what has kept me busy today. However, when we had some network issues this afternoon I got some really useful stuff done; clearing my desk. The whole thing looks a lot less like I live here, and more like I work here. It's rather good. Clear desk, clear mind. Or something like that. Anyway, I'm off to the boat house to do a quick weights session, then watch some of my women's crew do their 5K tests. Then home to see Rachel, have some food, watch Person of Interest, and then go to bed. Tomorrow I've got 3x 1600m sprintervals to do. Which might very well finish me off.

18/02/2015 [17:00] Last night's tempo run was pretty great. I was quite surprised, actually. I wasn't looking forward to it all that much, but it turned out that taking Monday off seemed to have been long enough for my body to recover quite substantially. As a result, while I'm still a little wary about this evening's run, I'm hopeful it won't be too bad. It is going to be pretty long, both in terms of time and distance. I should leave shortly. The weather's just as nice as it was yesterday at this time (calm, clear, still), so that should help. Work today was an entire morning of moving the last three servers from the old server room to the new data center, installing three servers I'd built recently into the new server room, and putting one in one the other server room. Patching everything in went OK, so it mostly all just worked. This afternoon I've been dealing with network outages caused by the POP switch being moved out of the old server room by the Networks guy, and catching up on stuff.

17/02/2015 [16:50] No exercise at all yesterday, which was probably for the best. I'm feeling a good bit better today. Not for too much longer though, see below. However, I got a reasonable night's sleep, and was in work well before 08:00 to patch the live servers of our tier one service. Happily everything went 100% to plan, which was wonderful. I was done before 08:30, so well inside the 09:00 cut off time. Patching later in the day on another service didn't go quite a smoothly with one machine failing its BIOS update, but seeming to be none the worse for wear for having to reboot again and revert to its original. I'll try again the next time I get to patch and reboot it. Given my training plan calls for a 16.1km or so tempo run this evening I just didn't have time to do it at lunch, so I'm heading off very shortly in the hopes that I can hold myself together enough to do the whole thing properly from home. It'll be an out and back route on the same path (plus a bit) as I did last Monday evening. Theoretically I've had a day's more rest than I did after a hard run with Rachel in Croydon the weekend before this one, so we'll see how things go. Also, there should be a smidgen more daylight, so less chance of me twisting my ankle in the dark, too. Then, apparently, I'll do my long run tomorrow evening after work, which should be interesting in terms of energy levels. Something approaching 26km again, hopefully. Anyway, that's tomorrow, I just have to get through this evening's run, then home for showering and refueling. Thinking about it, I don't think I have to be in work early tomorrow morning either. Which is nice.

16/02/2015 [17:30] This weekend was something of a strange one. It started off with another early morning for me as I got myself entered into the St. Neots Half Marathon in November. It usually sells out within a few hours of opening, so at 06:30 I was online and registered. This did mean I was then able to get to the train station in time to get the train with the women's crew I was coaching and head down to London. A long outing on the Tideway followed, with plenty of videoing by me in the coaching launch, a slightly sore throat from shouting a lot, and then some video debriefing afterwards. After being in the pub for a while I got a call from Rachel to say that I needed to go to Waterloo to meet her boss and collect her bag owing to the fact that she'd had to rush out of where she was to try and get to Heathrow to return someone's phone and passport to them before they tried to check in for a flight back to Kenya. Needless to say, without any way to contact the person things didn't go well and it wasn't until gone 22:00 that Rachel made it home to Croydon where I'd eventually been dispatched with her bag (containing her house keys, etc.). We had a very late dinner (which gave me stomach problems) and went to bed. The reason for the rapid bed was because we were due to run 18 or so miles the following morning with her running club. Waking at 06:00 again we spent a good few minutes debating whether or not to actually get out of bed. In the end duty prevailed and we made our way to the train station (a 2km or so jog in and of itself) and with many others got the train into London. Then we set off to run back to Croydon. From the off I didn't feel all that good. My stomach still wasn't settled from the night before, and the pace was all over the place. Rachel thinks that's probably one of the major reasons I just didn't enjoy the run. To cut a long story short, with about 5km to go I needed to find a bush to keep from having a major problem, so we split off from the others and made our own way home at a slightly different/faster, but more steady, pace. Unfortunately, that run left me somewhat broken in terms of aching shinbones even 24+ hours later, which means I haven't run today. We spent the rest of Sunday on the sofa though, eating, drinking, and watching things on the laptop. Another early morning today saw me back on two trains to work, where I arrived just in time to get on with a day's worth of tasks. Nothing particularly interesting though, other than a hard drive swap out, and preparing to patch eleven servers of our major tier one application tomorrow morning. It should all go according to plan, but you never know. I'm not going to do weights this evening, so I should probably go to Tesco for the week, but it means going home first and then back out again as I don't have anything other than a full rucksack with me. And it's raining. Oh well.

13/02/2015 [17:35] I am very glad that it's Friday. Not only because I'll get to see Rachel tomorrow afternoon, but also because this has been a tough week for all kinds of work-related reasons. Not quite as bad as the week before, but still pretty hard. Thankfully I didn't have to be in work early this morning, so I was able to lie in bed until almost 08:00. Not that I didn't wake up stupidly early as normal, but I could lie there and listen to the radio for a bit. I even had time to do some morning exercises and have a shower. At work today I was able to get a lot of smaller tasks completed/tidied up, which was gratifying. There was even a chance to get some more parts shipped for failed RAID disks and work out why IBM hadn't come to collect a dead hard drive I swapped out a few weeks ago. Over lunch I dragged myself out of my chair to do 7x800m sprintervals and from the looks of the graph on the exercise tracking sites I use I didn't do too badly, even if I didn't do quite as well as I actually was hoping for. I think I'm getting fitter, anyway. Maybe, a little. I'm heading off shortly for a weekend of coaching my women's crew on the Tideway (the Thames as it passes through London), then meeting Rachel and heading back to Croydon, then a 17.5 mile run back from central London to Croydon again on Sunday morning (so that's both weekend mornings being very early starts). Then I head back to work on Monday morning (another early start) for the beginning of a whole new week of work and running training. It doesn't really stop. I think the only real time I get off this weekend is Sunday afternoon. I hope to take maximum advantage of it.

12/02/2015 [18:05] Ultimately this was a productive day. I had a morning of really clearing my inbox down to seven emails (none of which I need to reply to), then went over with a new engineer to the data centre and left him to his own devices while I got on with some stuff via a remote connection to my desktop PC. Three or so hours later he'd managed to fix the array and we could come back to the office, report on the success and I could get another two hours or so of work done. Today was a total rest day after yesterday's long run and before tomorrow's dreaded sprintervals session at lunch time (7x800m). It's possible I may be moving some servers at some point, but after this morning's patching session I may be required to do some software upgrades for someone instead. Not really much else going on right now.

11/02/2015 [17:20] Coaching the women last night went quite well, I think. One person wasn't very happy with the exercises we did, which was disappointing, to say the least. However, I rolled with it, I think. I've asked for feedback and pointers, but I haven't heard anything as yet. Went to bed as early as I could given I needed to actually have some food and then let it digest a bit. As it was sleep wasn't terribly good in terms of quantity or quality, and I was fitful and in and out of a stupidly light doze from about 04:30 onwards. Given I was up and having breakfast at 05:20 this wasn't too bad, but not great. At work for 05:50 I was able to start running by 06:02, which was pretty good. My plan was to do two and a half laps of a 10km or so course, in about two hours. 26.3km and two hours and one minute seven seconds later I was done. Not the easiest nor the hardest run I've ever done. I was looking forward to sitting down for the rest of the day and getting some useful work done, but instead, post-shower I had to take the returning engineer over to the data centre and stick with him for most of the day while we tried to get the same storage array as yesterday back online. We managed it at one point... but then he did something ill-advised and now we're in what could be charitably defined as a pretty pickle. Hopefully he'll be able to fix it tomorrow, without bringing down any other arrays (as he and my co-worker did this afternoon when, after being on my feet since 05:15 this morning, I was finally able to sit down for a bit and get some actual work done). At least today I was able to have my lunch at a sensible time. Although I did miss out on the hot sandwiches van, which I'd been really looking forward to after my morning's exercise. Anyway, having been at my desk for all of an hour and a half today, I've managed to achieve amazingly amounts of things in that time, so I'm going to go home and collapse, after cooking myself some duck breasts and whatever else I have that might go with it. I really am Very Tired. Oh, and Rachel says I should be proud of myself for my run this morning. Honestly, I'd forgotten about it given everything else that's gone on today.

10/02/2015 [17:20] Mostly today I have been standing (or sitting) in a server room trying to fix external disk arrays and replacing the motherboard of another server. The latter worked perfectly (other than a motherboard battery needing to be swapped, and a RAID card battery now appearing to have expired), but the engineer was still working on the former when we gave up for the day. It's a really tricky (or annoying, depending on your point of view) problem. I did manage to fit in two UT2 6km ergs this morning before work, and a 13km run last night along the river in the pitch dark which was totally awesome (good time, too). But I'm very glad that I could get that run in last night rather than atempting it today. I just wouldn't have been able to, and I would have been really annoyed about that. As it is I'm annoyed at how long I had to spend in a loud data centre, but them's the breaks sometimes. As it was I only got to eat lunch at 15:45 when I got back to my desk for the first time since 09:30. I'm off shortly to try and coach the women's crew in the dark, and then go home and eat a lot before an early bed and a very early rise tomorrow for a long run with Max before work.

09/02/2015 [17:05] After Friday I was really not looking forward to the weekend. And it turned out that the first half of Saturday wasn't especially good. I cycled to work on my station bike and suffered a flat tyre. Then moved machines all morning when I shouldn't even have been at work (although lots of other people came in too, so that was good). Then I had to leave to get to London in time to meet Rachel just as the pizza was ordered. I managed to swap my entire rear wheel with a bike which'd been abandoned at work, although the rear cassette wasn't quite right for my chain/gears, so it ground a lot. Then I cycled to the station in a rush and discovered that, perhaps, Rachel's station bike had been removed, along with a mass of cycle racks, just like mine was over Christmas. This put a double downer on the day. I got to Rachel's place and had real trouble getting in the two doors to her place due to the keys being brand new and the locks recalcitrant. Eventually I got in, just a few minutes from her getting back from her hockey game. Whilest she got cleaned up I broke, and then fixed a couple of her light fittings, which made me feel a bit better (the fixing, not the breaking). We then got the train to Fleet and enjoyed a fairly quiet corner of Dunk and Jenny's housewarming party talking to Andrea. The night's sleep on a double lilo wasn't 100% awesome, but it was a real blast from the past to be doing so, like a student at a house party again. In the morning we had a quick breakfast and then headed back to Croydon. After getting our heads together at Rachel's house we pulled on our running stuff and forced ourselves out on a 15 mile run. Just a shade under two hours later we were back, having been ruined by the hills that exist between Croydon and Dulwich Park (which we did a few laps around). I haven't done hills in a long time. But we still weren't done. Given all of the work which happened over the weekend it made a lot of sense for me to be able to get to work early this morning, so after showering and having a bit of food we headed back out and groaning, cycled to the train station and got the train to my place. Back at the station we discovered that they'd in fact only moved the cycle racks, rather than removing them, so after a few minutes we were able to discover Rachel's bike, lock up the one we'd brought back, and cycle home. After managing to stay mostly upright to order Indian delivery food we then collapsed and managed to stay awake until around 22:00, at which point we went to bed and became unconsious in fairly short order. This morning neither of us wanted to get up, but we did. Rachel headed back to London (thankfully only working in central London, rather than having to head back to Croydon) and I got to work a little before 08:00. Immediately I had to go over to the new data centre and diagnose a server which was running slowly and didn't have all its fibre channels active (solved), help get an inter-site SAN connection working again (it is), and ascertain if another server needed an engineer visit (it does). So, more productive than not. By the time I got back I really didn't want to run, so that's been put off until after work. 13km, in the gathering dark, isn't going to be much fun at tempo rate, but it has to be done. Tomorrow my morning and lunch time are going to be filled with helping an Oracle engineer fix things. Then I may spend the afternoon doing as many of the many many things I have on my to do list as I can. Then I'll go home and collapse. For now though I'm going to cycle back with my flat tyre from the weekend (I'm on my good/commuting bike today) so at least all wheels are back with their respective frames again.

06/02/2015 [17:35] Today started really badly. I'm pretty sure someone here basically said that I don't really work very hard, or that I just don't pay attention to my incoming email. It left me steaming angry and close to having it out with them. On top of that was a fairly certain feeling that they equally don't respect me or the work that I do here. Of course, part of my suffers from Imposter Syndrome so in my darker moment I agree completely, which makes me feel doubly bad. I'm therefore trying to make back some ground/garner some much-needed brownie points by coming in tomorrow (Saturday, yes) along with them and a co-worker to help clear out the last remaining (29) servers which need moving to the new data centre. This means I've had to apologise to the W1 rowing women who I was supposed to be coaching on the erg and for an outing tomorrow morning. So, I'm letting them down. I think I need to be seen as a bit more useful at work though, so something had to give, and it was the rowing side of my life. As soon as I can get away from work though, I need to get a train to Croydon and see Rachel. At which point we'll then get a train to Fleet for Dunk and Jenny's house warming. We'll stay the night there, then travel back to Croydon in the morning, run 15 or so miles into central London, get the train back to Croydon, shower, then get the train back to my place so that I don't have to worry about trains on Monday morning when there could be a lot of technical tidying up to do in the wake of the server moves this weekend. In fact I'll probably need to get in earlier than normal, which just wouldn't be an easy thing to do starting from Croydon. For now though, it's Friday. I'm going home to collapse. Did I mention I did 5x1200m sprintervals over lunch time today? Maybe they were good (but not great) because I was so angry about the slights in the morning. I don't know. Anyway, I should go. Have a good weekend. Mine's going to be full of work, trains, friends, and running. Hopefully in the right amounts and without any unpleasantness.

05/02/2015 [17:45] I've lost count of the number of times I've gone over to one of the other server rooms today to swap hard drives around and kick off RAID rebuilds. And none of it has made a blind bit of difference to this RAID5 virtual disk's complaint that something Observium is doing with rrdtool is causing some kind of SCSI issue. I think, when time allows, I'm going to have to blow this instance of the OS away and reinstall from scratch in the hopes that that'll fix things. Not even reinstalling every single RPM and a RAID consistency check seems to have solved the issue. The day hasn't really been all that awesome on any level, if I'm honest. When I got up at 05:15 this morning it was snowing and the idea of running 27km or so in it really held zero appeal. In the end I decided not to be put off and cycled to work (nearly getting blinded by the snow/misting up of my glasses). The run started off fairly well, but by the time 12km or so rolled around I wasn't enjoying myself, I was fairly wet from car splashes, chafing a little, and my choice of leggings was incorrect. I wussed out and ran back to work to make a run of 16km. 10km short of what I'd wanted to complete this morning. The time was pretty poor as well. This sort of set the tone for the day, if I'm honest. I know I should care less about one run in the grand scheme of marathon training, but it worries me that I don't seem to be able to stick out proper, 2 hour plus runs all that often. Come marathon day I'm just not sure what's going to happen. It could be Paris all over again. Rachel tells me not to worry, so I'm going to try and not do so. I'm also going to daub on some anti-chafe cream tomorrow and do my sprinterval training at lunch time. Hopefully that'll make me feel a bit better, like it did last Friday. More patching tomorrow morning, but I don't have to be in work until 08:00, which is a lot better than this morning.

04/02/2015 [19:05] It has been a bit of a Day. Two disks went offline in a RAID5 set (note for the un-tech-oriented: this is a Bad Thing). One disk I managed to resurrect but it's now classed as deeply untrustworthy, the other disk screamed (literally) when I tried, and quit for good. I managed to rebuild the set with a generously donated disk, but the OS was in a state and the MySQL DB was toast. I even had to reinstall the MySQL software to get things working again. Sorting through lost+found took most of the day. It's late and I still don't think things are right with the hardware. I'm getting lots of warnings about inaccessible bits of (virtual) disk, so I'm going to proactively replace the other suspect disk tomorrow and hope that that fixes things... but it might not. For the moment I just hope it lasts the night. Something I seemed to have omitted previously is the logging of errors relating to the hardware (which is why I missed the first disk going offline). This has now been fixed, but it may just be in place to report that things have gone titsup, rather than that they're about to (and therefore that I should do something to stop that happening). I managed to squeeze in a run at lunch time today with Max which helped calm me down a little, and tomorrow morning I'm apparently going to be doing a long run before work, but otherwise that's it for exercise today. I've exercised my mind more than enough, and I feel pretty shattered.

03/02/2015 [16:15] Some stuff got done today. Disappointingly, it started very early, which wasn't very good as I was looking forward to a smidgen of a lie in. Alas it wasn't to be. Instead I was at work (after very carefully cycling to work on snowy/icy roads) for around 06:40 and patching servers so that at 07:30 I and my team leader could move another three physical servers from the old server room to the new data centre. All of that went off without a hitch and everything was back up and running (patched and rebooted, or physically moved) by 08:25, which was pretty good. Since then I've been cleaning up things flagged on our monitoring system, negotiating more early morning patching and rebooting schedules, and eating an inordinate amount of food whilest not doing any exercise over lunch (I did weights last night). I'm just about to leave early for the day and go and do two UT2 ergs at the boat house with Max and then have a quiet evening. Tomorrow there'll be a moderately gentle run at lunch time, probably also with Max, but we'll see how his knee is doing.

02/02/2015 [17:10] It was, on the whole a good weekend. Saturday Rachel was still in town, so we had what was close to an honest-to-goodness lie-in. She then left in time to get to play in a hockey game, if well enough. In the end it turned out that the match would have been earlier than she planned for, but was cancelled due to a frozen pitch. I had the day off after the Thursday and Friday's training. To be honest I really didn't do all that much other than go to Tesco. The decision to run was mainly based on the fact that I suffered some rather unpleasant chafing on Thursday's run, which I compounded on Friday somewhat with the sprints. Taking a day and obtaining some Sudacrem seemed like a sensible idea. On Sunday morning I was due to coach the top women's boat at 10:00, but they had a shocking outing (in high winds, it has to be said) and we decided that a second outing wasn't going to be productive. We watched the cox-cam footage of their last race (Boston Head) and then I went for my weekend long run. It was much harder than the one on Thursday, I thought, but I still got it done at a reasonable pace (in non-chafing clothing). Theoretically it was faster on average than Thursday's run, but a shorter distance by a few miles. Rachel arrived just before I got back from a nice hot shower at the boat house and we had a smashing lunch and then lazed around for the remainder of the day, which was excellent. This morning I woke to find that although stiff, I don't currently appear to have any major injuries (although various leg muscles occasionally feel quite tender, or lightly strained, etc.). I think I'll take it fairly easy for weights this evening. Work today has been pretty good. All the prep-work for tomorrow morning's patching and rebooting has already been done, I've replaced a RAID battery (having won a phone battle with Oracle not to have to ship a swollen Li Ion battery back to them, but instead dispose of in the WEEE Disposal we have here), started the prep on two big servers for our NetBackup infrastructure, and organised (I hope) ergs for tomorrow evening with Max (rescheduled from tomorrow morning when it turns out I have to be in work before 07:00 to get things patched and rebooted before moving servers with my manager. I should head off now and have something of an evening (Rachel's here again, hurrah!) before I have to go to bed.