theboywonder.co.uk

The fight back to fitness

Robin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:20:43 +0000

Aged 16 at the Juvenile Midland Championships (1998).

At age 28 and 10 years on, I have finally found the motivation to once again start cycling properly. In the back of my mind I’ve always told myself that I’d cycle and race again but life, travelling, relationships, work, and shamefully a bit of laziness have taken a priority (entirely my choice I have to say). So far exercising during my twenties has been somewhat sporadic, limited to the odd run, turbo session, and a bit of climbing but never anything more than that. Personally I blame the rapidly approaching number 30 and the inevitable decline of bodily function for my somewhat panic induced fitness fad, although my girlfriend thinks it’s perhaps to get away from her.

Still, motivation is an elusive beast and is often only captured when it’s in line with your core values, or when you feel you have no other choice but to tackle the issue at hand. I guess this is a bit of both; my core values being shifted around a little bit, and genuinely feeling like I have no other choice but to get training again and better the form I once held before it’s too late. It’s not a chore, at least not all the time, but going from a mediocre 40 miles a week (which can easily be 4 turbo sessions) to over 100 miles a week does require dedication. Sometimes you just don’t feel like going for a 30+ mile ride on a Sunday morning.

So far I’ve been cycling consistantly since April last year although I haven’t clocked up any significant miles. After some time off from November – early Jan this year (for various reasons) and missing most of the cyclo-cross season, physically I’ve felt really good the last few weeks. Don’t mistake that as being strong(!). Rather, I’ve had plenty of energy which feels great.

Suffering badly(!) at Allestree Park, September 2009. My first cross race in about 10 years.

I need to be averaging at least 120 by summer if I’m to outperform my old self and I’m still a little unsure how to achieve this, balancing it with my relationship, work, study, relaxation and sleep. One useful measure of form that helps me assess how I’m going is a particular hill climb on one of my regular routes – at the moment I feel like an elephant, but the legs should start to come back in a few months time and hopefully I can hit the 2010 cross season and not get lapped by the professionals ;)

Books for the Year

Robin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:59:54 +0000

When asked at work about my New Year’s resolutions I proudly exclaimed that it was my intention to read more books not related to computing. I had picked out twelve; one for every month of the year. A noble and virtuous aim, or so I thought. My colleague then mentioned that someone else within the department had completed “their 100 book challenge”. One hundred! Incredibly impressive. If I had to read that many I’d be reduced to reading Mr Men books in order to stay on target!

My twelve:

New Year’s Resolutions for 2010

Robin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:10:34 +0000

My New Year’s Resolutions are usually very similar each year – self improve with regard to fitness, both mental and physical, and work hard in my profession. This year I’m trying to set more explicit goals; rather than “read more”, I’ve set a target of reading a book a month. It may not sound like much, but when factoring in time spent on other things (not to mention reading technical literature) it’s a reasonable aim. Anyway, here they are:

Body:

After being ill, get cycling regularly again. Aiming for a consistant 100 miles/wk by May, then increase carefully.
Hit the cyclo-cross season in September feeling strong, not tired. Finish roughly 6-7 minutes down on the professionals.
Add running into the exercise routine.
Run my first 10K. Have a rough aim of beating 48 minutes.

Mind:

Listen to Radio 4 on the way to and from work (rather than music) – and hopefully absorb some of it.
Read a book a month.
Take the Microsoft 70-294 exam by the end of May.
Take the Microsoft 70-298 exam by the end of August, to get my MCSE.
Take the VMware VCP (Vsphere 4) exam by the end of October.
Learn to use my digital SLR properly in modes other than Automatic.

C-C-C-Combo:

Walk in the countryside more frequently.
Learn a new dish a month, and cook the well rated recipes more regularly!

Windows Update Multiple Fix Script

Robin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:01:08 +0000

I made a simple batch file to help fix Windows Update errors on our Windows Servers at work (both 2003 and 2008 / R2). It is based on some advice for various Windows Update errors that were on the internal knowledge base, which was no doubt gathered from information online somewhere. It performs a series of steps, saving a great deal of time over having to perform them manually.

Word of warning: The script will attempt to copy pending.xml before deleting it. If it cannot copy it it will delete it. Personally I have never been able to copy the file; most likely because I have not rebooted the server after taking ownership and granting myself full permissions to the file. I should add however that in all my use of this script I have not suffered any problems when deleting the file. Windows Update will recreate it the next time you/the computer downloads required updates.
:: Windows Update Multiple Fix Script :: v1.00 @echo off cd "C:\Windows\WinSxS" echo Taking ownership of pending.xml takeown /f C:\Windows\WinSxS\pending.xml echo; echo; echo Granting you permissions on pending.xml cacls C:\Windows\WinSxS\pending.xml /G %Username%:F echo; echo; echo Attempting to copy pending.xml as pendingbackup.xml copy "C:\Windows\WinSxS\pending.xml" "C:\Windows\WinSxS\pendingbackup.xml" echo; echo; echo Deleting pending.xml del "C:\Windows\WinSxS\pending.xml" echo; echo; echo Exporting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\COMPONENTS to C:\HKLM_backup.reg REG EXPORT HKLM\Components C:\HKLM_backup.reg echo; echo; echo Removing noted problematic registry keys REG DELETE HKLM\Components /v AdvancedInstallersNeedResolving REG DELETE HKLM\Components /v PendingXmlIdentifier REG DELETE HKLM\Components /v NextQueueEntryIndex echo; echo; echo Restarting Windows Update related services... net stop "Background Intelligent Transfer Service" net start "Background Intelligent Transfer Service" net stop "Cryptographic Services" net start "Cryptographic Services" net stop "Windows Update" net start "Windows Update" echo; echo; echo Please try running Windows Update / patching again. echo; echo; PAUSE

Copy the code and save it as a batch file.

A Kinder Philosophy of Success

Robin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:38:06 +0000

Ah. Alain. One of my favourite authors (having read “On Love”, “The Consolations of Philosophy”, “The Art of Travel” and “How Proust Can Change Your Life”). It’s nice to see that he is just as articulate and witty in person as he is in his writing.

As ever, at least for me anyway, the way in which he discusses elements of the human condition are often strikingly common sense, yet addressed in a manner that makes you feel as though somehow, you are being enlightened. Perhaps however that is a flawed feeling; is it not more likely having that which you feel to be true reinforced by someone far more suited to talk on such matters with authority? Whatever it is, I enjoy his work immensely. Infact, I can’t believe I missed the release of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”. Time for an Amazon order…

Embikes.com – Scam site!

Robin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:37:24 +0000

I came across Edward Murray bikes whilst searching for Kona Jake The Snake cross bikes. They were offering a seemingly impossible 30% off all orders placed before April 31st 2009 which seemed too good to be true so I decided to investigate.

Using DNStools.com it’s possible to see that the domain was registered on the 18th Feb 2009. Has the site only just appeared? If so, why? They have “blog/news” articles dating back to 2002.
For some reason, the robots.txt has been used to block a whole host of internet search engines. Why? A domain history in the “Way Back Machine” is blocked too.
The checkout process is insecure, carried out entirely over http:// rather than https://
Take a look at a few of the checkout options:

Enter your credit card details, over standard http! Haha, I think not.
They display a truste.org seal on their homepage. On a legitable website clicking this would redirect your browser to the truste.org website, which would subsequently display some kind of seal of approval. On this site however clicking it takes you to a copied version of the truste.org verification page, hosted on their own server. Here it is. Unsurprisingly when searching for seal holders on the truste website Embikes are not there, meaning they do not hold any seal of approval at current.
Almost every product has 1 review, and of course those reviews are always 5 stars.
They have all the bikes in the entire world in stock! Ok, not quite… but they have more than well known online retailers have. For instance, I could apparently choose any size Jake the Snake from the past 3 years (2007-2009 models). Unlikely.
I entered a brief email correspondance with the “owner” about purchasing a bike. As soon as I asked for some reassurance on the authenticitiy of their site (by providing some of the above concerns), all correspondance stopped.

Worryingly I found this site through Google Shopping. I haven’t yet found a way of reporting fraudulent shops but when I do I’ll be sure to send my “evidence” their way.

Update: Embikes.com no longer appears in Google Shopping results. I wonder how much money they made away with though :/

Adaptec 3805 and Seagate ST31500341AS

Robin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:32:23 +0000

Losing my main hard drive to a mechanical fault recently (and having to pay lots of money to have it professionally recovered) was the final push needed to shell out some cash and get myself setup with a RAID configuration to protect all my data.

Having decided on RAID 6 and knowing that I wanted upto 8 drives to be protected I did some reading around and went for the Adaptec 3805 unified serial (SAS/SATA) RAID controller.

Originally I had planned on kitting myself out with six 1.5TB Seagate drives (ST31500341AS), and although these weren’t in the compatibility list for the controller I had hoped they’d be ok. Luckily I checked with Adaptec and received this suprisingly detailed reply:

The new 1.5 TB drives from Seagate are currently under compatibility testing with several of our controllers, but currently are classified as unsupported. Until this testing is complete, we cannot recommend the use of these drives with any of our current controllers. The drive’s firmware appears to be incompatible with many of our controllers and in many cases, although the drives are detected, the array may not be able to be created properly or there can be behavioral issues with these drives. At this point, we woul recommend using drives listed in the compatibility report for this controller at: http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyres/154B1035-A97E-4E5B-9558-68E597C7E7E6/0/20081_ARCSASCompatibilityReport_030708_3×05_3085.pdf

So at the time of writing, unfortunately the Seagate ST31500341AS drives are not compatible with Adaptec 3805 RAID controllers. I think I’ll have to fill my case up with 1TB Samsung spinpoints instead…

Ulia and Rai.

Robin — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:15:23 +0000

I stumbled across Rai about a year ago now whilst browsing flickr.com. Now there are many quality photographers on this site, and Rai is no exception… but the thing that really made him stand out from crowd was his photographic dedication to his partner Ulia… or who he lovingly refers to as his “Muse“… an almost obsession, but a healthy one – which from her photography seems to go both ways :)

And as if the photos of the dashingly handsome couple in love weren’t enough to make us all jealous, they have even made videos!

(from their youtube page)

I’ve felt love like this before… and have spent many in between years convincing myself that relationships are ok despite knowing something is missing, but in the past year I’ve really learnt something: don’t settle. Don’t settle for less than the best when it comes to something this important. Potentially, it’s for the rest of your life! Do you want to wake up at 40 next to someone who feels like a stranger? Or do you want it to be the person you trust the most, admire the most, and who helps you be a better person? If you can love as much as Rai and Ulia, save it for someone who’ll give back to you what you can give them :)

As Stellarjandri says:

“Rai and Ulia will make you believe in romance again…”

… that they do :)

On the Lash – Women drinking

Robin — Fri, 11 May 2007 21:22:05 +0000

Source article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6213686.stm

Ah. the battle for equality seems to have been won. Women are equally as stupid as men now.. We should all be so proud.

- Richard, Huddersfield

Laughter – Stung Meanchey

Robin — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 11:02:39 +0000

Originally uploaded by Maciej Dakowicz.

Amazing shot… perfect timing… showing the persistence of the human spirit :)

So many incredible photos by this photographer. Please please check out her work.