I’m happy to say that my marathon running/walking for this season is done. Last weekend, I did manage to finish Grandma’s Marathon (no, its not a marathon for grandmas ) and am actually feeling pretty well. My legs don’t even ache any more.
I didn’t train well between the marathons, and it showed. I hit the wall pretty hard right around mile 19. I had to walk until mile 25, at which point I was able to muster enough endorphins to push through the pain in my legs and jog in the last 1.2 miles.
I’m looking forward to doing some shorter races around Duluth this summer/fall and trying to improve my speed at the shorter races before getting crazy and doing another marathon.
Obviously, I’m a little behind on posting this, but I did manage to finish the Big Sur Marathon, in 5 hours and 33 minutes. Not too bad for a first marathon, I guess. The first 18 miles went great. I was able to keep up my running/walking (thanks to the tips from Jeff Galloway the day before). I even thought I had a shot at finishing around the 5 hour mark. As it turns out… Jeff Galloway was pacing a group for a 5 hour finish, and I was ahead of them for the first 17 or 18 miles, but around that point, they caught up to me. Instead of letting them pass, I tried to keep up with them. They were only running for a minute and then walking for a minute, how hard could it be? Well, I had been running for 4 minutes and walking for 1 during the rest of the race, and my running pace was quite a bit slower than their pace. So after about a mile and a half of the 1 and 1 rhythm, I knew I was going to run myself into the ground if I tried to stay with them. So, I gave up on the 5 hour goal and set my sights on just finishing. At 20 miles, I knew that I had two hours to finish before they opened the highway to traffic, so I only had to average 3.1 miles per hour to get to the finish line. I continued along, walking uphill, and jogging downhill when it didn’t hurt too bad until the last 3/4 mile, and then I was able to jog my way to the finish. I was very sore, but it did feel great to have trained for, and completed a full marathon. The Big Sur was challenging, but overall, a great first marathon.
I’m looking forward to Grandma’s Marathon here in Duluth in June. Yep, I’m going to do at least another 26.2 this summer, and who knows, maybe I’ll do more after that.
I hope I’ve trained enough to make it through the course. I did my 20 miler a couple of weeks ago, and was able to walk the next day, so I think I’ve got a good shot at getting that finishers medal. Pretty crazy for a guy who said he’d NEVER want to run a marathon.
I’ll be twittering while we’re in California so keep an eye out for my updates.
Ok, so I’m trying to burn a dvd from a burn folder on my shiny new 24″ iMac. I got the following error The attempt to burn a disc failed. The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media.
So, being the tech support professional that I am, I googled the error message.
And found this solution:
Open System Preferences.
Click on “International”
Under “Languages”: Drag any of the other languages to the top,
then drag English back to the top.
Set “Order for sorted lists” to English
Set “Word Break” to “English (United States, computer)”
Close System Preferences
Restart computer
And it worked! WTF?!? Weirdest work-around I’ve ever encountered….
Mad props to Larry Andrick for posting the fix on the Apple discussion boards.
It appears I’ll soon start taking my ground school classes (October 29th) and be taking my written exam before Christmas. I can’t wait to get some flight instruction time in, too!
I’m also going to be getting my first ride in a Cirrus (SR22, I think) next week, as I am going to GFK for a day to help move some servers into a new rack. Fun.
Here is a useful nugget of info. To think all this time I’ve been firing up task manager and selecting explorer.exe and just ending the process… oops.
In Windows XP, you can get Explorer to exit cleanly by getting to the shutdown dialog (e.g., Start / Turn Off Computer, or Start/Shutdown), then hold down the Ctrl+Alt+Shift keys and click the “Cancel” button. (Ref: JeffDav’s blog.)
In Windows Vista with its standard Start Menu, click on the Start button. Hold down Ctrl+Shift and right-click on any empty area of the menu or on the power/lock buttons at the bottom of the right half of the menu. One of the context menu choices is “Exit Explorer”. Choose this and the main Explorer process will cleanly shut itself down. (Thanks to Mike Sheldon and Raymond Chen for this tip.)
If you are using the “Classic Start Menu” option in Vista, the XP Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Cancel method still works.
Like many Mac OS X users I have punched a hole in my firewall to allow remote ssh access to my home machine. One day, I was working on my (ancient) computer and noticed there was a pretty heavy spike in CPU usage, as well as incoming network traffic. After some brief searching, I found I was under an ssh brute force attack. Now, these attacks are very common to any Internet facing ssh server. However, given the load my tired old G4 450 is under, I want every cpu cycle I can get. A quick google search turned up sshblack, a nifty perl script that will look at yoursshd log files and ban attacking IP addresses. Browsing through the documentation only showed config examples for linux & FreeBSD, but I figured it had to be possible to use this on OS X. I’ve used Tiger’s built in firewall, ipfw, in the past so I figured that would be included in our block/unblock rules.
After a few minutes I found the magic bullet: my($ADDRULE) = '/sbin/ipfw add deny all from ipaddress to any';
my($DELRULE) = 'ipfw delete `ipfw show | grep ipaddress | awk \'{ print $1 }\'`'
(The delrule should be all on one line, unfortunately, it is wrapping on my display. It should copy & paste ok though….)
We also have to change the log to monitor to: my($LOG) = '/var/log/secure.log';
The included documentation explains the other user parameters of the script.
Next I wanted to get it to launch at startup. I probably could have just thrown a quick “/usr/local/bin/sshblack28.pl &” entry into /etc/rc.local, but this is OS X, so why not take advantage of Tiger’s launchd? Using Lingon I was able to create a Launch Daemon to handle the loading at startup very quickly. You can download the plist file here. (You’ll need to change the file name to sshblack.plist and save it to /Library/LaunchDaemons, and you might need to modify the program arguments string to point to your path to the sshblack file. )
So there it is, my instructions on how to setup sshblack on OS X. Clear as mud, eh? The real key is getting the add & delete rules setup properly. As a disclaimer, its been a while since I actually installed this so my memory may be very fuzzy at this point. Anyhoo, hopefully this will help *someone* out there…
) and am actually feeling pretty well. My legs don’t even ache any more. 
