RobLog

Rugby World Cup 2011

2011-10-23T19:35:00.000-05:00

Congratulations New Zealand!! Rugby World Cup 2011 Champions!!

iPhone Taking Forever to Back Up?

2010-11-13T21:52:00.000-06:00

So I'm finally taking the plunge and upgrading my iPhone to OS 4.1. As I've mentioned here before, I very rarely plug my iPhone into iTunes. I just charge it from the wall or car charger, rarely sync it. Mostly because it takes so damn long to back up.

But this time, since I'm doing an OS upgrade, I figured I'd better let the backup run. Several hours after kicking it off, the backup progress meter has hardly moved. I'm leaving on a trip tomorrow, so I don't have time for Apple crapware shenanigans, so I start doing some reading.

It turns out that there's an obscure setting that gets defaulted to 'true' that has your device send it's usage data and crash reports to Apple every time it sync's. You have to queue up to upload that data alongside everyone else on the planet that's currently synching. When I found my crashdump folder it had over 60 dumps in it. Goddammit Apple! Get your garbage off my computer!

This forum posting has instructions for how to reset that setting. It's not easy, you won't find it by poking around.
The Idiots Guide to Making your Iphone Backup fast

In case that forum thread ever vanishes, here it is in a nutshell.

1. Start a sync, but cancel it, so you have your device listed in iTunes, but not currently locked up.
2. Right-click and select "Reset Warnings" from the context menu.
3. Next time you sync, you should see a dialog box like the following.
4. Click "No Thanks". That'll get you out of the queue for crashdump reporting on every sync.

I'll drop an update later as to how the upgrade goes and the backup situation. Don't get me started on the fun of moving an iTunes Library from computer to NAS drive . . . which is what I spent the first half of the weekend doing.

Seeker, Spartacus, and The Hobbit

2010-06-04T01:41:00.001-05:00

Sam Raimi's Legend of the Seeker series is done now. His team are now filming Spartacus in New Zealand (in fact I hear one of the guys I used to play rugby with has a gladiator part!). So I wonder with the recent news of Guillermo Del Toro leaving The Hobbit, if they might grab Sam Raimi to pick up the pieces? I heard he was very keen to be involved when they were first talking about it, and he definitely doesn't seem to mind spending half his time in NZ!

In any case, I just finished watching the Season 2 Finale of Legend of the Seeker. They definitely got their mileage out of the North Island Bethells Beach shooting locations in these last couple episodes. They were travelling up and down the black sand dunes, and they finally brought in the recognizable landmarks on the main beach itself. Cool to see places you know transformed like that!

New Zealand Music Month

2010-05-31T23:08:00.000-05:00

May was New Zealand Music Month. It's been a bit tougher to keep track of Kiwi music now that I'm back in the states. But some of my favorite artists have just released new stuff, so there's no trouble rounding up enough for a post at the moment.

Evermore have just released an album intended to be their U.S. debut. I'll have to keep an eye out for it in stores over here.

Evermore, Underground.

OpShop, Pins and Needles. I've seen these guys a few times, always a great show.

Dane Rumble, Don't Know What To Do. Kel, Claire, and I went to see these guys in Auckland. We were the oldest fans in the crowd, but it was a great show.

Ladyhawke, Magic. I've heard this used as background music in a couple of promo things for CW shows. Great 80's sound.

Tiki Taane and Antiform, Got to be You. I like Tiki Taane's collaborations, especially the dance music. If you like this, check out last years post with Tiki and Bulletproof.

Boundary Waters, May 2010

2010-05-30T20:53:00.000-05:00

I've often wished I could remember all the places I've been in the Boundary Waters. So this time I'm writing it down. :-)

A couple weeks ago, we took a trip in via Entry Point #9, just west of Ely. We were staying only two nights, and there were only two campsites within a days range of the entry (both on the same lake), so we planned on just setting up base camp. The distance looked fairly short on the maps, and none of the portages were long, so we decided to haul in the good stuff (cast iron cookware, steaks on ice, etc).

The distance turned out to be a bit longer than it looked, due to the meanderings of the rivers, but it was still worth it for the food. :-)

The first day was an upstream paddle up the Little Indian Sioux River to the Little Pony River to Bootleg Lake. The Little Indian Sioux was fairly wide and deep, but the Little Pony was quite narrow, meandering, shallow, and obstructed with quite a few beaver dams. That first day in was about 15km, we paddled from about 11am to 6pm or so.

Our campsite on Bootleg was fantastic. Perfect spot for a layover day. Nice landing for the canoes, good hammock trees in the site, nice flat tent spaces for three tents, and a good branch for a bear rope. We had plenty of firewood (thankfully no burning ban), no bugs, and perfect weather.

On the way out we hit the water a little after 9am. We decided to take the long portage out at the far end of Bootleg Lake to take us directly back into the Little Indian Sioux River. We did that partially to avoid the Little Pony River, and partly just to see some new scenery for at least part of the way. In any case, the way back was about 24km and we pulled out of the water around 4:30. The downstream current didn't seem to contribute much. ;-)

Notes for next time: The only thing I'd have done differently is to bring one spare Duluth pack for the cooler and grill. Even if we pulled them back out at every portage to repack them in the canoes, it would make for much easier portaging to put those two items on our backs instead of carrying by the handles.

That said, I think next time is going to be a light-and-fast long distance trip. Those are fun too in their own way.

Template Upgrade

2010-05-30T20:10:00.000-05:00

Since Google announced the Blogger Template Designer I've been meaning to rework my site. There was a fair amount of hackish stuff in my template HTML, including a bunch of monkeying around to make my main post column wider yet still use the rounded corners on the old table based layout.

The new template I picked out is much simpler and cleaner looking. Amazingly, pretty much everything came over with no effort on my part. I did end up spending some time reworking the color schemes of my Tumblr and Flickr widgets. And I cleaned up some minor CSS and Icon annoyances.

I also took a look out at Flickr to see if they've upgraded their Badge Widget generator anytime recently. They have not, so my Flickr badge generator is still valuable. Looking at it again after all these years, it basically just hides the default Flickr table, draws my 2x5 table, then uses some script to pull the InnerHTML of the the Flickr cells containing 10 random images, and poke them into my cells. Like so:


<td class="robCell"><div id="rob1"></div></td>

. . . 

document.getElementById("rob1").innerHTML 
= document.getElementById("flickr_badge_image1").innerHTML;

I'm sure there are much more elegant ways to do this (one of these days I'll get off my ass and finish learning JQuery and/or Prototype), but for now, this is still working. No need to fiddle with it now that I've updated the colors and fixed the margin/padding/border issues that were bugging me.

The Tumblr Badge was even easier, that was just a few color tweaks, though again I messed with the margin/padding/border settings to bring things in a bit tighter.


/* Rob Styles*/
.tumblr_photo
{
width: 125px;
height: auto;
float: right; 
margin: 3px;
padding: 0px;  
border: 3px #444444 solid; 
}

.tumblr_posts
{
float: left; 
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
margin-left: -10px;   
}

.tumblr_post
{
font-size: x-small; 
list-style-type: none; 
width: 215px;
margin: 0px; 
padding: 0px;  
margin-top: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;   
max-height:210px; 
overflow: hidden;
border: thin black outset;
background-color: #222222; 
old-background-color:#78a;
}
.tumblr_caption
{
padding: 2px;
margin: 2px; 
}

Minnesota River Valley Trail Recon

2010-04-08T01:41:00.002-05:00

Now that I've set my mind to it, I'm making good progress on settling in. I've just found an apartment in the Highland neighborhood of St. Paul. It's a bit busier than I would have liked, and I'll miss having trees right off my balcony, but it's a great location.

It's 4.5 miles to work, straight down Highway 5. But even better, that neighborhood is right at a nexus of the major trail systems in the Twin Cities. I can take the River Road north on either side of the Mississippi, cross the river and take the Minnehaha Creek parkway west to the lakes, go east down Shepard road nearly all the way to my brother's place, or cross Highway 5 on the bridge and drop into the Minnesota River Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Speaking of the rivers, I'm right over the confluence of the Mississipi and Minnesota rivers at Pike Island, so once I have a car that can haul my kayaks, I'll be heading down there as often as possible. I've found a place to store kayaks and bikes as well, just down 7th, so hopefully no more big drives to my parents place to pick up the boat before paddling expeditions.

Weather was pretty nice today, and the flood waters are down a bit, so I finally got myself motivated to get out for a recon expedition into the River Valley trails. The objective of this one was to find the link between the Wildlife Refuge that surrounds the building I work in, and Ft. Snelling State Park. I know from camping in Ft. Snelling for the Mississippi River Challenge that you can get onto the Highway 5 bridge footpath from the Fort. So if I could find a way into the park, I can run or bike from my new apartment to work using only trails. :-)

It turned out to be much much easier than I expected. I ran from Ceridian to the NWR Visitor Centre on the road, from there I followed the road to the western side of the 494 bridge over the Minnesota River. At that point there was a little path beaten down the hillside under the bridge. That was slightly dodgy . . . I had to laugh at the two taggers who suddenly decided to causally saunter away from their open cans of housepaint, rollers and spray cans in their hoodies and huge backpacks.

On the other side of the bridge there was a bit of trouble picking out trails to get around the fences of the Air Force target range bordering the park. Once the river's back down to lower levels it should be easy, but as it was, I was crossing what appeared to be mud covered gravel roads tracked only by water birds and river otters ahead of me. :-) On the way back, I discovered I can bypass that stretch via Post road along the top of the bluffs for now.

After about a half hour of half-assed running around, I found a way through to the edge of Ft. Snelling State Park. I could see the Mendota Bridge in the distance over Snelling Lake. So that was mission accomplished. I know there are trails from end to end that would bring me back up the bluffs and into the Fort. So discovering whether or not those are above water is another run, probably starting from the other direction.

Next trip I definitely need to remember to bring my little Fuji, I saw so many critters . . . flocks of wild turkeys, and hordes of scraggly looking deer. So next mission is linking my apartment to the north end of this run, and the trip after is linking the Wildlife Refuge trails to Ceridian's little walking path without using any roads. That may have to wait for the flood waters to drop.

iPhone Not Recognized as a Camera

2010-04-08T00:33:00.002-05:00

It's not very often that I physically plug my iPhone into my computer. Mostly because when I plug it into my old laptop, it's a hassle to get it recognized, then it takes hours and hours to back up and synch. I've mostly got what I want on it, so I only plug it in if I really have to grab a firmware update, or really want some bit of new music or a large app update that won't come down over 3g.

But every now and then, I do use it as a camera, and there's something I really want from it. I'll dig out the white Apple proprietary USB cable and plug in. Usually I get the 'searching for driver' bit, then a fail. At work, I'd written it off as a big-brother firewall problem at first (blocked driver download). Then I discovered that my cube neighbor's iPhone worked on my machine, and my phone also failed on his machine . . . so much for a driver issue. I figured maybe a phone issue. Anyway, I can't be bothered with troubleshooting USB devices to get one photo, so I'd email it to myself. At home I'd just roll my eyes and fire up iTunes . . . after a few restarts of the Apple Mobile Device Service and a couple unplugs and replugs, maybe a reboot of the phone, it would be recognized as a device, and I could get the pictures out with Picasa.

But now I've got a new laptop. I really don't want to put iTunes on it until I'm ready to retire my old laptop, because I don't want to mess around with having to deauthorize all my former computers in order to authorize my new one (don't get me started on that, that's a whole other topic).

So when I plug the phone into my new laptop and it comes up as 'random usb thing which by the way failed to start' - it's on!

Google's taken all the fun out of low level troubleshooting, but there's no sense spending hours and hours on something that's common knowledge, so I did some searches. I turned up the usual crap from Apple and Apple cultist forums about updating to the latest firmware, rebooting your iPhone, rebooting your PC, updating to latest iTunes, reinstalling iTunes, blah blah blah.

Then I spotted something on a Microsoft site: 'Windows 7 will not recognize my iPhone as a Camera' [1] . That's promising, my exact symptoms, and a Microsoft forum, so it should (one would think) be free of Apple bullshit. So taking a look at it, the first response (which by the way is marked as 'the answer') links to some Apple KB article talking about USB drivers being 'out of date'. What an absolute load of crap, what kind of flakey garbage hanging on the end of the cable is going to have a problem with fresh out of the box Win7 USB drivers, or any drivers for that matter. You're doing something wrong if your hardware is worried about USB driver minor versions on various operating systems.

Just out of curiosity regarding peoples luck with this 'solution' I scrolled down the page . . . where I spotted this:

"There is something wrong with the firmware in the iphone. If you have any photos that are in your photo album within the phone that are there from any source except the phone itself such as an emailed photo or downloaded photo, PC's and Macs will not recognize your phone. You must delete the "foreign pictures" then the Mac or PC will recognize the phone."

Now that sounded more like the Apple crapware I know. I've always had 'foreign pictures' in my Camera Roll. And I know that was not always a problem, as I've used that space to move images from photo collection to photo collection at times. But annoying as it was, it had the sound of the sort of bug Apple would roll out, so I thought I'd give it a try. I did a quick run through and deleted every image that wasn't taken by the iPhone. Lo and behold, plug it in, it pops up as a camera . . . hmm. Figuring I'd repro it, do my bit, and properly report a firmware bug to Apple Dev. . . I pulled down a couple large images from my Flickr, and some PNG files off XKCD, but was unable to reproduce the problem again . . . go figure. *sigh*

How do people that make such terrible software, get their hands on such awesome hardware to defile with their garbage?

Anyway, if your iPhone's not recognized as a camera, try cleaning out your Camera Roll.

I'm gonna go kick a mac.

[1] http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/fi-FI/w7hardware/thread/0e73e4b1-9b7e-4a6f-98d4-058c7d12edc7

Travels and Back In the States

2009-12-02T01:20:00.001-06:00

Alright, I'm long overdue for a post here. I thought I'd post something when I was all employed and settled in, but that's looking like it's going to take a bit longer than I'd originally thought. I'd been keeping up with posts in Flickr and Facebook, but nothing here. So here goes, more of a photo-dump than anything, I think I've also been put off by the sheer volume of stuff to write about.

The day after my last day of work Kel, Gayle and I headed to Rarotonga. Claire flew over from London to meet us there a day or two later. There's not a lot to do on the island, but after the stress of wrapping up everything at work, that was fine by me. It was windy and not quite hot enough to make the water as inviting as it looks in the photos, so we did a lot of reading, eating and lounging around. Oh, and thanks to my inattention while grocery shopping we did an unintentional detox while DRINKING DECAF PLUNGER COFFEE ALL WEEK! Gah! I thought it was the water that made it taste funny until Kel noticed the Decaf marking. They should put bright colored warning labels on that stuff and sugar-free crap. :-)

When I got bored, I'd harass the local wildlife or paddle around the lagoon in the house kayak. One morning I went for a run over the highlands in the center of the island on the cross island track. Unfortunately, I'd just missed the annual cross island race which was held the week before we arrived. It was a good 10-15k run, with about half dirt road and half muddy steep jungle track.

After Rarotonga, we headed over to Whakatane. Kel booked Claire and I on a trip out to White Island, an active volcano about an hour offshore by boat. Despite being seasick the whole way out, that was a great trip. Imagine Yellowstone without all the boardwalks and fences and warning signs. There are just random thermal features that pop up and fade away, and the crater lake changes colours dramatically, depending on what's going on below. When we were there, the water table was quite high due to recent rains, so there was steam everywhere, and new mudpots had recently opened. Our guide also said a second crater appeared to be forming. It had gone from the size of a plate to the size of a house in a matter of weeks. We couldn't go anywhere near that or the sulphur stacks due to the steam.

After Whakatane, we drove across through Gisbourne to Mahia on the East Coast, for a second attempt to go swimming with Moko the dolphin. He'd been hanging around Mahia for years, stealing people's beach toys and bringing them fish . . . until the week before we showed up. Now he seems to have moved up the coast to Gisbourne. That's unfortunate for Mahia, as in the off season (when the water's too cold for swimming) there's not a whole lot to do there. Also unfortunate is that it looks like Moko's been having more negative interactions with people in the more populated Gisbourne beaches, knocking surfers off their boards and harassing lifeguards . . . not good. They should maybe try to lure him back to Mahia for his own good.

'Friendly' Dolphin Strikes Again - New Zealand Herald.

With the dolphin swim off the agenda, we went to the local pub to drink some beer. We were all excited to see Crayfish (Rock Lobster) dinner on the menu, only to learn that they were out of Crayfish . . . Mahia: the bay of disappointment. Probably best to visit in the summertime. ;-)

Next we continued along to Napier. Kel had booked us for a Wine Tour with a place called 'Grape Escape'. I should capture the names of the Wineries here before I forget them: Brookfields (excellent Pinot Noir), Ngatarawa/Farmgate, Elephant Hill (where Kel and I had the best gnocchi for lunch), and Matariki.

One funny thing about our wine tour was the fact that the rest of the tour group were Americans, including two officers on leave from Afghanistan. I think that's the largest group of Americans I'd seen in NZ since the Te Reo Maori classes we'd taken a year or so before.

On the way back from Napier, we stayed at The Chateau Tongariro for a couple nights. The intent was to do some skiing, but it was quite late in the season, and the weather wasn't cooperating. But the Chateau is nice whatever the weather. They have an excellent restaurant, and a nice pool/sauna setup in the depths of the building (At least when it's not infested with screaming sproglets. There seemed to be something about the acoustics down there that amplified kid screams to horrific levels). ;-)

From there we had a couple of free days up in Auckland, then Kel and Claire took off for Sydney. I flew over to join them a couple days later.

They'd gotten all the shopping out of the way, so we just hit some restaurants (in particular Bill Granger's place) and made a trip over to Bondi Beach. Kel and Claire relaxed in the sun while I went out on a surfing lesson. Those were the best waves I've had in a few attempts at surfing. Makes me wish I'd gotten out at Ohope a few times . . . one of those things you think you'll always have time to do. Then again, as fun as that was, I felt like I'd been hit by a train the next day. ;-)

Claire headed back to London from Sydney (via Hong Kong) while Kel and I flew back to Auckland. The next week was a blur of packing and getting stuff ready to ship, meeting up with friends, and visiting old haunts for the last time. As far as I've heard, my stack of boxes and the kayak Kel gave me for my birthday are still waiting to ship from Albany.

Kel and Gayle saw me off at the Auckland airport with gifts of NZ gear, Pineapple Lumps, and Conchords tunes!

On the other side of the 20 hour trip, I took a cab to my parents place from the Minneapolis Airport after waiting an hour or so for my brother to pick me up. He'd dislocated his shoulder playing volleyball earlier in the evening, and was sitting in the waiting room of the hospital.

It didn't dampen the Halloween spirit though.

I made it a point to get back to Minnesota in time for Halloween as David always goes all out at his place. We took my nieces to the pumpkin patch the next day. A couple days later we had a pumpkin carving night and horror-movie festival. Halloween night, I handed out candy while David took the girls out trick-or-treating.

Since October I've been catching up with friends, and working on finding a job, which is the first part of getting settled back in over here. That seems to be done now, but more on that soon . . .

XTerra 6 and a Crazy Few Weeks

2009-09-09T21:30:00.000-05:00

August 31st was the last race in the XTerra 2009 Trail Run series. This one was up at Shakespear Regional Park, a nice short drive from Albany. I ended up running with a few coworkers from ASB: Marco and Stephen, who also did the Riverhead race, and Rohith.

As usual for the XTerra races, the organizers did an excellent job in designing the course. We covered some of the same ground as the night run the evening before, but we also made our way all the way around the headlands on the rocky shoreline. I'm really bummed that all my photos from my little waterproof camera came out overexposed (I was trying an experiment with higher ISO setting to keep the shutter speed fast). But suffice to say that it was pretty tough keeping 10k per hour pace across slippery low tide rocks. :-)

After the coastal part, we cut into the center of the peninsula and did some running through the paddocks with the cows and sheep. That portion went a lot faster, even with the hills.

This was actually the first XTerra Long Course that I managed to finish in under two hours! It was only 17k, but still, I'm quite happy with that. My overall rank at the end of the series was 11th of 114 in the Men's Open Long Course category. Overall, there were about 300 runners in the Long Course group.

View Larger Map

In other news, for those of you that haven't heard: I'm going to be moving back to the states at the end of October. So yesterday was my last day at ASB, and today is my last day at Datacom. Over the next few weeks, we're going to be doing some travelling around. First up is a week and a half in Rarotonga with Kel, Gayle, and Claire. Then Kel, Claire and I are headed around the East Cape, and back to Chateau Tongariro for some Skiing at Ruapehu. Kel and Claire are then headed down to Wellington for a weekend, then the three of us are headed to Sydney for a couple of days. Yow! Anyway, probably lots of photos coming soon!

Night Trail Run at Shakespear Regional Park

2009-08-29T06:46:00.001-05:00

I just got back from an 11.5 Km night trail run up in Whangaparoa. I never would have thought that the limiting factor on my run time would be my cardio fitness, and I certainly wasn't expecting to finish so close to an hour (1:04:06), but I fell in with a group that had nice bright headlamps. I pushed hard to keep near enough to take advantage of multiple lights. One guy in particular had a huge spotlight mounted on his shoulder, there must have been a battery for it in his hydration pack. It was nice having him about 20 meters behind me for a good chunk of the race. :-)

The course was exellent . . . it was about an even mix of gravel road, single track, and paddock fence-lines. At one point we were running along a ridge with views of the Auckland skyline across the harbour on one side, and a stream of little multi-colored lights trickling up the hill out of the dark on the other.

I wish I'd had my little camera and a gorilla-pod along for that moment. At the finish, I did manage to grab my SLR and a tripod in time to catch some of the later finishers coming through:

As usual for TotalSport events, there were beer and sausages at the finish! Tomorrow is the last XTerra race at the same location. I'll get to see what we ran through tonight, plus a bunch of coastal rock scrambling.

Tumblr Badge for Blogs and CSS Troubleshooting

2009-08-29T06:17:00.001-05:00

My post on how to use CSS to restyle Tumblr's default blog widget has been quite popular. One commenter pointed out that it wasn't displaying properly in IE6 or IE7 (surprise). After a bit of investigation, it turned out to be the Usual Suspect: browser differences in default Box Model behavior.

Specifically, it appears that IE versions lower than 8 use a large amount of default margin to move elements to their default starting position in a container. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, on the other hand, seem to use about the same amount of space, but in Padding. You can see the difference in the two screen captures below. The Red border is the Tumblr_Posts div.

Note that in Firefox above, the whitespace is on the inside of the Div, it's "Padding" of about 50 pixels. In IE below, it's also about 50 pixels, same resulting position, but caused by outside the Div "Margin" space.

My goal with the stylesheet was to keep a minimum of whitespace between the outer container (Green border), and the little photo boxes (inside the red box). I did that with the first CSS property that came to mind: Margin-Left. I raised that number until it looked how I wanted it in Chrome, doublechecked it in IE8, Firefox, and iPhone Safari, then published it. Unfortunately, since IE6 started with Margin-Left at about 50px, the impact of setting Margin-Left to -30px was a 80px move in IE (compared to 35px in most other browsers). The result was the posts were chopped off about halfway across by the border of the sidebar.

The solution, as with most things in computing, is to reboot. ;-) Specifically, set all the box model numbers to the one number that puts all browsers on equal footing: zero.

Zeroing out both margin and padding did exactly what I wanted in the first place: let the Tumblr Post boxes fill the containing div. Any number would work actually, as long as you set them all explicitly, rather then letting the browsers use their assorted defaults.

.tumblr_posts
  {
    margin: 0px;
    padding: 0px; 
  }

Anyway, hope that helps. If you went and read up on the CSS Box Model, or have wrestled with this stuff before, you'll probably find this amusing:

CSS is Awesome! Mug on Zazzle

Here's the current, corrected CSS:

.tumblr_photo
  {
    width: 110px;
    height: auto;
    float: right;
    margin: 7px;
    border: 2px black solid;
  }
  .tumblr_posts
  {
    margin: 0px;
    padding: 0px; 
  }
  .tumblr_post
  {
    font-size: x-small;
    list-style-type: none;
    width: 210px;
    padding: 7px;
    margin: 5px;
    max-height:200px;
    overflow: hidden;
    border: thin black outset;
    background-color:#78a;
  }

Legend of the Seeker

2009-08-05T01:41:00.000-05:00

Kel and I have gotten hooked on the Legend of the Seeker TV series. It's the latest from one of my favorite writer/producer/directors: Sam Raimi (Spiderman, Evil Dead, Hercules, and Xena). Like Hercules and Xena, it's filmed here in New Zealand.

I had to laugh while watching the pilot when I saw them go from riding horses in the Southern Alps to rolling down the North Island West Coast dunes in a matter of seconds.

I'm pretty sure the spot in the dunes where this scene was filmed is at Bethell's Beach where I was running The Superdune race just a week earlier. Though it could be the Te Paki Dunes up north. Either way I've been there . . . love it! :-)

XTerra Race #4 (Waiuku)

2009-07-27T06:40:00.000-05:00

Last weekend was race four in the XTerra trail run series. This was the furthest I've had to drive so far. The race HQ was a ways south of Waiuku, nearly two hours from the North Shore, where the Waikato River meets the Tasman Sea. I'm glad I made the trip. Unlike the last race, this time the weather was perfect, and I think this was the best course yet.

That said, you can see from the photos that it had been raining right up to the day of the race. There were a number of large puddles out there, including this one right at the start.

The course itself was amazingly fast. It's almost 3km longer than the Riverhead course, but I finished over an hour faster, and that's got nothing to do with anything I did between those two weekends. ;-)

I actually thought for a minute that I might break two hours for the long course in this race. But once again I'd underestimated the sadistic streak of the race organisers: in the last few klicks some horrific mud pits appeared out of nowhere, and the finish was a load of sand hills. I was so shocked to be struggling with what had seemed an easily reachable goal a few minutes earlier, that I neglected to grab any pictures of the mud pits. They really were one of the nastier surprises of the series. Nice work guys! ;)

So even if I didn't manage to break 2:00, I'm still quite happy to have knocked an hour off my 20k time. I've noticed that I've also broken into the top 10 in the overall rankings for the series long course. As with the Beach Series, mainly by virtue of attendance. But hey, swag is swag (if I can sneak a few places higher by the end)! ;-)

XTerra Race #3 (Riverhead)

2009-07-05T07:50:00.001-05:00

Last Sunday was race 3 in the XTerra Trail Run Series. This time it was right in my backyard, just a 20 minute drive down the road to Riverhead forest. A couple of my co-workers decided to do the race as well: Marco (one of the members of our lunchtime running group) and Steve. That was probably a good thing, as I was pretty close to going back to bed when I woke up to pouring rain. ;-)

I'm glad I didn't, it's always good fun splashing through the mud and puddles once you're out in it. With the rain, this course was quite tough. We pushed fairly hard, but still came in at 3:03:11. Marco's wife and two little girls did the short course, they came in just a bit after us, with their umbrella's and gum boots. :-)

Next race is down at Waiuku, where the Waikato River meets the Tasman Sea. It's not far from Port Waikato, where my friend Tony and I once went to have a look (from a distance) at the Weathertop location from the Fellowship of the Ring movie. Hopefully the weather's nice that day. I wouldn't mind grabbing some photos, as that's another part of the Auckland region that you'd rarely have any reason to pass through.

The Watchtower of Amon Suil

XTerra Race #2 At Hunua Ranges

2009-06-11T07:11:00.000-05:00

Sunday I ran race 2 in the Auckland XTerra trail run series. This one was at Hunua Ranges regional park. Once again we had perfect weather for it! The morning started out quite foggy, but unfortunately I was running a bit late, so there was no time to stop for photos of the misty hilltops on the way in. :-( The shot below was taken with my little point-and-shoot by sticking my arm out the car window!

The course was amazing. Damn tough, (as they'd warned us). At one point we were climbing UP the Downhill Mountain Biking National Championship course.

Which reminds me: my running shoes have pretty much zero tread left on the soles. I think I may go for a pair of proper trail running shoes before the next race at the end of the month.

Despite the toughness of the course I'm quite pleased with my race. I ran 2:59:30, which is almost an hour slower than the last race at Woodhill, but felt like a good effort on the Hunua course.

Next race is at Riverhead, right in my backyard. I was hoping for a fast course, but the race organizers are predicting a mud-fest . . . That's fine by me too! :-)

New Zealand Music Month

2009-05-29T07:30:00.000-05:00

May is New Zealand Music Month. Last year I put up this post with some of my favorite NZ music. I figured I'd do the same this year. So here in no particular order or chronology, is some of my favorite NZ music since the last post.

Evermore - Between the Lines

Minuit - Species II

Tiki Taane and Julia Deans - Our Favorite Target

Opshop - Maybe

Midnight Youth - All on Our Own

Bulletproof/Tiki Taane - Dark Times

Kora - Skankenstein - The video is kind of distracting, but I like the tune. These guys are from Kel's hometown of Whakatane.

And of course what NZ music collection would be complete without Flight of the Conchords. I had this song stuck in my head all day after I saw the episode:

Flight of the Conchords - I Told You I Was Freaky

I like these guys too, but for some reason they don't allow embedding of their YouTube video.
Nesian Mystik - Nesian 101

XTerra Trail Run Series: Race 1 (Woodhill Forest)

2009-05-18T07:05:00.000-05:00

On Sunday I ran the long course (21.5km) in the first race of the Auckland XTerra Trail Run Series.

Despite the forecasts, it started out as an absolutely beautiful autumn day. In fact it was perfect to the point where I had to stop several times during the drive there along the Coatesville-Riverhead highway to take some photos. Fortunately I had plenty of time to spare so I stopped to grab a coffee and pastry at the apple orchard cafe just out of Kumeu as well.

The venue for the race was Woodhill Forest, best known as a mountain biking and motocross destination. The terrain was fairly flat sandy logging roads through red pine forest. It actually reminded me quite a lot of Chequamegon National Forest back in Wisconsin.

I'd decided in this race that I'd focus more on racing, rather than all the picture taking I did during the Superdune. At the start I lined up around the middle of the pack, and when the horn went off, I took off fairly aggressively. About 10 minutes in, I started feeling fairly run down. That isn't too unusual early on given my usual lack of warmup, but I was also a bit disheartened by the number of people passing me. I seemed to be losing quite a bit of ground in the field from my starting position. I was a bit bummed out by that until we hit the first water stop at 2.9 km. I glanced at my watch and saw that we'd come in quite a bit under 15:00. Doh! That wasn't too far off pace for my fastest half marathon. I eased back a bit and seemed to have settled into my place in the pack.

From there on I pretty much cruised along. The trail was nice and smooth, without any significant climbs, and quite good traction for all the sand. I hit the sign for 16km at about 1:24, so I had well over 30 minutes to run 5k and still come in under 2:00. That made me quite happy. So I picked up the pace a bit. I remember looking at my watch at about 1:47 and thinking: I've been running like clockwork, and the terrain's been the same, we can't have more than about 2km to go. Just then we hit the sign announcing "1km to go". Disturbingly, it was positioned right in front of a tangle of deadfalls. They turned out to be the gates of hell. ;-) From that point on it was a roller-coaster dune-slog. I had to laugh every time I staggered to the top of a sandy hill to see more sand as far as you could see. It took me damn near 20 minutes to cover that last "1km". I finished in 2:09:26.

Next race in early June is at Hunua Ranges. Rumour has it that the course is way tougher. I'll have to put in some hill work before then. Fortunately, I'm back at ASB starting next week, so I've got my lunchtime running partners back! :-)

After the race, I wandered around and took some photos of the beach at Woodhill. Typical west coast beach: mile after mile of beautiful sand, and not a soul in sight. I also stopped in at Muriwai beach on the way home. By then the weather had turned to crap, but it kind of suited the pounding surf. The fishermen and the kite surfers certainly didn't seem to mind.

Star Trek Rocks

2009-05-05T15:34:00.002-05:00

In honor of the premier of the new Star Trek movie tonight, I thought I'd share this little Facebook exchange I had with my friend Kevin last week. It's Facebook, so read from the bottom up. This made my day:

In Facebook, I posted the link to the Wikipedia article on the episode, but I should have posted this link to the YouTube video that's the #1 listing in a search for "Worst Fight Scene Ever". You can also see those rocks in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, numerous music videos, and just about every low budget Sci-Fi T.V. show ever made. ;-)

Superdune Half Marathon 2009

2009-04-28T19:29:00.000-05:00

On Sunday I ran the Superdune half marathon. I was excited to do this race as much for the location as anything. Bethells Beach is one of the west coast black sand beaches. I've seen lots of photos of it in books and postcards, so I was looking forward to seeing it myself and grabbing a few photos of my own.

Bethells Beach is a ways from Albany, but it didn't take as long to get there as I thought it would, no more than 45 minutes of the hour or so I'd planned on. After parking and signing in, I had almost two hours to kill before the race start. I grabbed a cup of coffee from the van at the race HQ, picked up my camera, and headed down to the beach. The light was flat and grey, with a bit of mist, but I could see patches of sun now and then. Only a couple of my morning pictures turned out, but I could see that there was potential for later.

I wandered around for a bit, then headed back to HQ for the race briefing, and to watch the multisport race start.

The start of our race took us into the black sand dunes straight away (hence the name).

Around the other side of the dunes, we dropped into a shallow creek, and followed it along like a road. I always love these bits of an off-road run. It's like playing in the puddles on a stormy day when you're a kid. It's not something you'd usually do if you just came out here to go tramping around outside of the race format.

After the creek run, we climbed up a large hill overlooking the beach. I won't post everything here, but there are a few more photos on Flickr. I'll probably add a few more to that set as I fix them up.

The course then dropped down off the hill and back onto the beach. We had one little channel crossing to do (about knee deep) to get back onto the main beach.

After the beach run we had a massive uphill climb followed by roller coaster ups and downs. I think the stats on the course were that the highest point was 230 meters or so, but the course as a whole has 750 meters of climbing. Yow! It was quite a slog on the uphills, and the red sticky clay that piled up on your shoes and accumulated every loose thing you stepped on didn't help. ;-)

The view from the top of all that was quite amazing. It always blows me away how far 20 kilometers is when you see it all laid out like this. In the photo below, the race start is about where you see the structures at center-right. The dunes are out of frame to the right. The first big climb is the dark green hill right in the center, with the course rejoining the beach on the far side. The beach run is obvious, and the red clay climb goes from there to the point where this photo was taken (which I think is just past 12-15k or so).

After the big climb, we dropped down through some pine forest, back to the dunes and the creek again. We started the first hill again, but this time around we cut out of it early and made a beeline back to the finish.

I'd finished near the tail end of the mens 21k field with a time of 2:33 (too much time messing around taking photos I think). There were still plenty of multisport racers out there. I watched a bunch more people finish, then I grabbed my SLR and headed down to see how things were looking at the beach.

Despite my sore legs I made the hike down to the far end of the beach to check out the big sea cave and see what was around the big rocks at the end. On the way back the sun popped in and out of the mist, creating a rainbow over the beach. The combination of patches of blue sky and the white puffy clouds was quite amazing. I'm really bummed that none of my photos come close to doing it justice.

I'm not sure what the problem was. I shot with almost the same settings, lenses, and filter setup that I used for my Coromandel photos, but those turned out much better. I think maybe the UV and Polarizing filters on my small lens didn't work out well with the misty clouds. Unfortunately, due to an accident years ago involving a drop from some height and a rock, the threads of the UV filter are pretty much locked into my small lens. :-(

Anyway, here are my favorite few from that hike after the race. There's more on Flickr, and I'll add in whatever others I salvage in post processing as I get around to it.

I was also bummed to see that almost all the surfers were gone by the time I got done taking photos. That usually means that its either no longer fun or getting dangerous. Ah well, probably best that I wasn't too tempted to grab my boogie board. Another hour or two of kicking around in flippers probably would have been way too much for my worn out legs.

Another Photo in Wikipedia

2009-04-28T19:20:00.001-05:00

This one's in the German Wikipedia article on the Tongariro River.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongariro_River

My Photo in Wikipedia

2009-04-19T17:42:00.000-05:00

I noticed some unusual stat numbers on my Flickr photos the other day and discovered that one of my photos is in Wikipedia now.

I have three that have been pulled into the Wikimedia Commons, but this is the first one (that I know of) that's been put into an article in the English Wikipedia. It's a photo of a cruise ship docked in Tauranga Harbour used in the Port of Tauranga article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Tauranga

The Dual: Motutapu Rangitoto Traverse 2009 - Half Marathon

2009-03-30T00:14:00.002-05:00

The Dual is now my all-time favorite running race! (Sorry Wild Turkey, you're just not the same without the canyoneering and creek swimming.) Short version is that I ran a 2:44 on quite a tough technical course, and had a great day out on the island.

Long version (with photos) follows:

I was up at O'Dark-Thirty to catch the ferry out to Motutapu. Weather was looking perfect and there was a nice sunrise going at Devonport Wharf. I'd arrived quite early, so I hit the cafe. There I just happened to run into my friend Derek. He was headed over to Auckland to sail in a regatta. He was on the yacht Thelma, racing around Rangitoto island but I only ended up seeing the regatta from quite a long ways away.

Note to self: Pain Au Chocolat + Large Coffee = excellent pre-race breakfast! :-)

It's about a 30 minute ride out to Motutapu, so I wandered around the boat taking some photos of the Auckland skyline on the way out. Auckland from that angle is mainly containers and cargo cranes, so nothing worth posting there. There were a couple nice views of Rangitoto on the way in. This shot gives a good idea of the scale of the volcano. The race course runs just around the peak.

Once we landed on Motutapu, I put my race gear together, stashed the rest, and had a wander around the race HQ. I ran into a few more friends from work while waiting for the start. Speaking of which, in this photo, the start of the course runs straight up that hill in the draw just to the left of the inflatable arch. :-(

The start of the race was quite packed. It was pretty much a solid mass of people walking up that first hill bit. Given the off-road course, I certainly wasn't planning on setting any PR's, so I just settled in and went with the flow. I managed to snap quite a few pictures through this stretch. In this one you can see Rangitoto out on the horizon. From where we are (about 2km into the course), we go over onto Rangitoto Island, straight up the hill, around the edge of the peak/crater, and back.

The first 8 k's or so were all mown grass truck trail through rolling pastures. The instant we crossed over onto Rangitoto island things changed dramatically. We were now running on a road of pulverized lava rock running through a field of not-so-pulverized lava rock. It was quite a long steady climb up to the shoulder of the peak.

Just after the highest point on the course, we dove into a bunch of lava rock singletrack through the bush. This stuff was extremely technical. People piled up a bit again as there was no way to pass. I was happy just cruising along, but my heartrate recovered quite a bit from the big climb at the pace we were going. Every now and then the trail would widen a bit and people would get a little crazy. I saw one guy take a tumble just ahead of me. He stuck his hands out to catch his fall and got absolutely shredded by the lava rock. I stopped to see what I could do, but he had some friends with him so they sent us along.

I got back to running thinking "Damn, I'm glad I know how to fall." About 5k later, the trail turned back into sort of a road. We were at about the 10k mark and I'd hardly been running, so I picked up the pace quite a lot. Sure enough, at some point I kicked a big tumbling hunk of lava rock and went down. I did a nice shoulder roll, so I took only a couple tiny scratches on my lead hand and a small tap on my elbow, but I must have come up with my weight on one knee because I ended up with a nice hunk of rocked stabbed into my leg just below the knee. I took a couple jogging steps and didn't feel any problems, so I stopped and pulled the rock bits out of my leg. There was a big bloody hole that I couldn't see the bottom of, but not that much was coming out, so I figured I'd be fine to keep going.

My knee felt quite bashed at first, but it warmed up in a minute or two. A kilometer or so later there was a water stop, I chucked a cup of water on the cut and had a look at it. I thought "Oooh, that's not good" but again, the bleeding was surprisingly light, and it didn't hurt to run on, so I thought I might as well keep going. It would probably take just as long to sit down and wait for an ATV evac, not to mention I'd be tying up the ATV that somebody else might seriously need. After that I didn't think about much of anything other than exactly where every footstep was going.

After quite a long stretch of lava rock singletrack segments, I was breathing a sigh of relief to be off Rangitoto and back in the rolling pastures of Motutapu. I didn't even mind the massive gradual uphill. It was actually kind of fun passing up mountain bikers slogging along in their granny gears.

B.t.w. I love how you can see people strung out all along the horizon in this photo. Though it kinda sucks that they're all ahead of me . . . I suppose that's the price of an extremely careful 7 or 8 k's through the last of the lava rock.

This was my favorite photo of the day . . . and not just because I'm almost done with the race . . .

This was the view from just the other side of the signpost in the last picture. The last K was pretty much a dive bomb run to the beach. Over the last few k's I'd spotted my friends from work, so I'd been chasing them a bit. I didn't catch them, but they were still gathered up at the finish when I came through.

I drank my sports drink and ate a banana while I chatted with them for a bit, then decided I'd better go see the ambulance guys. They dribbled some sterile water on my leg and said I should probably visit an A&E to have them "whack a few stitches in it". Well yeah, no kidding. ;-)

Ah well, I'm not sure what I was expecting, probably best that they saved their sterile water for dehydration IV use, and no sense bandaging a dirty wound that's clotted up and stopped bleeding.

So I went down to the beach, jumped in the ocean and scrubbed out the wound myself with seawater. :-) I still really didn't like what I saw, but there wasn't anything more to be done about it in the field.

After that I hung out for the after race festivities: lamb burgers, beers, merit prizes, and watching the rest of the racers come in. Ferry's were coming in every half hour or so starting at 1:30 or so, but the queues were really long, so we sat around until about 3pm before we decided to go join the queue. At that point it was pretty clear that there were some logistical issues with the ferry schedule, but we all got off the island by about 5pm.

On the way home I stopped at a pharmacy and grabbed a bunch of supplies, including some steri-strips (3M adhesive stitches). It's been over 72 hours now, the steri-strips are holding nicely, and the leg wound is looking ok. Or at least better than the other minor injuries, which are being treated with my usual regimen of total neglect. So score one for the healing power of seawater. ;-)

Note: stuff to pack in a real first aid kit for Adventure Racing:

Good squirt bottle with clean water.
Green scrubby pads (still sealed)
Liquid Antiseptic
Antibiotic cream
Big gauze pads
Steri Strips
Athletic/Duct Tape

But the bottom line is: despite another clumsy injury, it was a great day and a nice workout on an excellent course.

Here the NZ Herald write-up of the event:
Multisport: Scenic Dual attracts full field
And a promotional video from the Organizers (TotalSport.co.nz):
http://www.totalsport.co.nz/video.html

Technical note: I had tried a little experiment with my iPhone during the race. I'd downloaded an app called RunKeeper that acts as a little GPS waypoint recorder. Unfortunately, due to iPhone OS limitations, you can't use the hard screen lock while it's running, or it will stop recording. It has it's own soft lock, so at the race start, I started recording, locked it, and chucked it into the hip pocket on my hydro-pack. Somewhere around the halfway point in the race it seems that my gel-packs in that same pocket warmed up enough to start triggering the touch screen. They seem to have unlocked the screen, exited the app, made 4 phone calls to a 6-digit (fortunately nonexistent) number. They then proceeded to start a new text message and type lots of random keystrokes into it for over an hour. I'm very lucky that was never sent, that would have divided into hundreds of parts. As it was it drained the battery, and took 10 minutes to delete! I'll have to grab a little hard case for the iPhone before trying that again. :-)

Anyway, I mention that because I was hoping to have a map of the route here. Instead here's a plain Google maps view of the two islands. Crude route is Home Bay -> connection to Rangitoto -> Straight up the hill to the volcano's cone -> round the peak and down to Rangitoto wharf -> along the shore back to the Motutapu connection -> back across the pastures to Home Bay.

There's a detailed map on the website if you're really interested. There's some cool stuff on the islands, I wouldn't mind getting back out there sometime soon to check out the WWII fortifications, the volcanic crater at the very top, and the old lava tube caves.

View Larger Map

Beach Series Race 17 and Upcoming Races

2009-03-26T23:11:00.000-05:00

It's been quite busy at work, so I rushed out the door at the last minute on Tuesday. I'd forgotten to check the tide during the day. When I arrived I saw the water right up to the loose sand at the top of the beach! Doh!

I thought "Ah well, I'm here now, might as well do it". So I proceeded to the registration area. When I got in there, I realized that I'd run out of race credits, having only purchased enough to do the majority of the main series. So I headed over to the Top-up table. There I discovered that I didn't have enough cash to top up. I was just about to bail when the woman at the table said "No problem, just bring the rest next week.". I agreed to that, so now I'm committed to running next week, rain or shine, hell or high water. Great . . . teach me to hang around at work. ;-)

Anyway, can't expect much out of the high tide course, I finished 16th, but most of the usual lead pack weren't there. It was a 24 minute slog through loose sand and broken seashells. But it was a nice late summer night for a beach run.

Tomorrow is The Dual 1/2 marathon on Rangitoto Island. With a nice 250m climb up the volcano. Should be fun, I've never been out there. ;-)

Following weekend is the Orewa Beach 1/2 Marathon. It's also my friend Staton's birthday, so this is just a social one (if I can still move at all after The Dual). :-)

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.
8	22:23	23rd	Low tide course - out of shape.
10	23:23	30th	Low tide course - still losing fitness.
12	22:05	26th	Perfect weather, hard work.
13	22:30	21st	Perfect weather, some loose sand and splashy bits. Still feeling Sunday's run.
14	21:49	23rd	Perfect weather. Very low tide.
16	22:03	25th	Perfect weather. Very low tide.
17	24:21	16th	High tide course. Perfect weather.

No point in tracking splits this week as it's a totally different course.

Beach Series Race 16

2009-03-17T16:05:00.002-05:00

Last night was the last official race in the Beach Series. That said, due to daylight savings time and good weather, they've decided to add two "bonus races" for the next two Tuesday nights. They're pretty much the same event, but they're done tracking points for the series standings. Speaking of which, I ended up ranked 4th (out of 45) in men 30-39 in the final standings for the series. I'm 16th in the male standings for the beach run (out of 185).

Last nights race went quite well. It was perfect conditions again: warm with very low tide. I was running quite late, so I didn't squeeze in any warmup. I still ran fairly well: 22:03. Slightly slower than last week, but I didn't push too hard.

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.
8	22:23	23rd	Low tide course - out of shape.
10	23:23	30th	Low tide course - still losing fitness.
12	22:05	26th	Perfect weather, hard work.
13	22:30	21st	Perfect weather, some loose sand and splashy bits. Still feeling Sunday's run.
14	21:49	23rd	Perfect weather. Very low tide.
16	22:03	25th	Perfect weather. Very low tide.

Splits:

Leg	Last Week	This Week
Start to South End	4:07	4:01
South End to North End	5:29	5:40
North End to South End	5:41	5:43
South End to North End	5:25	5:32
North End to Finish	1:07	1:04

Flickr, Tumblr, and a Tumblr Badge Widget for Blogs

2009-03-15T22:20:00.002-05:00

I've really been loving Tumblr lately. It's been making my photo publishing workflow a lot simpler.

Here's the typical process now:

Take a bunch of photos.
When I get home, pull out the memory card and import everything into Picasa.
When I get time, flip through the photos in Picasa. Delete crap ones, Star the good ones, tag others for repair or editing later.
Select the Starred photos in Picasa and hit the Picasa2Flickr button. This little guy is a huge win. It basically just chucks all the photo file names onto a command line for the Flickr Uploader. You can set titles, descriptions, and tags as a batch.

Now here's where Tumblr starts to come in handy. I've always been tagging some of my favorite photos with "BlogBadge", which causes them to be eligible for appearance in the random 10 photos that go in the Flickr badge in the right sidebar. That thing uses the Flickr API, a bit of script and a bit of CSS, but I've forgotten how I originally did it, so that's a whole other post for later.

Anyway, I configured Tumblr to subscribe to the RSS feed for "BlogBadge" tagged photos as well.
So Tumblr will pull in the photo, it's title, and description. I've then set up Facebook to pull the Tumblr feed. So that saves me the trouble of cross-posting photos to Facebook.

Now to save the trouble of posting tiny little "here's what I did last weekend and a couple of photos" posts to Blogger, I created a little badge widget for my blog sidebar.

Tumblr provides a basic script to pull badge HTML, but the images are full size.


<script type="text/javascript" src="http://rengber.tumblr.com/js"></script>

I've whipped up a bit of CSS to cut down the image size, tweak the colors, and contain the Tumblr post text into a sidebar box. Just stick the following in your stylesheet, or in a style tag near the widget script.


.tumblr_photo
{
width: 110px;
height: auto;
float: right; 
margin: 7px; 
border: 2px black solid; 
}

.tumblr_posts
{
margin-left: -50px; 
}

.tumblr_post
{
font-size: x-small; 
list-style-type: none; 
width: 210px; 
padding: 7px; 
margin: 5px;  
max-height:200px; 
overflow: hidden;
border: thin black outset; 
background-color:#78a;
}

So from a simple batch Flickr upload, I've now covered both my Blog and Facebook, and the photos are available via iPhone. Which brings me to the main reason I love Tumblr: their excellent iPhone app.

From the dashboard of the Tumblr app, I can post any photo from the iPhone, and using CoolIris or Flickr mobile, I can pull any Flickr photo into the iPhone. Which means that I can do simple photo updates easily on the bus ride to or from work every day. Much more pleasant than messing around in Blogger (which is quite painful from the iPhone).

Beach Series Race 14

2009-03-03T23:54:00.000-06:00

I had a good race last night, but it probably had as much to do with the course, as anything. I was about 40 seconds faster than last week, though that's not saying much, the course was a mess last week, and I was out of breath at the start. Last night the tide was the lowest I'd seen, so the lines between the two ends were a lot closer to straight. Anyway this was my fastest post-holidays race, but still about 60 seconds slower than my fastest pre-holidays time. I suppose there's just no substite for running several times a week.

As I expected, I've moved in to 4th place in my age group for the series total points. I'm about 70 points behind the 3rd place guy, and about 50 ahead of the 5th. I've never beaten the guy above me, and we've both got 10 good races on the score sheet, so I think we're pretty much settled into our final ranking. Bummer, one of those Flight Centre travel vouchers would have been nice. ;-)

A couple interesting things were going on last night. Just as the race was winding up (luckily for the kayakers) a fairly large cruise ship was leaving the harbour and passing between Takapuna beach and Rangitoto Island. Just my luck, my camera batteries were dead when I went to grab a shot of it with all the kayaks in the foreground. Ah well, I'll repost one of the photos from the series site here when they go up. I'm guessing there'll be at least one shot that's pretty close to the one I wanted to take.

There was also a TV crew there filming something for Sky TV and TV One. I thought I heard them say something's airing on TV One on March 22nd. That's a Sunday, so it might be a profile of Rob Matthews a blind guy who did the swim last week, for the TV Show Attitude?

Not sure what the Sky TV thing would be, but there are a half dozen or so current Olympic team members who show up every week. Could be some background sort of footage for anything on any of them.

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.
8	22:23	23rd	Low tide course - out of shape.
10	23:23	30th	Low tide course - still losing fitness.
12	22:05	26th	Perfect weather, hard work.
13	22:30	21st	Perfect weather, some loose sand and splashy bits. Still feeling Sunday's run.
14	21:49	23rd	Perfect weather. Very low tide.

Splits:

Leg	Last Week	This Week
Start to South End	4:04	4:07
South End to North End	5:50	5:29
North End to South End	5:48	5:41
South End to North End	5:42	5:25
North End to Finish	1:04	1:07

Not too much to say about the splits. I went out fast again, but I was well rested at the start this time, so I held the pace together this time. I don't recall feeling slack on that middle leg, so that may have been headwind, or it may have been that it's tougher to pick out the best line on that leg with the majority of the run field in your face on the first run back. Anyway, happy with the race, going to be damn tough to improve on this one next week. Need to get at least two good workouts in between now and Sunday.

Beach Series Race 13

2009-02-24T22:18:00.000-06:00

This last week I actually did a bit of running. I did about 10k in our neighborhood, up the hills and around some of the back roads. It's a nice route, it passes some farms, paddocks and orchards, with nice views out towards the Waitakeres. I'll have to haul my little camera along one of these times. That was Sunday, I could still feel it a bit while warming up.

In any case, it was another perfect night for the beach series. I was feeling fast, but the course didn't quite cooperate. The tide was on it's way in, pushing the course lines up a bit from the optimal line, and putting the north end turnaround flag into a big wide pool about a foot deep (more so on the second lap).

So I pushed hard, but my time was about 20 seconds slower than last week. I probably would have been faster on the same conditions. Hard to tell, I also did a fairly hard warmup, and ended up coming in hot to line up at the start with just seconds to spare before the gun went off . . . oops.

There are 3 races left, the series tracks a point system though all 16 races. I've noticed now that I'm currently ranked 5th in Men 30-39. The top 3 in each age group win some nice travel vouchers. I don't think I can break into the top 3, they're way ahead of me, but I think I can take number 4. Still holding out for getting back to my pre-xmas times before it's all over. We'll see . . .

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.
8	22:23	23rd	Low tide course - out of shape.
10	23:23	30th	Low tide course - still losing fitness.
12	22:05	26th	Perfect weather, hard work.
13	22:30	21st	Perfect weather, some loose sand and splashy bits. Still feeling Sunday's run.

Splits:

Leg	Last Week	This Week
Start to South End	4:23	4:04
South End to North End	5:29	5:50
North End to South End	5:34	5:48
South End to North End	5:37	5:42
North End to Finish	1:05	1:04

Hmm . . . now that I've entered the splits . . .it definitely looks like I went out too fast: This weeks splits compared to last weeks: (-19, +20, +14, +5, -1). Looks like out too fast and into oxygen debt, followed by a gradual return to a stable aerobic pace. Wouldn't matter if there were 5 or 10 more Ks to the race, but that's typical marathon behavior that I'm trying to get rid of. ;-) Need to run more anaerobic: go out fast and keep it up.

Beach Series Race 12

2009-02-17T13:42:00.003-06:00

Last night was race 12 in the beach series.

Weather was pretty much perfect: warm, with a slight crosswind. Tide was about halfway up the beach. I think that ends up making the course slightly longer, but it's hard to tell by how much. You can always see the lines you need to run, and the waves push that line in a bit from straight, but the snakey line of fellow runners ahead of you is just as much of a distraction, if not more.

Anyway, I ran a 22:05, which is over a minute faster than last week. Not due to fitness, pretty much by will alone. I was sick of getting slower the last few weeks. Last nights time was the fastest since before xmas.

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.
8	22:23	23rd	Low tide course - out of shape.
10	23:23	30th	Low tide course - still losing fitness.
12	22:05	26th	Perfect weather, hard work.

Splits:

Leg	Last Week	This Week
Start to South End	4:49	4:23
South End to North End	5:56	5:29
North End to South End	5:52	5:34
South End to North End	5:37	5:37
North End to Finish	1:13	1:05

Digital Inventory

2009-02-07T02:32:00.004-06:00

Picking up an iPhone has made me take stock of all the applications and sites I use to ourganize myself and keep in touch. At this point, I should be able to do most of the miscellaneous organizing and reading I do on a computer from my iPhone.

Calendar: Google Calendar - synched with iPhone calendar app via Nuevasync.
Mail: Gmail - iPhone mail connects.
Tasks: Remember the Milk + free iPhone client.
Work Notes: Combination of TiddlyWiki and Evernote. I started on Evernote, switched to Google Notebook, and recently switched back. They have an excellent iPhone client app.

RSS Reader: Google Reader. Has an iphone optimized site. Also use Gazette offline reader for iPhone, it synch's with Google Reader subscriptions.

Workout and Run Logging: Shapelink. Has a mobile optimized site. Nice mapping interface to Google maps as well.

Links: Delicious primarily, though I still have stuff on Google Bookmarks.

Books: Shelfari for tracking and rating, and Safari Books Online for technical reading.

Social:
Social Hub: Facebook - all my social content feeds hit Facebook eventually. Facebook has a fantastic iphone client. I prefer it to the web interface! If I didn't have to type on that tiny little keyboard with my big fat fingers, it would be the only interface I'd use.
Photos: Flickr (though see below)
Status Updates: Twitter + Tweetie iPhone client. Though I find Twitter a bit limiting, see Microblogging below.
Blogging: Blogger (obviously). Blogger's a little too clunky for iPhone.
Micro/Mobile blogging: Tumblr. I like Tumblr a lot. I think I may start doing small and minor technical blog posts on Tumblr in preference to Blogger. Blogger's still great for larger posts requiring more layout and formatting, but for a single picture and a little blurb, or a small status report, error message screenshot and technical solution, Tumblr is nice. Their iPhone interface is excellent.

The Photo Problem

Picasa 3 is my camera import tool and the first catalog they go into. They get sorted, picked over, and edited. The best ones, or the ones I need for blog posts get uploaded to Flickr using the Picasa2Flickr plugin.

I'm still trying to figure out the best process from there. Photos that tell a story end up here on the blog in a post. But other snapshots don't necessarily warrant a blog post (say from the Lantern Festival last night).

Facebook wants photos to be uploaded to their photo library. That's OK now I suppose as Picasa has both Facebook and Flickr buttons to make that easier.

So far I've been importing my Flickr photostream RSS feed into Facebook, but that get's slightly annoying, there's not much control over how they're displayed, and I'm getting duplicates from the feeds from the MyFlickr Facebook app. I think the solution is to turn off the wall posting of the flickr stream item. I can subscribe Tumblr to a specific RSS feed from Flickr, and subscribe Facebook to Tumblr.

Beach Series Race 10

2009-02-03T04:19:00.002-06:00

Tonight was race 10 in the beach series.

I've still been slacking off on my running, so I tried to hold back the race autopilot.

Weather was quite warm, very windy, and the tide was on it's way out, so low tide course.

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.
8	22:23	23rd	Low tide course - out of shape.
10	23:23	30th	Low tide course - still losing fitness.

Splits:

Leg	Last Week	This Week
Start to South End	4:14	4:49
South End to North End	5:39	5:56
North End to South End	5:50	5:52
South End to North End	5:30	5:37
North End to Finish	1:09	1:13

I think I've finally come up with a plan for lunchtime running. A couple days a week I'll bring my gym bag on the bus, and use the locker rooms at Club Physical in the city. It's only a K or so from Datacom, so I should be able to get back and forth in an hour or so.

Six races to go. Need to get back in gear. At this point my goal is to set a new PR on the low tide course by the end of the series.

Auckland Anniversary Weekend

2009-01-27T22:24:00.004-06:00

Monday was Auckland Anniversary, so we had a long weekend, which I spent in Whakatane.

On the way down, I stopped in Hinuera. There's a quarry there that sells their off-cuts of Hinuera limestone to sculptors. I picked up three squareish blocks about the size of a television, and one block that I could barely lift, for a grand total of $25!

In Whakatane, the annual Tuna Tournament was on.

There were some interesting results, including a some sort of record Albacore Tuna (27.6kg) and a 158kg (320+ lbs) Blue Marlin.

There were a couple of Kingfish, and two sharks brought in while I was watching on Saturday afternoon.

This Mako Shark was 49.2 kgs, I hear there was one almost twice as big brought in on the first day. It was still doing ok after the weigh in, so they took it back out to let it go.

The summer arts festival was also on, including a week long stone carving symposium. They were working with large slabs of Oamaru stone. That stone is quite a bit harder than the Hinuera stone I picked up for Kel, but it looks very nice to work with. It's very smooth and white, and the extra hardness makes it easier to leave bits sticking out without worrying about them breaking off. Too bad Oamaru is way the hell down the east coast of the South Island (between Dunedin and Christchurch). We can't just pop in at the quarry like we can in Hinuera.

Sunday I got out boogie boarding for a while over at Ohope. I picked up some short flippers at the surf shop this time. That helped immensely. I was able to catch just about every decent wave even though the surf wasn't that big.

Normally, I would get the kayak out as well and go gather cockles and pipis, but there's still a paralytic shellfish toxin warning for the area.

Beach Series Race 8

2009-01-20T20:25:00.000-06:00

Last night was race 8 in the beach series, after a 35 day break for the holidays.

I'm no longer contracting at ASB on the North Shore. I'm in Auckland city now, so I've lost my usual running partners. I've gone from running 2-3 times a week (5-8ks per run) to zero. I'm going to have to do something. Maybe get out to Mission Bay by myself at lunchtime a couple of days per week, and definitely back to running on the weekends.

Anyway, last night was a minute and a half slower than my last time on the low tide course. Suck.

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.
8	22:23	19th	Low tide course - out of shape.

Splits are pretty much evenly slower:

Leg	Last Week	This Week
Start to South End	4:01	4:14
South End to North End	5:13	5:39
North End to South End	5:16	5:50
South End to North End	5:17	5:30
North End to Finish	1:00	1:09

Not good, it's going to take a week or two to get basic fitness back, then try to get some speed work in again. I'll be in Whakatane this weekend, so a long run is definitely on the agenda.

99 Degrees

2009-01-15T17:01:00.005-06:00

Ouch! There's a 99 degree (F) difference between the high in Whakatane today and the low in Minneapolis this morning.

Xmas Holidays

2009-01-04T05:09:00.000-06:00

Kel and I just got back from two weeks in Whakatane for Christmas and New Year's.

Unlike previous years where we spent most of the break on the beach, we didn't do any swimming or surfing at Ohope this year. Partly because the weather wasn't that great, and partly because I was protecting my new tattoo, which was my xmas present from Kel's mum and aunt!

My present from Kel was a tandem skydive in Taupo on New Year's Eve. We had perfect weather that day in Taupo, and it was an amazing experience! Pretty tough to describe, but maybe one of these days I'll clip my freefall video out of the DVD they gave me and try to write about it here.

Holiday Party

2008-12-16T20:30:00.000-06:00

Kel was singing with the band at the company holiday party this year. The gig went quite well, here's the playlist as far as I can remember it.

All Apologies - Nirvana
Bohemian Like You - Dandy Warhols
High and Dry - Radiohead
Rain - Dragon

Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol
Sway - Bic Runga (Kel lead vocals)

So Lonely - The Police (or just Sting?)
Proud Mary - Credence Clearwater Revival

Beach Series Race 7

2008-12-16T19:26:00.000-06:00

Last night I ran race 7 in the beach series. I was busy last Tuesday, and the Tuesday before was crap weather, so I've been out of it for a couple of weeks.

Lunchtimes have been busy as well, with xmas shopping and errands, so I've only squeezed in a few medium length, moderate pace runs, and one speed workout. The one speed workout was 5 x 1100m repeats at 20:00 5k pace around North Harbour Stadium. It was tough, but not that tough, at least until the 5th one.

So given all that, I was a bit worried I'd be slower on this race. But despite a couple lazy weeks, I ended up running about 7 seconds faster than my previous record in the event (it was the nice low tide course again). Weather was great, maybe a little wind, and quite hot, but can't complain. I think that bit of improvement was mostly just concentrating on running the shortest line on the beach.

The next race is after the holidays, so I'm going to need to make an effort to train in Whakatane over the next couple of weeks.

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.
7	20:49	21st	Low tide course - hot.

I also managed to catch better splits this time:

Start to South End	4:01
South End to North End	5:13
North End to South End	5:16
South End to North End	5:17
North End to Finish	1:00

Here's the map of the course, if you open it in a new window, you can check out the new Google Street View footage of the beach!

View Larger Map

Beach Series Race 4

2008-11-25T13:05:00.007-06:00

Last night was race 4 in the beach series. It was the high tide course again, so there was no way I was going to beat last weeks time. However, I did beat my previous time on the high tide course by a little over 20 seconds. So that was good.

This week's start was about 30 minutes after the peak of the high tide, so hopefully next week will be just after the lowest tide again. Definitely need to get some speed work in this week then. Easy recovery run today. The weather was great out there.

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.
4	22:52	28th	High tide course - good weather.

Last week I ended up in one of the photos on the website. Swimmers, runners, and kayakers all come running in to the same finish line, so the courses cross each other near the end.

Using NMock to Create an IDataReader for Testing Data Access Methods

2008-11-19T21:50:00.002-06:00

If you have a simple Data Access class with a method like the one below which you need to test without depending on specific values in the database (and without embarking on a major refactoring expedition).

public decimal GetAvailableBalance(int custNumb)
{
decimal retVal = 0.00M; 
using (SqlConnection sqlConnection = new SqlConnection(_dbConnection))
{
sqlConnection.Open();
using (SqlCommand sqlCommand = sqlConnection.CreateCommand())
{
sqlCommand.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
sqlCommand.CommandText = "dbo.GetCustomerBalance";
sqlCommand.Parameters.AddWithValue("CustomerID", custNumb);
using (IDataReader dr = sqlCommand.ExecuteReader())
{
if (dr != null)
{
dr.Read();
retVal = Convert.ToDecimal(dr["AvailableBalance"]);
}
}
}
}
return retVal; 
}

Replace this:

sqlCommand.ExecuteReader()

With This:

public virtual IDataReader GetReader(SqlCommand cmd)
{
return cmd.ExecuteReader(); 
}

Now create a test class that inherits from the Data Access class and override that virtual method. Like so:

[TestFixture]
public class IMTTests : TransactionStore
{
Mockery mocks = new Mockery(); 
IDataReader idr = null; 

public override IDataReader GetReader(SqlCommand cmd)
{
Expect.AtLeastOnce.On(idr).Method("Read").Will(Return.Value(true));
Expect.AtLeastOnce.On(idr).Method("Dispose"); 
return idr; 
}

Now in your test, create your mock DataReader to assign to the private variable and set the specific expectations of your data mapping.

[Test]
public void TestAvailableBalance()
{
idr = (IDataReader)mocks.NewMock(typeof(IDataReader));
Expect.AtLeastOnce.On(idr).Get["AvailableBalance"].Will(Return.Value(42.00M));
Decimal amount = this.GetAvailableBalance(12345);
Assert.AreEqual(42.00M, amount); 
}

Beach Series Race 3

2008-11-18T17:45:00.001-06:00

Haydn and I ran Race #3 in the North Shore City Beach Series last night.

I came in at 20:56. That's nearly two and a half minutes faster than last week!

I'm very happy with that, especially pulling within 60 seconds of my goal (sub 20:00 by the end of the series). But unfortunately, most of that improvement comes from running on the open hard-packed sand of the low tide course as opposed to dodging through the crowd in the loose sand of the high tide course. So this leap was a free one. The next seconds I shave off are going to take some hard work.

To that end, I've started puttting together a speed training plan. I've found a perfect spot at nearby North Harbour Stadium that has some grassy soccer fields for running sprints and 400ish repeats, some stairs for doing bounding training, and a bike track around the outside of the stadium that measures about 1100 meters.

I took a run over today at lunchtime to give it a try. I pulled some repeat times off McMillan Running's pace calculator based on my 20:56 from last night. That gave me an 1100m repeat time of 4:24 to 4:42 (4:00/k). My race pace worked out to 4:11s, so that seemed reasonable.

I ran two of those at lunchtime to see how they felt. I did the first in 4:17, and the second at 4:29. It was hard, but not gut wrenching, so I think a set of five of those will definitely be one workout a week, probably Friday's. Next I'll give some 400 repeats a try.

My next milestone goal is to beat the Under-13 leader (20:08 last night). I know marathon training has worn away all my speed, but it's still crazy to see little knee-high 10 year olds running barefoot and pulling away from me. ;-)

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22nd	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.
3	20:56	28th	Low tide course - perfect weather.

Shifting Gears

2008-11-15T04:20:00.005-06:00

After this last marathon, I decided to run some shorter races for a while. 5K's to be specific. The North Shore City Beach Series is a 16 week series of races on Tuesday nights at Takapuna beach.

I ran race #2 last week (race 1 was 2 days after the marathon). I ran 23:21, which put me 22nd out of 116 competitors. My best 5k would have put me in 3rd! That might be out of reach without a hell of a lot of work, but I'm hoping to be running under 20 minutes by the end of the series early in the new year. A sub 20 5k would put me in the top 10 as of this week, but I noticed from the results posted for last year that times improve a lot as the weeks go on.

The main thing I have to work on now is speed. I noticed that although I wasn't too winded, I just couldn't pull any more speed out of my legs in this last race.

In any case, I'll be glad to trade 30 kilometer runs for sets of 400 meter repeats. ;-)

Week	Time	Place	Notes
2	23:21	22	High tide course - loose sand, 3 laps.

Auckland Marathon 2008

2008-11-03T17:35:00.004-06:00

This weekend I ran the Auckland Marathon. This was my 9th marathon, and my 3rd Auckland marathon.

It was also my fastest marathon to date. I ran a 3:38:53, beating my previous record of 3:48:11 by almost 10 minutes! At the same time, I took back the crown from my friend Craig in our little marathon competition.

I think I was probably in the best long distance shape I've ever been in going into this. I was in good shape for my first marathon (and second fastest) in 2002, but I took about 6 weeks off running just before the race with a heel injury (which was annoyingly not even running related - long story). So thanks to Kel, Paul, Staton, Benny, Haydn, and all my training partners for that!

The race conditions were excellent, they'd been forecasting rain, but it never showed up. There was a bit of a headwind on the last 10k or so, and the sun warmed things up a bit in the last hour, but I definitely can't complain about the weather.

Our pace was a bit of a change in plans. My friend Paul and I had been doing long runs at about 5:50-6:00 Km pace. My weekday runs varied anywhere from 5:15 to 6:15. But after seeing Craig's results in the Marine Corp Marathon the weekend before, that had to move up a little. I decided that since Craig had run a 3:50, I might as well set a PR and break 3:48. So I checked with Paul, who was more than happy to shoot for that, and I grabbed pace bands for 3:45.

Once the race started, we settled in behind a pace group leader for a 1:50 half marathon. Strangely, that felt a little bit slow, so we passed her up and pushed on slightly faster. We ran quite evenly, give or take a bit for hills, and by the halfway point, we'd built up about a 6 minute buffer on our 3:45 goal.

By about 24 K, Paul was starting to feel the impact of the faster pace. His goal was sub 4:00 so I pushed on ahead.

At about 30 K I realized that I had 1 hour and 5 minutes to do 12k if I was going to hit my goal of 3:45. That was not a happy hour to look forward to at that point, so I focused on doing the next kilometer in under 5 minutes, and the next, and so on. I saw Paul again about a minute behind me from the out-and-back turnaround point, so that was good!

With about 3K to go I got the idea that I could break 3:40 if I just held it together for a couple more Ks. I choked down half a cup of water at the last stop and finished with the fastest 3Ks I've done in any marathon finish! It even ended up with a bit of a sprint at the end as I saw that my gun time would be just under 3:40 as well!

I didn't see Paul at the finish line, but I heard the next day at work that he'd come in at 3:58! Kel ran the quarter marathon (10K + change) in 1:15 (a PR for her as well), so a great day all around.


Km   Elapsed    Split Notes
1        ???   (5:21)
2      10:43   (5:21) 10:43
3      15:26    4:43
4      20:55    5:28  w 
5      25:32    4:37
6      30:23    4:50
7      35:10    4:46
8      40:10    5:00  w
9        ???   (5:17) -
10     50:46   (5:17) 10:35
11     55:43    4:56  
12   1:01:14    5:31
13       ???   (5:15)
14       ???   (5:15)
15       ???   (5:15)
16   1:22:15   (5:15) w21:01  
17   1:27:33    5:17
18   1:33:42    6:09  Long?
19   1:37:40    3:58  Short?
20   1:43:05    5:24  -10k 52:29
21   1:48:24    5:19
22   1:54:32    6:07  w-
23   1:59:49    5:17
24   2:05:03    5:13
25   2:10:02    4:58  left Paul. (avg 5:12 -> 5:09)
26   2:14:57    4:55  w
27   2:20:06    5:09
28   2:25:02    4;56
29       ???   (5:07) w 
30   2:35:17   (5:07) 10:15 -10k 52:12
31       ???   (5:12)
32   2:45:43   (5:12) w10:25
33   2:50:55    5:12
34   2:55:44    4:48
35   3:01:00    5:16  w
36   3:05:56    4:55
37   3:11:22    5:25
38   3:16:40    5:18
39   3:22:18    5:37  w
40   3:27:30    5:11  -10k 52:13
41      ???    (5:10)
42      ???    (5:10)
42.2 3:38:53   (1:02) 11:23
 
8:20 miles
5:11 ks

Happy Halloween!

2008-10-31T17:44:00.001-05:00

10K "Fun Run"

2008-10-27T12:47:00.002-05:00

Kel and I spent the Labour Day weekend in Whakatane.

While we were there I needed to do my last long(ish) run before the Auckland Marathon next Sunday. So I thought I'd head over to Ohope beach on Sunday morning and do the Ohope Beach Walk 2 Health Challenge. The entry fee goes to a good cause (Bay Hospice), it was a nice day, Ohope is a beautiful beach, and they'd measured out a nice series of courses (3k, 5k, and 10k).

The only drawback was something my marathon training plan had warned me about: wasting the extra energy that builds up from the decreasing training mileage to go and run too fast on a useless workout.

But that won't happen to me I thought as I listened to the pre-event briefing, where they too said "this isn't a race, there are no prizes for coming in first, go out and have fun".

But sure enough, once the run started, I gradually accelerated and ended up running a PR in the 10K by nearly 2 minutes (if the course is accurate)! My time was 44:08 over a previous best of 46:02. So the course would need to be off by over half a K for that not to be some kind of PR.

Oops . . . Oh well, doesn't seem to have impaired me too much. I feel quite good today, so I suppose we'll see how a medium long, slow recovery run goes tomorrow.

By the way, here's Ohope beach . . . notice the miles and miles of beautiful sand and surf without a person in sight! You'll see a few more people in the summer, but it never gets near anything you'd call crowded.

Minnesota Absentee Ballot

2008-10-22T23:37:00.001-05:00

I think I've now completed the process to submit my absentee ballot.

Minnesota made it quite easy . . . I was able to complete my request and overseas registration (FPCA) by scanning and emailing the documents to the Hennepin County election officials.

They acknowledged that when it was received, then sent me the ballot paperwork as PDFs via email.

Those then had to be printed, and snail-mailed back, but overall turnaround was about a week.

Now all that's left is watching the election coverage. I normally get all my U.S. news from The Daily Show and The Onion, but I'll be curious to see what TVNZ do for election night (afternoon for us).

https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/

https://minnesota.overseasvotefoundation.org/

Stolen Bike

2008-10-16T20:26:00.010-05:00

Our shed was broken into the other night and my mountain bike stolen. Fortunately, Kel's bike was in my car at the time, so they only got one of two bikes out of the shed, but I'm still pretty annoyed about the whole thing. The police have been very helpful, they came out to fingerprint and everything, much better service than you'd get in the states for this kind of thing. But I'm not holding my breath.

I think we'll be moving all the toys down to Whakatane this weekend.

Damn this pisses me off! I liked that bike. :-(

By the way, if any readers are in the North Shore area and come across a dodgy bike sale, let me know if you see a black Giant XTC 3. It's got a couple of very distinctive features that I could identify straight away if I (or the police) can get a close enough look at it.

Darjit Bird Sculptures

2008-10-02T02:48:00.004-05:00

I've made a couple of updates to Kel's site.
Last weekend we drove over to Katikati to drop off a couple of darjit sculptures she's just finished for the Katikati Open Air Arts festival.

The Hanging Bird has been in it's tree all week, but unfortunately, the Standing Bird was knocked over and damaged by volunteers as they were moving them out to the park for display in the morning. (Unbeknownst to us, they were moving all the sculptures from the park to a fenced in yard every evening, all but the Hanging Bird and some of the bigger ones anyway).

Unfortunately, that was the first day it would have been on display, and the day before the judging. Needless to say, Kel's not too happy about the damage, and definitely not happy that the Hanging Bird is out in the park all night by itself.

Hopefully, the damage is repairable, but it'll take time, and it may be a while before we have any pictures of it outside looking the way it should.

The Legend

2008-09-22T04:21:00.005-05:00

The race this weekend went great. I finished in 1:46.21. As far as I can remember, that's my fastest half marathon, though I suppose that's not too difficult, as the next fastest that I know of was the halfway split in my first marathon (1:49:40). I haven't run a lot of on-road halves.

Anyway, the day was fantastic, sunny and pleasant. The course was hilly, but nowhere near as tough as the website made it sound. Our weekend long run course on Whangaparoa road is quite a lot tougher. That said, there were a lot of rolling hills and nice smooth downhills.

Here are the splits (markers were every 2km)

2k  - 10:07   (5:03s)
4k  - 19:47   (4:50s)
6k  - 30:30   (5:21s)
8k  - 40:27   (4:59s)
10k - 51:55   (5:44s)
12k - 1:04:04 (6:04s) - big uphills.  
14k - 1:14:20 (5:08s)
16k - (4:34s)
18k - (4:34s)   
20k - (4:34s) 8:27? (4:13s)
21k - 1:46:21

My watch data is a little bit muddled from 16-20km. I think I got some of the full marathon distance markers mixed up with the half markers. But whatever happened, I was definitely averaging 4:34s from 15km to the finish! I would love to have the splits from the last 2km. 18-20 is 8:27 in my watch, but I'm not certain that's right.

Marathons Past

2008-09-18T23:56:00.007-05:00

This last weekend I did a 34k training run. That may be the furthest I've ever run outside of an actual marathon. It was definitely almost as tough as running a marathon itself.

It got me thinking about past races and times. It occurred to me that I'd lost track of how many marathon's I've run. I had the feeling it was somewhere around 10, but I couldn't be sure.

After a bit of searching around the websites of the races I've run, it turns out that this upcoming Auckland marathon will be my 9th. For future reference, here are the races and times:

Event	Time	Comments
Grandma's Marathon 2002	3:48:11	First Marathon with Craig, Pete, and Scott
Twin Cities Marathon 2003	3:59:54	Ran by myself, beautiful weather. Breaking 4:00 in this race is what made me think I could just keep running without training.
Grandma's Marathon 2004	4:00:20	Ran with Peter Akimoto. Stayed in the Clown House. I probably would have wimped out on this one if Peter hadn't been keen on driving up to Duluth on Friday night.
Twin Cities Marathon 2005	5:18:06	Ran this one with some first timers from work. For the record, running slower is more painful that just running as fast as you can (To a point at least, the very first marathon, I was at the best fitness level, but in the worst shape at the starting line, and in the most pain afterwards.)
Auckland Marathon 2006	4:28:16	First New Zealand Marathon. This one made me decide that I'd better get training again after all.
Rotorua Marathon 2007	4:51:10	This one was brutal. Pouring rain at the start line, cold wind later. This is the only marathon where I thought for a while that I might not finish.
Auckland Marathon 2007	4:08:20	I was in overall good shape for this one, but not the greatest running shape. I held the end together quite well, but just didn't have the leg muscles to finish under 4:00
Rotorua Marathon 2008	4:07:03	Much better than the last Rotorua, in fact the day was nearly perfect. Same story as Auckland 2007, good run, just couldn't pull in under 4:00

The last few months I've put in more running than any year since 2002. We'll see how that works out.

This weekend I'm running a half Marathon. "The Legend" named for Arthur Lydiard's training route in the Waitakere's. Looking at Arthur's training methods, they're nearly identical to what my old high school cross country coach used to use. I may have to study up on that again, I wouldn't mind seeing how close I can get to my 5k PR (18:03) one of these days in between marathons.

Anyway, here's The Legend, I'll post a race report afterwards:

Compile Error in ASP.Net (error CS0103: The name 'X' does not exist in the current context)

2008-09-10T04:08:00.007-05:00

Note: I would have liked to title this post "Microsoft Voodoo make Hulk MAD!!" but for reasons outlined in the rant below, I went with the title above.

The Problem

In an ASP.Net web project you may see one of these two compile error messages referring to a control in a page:

In the Visual Studio 2005 Output window:


"error CS0103: The name 'X' does not exist in the current context"
"error CS0117: 'XPage' does not contain a definition for 'X'"

and
In the VS.Net 2005 Compile Error List


"The name 'X' does not exist in the current context."

Where 'X' is your control variable name (like TextBox1). If you're seeing these, then you may have the same problem I did.

My problem more specifically was that I was copying files from one (working) VS.Net solution which contained one sort of web project, to another stand-alone project. I needed the new project to have a .CSProj file so our build guys could compile the site with whatever they're using. As soon as I copied the first non-static content into the new Project, the errors above started.

My Solution

The technical root cause of the problem was that there was no variable referring to the control(s) in the page object model.

More details

When I added a new page from scratch, a WebForm1.aspx.designer.CS file appeared, with the following code in it:


protected global::System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox TextBox1;

Hmmm . . . why did the other page not have a designer.cs file? In fact the original project I was copying from has no Designer.cs files at all.

I went back to the other (working) project and right clicked on the object referece to my control. In response to "Go to Definition" I got a message box stating:

"The definition of the object is hidden."

WTF?!?

Hidden where exactly? Visual Studio's little "Show All Files" option is greyed out. A look at the file system revealed no mystery files. This was starting to sound familiar from my long ago reading about new partial class features.
After Googling "The definition of the object is hidden" I had my answer (see references for details, specifically [1]).

It turns out that I'd stumbled into a gap between "Web Site Project" and "Web Application Project"[2]. I was attempting to manually copy files from a "Web Site" into a "Web Application". In a "Web Site Project", the compiler does some code generation for you, and hides it away in a temporary assembly stored in the location specified by HTTPRuntime.CodeGenDir.

"Web Application Projects" were rolled into VS.Net 2005 with Service Pack 1.

So anyway, throwing the textBox variable declaration into the code-behind file allowed a successful compile with a cut down version of the page. That was definitely it.

Now that I knew what I was looking for, I searched on "Converting a Web Site Project to a Web Application Project". Sure enough, that turned up [4] Walkthrough: Converting a Web Site Project to a Web Application Project in Visual Studio 2005

Great . . . not only does this guide contain an exact description of the specifics of the problem, but it's a detailed guide to the solution. I still need to read a bit more of this tomorrow, but this has certainly cleared the biggest roadblock. To rub salt in the wounds, if you do the file copy from IDE window to IDE window it all happens magically, I never would have seen this problem at all:

"Visual Studio includes an option to convert pages and classes within Web application projects to use partial class declarations. Partial classes are used to separate designer-generated code from code-behind code. These designer-generated classes are stored in a separate file from the code-behind file. This conversion process causes Visual Studio 2005 to recursively examine every page, user-control, and master-page in the project, and to automatically generate a .designer.cs file for each. Visual Studio also changes the .aspx or .ascx files to use the codeBehind attribute instead of the codeFile attribute."

I get incredibly annoyed with some of these 'easy' problems. I want to be able to just look up the error message in a search engine, but it seems I always run across the same pattern of search results:

1. Often the top couple of hits are totally irrelevant sites that happened to be experiencing the same error at the time that the crawler bot visited.

2. The next hit or two are even more annoying. Typically, it's somebody who has innocently(naively) cut and pasted their error message into some forum site or support board. Their post is at the top, then there follow the useless trolls and know-it-alls who bitch about posting off topic or demand more irrelevant data. Then the whole thing either trails off, or the person solves their own problem, but doesn't post the solution. Better forums at least they put a little mark on the solution (if one has emerged).
3. After the first page or so of search results, you just get forum sites that scrape other forum sites, or tons of cross posts of the original problem to ghost-town forums.

So anyway, the moral of this story is: here's my contribution back to the internet: The error message and a solution in one troll-free page. ;-) I've seen quite a number of search hits for other technical posts here, so hopefully this helps somebody.

</BonusRant>

References

[1]The Definition of the Object is Hidden
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=115127

[2]Visual Studio.Net 2005 Web Application Projects
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/aa336618.aspx

[3]ASP.Net 2.0 Hidden Files and Assemblies
http://blogs.msdn.com/daviddu/archive/2006/06/03/616324.aspx

[4]Walkthrough: Converting a Web Site Project to a Web Application Project in Visual Studio 2005
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa983476(VS.80).aspx

Tech Ed NZ 2008

2008-09-01T21:31:00.005-05:00

Tech Ed New Zealand is on at the moment. It's day two.

I was excited about it over the weekend and yesterday morning, but I've had enough now.

This is one of those in between years when everything is pretty much where it was last year. Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5. I didn't even see anything shiny or fun in the Silverlight or WPF department. Most annoying of all, in between sessions when I went down to play in the hands on labs, all the lab virtual machines had expired beta versions of Expression Blend, rendering them unusable for WPF and Silverlight labs.

Ah well, maybe it will be more fun next year. I really only learn from what I work with every day anyway. At the moment, that's WCF via VS.Net 2005, most of my work doesn't even have GUIs other than my own test harnesses.

Speaking of testing, one of my co-workers: Rob Fonesca-Ensor gave a presentation on Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control and Unit Testing during the New Zealand .Net Users Group Code Camp on Sunday. Very good presentation. There's some stuff I'll actually use soon, I need to do some follow-up on the Ninject framework.

Two other good things out of Tech Ed: Scott Hanselman is coming over here to talk to our developers in our lunchroom for a couple hours. Scott's ASP.Net MVC presentation was the high point of day one. Then OpShop is playing at TechFest tonight.

Waikato Tough Guy and Gal

2008-08-27T01:23:00.003-05:00

The photos are finally available from the race.

It was a 6 (1 lap) or 12 (2) kilometer race through a mud track and army-style obstacle course.

Kel ran her 6K in 1:20:23

I did the 12K in 1:35:33

My lap 1 was 43:06
Lap 2 was 52:26.

It felt like lap 2 was slower mostly due to congestion on the course and obstacles.

Weather was good, rain overnight (good for mud), but mostly sunny and just slightly chilly during the race. We had just a bit of a shower about halfway through.

Overall a lot of fun, definitely have to do this one again next year. Hopefully we can get a team together next time!

Waikato Draught Tough Guy and Gal

2008-08-13T16:08:00.002-05:00

Kel and I are doing this race in Rotorua this weekend:
http://www.toughguyandgal.co.nz/

Updates to Kel's Site

2008-07-22T05:12:00.003-05:00

Kel did another Darjit Sculpture workshop this last weekend.

This time she made a couple of bird sculptures. One for an upcoming competition.

http://www.kelhicreative.com/DarjitGallery.htm

Snowplanet

2008-06-15T08:15:00.004-05:00

It's winter here in New Zealand, and the ski slopes are starting to open. I heard the other day that this is the earliest opening for some since 1992.

Later this season we'll get down to the south island to hit Cadrona or Treble Cone. But in the meantime, Staton and I went up to check out Snowplanet.

In Minnesota, there'd be no need for a place like this. But down here, even in the depths of winter, you'd have to drive 3 or 4 hours from Auckland to find snow. Even then it's hit or miss. We went skiing at Whakapapa last year towards the end of the season, and the snow was pretty poor.

Snowplanet's like a bunny hill in a box. Like a Minnesota hill, you spend more time on the lift and in the queue than on the downhill, but it's nice for knocking a little rust off before heading for the mountains.

New Zealand Music Month

2008-05-10T05:12:00.002-05:00

In honour of NZ Music month, I thought I'd link some of my favorite Kiwi Music.

In no particular order or organisation:

Evermore: Running

Minuit: Fuji

Atlas: Crawl

Scribe: F.R.E.S.H.

Scribe: Say it Again

Solaa: Sylphlike

Tiki Taane: Tangaroa (God of the Sea)

Have a look at Amplifier.co.nz as well.

Rotorua Marathon 2008

2008-05-10T03:58:00.006-05:00

I completed the Rotorua Marathon last weekend (May 3rd).

I ran 4:07:03, which is my fastest New Zealand marathon, and way better than Rotorua last year. However it's a ways off my best marathon time (3:48), and probably not quite fast enough to keep me ahead of Craig when he runs the Marine Corp marathon in October. Fortunately, the Auckland Marathon is just a few days later (2 Nov), so I've got something definite to shoot for if Craig does beat me. ;-)

Anyway, conditions were just about perfect for Rotorua this year. Sunny, slightly cold, dry, and partly cloudy. It was an all around fantastic day for running. The only possible compliant is a little bit of a headwind along the open stretches around kilometers 25 to 35 or so.

My splits are surprisingly even. I can't come up with any issues with this race: Weather was perfect, the course is fast, and my nutrition/hydration felt great this time. I just need to do some training and run faster next time. I think that 8:01 for K35 is a misplaced marker. I did take a food break around there, but not that long, the 5:30 before that makes it doubly suspicious. I think that 5:30 probably ought to be about 6:30, with one minute off the 8:00 and about 30-40 seconds of the remaining 7:00 going to slacking off at the water stop. That would make the last kilometer my slowest at 7:06 (pretty much to be expected), and my fastest that 4:57 on the big downhill on the back side of the lake (also no surprise).


Km  Elapsed  Split
1      6:06   6:06
2     11:56   5:50
3     17:17   5:20
4     22:54   5:36
5     28:15   5:21
6     33:35   5:19
7     38:38   5:02
8     44:11   5:33
9     49:31   5:19
10    55:04   5:32
11  1:00:36   5:32
12  1:05:56   5:19
13  1:11:09   5:13
14  1:16:35   5:25
15  1:21:57   5:22
16  1:27:54   5:57
17  1:33:59   6:04
18  1:38:56   4:57
19  1:44:30   5:33
20  1:50:20   5:50
21  1:56:33   6:13
22  2:02:05   5:31
23  2:07:27   5:21
24  2:13:27   6:00
25  2:19:29   6:01
26  2:25:04   5:34
27  2:31:01   5:57
28  2:36:28   5:26
29  2:42:19   5:50
30  2:48:06   5:47
31  2:54:06   5:59
32  3:00:30   6:24
33  3:07:27   6:56
34  3:13:01   5:33
35  3:21:02   8:01
36  3:27:28   6:25
37  3:33:55   6:26
38  3:40:24   6:28
39  3:47:06   6:42
40  3:53:36   6:29
41  3:59:58   6:22
42  4:07:03   7:06

Photo Catchup Part II

2008-05-04T21:09:00.005-05:00

Still more catching up to do . .

As a Christmas present, I enrolled Kel in a Darjit Garden Sculpture workshop over in Tauranga. She created a planter for her mum's garden.

I took some photos, then headed off to climb Mt. Maunganui, and do some surf kayaking at the beach.

She liked that class so much, she enrolled for another one before leaving at the end of the second day. In that one she's been making a big garden throne. That's still in progress, she's going to cover it with mosaic.

A couple of weekends ago I drove down to Tauranga to pick it up (it takes a week to dry, and Kel was on call that next weekend). On the way back, I stopped in Hamilton to catch the Nightglow part of the Balloons Over Waikato festivities.

Over the last few weeks, we've been photographing all of Kel's paintings and Sculptures, and posting them to a web site we've set up. http://www.kelhicreative.co.nz/. I'll post more of the Darjit Garden Sculpture photos there as they progress.

Photo Catchup

2008-05-04T19:55:00.003-05:00

Alright, It's been way too long since I've posted to do much in the way of catchup. I'll have to settle for a barrage of photos. Here goes:

Trip to Minnesota, late December early January

Highlights:

Seeing family again

Kel's first white Xmas

Staying up North at Grand View Lodge with the gang

Dogsledding

Cross Country Skiing with Craig and Jeff

Catching up with friends in town

Seeing all the Xmas Lights

Catching a Wild game in St. Paul

Second Christmas in Whakatane

After getting back to New Zealand, we had a second holiday celebration down in Whakatane, Kel's hometown in the Bay of Plenty. For those of you who've met Kel's mother's dog Cindy, we saw her for the first time after her summer haircut, it was hilarious! Definitely much nicer to have the shorter coat for swimming over at Ohope.

Miscellaneous News from back in NZ

In mid January, I did the Wild Turkey Off-Road Half Marathon. That was a blast, after about 7 km along the beach, it had a whole long canyoneering section in the middle. I spent more time taking photos than running, but it was all great fun. My friend Staton spent most of the race trying to keep his iPod dry. :-)

For my birthday this year, Kel bought me a kayak! That's been out several times now, around Whakatane and Mt Maunganui.

We went to see Bon Jovi in Christchurch

Ok, this post is getting long. To be continued. . .

Google Calendar, RSS, ATOM, XML, XSL, XPATH, Namespaces and Firefox Bugs

2008-02-21T22:31:00.003-06:00

I'm not quite sure how such a simple request spiralled out of control, plunging into buckets of alphabet soup . . . but I need to write something down. By Monday morning I'll have completely forgotten what the hell I was doing today. :-)

It all started simply enough: Updating a rusty old business process.

The old process:
1. Business user creates/updates a timetable spreadsheet.
2. Business user emails spreadsheet to web team.
3. Web team converts spreadsheet to HTML cuts/pastes/styles and generally beautifies content.
4. Web page is updated with new Timetable HTML.

This of course is a very 90's way of running a website, so we were discussing alternate ways of updating and automating this process.

We settled on the idea of creating a Google Calendar for the Timetable. The interface is simple for the business users, not much different than their Outlook calendar. The owners can set up their recurring appointments, and when they need to reschedule something around an event or shift a time, it's instantly live.

On the web team side, we just needed to pull down the RSS XML from the public address of the calendar, style it with XSL, and output the same HTML table view that the users know and love.

New Process
1. Business users maintain Google Calendar
2. RSS, XSLT and CSS magically produce an HTML Timetable for the site.

And so it began . . .
I set up a public Google Calendar, entered a few test events, and downloaded the Atom feed Xml.
I posted the Atom XML on my local web server.
I opened the XML in my browsers . . Firefox shows me the feed subscription page, IE6 shows me raw XML . . . so far so good.
I created a rudimentary XSLT and inject it into the top of the XML file.


<?xml-stylesheet title="XSL_formatting" type="text/xsl" href="wtf.xsl"?>

This displayed my "Hello XSLT" in IE6, but Firefox still shows me the default subscription page. I figure I did something dumb, or not quite standards compliant, and set off happily developing and testing in IE6 (back to this later).

Now I started putting some XPath pattern matching into my XSLT. This didn't go so well.

An RSS/Atom doc is pretty simple, it's really just a 'Channel' or 'Feed' element filled with either 'Item' or 'Entry' elements.

So I was surprised when none of my XPath worked. No combination of


/ //Entry  /Entry  Feed/Entry    /Feed   or  //Feed

selected any content.
Annoyingly,

<xsl:for-each

did work, and when I did

<xsl:value-of select='name(.)'

on the current node, I got back "Entry" and "Feed".
Grrr . . .

Eventually, I decided that it had something to do with namespaces, particularly the default namespace.


<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' 
      xmlns:openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/' 
      xmlns:batch='http://schemas.google.com/gdata/batch' 
      xmlns:gCal='http://schemas.google.com/gCal/2005' 
      xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005'>

Google turned up all sorts of noise around how to pull out namespaces using XSLT. I was distracted for a while trying to pull out the default namespace programatically, and tack it on to my XPath patterns. In the end, it turned out to be quite simple. I just needed to declare a prefix for the default namespace in my XSLT file:


<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

This page pretty much solved it for me:
XPath and Default Namespace Handling;

Embarassingly, this article from back in 2001 would also have shown me the light:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/02/trxml.html;

Of course this all would probably would have been easier if I used a tool other than Notepad as my XML/XSLT/XPath IDE. :-)

In any case, a very simple little XSL pulls all the Entry Node contents out of an ATOM Feed:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <html>
      <head><title>Google Calendar Test 2</title></head>
      <body> 
         <xsl:apply-templates select="//atom:entry"/>
      </body>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="atom:entry" >
    <h2><xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/></h2>
    <xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This gave me a ugly but accurate display of the timetable info we were after . . . at least in IE.

I popped over to Firefox to take a look at it, and discovered that Firefox still displayed the same old default subscription page. I fiddled with pathing and file names for just a bit before deciding that it was something stranger than me fat-fingering a path.

It turns out that Firefox does indeed ignore your stylesheet if the phrase "RSS" or "Feed" appears in the first 512 bytes of your XML file!

Firefox 2.0 breaks client-side XSL for RSS and Atom feeds

BugzillaBug 338621 – Feed View overrides XSLT stylesheet defined in XML document

*sigh*

Ah well, I did get a good laugh out of one of the workarounds in the comments:

"The emerging workaround for this problem (which isn't new to us, since we're
using the same heuristic that IE7 betas have been using for months) is to put
in a comment ranting about the evils of sniffing web content and overriding the
desires of web developers which is long enough to move "<rss" or "<feed" out of
the first 512 bytes, since that's all we sniff.

Then, just to kick some more sand in my face, I caught this out of the corner of my eye as I was closing up my browser windows for the day:

"The Firefox pitfall

All would be good in the land of RSS and Atom if Firefox had support for the disable-output-escaping feature in XSLT but it does not.

disable-output-escaping is an obscure feature in XSLT that serves only one purpose: it processes tags that appear in other tags, such as CDATA sections. And, RSS and Atom make heavy use of CDATA sections to embed HTML code.

With disable-output-escaping, you should be able to lift the HTML tags from the feed and insert them right into the HTML page...but for Firefox. Firefox essentially ignores the instruction so it ends up displaying the raw HTML code.

There's been some debate in the Firefox community as to whether this behavior was standard compliant or not. Nevertheless it is a problem and one for which you need a solution."
Working XML: Serve friendlier RSS and Atom feeds

Then, to top it all off, I realized that there was no way we would have been able to inject that initial stylesheet declaration into Google's Atom XML anyway. We've no choice but to use either some server side script or some string parsing to help with the transformation. So we don't really need to worry about XML Namespaces or XML element names for that matter. Hmmm . . .

Ah well, I'm sure I'll be pissed about all this on Monday, but for now I've had enough. Hopefully I'll get around to posting some catchup stuff by Monday!
Have a good weekend!

File Under: Technology,

Posts To Do

2008-02-12T20:56:00.006-06:00

Ugh, I can't believe it's been over a month since I've posted anything. After finally getting around to the long overdue blogger layout upgrade, I figured it'd be much easier to get back into posting regularly. Unfortunately, with the summer weather down here, it's been pretty tough to set aside computer time.

Anyway, here we go now. Since my last non-technical post:

We've been back to Minnesota for Christmas and New Years

Down to Whakatane for a 2nd Christmas with Kel's family

Down to Christchurch to see Bon Jovi

Kel gave me a Kayak for my birthday!

We attended a Twenty20 Cricket match: NZ (Black Caps) vs England.

We've been down to Whakatane for Kel's cousin Jeremy's wedding

We've been over to Tauranga where Kel attended a sculpture workshop I'd booked for her as an anniversary present (meanwhile I paddled Tauranga harour)

Individual posts and piles of photos to follow . .

Upgraded Blogger Template to New Layout System.

2008-01-09T21:40:00.000-06:00

I've just finished something that I've been putting off for a long time: upgrading my blog template to Blogger's new Layout system.

At first, it appeared to go quite smoothly. The same basic theme/template was still available, and all my widgets and hacks worked as HTML/Script blocks with no problems.

I ran into the first issue when I wanted to increase the width of the main post window. This little comment in the HTML of the template says it all:


/* Page Structure
----------------------------------------------------------- */
/* The images which help create rounded corners depend on the 
   following widths and measurements. If you want to change 
   these measurements, the images will also need to change.
*/

Happily, the HTML of the new template was nearly identical to the old one, so I just reused my wide rounded corner images from the old template.

Anyway, glad that's done. Now I can get back to posting without being annoyed by the old layout code every time I look at things.

For those of you who subscribe via feed readers and never hit the blogger pages, here's what's changed.

Switched the header image from the St. Croix river to Mt. Nguaruhoe.

Got rid of the "Days in New Zealand" counter. It'll be two years in April. That counter originally started as a countdown to keep me motivated in my moving preparations. It's not so interesting anymore.

Added a feed for my shared items from Google Reader.

Added a feed for my code snippets on Snipplr.

Added a "What I'm Reading" badge from my Anobii bookshelf.

Added a quilt of my iTunes album covers from LastFM.

Added a blogroll of shared feeds I read from Google Reader

Added a tagroll of my bookmark tags from Del.icio.us. (Although I mostly use Google Bookmarks and Google Notebook now. Unfortunately, Google bookmarks is still missing a few cool features from Del.icio.us. It's main advantage, and my reason for switching, is that it doesn't get blocked by most Surfwatch Big Brother programs)

Visiting Minnesota for the Holidays

2007-12-18T13:28:00.001-06:00

Kel and I are arriving in Minnesota on December 22nd. I'm not as organized as I'd like to be, but we have a few plans in place.

We'll of course be spending most of our time catching up with friends and family, but there's a whole list of stuff I miss that we'll need to do while we're in town. :-)

See fresh snow in the morning!
Sledding with my nieces.
Building snowmen
Skiing at Afton Alps.
Cross country skiing at Battle Creek or Hyland
See the Holidazzle parade downtown
Sit by the big fireplace at Brits pub after the Holidazzle parade.
Coffee and Chess at Dunn Brothers.
Coffee at Black Dog Cafe in St. Paul
See a Minnesota Wild Game
Get out for a night on the town in Minneapolis.
Mexican food and Margaritas at La Cucaracha
Wild Rice soup at Byerley's.
Chinese food at Red Dragon
Taco Bell ;-) (There's about two decent mexican restaurants in all of New Zealand.)
Khan's Mongolian Barbeque

That's a start, I'm sure I'll think of more later.
See you all soon.

Auckland Marathon 2007

2007-11-13T09:00:00.001-06:00

I completed my second Auckland Marathon the other weekend. My time was 4:08:20, which surprisingly is about 12 minutes faster than last years.

I still haven't done much running, but Kel and I do a fair amount of other stuff, including boxing two or three times a week.

In any case, this race went quite a lot better than my last few. I think the key was eating quite a lot in the early morning before the race, then not eating much at all while running. In some races (including my first and still fastest) I feel the low blood sugar, and pig out on energy gel and whatever sport drink is on hand. In almost all my previous races this seems like it's led to my stomach waking up and going into digestion mode, taking blood from my legs, which then cramp up. As you can see from the splits below, this last race's split times were much more consistent than my Rotorua marathon splits. In fact, I held my finish together much stronger than even my fastest marathon. In that race I dropped to 10 minute miles in the last quarter, and only managed the time I did (3:48) by virtue of the massive buffer I'd built up in the first half of the race. In the Auckland this year, I went light on the drinks and water in the last half, and only took one big food break, at about 30k. Definitely going to use that strategy again . . . oh, and do some running before the next one. We'll see how Craig does in the Marine Corp marathon, hopefully that'll move the goalposts a little farther from the couch. ;-)


Auckland Marathon 2007
KM  Split 
1   6:02 
2   5:43
3   5:55
4   5:57
5   5:51
6   5:51
7   5:23
8   5:41
9   6:17
10  5:37
11  5:17
12  7:24
13  5:40(est) 28:21
14  5:40(est) 28:21
15  5:40(est) 28:21
16  5:40(est) 28:21
17  5:40(est) 28:21
18  5:16(est) 10:32
19  5:16(est) 10:32
20  6:14
21  5:32
22  5:43
23  5:57
24  5:55
25  5:36
26  5:34
27  6:04
28  5:36(est) 11:12
29  5:36(est) 11:12
30  5:53
31  5:53
32  6:06
33  6:17
34  6:46
35  6:20
36  5:54
37  6:18
38  5:46
39  6:06
40  5:57
41  6:31(est) 13:02
42  6:31(est) 13:02
Fin: 4:08:20

Skiing at Whakapapa

2007-11-13T08:22:00.001-06:00

In mid August Kel and I went on a ski trip with our friends Brent and Maria.

We stayed at The Chateau. I really enjoyed it. It felt like the old Overlook Hotel from The Shining. The facilities were nice, sauna, warm pool, all the typical ski village stuff, plus the food in the restaurant was excellent.

I rented telemark ski's like I usually do. Unfortunately, it didn't work out like it usually does. Normally, the telemark ski's are the latest and greatest high performance demo equipment that just lays around in the shop because nobody ever rents it. But at Whakapapa, the rental tele skis were dusty old antiques that they had to pull down out of the rafters. Oops. Ah well, lesson learned for next time.

On the bright side, I think Kel's hooked on skiing now, so we'll have to get out once or twice when we're over for the holidays.

A month or so after we were there Mt. Ruapehu had a little eruption and threw a lahar down the mountainside. Do a search on "Ruapehu Eruption" on Flickr to see some pictures of the big black streak down the slopes.

As you can see, the scenery was incredible, and the weather was excellent (on the second day at least). But the snow conditions weren't nearly so nice. It was crusty and melty, you got the impression that they were just a warm day or two away from being back to bare rock. I miss real snow. Here's hoping for a nice white xmas and a blizzard or two while we're back in Minnesota this winter. :-)

Catching up (again)

2007-11-13T06:01:00.000-06:00

Once again it's been ages since I've posted. Here's the quick rundown on what's been going on:

The second half of Tony's visit

Before our SCUBA diving and our trip around the north, Tony and I were down in the Waitomo region to do one of the many cave tours. It's the second visit to the caves for me. This time we did a more physical tour than the one Kel and I did. This one also started with a long (50m?) abseil down the entry shaft into the cave. Some of the highlights were being dropped one at a time down a dark shaft into a deep pool, swimming through a waterfall into a waterslide like tube, and a medium long abseil down a waterfall. I highly recommend the caves to anybody visiting. I'll definitely go again!

After the caves, we met up with Kel in Hamilton to go see the All Blacks play Canada. Speaking of the All Blacks, they were put out of the Rugby World Cup (by France!) in the quarter finals . . . suck. New Zealand is hosting the next world cup in 2011, if they can ever get their stadium controversy sorted. Maybe Jesse Ventura can come over to help? ;-) Anyway, good fun was had watching them crush Canada at Waikato stadium.

After the trip around Waikato and the northland, we headed to the Bay of Plenty and Kel's hometown. We had a nice relaxing time sightseeing there, before driving on to meet up with Brent and the gang for fly fishing on the Tongariro river. After getting skunked on the river, we headed back up through Rotorua. Though it turns out that we missed quite a lot of excitement the next day as Brent's friend Steve leapt from the car to tackle a couple of Kune Kune piglets with moves reminiscent of Jim Fowler from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. ;-)

In Rotorua, we went to the Tamaki village to do the "Maori Experience" thing. That was fun, though a bit too touristy for me now. I've had really amazing Hāngi with Kel's relatives in Opotiki, and seeing a haka performed by the Rotorua locals doesn't quite make the same impression as seeing it done by the All Blacks, or for that matter this crew of badasses that Tiki Taane rouned up for his "Tangaroa - God of the Sea" video. Speaking of Māori, Kel and I have started taking community ed classes. Our teacher just happens to be an old classmate of hers from Whakatane.

After Rotorua, we headed up to Matamata to do the Lord of the Rings tour of the Shire shooting location. As much as I love the LotR, this was definitely embarrassingly touristy. There's this little hobbit hole looking bus stop/information station in the middle of town where you wait for the hobbit van to come and pick you up. It was a brisk fall day, and it was just Tony, myself, and a fat bearded european uber geek hanging around the bus stop. I kept having 80's movie visions of the bus dumping us off in front of the local rugby club, and somebody yelling NEEEEEERRRRRRDDS!! as the team came thundering out to pummel us.

Once we got into it and there were only sheep around to see us, it was a great experience. A lucky break with the weather prevented the site from being demolished on schedule, and the farmer who owns the land managed to negotiate some rights to what was left behind. Unfortunately, those rights don't include the ability to do any restoration, but what's there is enough to line up the landscape with the movie. Listening to our tour guides tales of some of the people who've made their pilgrimages to the site made Ye Olde Minnesota Renaissance Festival sound like a stuffy old law firm. ;-)

After that it was back to Auckland and back to work for me. Tony had a day out on the east coast, and a day to bum around the city, then he was off.

Long rambling late night post brought to you by the weekly maintenance outage in Blizzard's World of Warcraft servers. ;-)

Tony's Visit

2007-07-19T23:30:00.000-05:00

Tony was over to visit a couple of weeks ago. I've been meaning to make a big post once I got all my photos downloaded and organized, but I haven't really gotten around to it. So I'm about as organized as I'm going to get anytime soon.

Tony kept a blog while he was here, so you can visit his site for a more complete account of our travels:
Not All Who Wander Are Lost

The short version of it all is that it was great having him over. As was typical in Minnesota as well, we got into adventures that I probably wouldn't do on my own. The second day he was here we took off to Port Waikato to try to find the shooting location for Weathertop from The Fellowship of the Ring movie. We found it, but there were a few too many miles of sheep filled paddocks to cross from the nearest piece of road we could find. We had to settle for a visit to The Shire in Matamata a week later (see below).

A couple days later we headed north to Tutukaka to do some diving at the Poor Knights Marine Reserve. As you may have noticed from my previous post, I've just gotten my PADI certification, so this was my first dive in the ocean. The boat ride out to the islands was brutal, this was the first day in a week that boats were able to leave the harbor, so the swells were still quite high. After an hour or so spent feeding the fishes every few minutes, we arrived at one of the few spots sheltered enough to drop anchor and do some diving. That part of the trip was fantastic, the water felt warm, and there was no seasickness once we were under. There were little fish everywhere, we saw rays, scorpion fish, a john dory, and quite a few conga eels. Unfortunately, most of my pictures with the little waterproof camera film came out too dark. After the flash fired on the first shot I took I thought it must have some kind of light meter in it (in reality I must have accidentally bumped the arming switch). A couple pictures might be salvageable, I'll have to scan them in and see.

Anyway, scuba diving was a fantastic experience, I'm looking forward to more dives in calmer water and nice warm sunny places/weather! :-)

After Tutukaka, Kel headed back to Auckland while Tony and I headed up North to Cape Reinga. That's as far north as you can get in New Zealand.

We hung out there for a while, then started back south. We thought we'd catch the sunset over 90 mile beach from the Te Paki Sand Dunes. Unfortunately, once we climbed the first wall of dunes, there were just more dunes after that. We missed the sunset, but the dunes were still damn cool.

We returned to Albany that night, then left for the central North Island the next day. I'll put some of the photos from that part of the trip in the next post. Plus maybe some stuff I missed from the first part . . . hmm . . better read Tony's blog again, I forgot about the All Black's game and the Waitomo caves. ;-)

Anyway, more later . . .

File Under: Adventure,

Busy Weekend

2007-06-07T03:23:00.001-05:00

Guess what I did this last weekend!

Rotorua Cateye Moonride 2007

2007-06-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

I rode in the Cateye Moonride race with some co-workers a couple weeks ago. It's a 12 or 24 hour lap race. Teams from 1 to 5 members take turns running laps around an 8km loop. There were 400+ teams this year. Datacom entered 5 teams in the 12 hour!

I had a great time, though I was fairly beat up and quite tired by the end. Definitely need to start training for these things. ;-)

This site has got an excellent little video overview of the race, including the finish.

All in all, it was a load of fun, definitely have to do it again next year.

Rotorua Marathon Splits

2007-06-01T09:19:00.001-05:00

I was looking at my watch the other day and realized that I'd completely forgotten to pull out my splits from the marathon:

KM Split Elapsed Time
?3 15:54 15:54
4 5:18 21:13
5 5:15 26:28
6 5:45 32:14
7 5:28 37:42
8 5:43 43:25
9 5:25 48:51
10 8:05 56:56
11 5:40 1:02:36
12 5:49 1:08:26
13 5:54 1:14:20
14 5:57 1:20:18
15 5:36 1:25:54
16 6:33 1:32:28
17 3:45 1:36:13
18 5:57 1:42:11
19 6:15 1:48:26
20 8:14 1:56:41
21 8:06 2:04:48
22 5:23 2:10:11
23 6:14 2:16:26
24 7:10 2:23:36
?26 15:07 2:38:44
27 8:00 2:46:45
28 7:37 2:54:22
29 9:12 3:03:35
30 10:16 3:13:51
31 11:03 3:24:55
32 8:45 3:33:40
33 7:48 3:41:29
34 6:43 3:48:12
35 8:41 3:56:53
36 7:40 4:04:33
37 7:40 4:12:14
38 7:11 4:19:25
39 7:26 4:26:52
40 6:58 4:33:51
41 8:22 4:42:13
42 8:35 4:50:48

That big sag in the third quarter of the race was due to running out of food. I normally carry a few gel packets, but I didn't think to pack them this time. Afer the rain and cold at the start of the race I was just wiped by 30k. Then slowing down caused my muscles to get colder, and stiffen up. I was stuck at a walk until I ran into a woman who offered me a handful of gummi worms! It's amazing how much a little sugar can revive you in these things.

The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly

2007-05-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is a case of poor choice of error messages. What it really means is that the Performance Object Category does not exist. The solution is to load the performance counters from the source DLL. In the .Net case, this means running InstallUtil on the file in question. For older perfmon objects, use Lodctr.

Technical details:

If you attempt to load a performance counter with this code (existing Performance Object, non-existant counter):

PerformanceCounter newCounter = new PerformanceCounter("RealCategory","BogusName","Foo",true);

You'll get the very helpful error message: "Counter 'BogusName' does not exist in the specified Category."

If you use this code (non-existant Performance Object):

PerformanceCounter newCounter = new PerformanceCounter("BogusCategory","BogusName","Foo",true);

You'll get a slightly less helpful error message: "Category does not exist." . . . hmm . . would have been nice to know which category.

Now if you use that same call, but flip the readonly flag to false

PerformanceCounter newCounter = new PerformanceCounter("BogusCategory","BogusName","Foo",false);

You get this very unhelpful message: "The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly."

The trick at this point is figuring out who's trying to load a counter, and which one they're trying to load. The following code will locate a PerformanceCounterInstaller within an assembly, given a filename. Easy enough to list all the DLLs in a given space with DIR /S /B *.DLL, then run InstallUtil on the ones that turn up positive.


  System.Reflection.Assembly assy = System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFile(fileName);
  Type[] publicTypes = assy.GetExportedTypes();
  foreach (Type t in publicTypes)
  {
    if (t.BaseType.Name == "Installer")
    {
      Installer o = (Installer)t.Assembly.CreateInstance(t.FullName);
      foreach(Installer i in o.Installers)
      {
        if (i.GetType().Name == "PerformanceCounterInstaller")
        {
          MessageBox.Show("Performance Counter Installer Found in Assembly " + fileName);
        }
      }
    }
  }

Taupo Fly Fishing

2007-05-14T05:54:00.001-05:00

I spent the first weekend in May fly fishing with my friend Brent down in the Taupo region.

We stayed at a place called The Creel in Turangi. Turangi is allegedly "The Trout Fishing Capital of New Zealand".

The Creel was right on the Tongariro river, so we were up fishing at the crack of dawn. After a break for breakfast, we relocated a bit further up stream.

That was a beautiful stretch of river, but we didn't catch anything all day, maybe because of the constant stream of whitewater kayakers paddling through our pools. ;-)

At the very last minute, just as it got too dark to see our lines, Brent hooked one.

On day two we started fishing Lake Otamangakau. We had no luck there, despite seeing a constant stream of fish jumping out of the water on the far side of the lake. So we packed up and started the drive back. On the way we stopped in Tauramanui to fish the Whanganui river for an hour or so. By that time I'd had enough fishing for the weekend, so I spent some time taking photos.

Brent caught two small fish (smaller than the one above), and missed one big one. I was a mile or so down the trail, so there were conveniently no witnesses. ;-)

Rotorua Marathon

2007-05-14T05:36:00.000-05:00

This site provides a couple of really cool ways of visualizing marathon results. (Damn, I need to train more for the next one.) ;-)

Hopefully they'll use this site for the Auckland Marathon results as well.

Rotorua Marathon

2007-04-29T23:59:00.001-05:00

I completed the Rotorua Marathon on Sunday with a time of 4:50:45.

The conditions were rough. We started in rain and a temp of somewhere in the low 60s. I think it rained through the whole first half of the run. Needless to say, wet feet aren't so happy after 4 hours of running. It dried up and the sun came out for the second half, but I'd rather have it the other way around. My training was lacking once again, I definitely need to find some people to run with down here.

Kel and I stayed at a bach(Kiwi for Cabin) in Rotorua for the weekend, I'll put some pictures up soon.

New Zealand in the Cricket World Cup Semifinals

2007-04-23T23:51:00.000-05:00

New Zealand (Black Caps) are playing Sri Lanka in the Cricket World Cup semi-finals tonight. They've been to the semi four times, but never made it through to the finals.

We're planning to stay up to watch the game at a friends place. It starts at 2:30 am NZ time and will probably run through to 10am or so . . . should be good fun if it's the game everyone is expecting.

NZ Herald Headlines

Here's the matchcast from the official site:
Cricket World Cup 2007 Matchcasts and Scorecards

The next semi game is Australia vs South Africa tomorrow. If NZ wins this one, and Aus win that one, there'll be one hell of a ruckus for the final.

Naptime now.

New Caledonia

2007-04-19T05:33:00.000-05:00

Oh, can't believe I almost forgot: we took off for a weekend in New Caledonia just after Valentines day. It's nice to have all these little islands around, Samoa and the Cook Islands are next on the list I think, or maybe Norfolk Island, Kel has some relatives there.

News from Back Home

2007-04-19T04:50:00.000-05:00

Two items of interesting news from the Star Tribune in the last couple weeks.

First is that my old National Guard unit (2nd Battalion of the 147th Assault Helicopter Brigade) is headed to Iraq soon. Before they go, they're training for a few months at Ft. Sill Oklahoma, which also happens to be where I did my Basic Training.

Guard unit will Head to Iraq, fly helicopters

Second is that my old employer (where I worked for 10+ years before moving to NZ) is making headlines. Even before I left, the merger with the GMAC sister company combined with the sale to Cerberus group was sounding like a real pain. Then in the last few months, problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market started making headlines way down here. All along I've been hearing stories from friends about things getting messy, but I think this is the first time I'd seen articles specifically about our old RFC branch of the business.

CEO Paradis to join ResCap exodus.

ResCap to cut 1,000 more jobs.

From NZ:
New Zealand Herald: Mire Grows Deeper at GM.

New Zealand Herald: Mortgage crisis paralyses US markets

"GMAC LLC, a lender owned by General Motors Corporation and Cerberus Capital Management LP, on Tuesday said its ResCap mortgage unit posted a $651 million fourth-quarter loss, and "sharply reduced" its exposure to nonprime loans."

Ouch!

B.T.W. Thanks to Aldo for sending me the article on Bruce.

File Under: Minnesota,

Catching Up

2007-04-18T01:07:00.000-05:00

It's been forever since I've posted what I've been up to, so here goes:

We went to see WWE Smackdown a few weeks back. It's the first time they've ever come to New Zealand. It probably wouldn't have been a big deal to me back in Minnesota, but down here it's like Halley's Comet coming around! Plus it reminded me of home a bit. Anyway, good fun, The Undertaker was there. I'll add some blurry cameraphone pictures later (promise).

On the same note, we also went to see the Pet Shop Boys, also on their first ever visit to New Zealand, more phone pics for that one. I'm kicking myself for not bringing my little fuji 5mp for that, I should have learned my lesson back at that All Blacks game.

Steppenwolf were supposed to come down too (yet another band that's never been here). Unfortunately, they cancelled, with no sign of a rescheduled date.

Red Hot Chili peppers are coming this week. You can imagine the hype that's pouring out of the radio, I think Peter and Rich probably heard piles of it when they were here way back in November! We're not going to that one (not this time anyway), they'll be back, I think a at least one of them owns some land down here.

New Zealand's Cricket team (the Black Caps) are in the semi-finals of the Cricket World cup, along with Australia, Sri Lanka and South Africa. There should be some good games in there. NZ vs Australia is always a grudge match. They play them for certain in the last Super 8 game on the 21st. They'll play them for the final if they can win their semi final game. If I get some time, I'll post a cricket primer for all you Minnesotans. According to my brother ESPN 8 (The Ocho) should be playing all 8-10 hours of the final match. ;-)

You can follow along online if you don't get The Ocho:
Cricket World Cup 2007 MatchCast

Most of you probably know we're planning to visit over the holidays this year. Current plan is Christmas in the cities, then New Years party up north in the Brainerd area (ala the good old MLK weekends of yore). Excellent news for visiting the states is that the Kiwi dollar is at a 25 year high!

NZ Dollar Reaches Record High

I just need to make sure I book all our big ticket stuff before it drops. It's up about 10-20 cents on the dollar from when I arrived.

News for those of you who might be planning a trip down here, the NZ tourism office has release a layer for Google Earth full of points of interest around the country:

100% Pure New Zealand Layer in Google Earth

Upcoming events:

I'm doing the Cateye Moonride the second weekend in May. That's a 12 or 24 hour relay/lap race around the Rotorua redwood forest mountain bike trails. Same place where I dislocated my shoulder, but definitely not the same trails. That reminds me, I'll post some pictures of Peter riding those trails here, at the moment there in Flickr, but not well labeled.

Gotta run, more later.

File Under: New Zealand,

How to Undisable the Use of USB Storage Devices

2007-03-20T22:33:00.000-05:00

In a managed desktop environment, if a USB device fails to install because XP can't locate the drivers, chances are that The Man has messed with the permissions on USBStor.inf and/or USBStor.pnf

Just reverse whatever has been done from this article (requires admin privileges of course):

How to Disable the Use of USB Storage Devices.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823732

.Net CLR Performance Counters Don't Appear in Perfmon

2007-03-14T20:11:00.000-05:00

This took a while to figure out . . . I needed to use the .Net Memory counters to watch the heap sizes and garbage collections. Unfortunately, none of them appeared in Perfmon under Performance Objects.

I looked up the old standby on "How to Manually Rebuild Performance Counter Library Values"

I wasn't quite willing to do all of the registry pecking and ripping needed to do that rebuild but I checked out the keys mentioned and tried running LODCTR \R on the .Net CLR ini file. That reported that they were already installed. :-

So I checked in on the registry entries under Services . . . HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\.NETFramework\Performance

Imagine my surprise when I saw this value:

Disable Performance Counters = 1

Setting that to 0 brought the counters back as expected.

I blame big brother for this one, but it turns out that windows will make this setting if a counter fails some tests at load time.
Disable Performance Counters

Although you can set Perflib not to disable on fail:
Perflib Configuration Flags

COM Interop Problem with Type Library CoClass Names Changing

2007-03-04T22:04:00.000-06:00

Message

This was a real pain, and google was no help, so here's a post that hopefully helps someone else.

(By the way, if you want to have some fun with VB developers who are calling your .Net Assemblies, this is hours of good, wholesome, plausibly deniable bug hunting.)

Background: A Visual Basic 6 project has been happily consuming a set of C# Serviced Components for some centuries. One day, some functionality was added to the C# solution.   Suddenly the VB projects wouldn't compile.

Basic investigation on the VB side revealed that the names of the components had changed from <BusinessObject> to <CompanyAccronym>_<FunctionalArea>_<BusinessObject>. Basically, the new name of the object had become the namespace with dots replaced by underscores.

We had enough experts around that we quickly narrowed it down to a naming conflict. Ripping all the new functionality out of the solution fixed the problem, so it was obviously a conflict with a newly added object. Renaming anything that might conflict would be the solution.

The lingering question was exactly what circumstances cause the problem?

To that end I've created a very simple repro in VS.

The bottom line is that you can't have two classes with the same name in the same solution, no matter what you do with the namespaces. As soon as you add the second (conflicting) class, you hose all of your COM clients who call your first class.

Here's the Repro:

Create a solution.
Add a class file:
namespace RobTest.TypeLib
{
public class conflict
{
public conflict()
{
}
}
}

Generate the type lib with Tlbexp:
[
uuid(44EB15C1-7CE0-39D7-9ADB-B0086CE7F6EB),
version(1.0),
    custom({0F21F359-AB84-41E8-9A78-36D110E6D2F9}, "RobTest.TypeLib.conflict")
]
coclass conflict {
    [default] interface _conflict;
    interface _Object;
};
Looks OK.

Now add another class in a totally different Namespace
namespace RobTest2.TypeLib2
{
public class conflict
{
public conflict()
{
}
}
}

Regenerate the type lib:
[
uuid(90EDBC47-D360-3545-9786-15FF36E3AF66),
version(1.0),
    custom({0F21F359-AB84-41E8-9A78-36D110E6D2F9}, "RobTest.TypeLib.conflict")
]
coclass RobTest_TypeLib_conflict {
    [default] interface _RobTest_TypeLib_conflict;
    interface _Object;
};
[
uuid(A45FCAAA-AC72-31DA-A6FC-DEC2EDE2489F),
version(1.0),
    custom({0F21F359-AB84-41E8-9A78-36D110E6D2F9}, "RobTest2.TypeLib2.TypeLibProblem2.conflict")
]
coclass RobTest2_TypeLib2_conflict {
    [default] interface _RobTest2_TypeLib2_conflict;
    interface _Object;
};
Not Good!

The only solution is to rename the conflicting class:
namespace RobTest2.TypeLib2
{
public class NoConflict
{
public NoConflict()
{
}
}
}

Then everything goes happily back to the way it was.
[
uuid(D26D7937-EA9B-30B6-BA98-A36614BF7CCE),
version(1.0),
    custom({0F21F359-AB84-41E8-9A78-36D110E6D2F9}, "RobTest.TypeLib.conflict")
]
coclass conflict {
    [default] interface _conflict;
    interface _Object;
};
[
uuid(3E9830B2-B787-3FBF-A493-370273AB224F),
version(1.0),
    custom({0F21F359-AB84-41E8-9A78-36D110E6D2F9}, "RobTest2.TypeLib2.NoConflict")
]
coclass NoConflict {
    [default] interface _NoConflict;
    interface _Object;
};

Mail-to-Blogger Post Tip Number 1

2007-02-22T21:41:00.001-06:00

Use (hash)end at the end of the post content to keep the email auto-footer from posting.

Testing Post from Email

2007-02-22T20:01:00.000-06:00

I've developed a backlog of little tiny posts on technical subjects that I've been intending to keep just as a "note to self".

It should be easier just to post these as they come up via emails to blogger. I'd forgotten that it had that feature.

Coromandel Weekend

2007-02-22T01:08:00.000-06:00

Another part of my birthday present from Kel was a weekend in the Coromandel!

We started out kayaking in Hahae, off the east coast of the Coromandel peninsula.

Here's Cathedral Cove, we got lucky with the timing there, it had been closed for days earlier while there was filming going on for the next Narnia movie.

After the kayaking we did some driving and hiking to get to the tip of the peninsula. On our way through Whitianga we saw a boat come in with a 114kg Striped Marlin.

That evening we camped at a Dept. of Conservation (DOC) campground at Stony Bay. Check out the geotags on the Flickr photos to see the locations on a map. It was a long winding way on single lane gravel roads.

The next morning we hiked across the very tip of the peninsula to Fletchers Bay. The scenery was amazing, I highly recommend that hike.

On the other side, we hit a beach for a quick swim, then we did some biking along the coast.

Lastly, we stopped in Coromandel town for dinner (and happened to catch the tail end of the Black Caps beating Australia in Cricket). Fabulous weekend!

File Under: New Zealand,

My First New Zealand Earthquake

2007-02-22T00:41:00.000-06:00

We had an earthquake last night. Actually, there were three of them, but the first one hit while we were in the car, and the second after we were asleep.

The one we felt was a 4.5 centered just up the road and off shore in Orewa. Down in Albany, it felt like sitting on a sofa in a moving truck while somebody gives it a big shove. Then there were a few rattles following that.

Here's the article from the Herald:

Earthquakes Shake Auckland Region.

File Under: New Zealand,

Birthday Bungy Jump

2007-02-03T22:02:00.000-06:00

This past weekend was my birthday (Jan 25th).

One of my Christmas presents from Kel this year was that we were going to be staying at the Powderhorn Chateau and hiking the Tongariro Crossing over my birthday weekend.

When I opened my other presents on Thursday morning, one of them was a small printed voucher "good for one Birthday Surprise on the 25th".

I thought a lot about what that might be on the drive down to Taupo. I discovered shortly after Kel took over driving when we pulled into Taupo Bungy parking lot!

They were taking a break for a bit when we pulled up, so I didn't get to see anyone else jumping straight away. Kel also recommended that I not look over the edge until after I'd signed up and weighed in, but after that I grabbed some photos from the platform.

When they started up again, I was second in line. It was nice to have one person ahead of me, so I was able to watch and knew basically what to expect. Though the scream that girl gave when she finally jumped wasn't at all what I wanted to hear at that moment. ;-).

When it was my turn they quickly strapped my lower legs into big cuffs, then attached the end of the bungy onto that harness with a big carabiner. Next they had me shuffle to the edge of the platform. That was probably the hardest part, standing on the very edge with my legs tied together, and feeling the weight of the whole bungy cord pulling on them.

Looking at the drop from there, the water looked beautiful and deep. It would have been a perfect cliff jumping spot. If it were about one third the height (Which is 47 meters b.t.w.) I might have been tempted to jump without the bungy. That made it much easier to go when they counted me down.

The drop is about what you'd expect. A rush of freefall, just like a cliff jump. Once you get going, the water comes up incredibly fast. But just before you get there, there's this springy sensation building up behind you. Then next thing you know you're flying up to the platform again. That's the second hardest part! There's a bunch more bouncing and dropping before you're done. Overall a great experience, I'm glad Kel did that for me (and even more glad it was a surprise). ;-)

My recommendation is definitely do the water touch thing, and don't bother wearing a shirt. ;-)

This one isn't me but it's a great shot Kel caught while I was walking back up the hill after my jump:

File Under: New Zealand,

Visiting the States

2006-11-24T18:54:00.001-06:00

In late October, Kel and I came over to the states for a week and a half. We spent a few days in Minnesota catching up with family and friends.

Next we headed over to New York City to meet up with Kel's friend Claire from London. While we were there we caught a Rangers Hockey game at Madison Square Garden and the musical Wicked on Broadway.

We spent the last few days in upstate New York at a surprise birthday party for my friend Jon.

It was great to see everyone again, even if only for a few hours each. That's the only bummer about living in New Zealand, we're so damn far from everywhere.

Hopefully we'll be back again for Christmas next year. In the meantime, I'm working on convincing as many people as possible to come down to visit. I'll post some stuff on Rich and Peter's visit next.

Catching Up

2006-11-16T21:24:00.000-06:00

As I was pulling pictures off my cameras the other night, it occurred to me that I'm way behind on personal news on this blog. So here go the headlines:

August
I went to my first Allblacks game! (That's New Zealand's national rugby team for those of you back home). Not only that, but it was NZ vs Australia! (Think Vikings vs Packers). We had fantastic seats and the Allblacks won 34-27.

I wish I'd known that they didn't mind cameras in the stadium, I'd have brought my SLR. Instead, I've got some cameraphone pics.

September
For Kel's birthday, we went to see INXS. The new INXS with the lead singer they picked out in their Reality TV show (J.D. Fortune). Really great show. We were in th e superfan section, everyone in front of us jumped up and started dancing from the very first song. J.D. had some kind of problem with the zipper on his pants, despite some roadie assistance, his fly was open the whole show.

October
Kel and I were in the states for a week or so. We stopped in Minnesota to vist friends and family, then headed on to New York City to meet up with her friend Claire from London. After a couple days there we headed on to upstate New York for my friend Jon's surprise (super early) birthday party. I'll post some stuff on this set of trips once I get all the relevant photos up to Flickr.

November
My friends Peter and Rich have come over to New Zealand to visit. I took a few days off work to hang out with them while they've been here on the North Island. Definitely more on this coming up.

Right, that's all for now, one monkey off my back. Gotta run.

Synching GMail with Mobile Phones

2006-11-12T21:58:00.000-06:00

Cool, I've been looking for something like this for a while. This plugin lets you pull an iCal into Outlook. Then your mobile phone software, (like Nokia PCSuite) should be able to do the rest. I'll post the results (along with lots of catch-up stuff) later.

Incorporate Google Calendar into Outlook.

File Under: Technology,

Auckland Marathon

2006-10-29T21:24:00.001-06:00

I ran the Auckland Marathon yesterday.

It turned out to be a great day for it: overcast, and not too hot. It eventually started raining, but not until just after I finished.

The course is great, no major hills (the harbor bridge isn't as tough as it looks). It's completely flat along the waterfront for the last half. My only complaint is that the outward portion of the out-and-back along the waterfront felt like it would never end. That said, once we hit the turnaround, the trip back seemed to fly.

I'm quite happy with my time, considering my lack of training (again). I'd picked up a 4:30 pace band, but once I started running, I was thinking about pushing as close to 4:00 as I could. That lasted until just after 30k. Just before that, the split button jammed on my watch, so I have no split times for the last 1/4 of the race.

I did notice that I was just a few seconds over 3:00 at 30k. At 7min per k for the next 10k, my 40k split should have been about 4:10, adding 14 min for the last 2.2k would be 4:24. So the lack of training once again shows up in the last few miles. My actual finishing time was 4:28:16.

It was nice having the markers every kilometer, that's providing pace feedback almost twice as often as the mile markers I'm used to.

Physical damage was amazingly low. One tiny blister and legs that won't bend, but I'll probably be walking normally by Wednesday, maybe running again next week!

Here are the raw splits:


1  6:19
2  (5:42)
3  (5:42)11:24
4   5:29
5  (5:36)
6  (5:37)11:13
7  5:12
8  5:32
9 5:46
10 5:31           **Elapsed 56:28**
11 5:50
12 5:32
13 (6:22)
14 (6:22)
15 (6:22)
16 (6:22)
17 (6:21)31:49
18 (5:48)
19 (5:48)
20 (5:48)17:24    **Elapsed 1:57:05**
21 5:40
21 5:49
23 6:37
24 6:07
25 6:06
26 5:52
27 (6:28)
28 (6:27)12:55    **Elapsed 2:46:15**

**Button Stuck on Watch**
**Approximately 7:00 k's from here out**

Finish 4:28:16

Note to self:
Buy new running watch. ;-)

Here are the photos from the official race photographers:

www.marathon-photos.com - 533

and the official results:

www.enteronline.co.nz


No.  First   Surname Grade Group Overall Net Time
533  Robert  ENGBERG M0134 255   771     4:28:16

Next up: Rotorua Marathon, Saturday April 28th 2007!
With decent training this time. :-)

File Under: Training,

Reinventing the Wheel . . . Makes Hulk Angry

2006-09-07T20:10:00.000-05:00

Aaaaaaagh!

Every time I join a new ASP.Net project I get bitten by these two things, and every time I end up working them out again. This time I'm writing them down. :-)

Joining a project configured as a web project(s) by opening the solution file:

If practical configure your local web server with the project on the same path.

If not, open the SLN file and fix everything that looks like a URL (you won't be able to fix it from VS.Net)

Presumably, making a new solution will solve it too. As I was getting pretty close to turning green and digging out the purple pants, I didn't pursue that path to its smoking, pulverized computer end

Don't even get me started on VS.Net 2003 VSS integration.

Adding a Strong Name Key Pair to a Local Key Container

If there's a line like this in the Assemblyinfo.cs
[assembly: AssemblyKeyName("containerName")]

Or you get "Cryptographic Failure" errors on the first compile of the project

Find the .snk file and run this command line:
sn -i keyfile.snk containerName

File Under: Technology,

Cool New Flickr Mapping Feature

2006-08-30T20:15:00.000-05:00

Flickr has just added some fantastic new features for adding geographic data to photos. Including a new map interface in the Organizr that lets you drag and drop photos onto a map. Check it out:

Once you've pinned a photo to the map, a new link appears on the photo page that says "Taken in (map)". Clicking the map link opens up a little map with the thumbnail photo pin. That map gives you the option to view all photos on a user specific map, or view all photos taken nearby. Way cool, I've been looking for something like this for a while. The only drawback is that it's Yahoo maps, not Google maps (Google has much better New Zealand data).

Here's the Flickr Blog writeup:
Flickr Blog: Great shot - where'd you take that?

I've also been messing around with a couple of websites which integrate with the new Google maps API. None of them have exactly everything I want, but they're getting close. The one I like best is called Platial. It lets you create maps, pin locations, describe and tag locations, and associate photos with locations. It does integrate with Flickr, but it's a bit difficult to locate specific photos (it does a search on all photos marked with a Creative Commons license, so you need some distinguishing text in your photo page to find your own stuff).

In any case, I've been using Platial to gradually assemble a map of things to do on the North Island if any of my friends or family come to visit. Take a look:

Platial Map: Stuff to do in a Week on the North Island

File Under: Technology,

XNA Game Studio

2006-08-29T19:27:00.000-05:00

Hmmm . . . this looks interesting:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/gamestudio/

The Framework looks like a replacement for Managed DirectX 2.0. Might be fun.

File Under: Technology,

VS.Net 2003 to 2005 Web Project Conversion Problems

2006-08-18T18:00:00.000-05:00

This one is a bit obscure, and the solution may be a bit obvious, but it might just turn up in Google and save someone a couple hours of detective work.

So . . . while attempting to load a VS.Net 2003 web project into VS.Net 2005, I was continually blocked by this error:


"The project file must be opened in the Visual Studio IDE and converted to the latest version before it can be built by MSBuild"

Hmm . . . I thought I just did open it in the IDE.

Our next strategy was to create a new 2005 web project and import all the files from the previous project.

Oddly, there was no option available to create a new web project. It turns out that the previous owner of my dev environment had never installed the Visual Web Developer feature.

Once that feature was installed it ripped right into the conversion.

File Under: Technology,

Cold Snap

2006-08-15T16:02:00.000-05:00

I've had frost on my windshield the last couple of mornings. It's been about 3°C at 7am or so. That's left just enough frost to need to blast the heat and run the wipers for a few minutes.

That's made me think: Winter is almost over down here, and that's all there is to it . . . we won't even see a real frost, the kind that leaves you running late, so you have to chip a hole through the ice and go, hunched over and peering out like a tank driver.

What's really a bummer is thinking of "winter" going by without one of these!

I'm not sure when I'll get a dose of snow and cold this year. It's not looking good for a trip to the South Island or Mount Ruapehu anytime soon.

On the bright side, I will definitely be back in Minnesota for my favorite time of year!

File Under: New Zealand,

My TechEd NZ Schedule

2006-08-02T17:31:00.000-05:00

Sunday, August 20

2:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Registration and Hands on Labs Open SkyCity

Monday, August 21

8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Keynote New Zealand Rooms, SkyCity

10:30 AM - 11:45 AM

CON301 (.NET 3.0) Introduction to the .NET Framework 3.0

11:55 AM - 1:10 PM

CON203 (.NET 3.0) Windows Workflow Foundation: Introduction

1:10 PM - 2:00 PM

Lunch

1:20 PM - 1:50 PM

2:00 PM - 3:15 PM

OFC304 Securing and Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office (VSTO) Solutions + what's Coming in version 3.0:

3:35 PM - 4:50 PM

ARC209 Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Service-Oriented Architectures

5:00 PM - 6:15 PM

MGT304 PowerShell: Next Generation Command Line Scripting

6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Ask the Experts Evening MarketPlace, SkyCity

Tuesday, August 22

9:00 AM - 10:15 AM

ARC205 Putting the User Back in to SOA

10:45 AM - 12:00 PM

CON308 (.NET 3.0) Windows Communication Foundation: Building Secure Services

12:10 PM - 1:25 PM

CON311 (.NET 3.0) Windows Workflow Foundation: Building Rules-Based Workflows

1:25 PM - 2:20 PM

Lunch

1:35 PM - 2:05 PM

2:20 PM - 3:35 PM

ARC207 Guerilla SOA

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

WEB211 Developing Data-Driven Web Applications with .NET Language Integrated Query

5:10 PM - 6:25 PM

WEB310 ASP.NET: Creating High-Performance, Enterprise-Scale Web Applications Using Visual Studio 2005 Team System

6:30 PM - 11:30 PM

TechFest St James Theatre, Queen St

Wednesday, August 23

9:00 AM - 10:15 AM

WEB312 ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and Tricks

10:45 AM - 12:00 PM

CON319 .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.0: How WCF will change the way you’re developing Service Oriented solutions

12:10 PM - 1:25 PM

CON316 (BTS) "And I thought I knew everything about BizTalk"

1:25 PM - 2:20 PM

Lunch

1:35 PM - 2:05 PM

2:20 PM - 3:35 PM

CLI311 Developing a Windows Presentation Foundation Application

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

CON204 (BTS) Planning and Designing Enterprise Class BizTalk Server Solutions

5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

Farewell Drinks MarketPlace, SkyCity

File Under: Technology,

Returning a Recordset from an Oracle Stored Procedure to a .Net Caller

2006-08-01T20:20:00.000-05:00

You wouldn't think this would be difficult, but every example I googled up was either incomplete, excessive, or needlessly confusing. So for my own future reference as much as anything, here it goes. . .

The minimalist implementation of a Stored Procedure that returns a recordset:

Oracle side:


CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE RobCursorTestProc
(
  my_cursor IN OUT SYS_REFCURSOR
)
AS
BEGIN
  OPEN my_cursor FOR
    SELECT  TABLE_NAME,
            OWNER    
    FROM ALL_TABLES;
END;
SHOW ERRORS;

.Net Side


  using Oracle.DataAccess.Client; 

  OracleConnection OraConn = new OracleConnection();
  OraConn.ConnectionString = 
"Data Source=DBName;User Id=MyUser;Password=MyPW;";
  OraConn.Open(); 
  OracleCommand OraComm = new OracleCommand("RobCursorTestProc", OraConn);
  OraComm.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
  OraComm.Parameters.Add
("Cursor", OracleDbType.RefCursor, ParameterDirection.Output ); 
  OracleDataReader OraDR = OraComm.ExecuteReader();
  if (OraDR.Read())
  {
    MessageBox.Show(OraDR.GetName(0));
    MessageBox.Show(OraDR.GetValue(0).ToString()); 
  }

Here's a bit more user friendly view:
http://snipplr.com/users/rengber/

File Under: Technology,

Tech Ed NZ

2006-08-01T20:16:00.000-05:00

Oh Yeah!

File Under: Technology,

NZ Health Care

2006-08-01T19:42:00.000-05:00

While my shoulder was out, it was hard to think about anything else, but somewhere in the back of my mind I was tallying up the bill for my accident:

Ambulance ride: $

Emergency room visit $$

Two X-Rays of my shoulder $$$

Letter from ACC telling me that they've been notified of my injury, have agreed to cover the cost, and as I was treated in a public hospital, they have in fact already paid my bill: priceless. :-)

Note that this may not work so well for those of you who come over to visit. So as Super-Moto always says: "Rubber side down!"

File Under: New Zealand,

USB Drive Annoyances

2006-07-31T19:52:00.000-05:00

If you plug in your USB drive, the drivers install properly, but it doesn't appear as a drive letter, it might be conflicting with an existing network drive.

The solution is to go into the Disk Manager (Computer Managment) locate the storage drive, and change the drive letter.

Driver conflicts can usually be solved by removing the device from the device manager, then plugging it back in again.

File Under: Technology,