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New 5RM Deadlift Today

Over the past few months I haven’t been quite the gym freak that I’ve been in the past but one exercise I have continued to regularly train has been the deadlift.

Saturday mornings had become my sole weekly strength session so I had to ensure I was getting as much bang for my buck as possible and nothing works the body like this exercise.

I haven’t set a new personal record in any of the big movements since about November so it was a good boost to exceed my previous best. This morning’s effort was the culmination of 8 weeks work: starting off at a relatively low intensity and adding weight to the bar each time. I had planned on reaching this stage sooner but I noticed one Saturday that I couldn’t grip the bar properly and found I had developed a blister which proceeded to burst, resulting in missing my target for that session and slowing my progress.

I’ve recently been reading up on Mark Rippetoe’s techniques and slowly moving away from those of Stuart McRobert, hence the 5 reps, and I’ll probably start a “Practical Programming” style training cycle once I’ve finished reading the book and absorbing it’s material. Squats every workout? Brilliant :)

The question now though is, can I keep the progression coming and lift heavier next time?

2008 02 23 Training Comments (0) Permalink

Virgin Media customer satisfaction shocker

As I mentioned yesterday, my broadband had been on the blink and this morning I decided to take action as I need to do some work from home this weekend.

Just before 9am I phoned tech support and was suprised to not have to wait on hold: my call was answered almost immediately. The support guy was polite and after I explained the situation he tested the line from his end and without any messing around scheduled to have an engineer sent out between 12 and 4pm.

At 12:15 my buzzer went and about 10 minutes later I had a new modem. The engineer had quickly tested the signal strength and determined that it was the hardware that was at fault and swiftly had it replaced. Result.

All that was left to do was ssh into my router and bring the external network interface down and then back up again and voila, the gift of broadband was mine again :)

This incident was a far cry from my experience of NTL’s customer support. Thumbs up for Virgin Media!

2008 02 16 Geek Comments (2) Permalink

Trigger happy without broadband

For 2 days now the “ready” light on my cable modem has failed to light up and hence I’ve had no internet access at home :( I’ve tried power-cycling the modem, leaving it unplugged overnight and even disconnecting and reconnecting the cable input. No Joy.

I checked the Virgin Media service status page and can see that there was maintenance scheduled for Belfast this morning, maybe this will remedy the problem…

My morning routine has evolved to consist of catching up on RSS while eating breakfast and guzzling coffee, so this ritual has been disrupted and as an alternative to plugging in to my feed reader I had a look through my home folder for one of the many eBooks I’ve downloaded and not finished reading.

The lucky contestant turned out to be the freely downloadable
Trigger Happy by Steven Poole and what a dose of nostalgia it’s been!

I haven’t seriously played any computer games in about a decade now but this book lists many of the titles I invested many hours into when I was younger. I was brought back to the days of sitting hunched over machines like the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Amiga 600 and NES and I’ve even considered investing in a new console although my need to save for my future is overriding my want for something new and shiny which I might not even make much use of.

Saying that though I’ll probably end up grabbing an Amiga Emulator or MAME at some point over the weekend, Virgin Media willing, and catch up on a few childhood memories.

Game on!

2008 02 15 Books
Distractions
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6 months at $BIG_CORP

I can hardly believe it, today I'm 6 calendar months into my position as Analyst Programmer at $BIG_CORP.

How time has flown. More surprisingly, I almost seem to have grown accustomed to the stress of working with mission-critical systems and getting called-out in the wee hours of the night.

2008 02 13 Clerical Comments (4) Permalink

Fun with Photoshop and cross-browser CSS

The consensus wasn't to go live with the new site straight away after all but to create a better impression on the public by waiting on the final design and within no time at all Jordan had worked his graphical magic and delivered the goods.

I was supplied with a .psd mockup and got busy with Photoshop. I hadn't used this app in a while and it took some time to relearn how to use it but I managed to cut things up and proceeded to get stuck into the CSS.

Again I had to revisit some skills I hadn’t used since I started my current day job and when I looked at my first iteration in Internet Explorer I nearly cried.

Areas of difficulty I had were mainly concerned with how different browsers implement the box model and I also had to jump through some hoops to get opacity working but the end result is a consistent look across Firefox 2.0.x on Windows & Mac, Safari 3.0.x on Mac and IE 6.0.x on Windows. I haven't had a chance to test it with IE 7 but I imagine it is as broken as it's younger sibling ;)

I've already been working on the release process so there's just a few minor tweaks to go and the new site will be available in production.

2008 02 12 Infurious
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Getting ready to launch infurious.com

I’m preparing to push my code for the new Infurious site into production so we can start selling our first application, Rickshaw.

The site’s not too pretty but It Works and our freshly recruited designer Jordan has some interesting ideas for the next iteration. All the important stuff is present: people can download Rickshaw, purchase a license and the license details will be generated and mailed out to them. I’ve just had a dry run of this scenario and it all looks good.

Thankfully Aidan has been at hand and steered me away from over-engineering the project and ending up with just a mess of unfinished code :)

Doing this and holding down a 9 to 5 I’ve found difficult and the progress has been painfully slow but it will all be worth it.

Watch this space!

2008 01 28 Infurious
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Site migration

I’ve just finished migrating sickbiscuit.com from my home development machine to my new VPS.

DNS records have been updated and decaf is now handling mail and web traffic for the domain allow the only thing I’ve copied over is this blog.

Hopefully this will give me the motivation needed to spruce things up a bit as the last iteration of sickbiscuit.com looked like it was designed by a programmer ;)

2008 01 04 Linux
Meta
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28 today

It seems like I've survived another year :)

I've just finished processing my email and am reflecting on the goals I wrote this time last year:

  • continue bodybuilding
  • write more code
  • blog more
  • increase Linux skills
  • get a “real” job

Here's the outcome:

  • I put a lot of effort into training and nutrition last year and found that when vanity is my motivation then happiness will not be mine. I'm still trying to find a long-term strategy with this
  • I developed MacServ for the guys at Mac-Sys and it is in daily use
  • I continue to blog, albeit irregularly. I still wouldn’t consider myself a “blogger” though
  • I've done a lot with Linux over the last year. My 9 to 5 involves a lot of Solaris and all my side projects involve either Linux or the BSD derived Mac OS X. This stuff is becoming more and more ingrained
  • I'm currently working for the largest company in the world. Scary biscuits!

My intentions for this year run along these lines:

  • Communicate more, whether in person or via blogging/email/IM
  • Contribute to an open-source project
  • Learn a new programming language
  • Put more emphasis on software development in general
  • Travel to somewhere I've never been before

These I think are realistic and very much achievable. More idealistic/loftier things I'd like to do:

  • Learn to touch type
  • Become a freelance/contract developer
  • Become a “Mac guy”

I look forward to seeing how much of this I'll achieve before review time comes around again. I was quite pleased to see how many things I'd ticked off my list from last year.

I've kicked off my birthday celebrations with an extra shot americano from the coffee guy at work. Chin-chin!

2008 01 03 Me Comments (0) Permalink

Infurious in person

I met my co-conspirator Aidan in person for the first time today. He's over here in sunny Belfast for a while and is working up on the third floor of the same building as myself, so we had a bit of lunch and got chatting about our plans for the future, our experiences of working for $BIG_CORP and life in general.

It was good to finally put a physical person to the online persona and apparently neither of us looks like the photos we use as avatars ;)

Go team Infurious!

2008 01 02 Infurious Comments (0) Permalink

ISP style mail server on Debian VPS

Last month I decided to invest in a VPS from VPSLink.

I had been considering this for a while, especially after my experience using an Ubuntu VPS with Infurious and after 2 power failures within as many weeks due to building work nearby to my home, my hand was forced. No more hosting on a Linux box on the end of a DSL connection for me!

I opted for a XEN based VPS running Debian Etch. I've really come to love APT based distros after running Kubuntu on my desktop before I was endowed with a Mac and with the relative ease of setting up all the Infurious services on Ubuntu. So I decided to go upstream and it's a far cry from my past experiences with Slackware :)

My first priority was getting my LAMP stack up and running and I spent my free time over the past few days following this excellent tutorial.

Just like many other things in the FLOSS world: you get the instructions, follow those instructions and it Just Works. This instance was no different and all I really had to so was copy and paste commands & configuration settings and I probably spent more time doing background reading, testing each part as I went along and keeping track of all the changes I made on my personal wiki.

The result is I can now host email accounts for as many domains I wish, provide access to those accounts over IMAPS and perform server-side virus scanning and spam filtering.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love free software!

2008 01 01 Linux
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