Entries posted in July 2015

So recently I posted on twitter about a sudden gain in strength:

I have conquered pull-ups!

On Saturday night I could do 1.5. Today I could do 11!

(Chinups were always easy.)

To put that more into context I should give a few more details. In the past I've been using an assisted pull-up machine, which offers a counterweight to make such things easier.

When I started the exercise I assumed I couldn't do it for real, so I used the machine and set it on 150lb. Over a few weeks I got as far as being able to use it with only 80lb. (Which means I was lifting my entire body-weight minus 80lb. With the assisted-pullup machine smaller numbers are best!)

One evening I was walking to the cinema with my wife and told her I thought I'd be getting close to doing one real pull-up soon, which sounds a little silly, but I guess is pretty common for random men who are 40 as I almost am. As it happens there were some climbing equipment nearby so I said "Here see how close I am", and I proceeded to do 1.5 pullups. (The second one was bad, and didn't count, as I got 90% of the way "up".)

Having had that success I knew I could do "almost two", and I set a goal for the next gym visit: 3 x 3-pullups. I did that. Then I did two more for fun on the way out (couldn't quite manage a complete set.)

So that's the story of how I went from doing 1.5 pullus to doing 11 in less than a week. These days I can easily do 3x3, but struggle with more. It'll come, slowly.

So pull-up vs. chin-up? This just relates to which way you place your hands: palm facing you (chin-up) and palm way from you (pull-up).

Some technical details here but chinups are easier, and more bicep-centric.

Anyway too much writing. My next challenge is the one-armed pushup. However long it takes, and I think it will take a while, that's what I'm working toward.

Tags: fitness, health | 1 comment

So we've recently spent our first week together in Helsinki, Finland.

Mostly this has been stress-free, but there are always oddities about living in new places, and moving to Europe didn't minimize them.

For the moment I'll gloss over the differences and instead document the computer problem I had. Our previous shared-desktop system had a pair of drives configured using software RAID. I pulled one of the drives to use in a smaller-cased system (smaller so it was easier to ship).

Only one drive of a pair being present make mdadm scream, via email, once per day, with reports of failure.

The output of cat /proc/mdstat looked like this:

md2 : active raid1 sdb6[0] [LVM-storage-area]
      1903576896 blocks super 1.2 2 near-copies [2/1] [_U]
md1 : active raid10 sdb5[1] [/root]
      48794112 blocks super 1.2 2 near-copies [2/1] [_U]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[0]  [/boot]
      975296 blocks super 1.2 2 near-copies [2/1] [_U]

See the "_" there? That's the missing drive. I couldn't remove the drive as it wasn't present on-disk, so this failed:

mdadm --fail   /dev/md0 /dev/sda1
mdadm --remove /dev/md0 /dev/sda1
# repeat for md1, md2.

Similarly removing all "detached" drives failed, so the only thing to do was to mess around re-creating the arrays with a single drive:

lvchange -a n shelob-vol
mdadm --stop /dev/md2
mdadm --create /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-devices=1 /dev/sdb6 --force
..

I did that on the LVM-storage area, and the /boot partition, but "/" is still to be updated. I'll use knoppix/similar to do it next week. That'll give me a "RAID" system which won't alert every day.

Thanks to the joys of re-creation the UUIDs of the devices changed, so /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf needed updating. I realized that too late, when grub failed to show the menu, because it didn't find it's own UUID. Handy recipe for the future:

set prefix=(md/0)/grub/
insmod linux
linux (md/0)/vmlinuz-3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64 root=/dev/md1
initrd (md/0)//boot/initrd.img-3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64
boot

Tags: life, mdadm | 2 comments

So we're in Finland, and the differences start out immediately.

We're renting a flat, in building ten, on a street. You'd think "10 Streetname" was a single building, but no. It is a pair of buildings: 10A, and 10B.

Both of the buildings have 12 flats in them, with 10A having 1-12, and 10B having 13-24.

There's a keypad at the main entrance, which I assumed was to let you press a button and talk to the people inside "Hello I'm the postmaster", but no. There is no intercom system, instead you type in a magic number and the door opens.

The magic number? Sounds like you want to keep that secret, since it lets people into the common-area? No. Everybody has it. The postman, the cleaners, the DHL delivery man, and all the ex-tenants. We invited somebody over recently and gave it out in advance so that they could knock on our flat-door.

Talking of cleaners: In the UK I lived in a flat and once a fortnight somebody would come and sweep the stair-well, since we didn't ever agree to do it ourselves. Here somebody turns up every day, be it to cut the grass, polish the hand-rail, clean the glass on the front-door, or mop the floors of the common area. Sounds awesome. But they cut the grass, right outside our window, at 7:30AM. On the dot. (Or use a leaf-blower, or something equally noisy.)

All this communal-care is paid for by the building-association, of which all flat-owners own shares. Sounds like something we see in England, or even like Americas idea of a Home-Owners-Association. (In Scotland you own your own flat, you don't own shares of an entity which owns the complete building. I guess there are pros and cons to both approaches.)

Moving onwards other things are often the same, but the differences when you spot them are odd. I'm struggling to think of them right now, somebody woke me up by cutting our grass for the second time this week (!)

Anyway I'm registered now with the Finnish government, and have a citizen-number, which will be useful, I've got an appointment booked to register with the police - which is something I had to do as a foreigner within the first three months - and today I've got an appointment with a local bank so that I can have a euro-bank-account.

Happily I did find a gym to join, the owner came over one Sunday to give me a tiny-tour, and then gave me a list of other gyms to try if his wasn't good enough - which was a nice touch - I joined a couple of days later, his gym is awesome.

(I'm getting paid in UK-pounds, to a UK-bank, so right now I'm getting local money by transferring to my wifes account here, but I want to do that to my own, and open a shared account for paying for rent, electricity, internet, water, & etc).

My flat back home is still not rented, because the nice property management company lost my keys. Yeah you can't make that up can you? With a bit of luck the second set of keys I mailed them will arrive soon and the damn thing can be occupied, while I'm not relying on that income I do wish to have it.

Tags: finland | No comments