Entries tagged health

Surprisingly many local people seem to be catching icky-illnesses of death recently.

Both Megan and myself are under the weather recently. I managed to infect her with a nasty cough and cold on Wednesday and the pair of us have been mostly shivering indoors since then.

Today is the closing day of The Leith Festival (Leith being a district of Edinburgh. Where we live.) So we made it outside and consumed beer and pies for a while. Now we're back and I'm wishing I'd not left the house.

Still it could have been worse I could have been in the sun in a blurry suit and without any books! (Books visible and recognizable include the complete works of Terry Pratchett, minus two, the complete works of Steven Brust (Maybe Vlad will give me the edge in the assassins game!))

All being well we'll be more recovered in time for the Debconf7 activities, although I expect Meg to be driving around Scotland for part of the time with a friend and not completely available. (A three-day roadtrip with Emma - a local girl who is hoping that somebody at Debconf will be able to fix her Ubuntu laptop..?)

Update: - Debconf7 game of Settlers of Catan..? (I have only the Zarahemla set myself, but it will suffice for four players in a pinch.)

Tags: debconf7, health, leith, megan, pics, ubuntu | No comments

"I've got chills
They're multiplying"

I guess technically I could have used that as a subject, but ugh.

If ever you're a bit shiverry, and a bit unwell, don't shave your head. It'll take three times as long, and you'll cut yourself.

ObQuote: Red Dwarf.

Tags: health, random | 2 comments

So I'd previously talked about migrating machines. From having one virtual machine running "mail" + "web" + "stuff" I've now got three hosts:

ssh.steve.org.uk

This is supposed to be used solely for shell access, email reading, IRC.

Sadly it still hosts one website, the web interface to my Mercurial repositories. This can't be moved without moving the repositories which is a step too far. Although I don't particularly want people browsing my code/changes I do want them to be able to clone them. If I could get anonymous-SSH checkouts working, sanely, then I'd be happy, but I don't see how to do that.

skx-web

This hosts all my websites except for two.

The two that are excluded are my mercurial repositories, which still lives on ssh.steve.org.uk, and my blogspam service.

blogspam

This runs my blogspam.net service.

I wish I could retired this, since it uses cruftly XML::RPC. I'd rather see a RESTful application sending/receiving JSON.

Sadly I can't kill it without annoying a lot of people. So it must remain.

I chose to add the blogspam guest, because that service does really take over an IP, and it just seemed simplest to move it to one machine. As a quick hack both http://repository.steve.org.uk & http://blogspam.net/ run under Apache. Although the other websites run under their own UID with thttpd + my proxy.

Now time to change the subject entirely. I've recently joined gym. Which isn't as horrible as I thought it might be, though as a matter of policy I refuse to go on any of those fancy running/jogging machines.

The first three weeks I just alternated between the cycling machines and the rowing machines. Initially ten minutes on each, then twenty, then thirty.

Now I'm being all brave and adventurous, using new machines and pieces of equipment.

Writing this I've got a dull ache in both my arms, after doing seated-dips with 100Lbs. So I guess I'm starting to make progress.

No specific goals in mind, but I've been paying slightly more attention to my diet over the past month and I think if I'm a "little fitter" and have "slightly nicer arms" then I'll be happy enough.

I've no desire to go all anal and count calories, or give up chocolate and beer. So it is almost hard to explain why I'm going, but .. it is fun, and watching the numbers change is fun too.

I'll probably post more about this in the future.

Tags: bigv, fitness, health, migrations | No comments

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 I did start a project, to write a puppet-dashboard, it is functionally complete, but the next step is to allow me to raise alerts based on failing runs of puppet - in real-time.

(i.e. Now that I have a dashboard I wish to not use it. I want to be alerted to failures, without having to remember to go look for them. Something puppet-dashboard can't do ..)

• github link
• Sample Installation
  • This might go away in the future.

In other news a while back I slipped in a casual note about having a brain scan done, here in sunny Helsinki.

One of the cool things about that experience, in addition to being told I wasn't going to drop dead that particular day, was that the radiologist told me that I could pay €25 to get a copy of my brain data in DICOM format.

I've not yet played with this very much, but I couldn't resist a brief animation:

• See my brain.
  • Not the best quality, or the best detail, but damn. It is my brain.
  • I shall do better with more experimentation I think.
  • After I posted it my wife, a doctor, corrected me: That wasn't a gif of my brain, instead it was a gif of my skull. D'oh!

Tags: health, puppet, puppet-dashboard | No comments