I have never really been what one would call an active person.

But over the last couple of years, I have become more active, not talking about running several miles a day or bench pressing my bodyweight (which I cannot currently due), but in comparison to my previous lifestyle (consisting of sleeping, eating, driving to work, sitting at a desk for at least 8 hours, then playing video games whenever not doing those other things), then I am an Ironman.

Due to scheduling conflicts I have not been to Gladiator in quite a while, but have taken what I have learned there and been applying it to my own workouts, which consists of a decent amount of swimming. I have managed to go swimming at least a few times a week and for a bit there, I was going to the pool every evening. Then I did the Spartan Race, about four miles of rough, hilly terrain with various obstacles (representing the feats of strength of a Spartan). I completed the race about 15 minutes after when I wanted to and did that with a sprained ankle. (I sprained it fairly bad about 1/2 way through the race.)

This hampered my swimming, causing me to only be able to swim once or twice a week and rarely back-to-back. But the ankle is mostly healed now and I have started swimming on a back-to-back basis. But of course, we are now into the summer months, this means that everyone and their brother (and their brother’s kids) are at the pool. Swimming at the El Salido pool over the fall and winter months has spoiled me something awful, I mean I am used to there being a handful of people swimming in the pool and rarely having to share a lane.

With the triple digit temperatures forcing those seeking relief from the heat with the benefit of some fresh air out to the pool, the place is an utter madhouse, children running everywhere, kids playing basketball, dive board has a line constantly five or six deep, the pool is proverbially popping. I feel like an old man, wanting kids to get off my lawn, I remember feeling spoiled like this when I bowled in a league with Jeremy many years ago, we would close the place, bowling for a few hours after league ended.

But I need to get my lap swimming in right? So I try to get to the pool as early as possible after work, but still it is packed, with them cutting the number of lap lanes down, to make room for the increased number of kids, it means that the lanes are doubled up and often times there are a few folks waiting for a lap lane (myself included). This has put a cramp in my style. So thankfully with summer comes morning swimming hours at many of the pools in the area. (Note, El Salido is the ONLY PUBLIC pool open year round.)

Being a member of the El Salido pool, I also have access to the Anderson Mill pool, which has morning swimming from 7 to 10 am in the morning. But that didn’t feel quite early enough given the distance to the pool from the house, so I looked around some more and found that Cedar Park has a pool that has open lap swimming (from June to the end of August) from 6 am to 9 am, and is only a short distance from the house. I managed to get there three times in a row last week for morning swim before work (scheduling didn’t permit it the rest of the week).

This weekend I didn’t have a chance to get out to El Salido either Saturday or today (Sunday), but there is the Buttercup pool that is only two blocks from our house here in Cedar Park. I have driven by that pool for the last 11 years and never really thought about going to that pool. Mind you, up until October of last year I didn’t swim, at all. But I decided I needed to finally learn, I swim better now than I ever did before, but am still not what one would call a strong swimmer (unless I have my kickboard with me, then I am Michael Phelps).

So today, after having breakfast and working for a bit, I decided I should get a swim in and thought walking over to the Buttercup pool would be a good idea, the public open swim began at 1pm, I was there by 1:10 pm. I got setup and began swimming laps, the pool itself is nice a clean, the ‘deck’ area around the pool could use some cover, again El Salido has spoiled me. I finished up my laps, dried off a bit and walked home. It felt really good.

Just feels weird, like I am finally learning my neighborhood for the first time in 11 years.

Laterz

The saying works better, when you are talking about non-descriptive positions likes kings or queens. As some may have read in facebook postings my beloved server Jules has for all intensive purposes died. I had Sprocket Networks ship him down to me for the low price of $39.95, in the hopes that I would be able to retrieve database data off of him.

Luckily I was able to retrieve the majority of my data off of him. However, not sure much more is retrievable, I took the hard disk out and will slap it into a USB enclosure, I have one laying around here somewhere.

All technological buffs (nerds, geeks, technosnobs) at some point have to name a computer. The naming of a server, tends to run in a theme, often times related items, like brand names of beer or alcohol, Jeremy and I settled upon the Pulp Fiction characters, the first of which was Jules. He was a box that I had laying around, I bought a new hard drive for him and increased the ram and installed Fedora Core on him.

I looked around for places to co-locate a mid-tower box, in Austin this was too cost prohibitive. However, in Dallas there was a a price I could not beat $65 + tax per month. So I dropped him off and he worked great up until the last few months. The power supply died a few months back, luckily Sprocket Networks was cool enough to replace it free of charge, in exchange for a replacement power supply.

But this last issue, is indicative of a hard drive failure, or at least from what I went through to get the data off the drive that I plucked from Jules’ case, much like one would pluck a still beating heart, being failure is imminent.

I have been working on Amazon EC2 server configuration as part of my 2nd contract. So that meant, I had to name a server, this one would be known as Marvin, you know the one that Vincent shot in the face. You know ‘Oh man, I shot Marvin in the face!’

Vincent is a server that was setup for a side project that a few of us had going about a year ago.

And Coolidge (the boxer from Pulp Fiction) is a Windows EC2 instance that I have running for another contract project.

I spent some time today working on getting my Technosnobs and Ben.Dominguez-Benner blogs back up. In both cases the blog engines had to be upgraded to a version that is PHP 5.3+ compatible.

Well, I best check on dinner and I have some server config work to do that actually pays the bills.

Laterz.