Well my *real* goal was to finish the marathon yesterday in 5 hours, but deep down I wanted to get under 4:30. I'm really hurting today, but I crossed the line with a chip time of 4:27:10, so I'm pretty happy with how things went :)

I ran with my buddy Mike at a 10 min/mile pace all the way to 24 miles, but he was in the zone and told him to just go cause I was really starting to feel it. Throughout training he was battling a really painful problem with his left knee, so if he stopped running we feared the pain would appear and he'd be in real trouble. Around 24 miles I started to feel stomach cramps at the pace we were going so I just couldn't keep going with him. He crossed the line at 4:23:52, which was just awesome.

The weather was holding out until we got to about 4 miles, and then it started to just pour. When that combined with the really skinny streets around lake Calhoun (think giant puddles) we all had cold, sopping wet feet, and a hell of a wind to deal with. All in all though I think the temperature and rain helped, but it really sucked for a while there.

 So I'm really happy with how things went, but I am really hurting today. I didn't expect this much pain, but our longest training run (~21 miles) took us about 4:20, so we really pushed ourselves during the race.

We're talking about doing a half-marathon in Arizona this winter, but I'm not sure if I'll be doing the full thing again. However, it is pretty damn fun to cross that line, so I guess you never know...

Tomorrow I'm running in the Twin Cities Marathon, and while the weather isn't looking too hot, I'm pretty excited. I ran Grandma's Marathon a few years ago with the goal of completing it within 5 hours, but didn't make it (I was 5:17 I think). My downfall was skimping on the 18-week training regimen. I did most of it, but I never did some of the tougher, longer runs you are supposed to.

 This time around however I had some running buddies so we were able to do the full training program. I was figuring things out, and over the past 18 weeks we've run a combined 435 miles.

If you map it out, that's basically the same as me stepping out my front door in Chaska....and running to Chicago.

Wish me luck!

(This post is an attempt to be better at actually using this blog for, well, blogging. I've had some fun photo opportunities lately so I'll try to talk about them a little.)

Shannon and I headed west to Sleepy Eye, MN for Mark and Amy's wedding this weekend. Mark is the brother of our good friend Mike, and it was quite the event. Since they are basically friends of ours, and I didn't know what kind of photo setup they had I brought along my camera. To keep things simple I brought just my 17-35mm F2.8-4 lens and 430EX flash. I didn't really bother taking any pictures during the ceremony because we were sitting in back and there was already their paid photographer there, but it was a gorgeous cathedral:

 It reminded me a lot of how the ceilings in Greek cathedrals were with high arching ceilings and lots of details. The reception was at Jackpot Junction Casino just a few minutes away so we first grabbed a b-day cake for Mike (his bday was the same day) and headed out there. Once the reception started, and the regular photographer left, I decided to start taking some pictures. The lights dropped pretty low and I shot ISO800 at F2.8 and anywhere from 1/10s to 1/30s with and w/o flash depending on what I was going for. The Rebel XTI does a pretty good job at that high ISO, but you can definitely start to see some noise creep in the darker areas on shots like this:

I just started playing with Noise Ninja to help clean up my photos. I have two Tamron lenses that do a pretty good job, but they just don't compare to Canon L glass unfortunately. However, I was pretty impressed by how much NN can help clean up these low-light shots. I'm saving up to get my first "L" series piece of glass, so please hire me! (j/k, but seriously, do!)

The party went until about midnight, but not before the classic Piano Man circle with the happy couple dancing in the middle:

...and of course the mauling of the groom by the happy guests:

All in all it was a really fun time, and good experience for me, so thanks to Mike for inviting us. The highlight of the night was a girl yelling to me, "You have the *best* job ever!" (sigh) if only... The rest of the pictures are available here:

2008/08/09 Mark & Amy's Wedding

If you opt to use ASE's password policy capabilities to enable "systemwide password expiration", pay close attention to the "password exp warn interval" setting as well. The default appears to be 45 days, which is a bit high for me.

The reason I bring this up, is when that interval is hit, any attempt to login will be greeted by a warning from ASE indicating how many days are left before expiration. Seems simple, but this can cause headaches for cron jobs and other applications that aren't designed to handle the additional output (or error message if you're coming in via OCS). This is a pain in the butt to discover at 3am on a Sunday when your pager starts going off because of failed cron jobs all over the place.

Tomorrow morning I'm scheduled to undergo LASIK eye surgery. While I'm a little nervous, I'm also very excited to say goodbye to glasses by this time tomorrow.

I opted for a newer technology called InterLase, where a laser is used for the entire procedure. This differs from traditional LASIK where a microkeratome blade is used to create the corneal flap. In InterLase a laser creates micron sized CO2 bubbles within the cornea that create the cut. The available data is mixed, but supposedly this creates a flap that is faster to heal with less chances of complications. At any rate, the surgeon was quick to state it's their preferred method (by far) so that was enough to persuade me.

So by noon tomorrow I'm hoping to be up and seeing again without any help. Hopefully I won't need it, but wish me luck :)

Update:

About 12 hours post-procedure my eyesight is pretty incredible at the moment. Things are still a bit hazy, but seems to be improving every hour or so. The surgery itself went fine, and there weren't any problems. I was pretty nervous during it, but just tried to remain calm, and within 15 minutes or so it was all done. The strangest part of the procedure was the amount of pressure they applied while creating the corneal flap. They put a plastic ring on your eyeball, and create some serious suction to keep the eye in place. I've actually got little blood spots in my eye from it, but that is normal with this procedure.

By far the hardest part of the whole process was the initial 3-4 hours afterwards. I opted for the valium (10mg total), but they didn't give it to me until about a minute before the procedure. So it didn't kick in until the ride home, but by that time my eyes were burning pretty bad. By the time we got home it was like I couldn't stop crying. Tears kept forming and I could feel (and almost hear) waves of pain shoot back through my head. It took me about 45 minutes to finally get to sleep because of the irritation in my eyes. Luckily though, once I did things were much better when I woke up.

Now I'm just relaxing with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's awesome to look at my laptop and see things clearly, and then switch to the TV and everything remain just as clear. Looking outside I can actually see bark on trees across the street, which was simply impossible 24 hours ago.

I've got a follow-up tomorrow, but for now there's just a simple eye-drop regime to follow for about a week. I also got some pretty slick eye guards to wear while sleeping. All in all, as of right now I am very excited about how things are turning out.

I've never been a person to always seek the latest and greatest, and it's certainly not without serious contemplation that I've decided to leave Rosemount. With great excitement however, I've taken a position at Cargill as a Sybase DBA in their grain IT team. I start on Monday, and I'm really looking forward to new challenges, situations and people.

I've really loved my time at Rosemount, but at some point every person needs to take stock of their situation and see if it's the best for them. In looking at mine it became clear there was a lot out there I had yet to explore, and now was as good a time as any to ship out.  

Wish me luck! :) 

If you're not aware of what a SunRay is then check them out. They are so-called thin clients that are diskless and fanless, providing a very clean solution to not wanting a noisy machine that can break. They're not invincible of course, but my recent experience deploying a few of these had made me just love 'em to death.

Despite the glamour of a silent desktop PC, there are some other requirements. The main one is you need a server for the SunRay to connect to, and get the actual session from (whether it's CDE, Gnome, or windows via RDP). Given the SunRay is essentially state-less it needs a way to figure out where the server is. One method is to modify your DHCP responses to include some special information the SunRay's understand. This works well, but in some cases isn't possible. The older SunRay 1 model would then default to broadcasting on the local subnet (or VLAN) to see if a server would respond. If so, then we're all set and things work.

So what's my issue? Well I just got one of the new SunRay 2FS models and I expected it to just broadcast on our VLAN to find the server. Well it did find a server, but it was on IP 68.178.232.99,  which is not in our local network. I was a bit puzzled by this because, well, this didn't make any sense, until I learned something:

The default firmware on a new SunRay 2FS will try to use DNS lookups to find a server, only broadcasting should that fail.

This small point has big implications for anyone wanting to rely on broadcasting for their SunRays. The specific method it uses is the following:

1. Look for sunray-servers.my.local.domain.com
2. Look for sunray-servers.local.domain.com
3. Look for sunray-servers.domain.com
4. Finally look for sunray-servers.com

See the problem? Of course someone registered the sunray-servers.com domain and gave it the magic IP of....68.178.232.99! Apparantly this issue has been resolved in a newer firmware revision, but this will cause problems for anyone hoping to use the SunRay 2FS out of the box with broadcasting as the server resolution method.

If you need to change the host IP within Solaris 10, make sure you update all three of these files with the new settings:

• /etc/hosts
• /etc/inet/ipnodes
• /etc/defaultrouter

...otherwise things won't work :)

After you update those files you can either reboot (if you're moving the machine like I was) or just run the following command:

    $# svcadm restart network/physical

At my company we're using Team Foundation Server to handle source control and work-item management. After a recent company wide update to Active Directory we ran smack into a flaw in how TFS is designed. 

The problem resides in how TFS handles the history of work items. While it effectively handles the identity of a user despite changes to their AD information, it relies on the "display name" for certain fields within work items. After a change to someone's name, TFS suddenly sees the old name in work items as invalid, and refuses to allow updates to them. While you can update the visible fields fine, there are hidden fields that TFS uses that you can't update. This is a major, major issue that Microsoft doesn't seem important enough to fix before the "resario" release.

Microsoft themselves discusses the issue here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932717

While it's not an excuse for such an oversight, they do provide a tool to fix the issue. It's called TfsWitDisplayNames and is available from Microsoft support. They might want to charge a credit card to speak with someone from the TFS support team, but the guy I talked with said he refunds any charges related to this case. If you do end up calling, make sure they do the same for you.

The tool itself seems to work fine (I didn't run into the bug described in this blog though), but it's still a serious pain in the butt to deal with something like this.

Check this out­: