Getting fit (update)…

I mentioned in my last post about trying to get fit. I just thought I would give a little update…

It’s 5 days since I joined the new gym and 4 days since my disastrous first personal training session. What a difference 4 days makes. I’ve been hitting the gym every day and doing interval training (sprint-slow intervals) like I did with the personal trainer. Even though I’m fat I’ve got quite a bit of endurance for steady paced stuff. I can swim 2 miles of front crawl without a problem. I can ride a stationary bike or cross trainer for ages, providing boredom doesn’t set in. The interval training is a totally different kettle of fish. On the first attempt 15 minutes killed me. Today 30 minutes felt OK. It’s never going to be easy because the fitter you get the harder you try. I’m trying not to get too excited and extrapolate to a beating Paula Radcliffe in a marathon, but I’m pleased with the difference already.

One slight issue, that I should probably consider a good thing, is the exercise is making me gain muscle at a crazy rate. I did a lot of weight training as a kid and I guess the whole muscle memory thing kicks in. Everything has puffed up, but hidden under a liberal coating of fat it just makes me look fatter now than I did when I joined the gym. In the long term, it’s a good thing as muscle is active and burns fat even when resting, but at the moment it feels a little negative.

Anyway, new week starts tomorrow…

Cheers

Tim…

Getting fit, hopefully…

The other day I joked about the gym when I was talking about Thor.

I was very impressed by the change in Lewis Cunningham when I last saw him and I’ve been following Debra Lilley’s success with interest. Reading Chet’s post Tired of the Fat Jokes today has inspired me to out myself. I am on a bit of a health trip at the moment. Pretty much since I got into the Oracle ACE program I’ve piled on the weight. I could blame the disruption to my routine and foreign travel, but really I just got into avoiding exercise and eating crap food. Nobody to blame but myself.

About 2 months back I decided to sort my diet out. It’s been a little up and down, but so far I’ve lost 21 lbs. It feels a little like polishing a turd, as there is still a long way to go, but it’s a start. I ventured to the gym last week to start trying to get back into exercise again. I’m more interested in being fit, than being thin. It wasn’t very inspiring, so I decided to join a new place, hoping that the money would be a motivator. Today I had my first personal training session. Part of me hates the idea, because I know what I have to do, but I thought, in for a penny, in for a pound.

The guy was less than half my age and looked like he only stopped exercising to go to the toilet. He asked me what my goals were and after deciding that “to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club” was not really an achievable goal I just said, “to get fit”. I would like to say I impressed him, but the reality was after 2 minutes I was considering feigning a heart attack so I could stop. After 15 minutes it took all my mental effort to stop myself from crying. I know interval training is great for getting fit, but it is so darn difficult, which is why it’s so easy not to bother with it when you are training on your own. After that I spent about 15 mins on a bike silently debating the pros and cons of throwing up. Next the guy took me to the mats to show me some stretching stuff. After the shame of the previous 30 minutes it was nice to do something I can do well. I’m very flexible and if I’m honest I’m a bit of a stretching snob. I managed to keep my gob shut (I really must have been knackered) and let him do his job. I’ve booked in a session with him again next week. I’m going to try and get to the gym every day between now and then. Hopefully next time I will last 16 minutes of intervals before I want to cry. 🙂

With a bit of luck adding the exercise into the mix will speed things up keep me motivated.

Thanks to all those mentioned above, and countless other bloggers, whose posts serve as encouragement when the thought of surfing the net and eating pizza seems infinitely more appealing than vegetables and treadmills. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Barclaycard Security: So boring it works…

I’ve just bought something over the net using my Barclaycard. As usual, the checkout screen bounces me to a Barclaycard verification screen. As usual it asks me for several letters from my password. As usual my password doesn’t work. As usual I reset the password. Not as usual, the screen then asks me for the 9th letter of my password when I only set an 8 character password. Phone call later my password is reset again. I complete my order. I have to rest my password, but can’t use the one I set previously as it “has been used to recently”.

If I was a thief I really couldn’t be arsed to go through this when I could just mug a granny in the street. I see now how Barclaycard security works. It bores people out of commiting credit card fraud… Sigh…

Cheers

Tim…

Thor…

Just got back from watching Thor. It’s very cool! I heard some reviews saying it was crap. I guess they must have seen a different film to me.

Tomorrow I’m off to the gym to do some weights, then I’ll drop by the DIY store to buy the heaviest mallet they’ve got… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

My Sister’s Funeral…

Yesterday was my sister’s funeral. The easter holidays and the imminent royal wedding caused some serious delays, so rather than having the funeral within about a week of her death, it ended up being just short of three weeks. Far too long, but it was out of our control so you’ve just got to get on with it.

I was pretty nervous during the day. I had organized most of the stuff and I was just waiting for something to go spectacularly wrong. Fortunately it all went to plan, which was a relief. We are not what I would consider a religious family and I find it more than a little hypocritical that, like many Brits, we roll out religion for births, marriages and deaths, but it seems to be what people want at these times and who am I to argue? We ended up having a Church of England service at a crematorium. The Reverend was a really cool guy (he has a WordsPress blog 🙂 ) and did a cracking job. Everyone was really pleased with the way it went.

After the service we had a wake at a pub close to my sister’s house. My family’s response to most things is to talk crap and laugh at ourselves. Not surprisingly, we reverted to type pretty quickly, which was good to see. It turns out my cousin might be going to work at the funeral directors we used, which prompted comments like, “If you had got your arse in gear we could have got a discount on the funeral!” etc. Like I said, we talk crap and laugh at ourselves…

… and so ends another chapter…

Nearly forgot. We asked people to donate money to Cancer Research UK, rather than buy flowers. That went really well.

Cheers

Tim…

No Linux servers for Oracle Support…

I was just mailed a bug update and it included this text (spelling mistakes theirs, not mine).

Note customer is on Linux but could not find an available
11.2 Linux database to test on.  Reprocided problem on Solaris
confirming that there is some generic problem here.

Really?

And here’s me thinking that firing up a VM with any version of Linux & Oracle was quick and easy. Perhaps their VMs are running on Amazon, hence the lack of available systems. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Fast & Furious 5: Rio Heist…

It was only as I started to write this post about Fast & Furious 5: Rio Heist that I realised I’ve not seen the 4th film yet. I’m sure it’s not much different to all the others. This one has most of the old gang back together to drive around really fast and do lots of impossible stuff. It’s a nice bit of mindless escapism, just before getting back into my diesel Renault Clio to drive home at a sedate pace… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Perhaps I’m not making myself clear… Virtual Insanity…

What is it with virtualization? It’s like people remove their brain as soon as they hear the word. I get a lot of questions about virtual RAC installations and the vast majority of problems are due to people trying to run them on a host that can’t cut it.

  • When I explain you need 3-4G RAM for each VM node in a VirtualBox RAC installation, would you consider it sensible to try and build a 3 node virtual RAC on a host with 8G RAM? Do the maths. If you are attempting a virtual 11.2 installation with less than 3G RAM per node and you have problems, don’t come asking me because I will be out.
  • Do you really expect disk speed to be good when you put 8 virtual disks on to the system disk on the host machine? Do you think virtual disks magically run independently of the hosts disk subsystem? Putting all the virtual disks on one physical disk will work, but it will be so darn slow you will probably be leaving installations running overnight. Believe me, I’ve done it. If you want any sort of speed, spread the virtual disks around on separate physical disks.
  • Yes, you really are going to need all those IP addresses. Deal with it.
  • Use DNS or accept the fact there will be SCAN configuration errors during the installation. It’s one or the other baby!
  • Have you really done what my article suggests? Normally, after about a week of going back and forward I get a message saying something like, “Oh I fixed it. I didn’t bother doing step X before and once I did it it worked fine.” Don’t waste my time and yours. Follow the steps, or do it your own way and don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.
  • Use the same software I list in the installation. Don’t just assume that if it works fine with OL 5.x it’s going to work unchanged on OL6, SUSE x.x or Ubuntu (Lethargic Leaper) etc. If you want to try with different distributions that’s fine, but I’m probably not going to be able to help you because if there isn’t an installation guide for it on my site, it probably means I’ve not done it.
  • If it is the first Oracle installation you’ve ever done, don’t start by trying to install a virtual RAC. Learn to walk before you try running…

Cheers

Tim…