Setting orienteering course for Sunday May 6th

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Just got back from setting the long course for Sunday.

I waited for the rain to stop, but by 5:30 it was clear it wasn’t going to. So half of the time I was in the rain, and even though I had a plastic map cover, the water still got in. To the point where the top side of the map was so wet that the ink was getting smudged (yes, I only have a deskjet at home).

And for extra fun, I had to set the last 5 controls in the dark. Night orienteering is not easy at Umstead, when you’re looking for tiny orange ribbons.

Mud Run

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Today I ran my first first 5K mud run. I was part of a 4-person co-ed team from the Raleigh Trail Runners meetup group.

The obstacles were numerous and challenging, but we all had a blast. It is definitely not your typical 5K run. The run itself was actually the easy part. I am very curious how long it took us to finish the course, I know the start time but none of us paid attention to the finish time. Results will probably be posted over the next few days.

20 of the 32 obstacles were featured in these short video clips on YouTube before the race, but there were some surprises (like obstacle 21, The Weaver, where you had to go over a log and under the next one (for a total of probably 16 logs) without touching the ground. This Google Map has a description of all obstacles and links to the video clips above.

Damage: $32.50 (not bad at all for a race!), a scraped and bumped knee, a few minor scratches in addition to a rather large one (most of them from The Weaver).

For the low-end cost of the race, the race was incredibly well organized. Building that course must have been a huge volunteer effort.

The beginning of a new Orienteering year

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For Backwoods Orienteering Klub, the month of September is the beginning of a new year. In part because membership is paid from September till next year’s September. But also because during the summer the only events are advanced and sprint ones, so this month does mark the return of regular events.

Today’s course was beautifully chosen. I got very tired very fast, I think I managed to kill my legs yesterday when I ran as a preparation for today. So it was a constant struggle to keep the appearance of running while on the course, but overall I am very pleased with the result. I made two minor mistakes which costed probably a few minutes each – I can blame the rest only on my slow pace.

Overall, between yesterday’s 6 mile run at Lake Bond and today’s 88 minutes of pain, I think I got over the goal of running 26 miles per week. (I ran 3.5 miles on Monday, a very fast 6+ on Loblolly Trail on Tuesday, a slow 6 on a combination of Company Mill, Graylyn and Sycamore Trail on Thursday) Props to the Raleigh Trail Runners group for giving me motivation to wake up early.

And the Oscar goes to…

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After today’s World Cup Final, I am even more committed to boycott Soccer (or Football for the other 99.9% of the nations out there) by not watching it.

Too much acting. Too much cheating.

Imagine this discussion with your child (and no, it didn’t happen to mine, but I am sure it could):

“Daddy, who is Cristiano Ronaldo?”

“He’s this very famous player that earns millions per year.”

“Wow, he is really good. Look at his skills. The other team can only stop him with fouls, see? Look at the replay, you see how they… Oh, wait… They didn’t even touch him. He just fell off his feet and the other guy got red carded.”

“Well, you see, sometimes they play a little bit of acting,  you know, to improve their odds…”

“But isn’t that cheating?”

“It is, but…”

“So why do I get punished if I cheat at my test, or I am called out for plagiarizing, but they get away with it? And they have no shame that everybody will see the replay, and realize how crooked they are? Including the referees who got fooled for a second, and will get (rightfully) stonewalled after the game? And why is FIFA’s slogan ‘Fair Play’? Is it really fair to cheat?”

I am not original, I read some of these opinions on other sites. I am sure a lot of people feel the same. I am just wasting zeros and ones here.

Spain deserved to win, they were the better team (although I must admit I did not watch the whole game). Netherlands did not deserve the silver medal, after all the theatricals they played. No matter how talented Robben is, I lost all respect for him the moment he fell off his feet and claimed a penalty kick or whatever he was claiming when he was booked.

I am sure that, 4 years from now, I will forget all this, and I will waste other 90-minute chunks of my life. And I will again feel sorry for that. If FIFA does nothing to make the game what it used to be, I am afraid the game is doomed.

Recovering data from one disk from a RAID1 array

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Last night I helped a friend recover his data he had stored on an Iomega NAS.

The disks were fine, the rest of the hardware had failed.

Prior to me being involved in this, my friend had installed Ubuntu on an older machine and had installed both drives.

Not having played with RAID for quite some time, I had to acquire some knowledge first – google to the rescue!

In the process I used the wrong option to mdadm (–create instead of –assemble), so I messed up the RAID descriptor on one of the disks. Fortunately, the second disk was fine.

Here is what I ended up doing:

  • install mdadm, a utility to configure RAID devices.
  • install lvm2, a utility to configure LVM (Logical Volume Manager).
  • Run:

mdadm –assemble /dev/md9 /dev/sdc1 –run

(this adds one of the partitions on the existing drives, /dev/sdc1, into a RAID device /dev/md9 running in degraded mode, i.e. with not enough disks – that’s what –run does)

vgchange -a y

(this scans all drives, including the newly created /dev/md9, for logical volumes)

It should print something about a new device with a rather cryptic name, I think something like /dev/vg1_md9/lv1. lvdisplay will show the available volumes.

This new device has a filesystem that can be mounted:

mkdir /tmp/olddrive
mount /dev/vg1_md9/lv1 /tmp/olddrive -o ro

After this, the directory /tmp/olddrive is associated with the contents of the filesystem.

There may be better ways to achieve the same thing, but this is what worked.

“The hardest thing to learn is that which we think we already know”

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I saw this quote, quite some time ago, on a friend’s page, attributed to Robert A. Heinlein.

For some reason, it never struck me as something that would be generally applicable. Until several days ago, when I started to think some more about it.

The world was the center of the Universe. It took some serious effort to change that.

I guess we tend to not question what we already know. It would not be very productive if we did, at least not at every step.

But maybe on occasion we should stop and think about what we know – is that really the truth?

More than once (and too much over the past couple of days) I’ve seen us defending a position, not because it was the right one, but because we needed to justify the decision. You may notice that, sometimes, if you point something out to a person, they tend to become very defensive and argue, sometimes fiercely, what they think they know.

It happened to me before, and probably continues to happen all the time. As usual, I am better at spotting this in other persons than in myself. After all, I know myself, why would I be wrong? I’ve seen it happen to friends, to people I love, in them dealing with their own problems (in which at least I have no stake, which is the reason I can claim impartiality). It is heart-breaking how blind we can be when we try to justify (what I perceive, as an outsider, as) the wrong decision.

If I am allowed to quote from a movie, “Vanity, definitely my favorite sin.” I cannot  think of a better explanation that pride for this struggle to realize when we’re on the wrong wrong side of the fence, when it comes to human relationships.

Science may be wrong in some of its assumptions (just like in the geocentric example above), and that would have nothing to do with pride. But one person admitting their mistake takes a lot of un-learning.

If only we could see the difference between right and stubbornness.

Is there a cure for my Al Baraka addiction?

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I seem to be a sucker for whatever Al Baraka (on Hillsborough Street, right next to the I-440 ramp) sells.

Today’s way of killing money:

  • fresh lamb, locally grown (from Salisbury, NC)
  • Baba Ghanouj (metal can, but who cares, as long as the contents are good)
  • Kurdish olives. Pickled, not very salty

Every time I go there I discover something new that I really have to try. I hope there’s cure for that.

Sycamore Scramble

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The local orienteering club, BOK, is organizing an A-meet (i.e. a national event), February 20-21. I’ve signed up to be one of the setter/vetters.

It’s very interesting how we decided to make sure we minimize the risk for mistakes when setting up controls, and in a way it’s an OCD-er’s dream. There are at least three setters that will go out and hang ribbons where the controls are placed. Then, two other persons (the vetters) have to go and vet (approve) the location chosen by the setter. Setters have the liberty to move the control from where the course designer suggested the location to be, for example if a feature is missing or is too dangerous to get to; vetters should try hard not to move controls, unless they were set wrong.

This gives you triple accountability for a control’s location, not to mention that some of the club members will have a practice run of the courses the week prior to the meet (which happens to be next weekend).

Today I spent more than 4 hours vetting. Now I am barely moving. Probably getting into the warm house after all that time in the balmy 34-36°F (1-2°C) did not help much. However, this is exactly what I need, hopefully the small injuries I’ve been accumulating over the past couple of months will eventually go away to let me go back to running on a more regular schedule.

I’ve also worked on a solution to download data from an Sportident box on a Linux computer (it might work on Windows too, since it’s written in python, and I believe pyserial does work on Windows. It has sound to alert users if their download was unsuccessful (more about that in a future post), and generates a PDF for the splits and total time; I think the printing part is going to be the one that will cause most of the problems, I seem to have bad luck with printers in general. (The printing part would definitely not work on Windows). At some point I will publish the code, maybe someone else has a use for it.