Owls Count

Saturday night was spent in Leatherhead. I watched a fair amount of the Six Nations and had dinner at a local Italian restaurant. From the Travelodge it was a short journey on Sunday morning to the event.

When I put on my o-shoes I noticed that my heel was sore. I decided to go up to the start and see how it felt. I started, made a mess of the first control - a lack of concentration putting me in the wrong block of forest. I continued on to the second control, but could not get up any speed. The heel was hurting quite a bit - especially when I was going up hill, down hill, or on muddy ground. I decided to retire at this point and made slow progress back to the finish.

On arriving at the finish I was asked if my map could be recycled. It appears that a course allocation problem had meant the wrong number of maps had been ordered. I expect that whomever got my map was quite lucky - many of those finishing had mud covered maps and the mud was proving difficult to shift off the new waterproof maps; whereas my map was clean.

This weekend was the JOK Chasing Sprint, held on Banstead Heath. The whole of this weekend was made more difficult by me forgetting to take any contact lenses with me and, so, having to run in my glasses - not the best way to start.

Prologue
In the morning was the prologue. A 5.9km course, with an, overly optimistic, estimated winning time of 25 minutes.

I started well. At number three I made a 40 second mistake, when I overshot the control. For the rest of the course I managed to keep up a reasonable pace, with small mistakes at eleven and twenty one - though I only noticed both of these mistakes from the splits and cannot remember anything particularly going wrong on either. The uphill finish took a lot out of my legs.

Chase
I was off about a minute after one person and had someone else ten seconds behind. Both of these runner were faster than me - with both having made mistakes in the prologue to put them further down the results. A four km course to navigate.

My afternoon start was even better than my morning start. I ran well for the first eight controls. By number nine, where I made a small mistake, I was running with both the person who started just behind me and the person from infront.

At number eleven I lost touch with the other two. I hit the wall and was unable to keep going at any kind of pace. Unfortunately, as I slowed down I also switched the brain off and made a large (3+ minute) mistake at twelve. I struggled through the next few controls, losing more time in the next few controls. At sixteen I was caught by someone who had started four minutes behind me. This spurred me on and from there I ran well into the finish.

All in all a good, enjoyable event. It just reiterates to me that I need to run faster. (And remember my contact lenses!)

I cannot remember where I got the first of these tips from, but I really am grateful for learning of it. I spend a fair amount of time ssh-ing into various machine I use. Having to type out the full command ’ssh [machine name]‘ is quite annoying - especially as some of the full machine names we use are long. I use Kubuntu, with bash for the shell - this tip may need editing for other shells.
Add a line to /etc/hosts ‘[ip address] [machine alias]‘ - i.e.
192.168.2.67 server
Then add to .bashrc ‘alias [alias]=”ssh [machine alias]“‘ - i.e.
alias server="ssh server"
Then you type just server to ssh into the machine and can also use ’server’ as the machine name for other commands, such as in scp.

Also, we have several servers running ssh on a non-standard port. Just a small addition to the file ‘~/.ssh/config’ (this file may need to be created) can solve this problem.
host server
hostname 192.168.2.67
port 456

Reasonable course and a fairly good area to run on. I made a silly five (plus) minute mistake at number six, when I stopped concentrating and ran one spur further than I should have. The navigation was not that difficult and generally it was a case of running as fast as possible on a fairly accurate compass bearing. My running was too slow all the way. Particularly through the heather I failed to keep my speed up.

Before running I helped to set up the start and after running I helped out on the start. A good day to be out in the New Forest.

For my day to day internet browsing I use Firefox. One of the great features of Firefox is the ability to extend the browser using Add Ons (or extensions as they used to be known).

Last week I cam across FaviconizeTab. This extension allows you to reduce certain tabs so that all that is displayed is the favicon. This is fantastic for all those tabs that you always have open - in my case e-mail, rss feed reader, calendar, etc - rather than these tabs taking up a large space in the tab bar they are reduced to something much smaller and I cannot accidentally close any of them, as they have no close icon.