williamhathaway.com

the iron is cable-locked to the ironing board.  Welcome to the Best Western in Morgantown, WV!

Tabacco sign on a McDonald's

I saw this when stopping on my drive back from West Virgina this afternoon.  The McDonald’s was at a travel plaza and shared  space with a small convenience store.

Venn diagram of UNIX and graffiti enthusthiasts

I came across this on a couple of buildings, fence posts, and the sidewalk while walking around Morgantown.

Has anyone seen UNIX-like graffiti tagging elsewhere?

UNIX graffiti in Morgantown, WV

I just stumbled onto a site that lists some restaurants close to Harrisburg:

http://www.dineoutharrisburg.com

Unfortunately, they also don’t list casual places like Neato Burrito, one of my favs.  Here is the snippet from their website FAQ:

Why is “X” restaurant not listed?
At DineOutHarrisburg we believe in listing restaurants on several criteria. 1) The restaurant has table service (waiters and waitresses) and not just a casual lunch ordering area. 2) The restaurant is within a 15 mile radius of Harrisburg. We believe the combination of food and service is what makes a successful restaurant.

–

I think it would be nice if they would loosen the restriction and include casual places, I’d more inclined to use their site.

Zerion Software demoing their iPhone framework

I attended a session of the  Central PA New Technology meetup group last night.  They hold monthly meetings in a location that shifts among Hershey, Lancaster, and Harrisburg depending on what facilities are available.   About 40 people were  registered for the event although I think closer to 20 actually showed up.  We got to see a demo of Zerion Software’s iPhone form builder framework and Jake Ray from Penn State’s Smeal School of Business gave a talk about the current venture capital environment.    After Jake’s talk there was some discussion about the Startup Weekend idea.  The official meeting then closed around 8:15 and about a dozen of us moved to a nearby bar and continued talking.  There was a nice mix of people who attended:  IT workers, technical hobbyists,  technical marketing, an intellectual property lawyer and some small business owners.  I enjoyed the experience and am definitely planning on attending additional sessions.

Executive summary: Very under trained, ran the race in 1:56:11, enjoyed the experience despite being 21 mins slower than last year.

Long version: I had signed up for this race with high hopes in the fall of 2008.  Unfortunately, my overall training load has been extremely low and as of  Saturday morning, I wasn’t planning on running the race.  I did still want to go up to the race in Allentown, but was figuring on just cheering people and taking photos (I packed my mountain bike and 2 cameras).

My friend Jon and I drove up to the race expo in Allentown on Saturday afternoon so he could pick up his race packet and we also had to pick up race packets for our friends Lindsay and James who wouldn’t be able to make it up until right before the race on Sunday morning.

Even though I wasn’t going to run, I had been considering still picking up my race packet since I had already paid, and the packet usually includes a bunch of goodies.  One thing I didn’t want to do was  have to bother with was returning the timing chip that large races normally use.  If your timing chip doesn’t get returned (typically taken off your shoe at the end of the race just past the finish line), you get fined $25 – $35.  When Jon and I walked into the packet pickup area, it turned out that attached to the race bibs were a new type of disposable timing chip.  This meant there was no need to worry about returning the chip.  I figured that since my chip dilemma was solved, I might as well pick up my packet.

Jon and I then browsed the expo for a bit and got our free race windbreakers with the race logo.   After picking up the windbreaker, I realized that I would feel pretty lame if I wore the windbreaker but didn’t run in the race.  That got the wheels spinning in my head about whether I might actually be able to finish the race.

After waffling a bit I decided I’d run the race unless my legs were really bothering me in the morning (I’ve been having annoying leg and foot twitches/cramping for a while, likely caused by BFS).     I wasn’t expecting much since my longest run in 2009 was 9.3 miles, and I have been averaging about 16 miles a week lately.  I felt like I would be okay aerobically, but I was nervous that I’d end up hurting a muscle or tendon due to fatigue late in the race.

After a fairly restless night of sleep, my legs were feeling decent in the morning so decided I would do the race.  We had an uneventful trip to the parking area at the Allentown fairgrounds, met James to hand off he and Lindsay’s bibs and then walked over to the high school where the race would start.

The race area was crowded as usual, with people everywhere doing their pre-race rituals. There were just over 3000 runners in the half-marathon and another 600 or so in a 5k race that starts 10 minutes earlier.

Start area for the race

Jon had been nursing a back injury and thought he would start off slow,  so we planned on running together in the beginning.  He was carrying my small camera (he took all the photos in my gallery except for the ones of him).  A lot of the photos are a little blurry, but that is what you get when taking photos while running.  Jon had also bought a pair of headphones for his iPod touch that included a voice recorder and made an audio recording of most of the race.

The first mile was pretty uneventful as the crowd of runners slowly started stretching out.  We passed the “big drum” group which has a really cool sound.

Big drum group

We ran about an even 9 minute pace for the first mile.  I could feel a little bit of a twinge in my left quad but it wasn’t strong, so I hoped it would loosen up.

Miles two and three we hit around 8:50s each and at the end of the 3rd mile I felt the twinge in my left quad go away so I started to get a little bit more confident on finishing.

Around mile 3.5 we  saw Lindsay and James going past us in the opposite direction, they looked strong. (Sorry James, we couldn’t get the camera to fire again soon enough to catch you.)

Lindsay Zemba

Around mile 5 we ended up talking to a woman named Marla who was running at our  pace.   The three of us were chatting and clicking off miles at a fairly even pace of about 8:55.    We saw a guy with a unique “hand” haircut around mile 5.5.

Hand haircut guy

Around mile 6 we saw a neat looking medical vehicle that I was hoping I wouldn’t need a ride in.

Medical vehicle

Here are Marla and Jon when we are at about mile 7.5

Marla

Jon

Around mile 8.5 Jon said he was feeling pretty strong so he bid farwell and started pushing the pace (he would average about 7:30 pace for the remainder of the race).

Marla and I kept on running a steady pace but started to pass more people as a lot of people were slowing down later in the race.  I think we were running very even splits.

After we hit the 10 mile mark, the race was mentally easier as there was only a 5k to go.  I was feeling a little bit of pain in my left hip, but it seemed minor and my confidence that I’d be able to finish without some horrible biomechanical meltdown was starting to grow.

The crowd support was growing during the last two miles and that definitely helped.  It was really nice having run the course twice before and knowing exactly what was coming up as we closed in towards the finishing area.

I really like how the course ends:  you finish inside a stadium on an all-weather track.  The track just feels bouncy and fast and there is a ton of excitement in the air as you can hear an announcer call out names of finishers and the crowd is cheering for everyone.

We picked up the pace and probably passed around 10 people in the 250 meters or so that are ran on the track.  The clock time was 1:57:02 and my chip time ended up being 1:56:11  (8:53 average pace).

A big dorky smile after the race

I was completely thrilled to have finished.    This was the slowest half-marathon I’ve ran, but given the reality of where I am fitness-wise now this felt like a real accomplishment.   I felt really sore after I finished (and the hilly walk back to the car didn’t help), but after a few hours and a nap at home I am feeling pretty good.

LVHM finisher's medal

Links:

Metals4Mettle: Cool charity that collects marathon, half-marathon, and triathlon medals to give to struggling kids.  I’m donating my medals to this.

Official race results

Solaris 10 update 7 hit the download site earlier this week and I just gave zone cloning a spin.  Zone cloning has been out for quite a while, but the new twist is that you can finally use ZFS snapshots/clones as an underlying mechanism for zone creation.  With this feature you can make additional zones really quickly and with very little overhead, even for full root zones.

Here is what I did:

create a ZFS file system mounted at /zones

# zfs create -o mountpoint=/zones -o compression=on -o atime=off data/zones

create a zone ‘goldenzone’ that I will use as a target for cloning.  If I wanted to add certain software or other setup (like security hardening) to all zones I would do that here.

# zonecfg -z goldenzone

goldenzone: No such zone configured
Use ‘create’ to begin configuring a new zone.

zonecfg:goldenzone> create -b

zonecfg:goldenzone> set zonepath=/zones/goldenzone

zonecfg:goldenzone> exit

# zoneadm -z goldenzone install

Creating list of files to copy from the global zone.

Copying <130143> files to the zone …

# zoneadm -z goldenzone boot (so we get the SMF importing out of the way)

# zlogin -C goldenzone (verify the SMF import finishes and answer sysid questions)

This is also a good time to do any customization steps that you would like done everywhere, such as disabling services, changing root’s shell to /bin/bash, using a custom apache configuration, etc.

# zoneadm -z goldenzone halt

Now we will create a new full-root zone ‘zone1′ that we will clone from goldenzone

# zonecfg -z zone1

zonecfg:zone1> create -b

zonecfg:zone1> set zonepath=/zones/zone1

zonecfg:zone1> add net

zonecfg:zone1:net> set physical=e1000g0

zonecfg:zone1:net> set address=zone1/24

zonecfg:zone1:net> end

zonecfg:zone1:> exit

Now that we have finished the main configuration, lets see how long it takes to make the new zone:

time zoneadm -z zone1 clone goldenzone
Cloning snapshot data/zones/goldenzone@SUNWzone1
Instead of copying, a ZFS clone has been created for this zone.
grep: can’t open /a/etc/dumpadm.conf

real    0m4.088s

user    0m0.439s

sys    0m0.187s

We will also take a look at the space used.  The goldenzone took 1.7GB (ZFS compression was on) and we can see that the snapshot & clone used for zone1 took us less than a meg of extra space.  Sweet!

NAME                              USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
data/zones                             1.70G   263G  42.0K  /zones
data/zones/goldenzone        1.70G   263G  1.70G  /zones/goldenzone
data/zones/goldenzone@SUNWzone1   405K      -  1.70G  -
data/zones/zone1                  285K   263G  1.70G  /zones/zone1