David Goodwin

I came 29th - with a time of 42 minutes 50 seconds - it was pretty hot, and I was therefore quite pleased with my time - which was better than last year.

thanks to the organisers; more info here

Since I've been messing around with this drupal site, and upgrading/downgrading etc, I seem to have lost my spam protection/armour. Since Saturday, the approval queue today (48 hours later) contained 1500+ comment spam things.

Like FFS... I know you're not reading this M[rs]{1} Spammer, but really - just don't bother trying. I won't let you get through.

I've now installed some ASCII art anti-spam stuff, hopefully this will work better than whatever chocolate teapot there was before.

DELETE FROM comments WHERE status = 1

On Friday, I bought an iphone 3gs, it comes with a 24 month sentance to pay o2 a load of money.

On the positive side of things ....

• It's easy to use and has an excellent UI
• Great for passing the time
• Using Trails I can log where I run/walk etc, so perhaps I'll finally be of some use to OpenStreetMap (e.g. I logged Sunday's run which gave me times/speeds/elevations etc)
• Means I'm no longer ever away from work (is this good?)

Sunday saw me cycling 75km across random moorland and hills around Kington on the Rough Ride. I found it slow going, a little too hot - but fun (looking back at least, during the event I was happily cursing to myself and listening to Groove Electric). For the first time ever I nearly passed out from pushing myself too hard near the finish (I did the last 5k as fast as I could, overtook lots of people - but was nearly thwarted by a short uphill to get to the finish, which nearly finished me off!).

Well, I thought this site had upgraded fine without problem to Drupal 6. Wasn't I wrong.

The taxonomy was totally lost, and I wasn't able to make new posts (stupid failure to write code that works on a database other than MySQL)... *grr*

So I've now rolled back to Drupal 5. If I could I'd move to wordpress, but I think that would be too difficult as I'm using PostgreSQL.

Now, perhaps - finally - I can make my blog post about the Marin Rough Ride 2009...

Right - first off, thanks to the Debian developers - this morning I finally finished off upgrading the server this site resides on to be a full Lenny install with the underlying server running Xen 3.2. It was (from my point of view) a hassle free experience (aside from dealing with the config file changes I've made which caused conflicts, but these were easy to resolve).

I tried, and failed, to get the pidgin-twitter plugin to work (installed fine, but what do I click on to use the fricking thing?)

So, Peter suggested I try twirssi - a script for irssi which adds Twitter capabilities. All very well. The website even seems to imply it supports identi.ca, but conviently seems to omit how one does this.

Here's how -

/twitter_login thegingerdog twitterpassword
/twitter_login gingerdog@identica identicapassword

Short summary - once again I suffered some form of dehydration and had a stinking headache around at least the last third of the course; I'm pretty sure I hit the 'wall' - as I kept thinking "I'll never do this again" and "If I see a shortcut, I'm taking it". But then, at about 5km from the finish my mental attitude perked up and I was somewhat happier.

Today I did the Stratford-on-avon Half Marathon in about 1 hour 35ish. The route itself quite nice, mostly on side roads and with plenty of water/refreshment stops - which was good considering it was quite warm and sunny.

Afterwards we walked to the local Toby Carvery and replaced the lost calories :-)

Lately I've been beefing up my anti-spam fung foo - this is partly because two customers were having problems with it - and also because a few obvious emails were getting through to me (i.e. 'Sex toys' in the subject).