When I was a teenager my best mate lived in a house which backs onto this smallish reserve and we used to walk his dog here heaps. I had a few spare moments yesterday, so I was keen to do a quick explore and see what its like now. The short answer is that its still nice -- good terrain, nice mature trees, and a few geocaches. I think this one would be a good walk for cubs. [kml: 20151001-2]
I decided to go on a little walk on the way home from a work lunch and I don't regret it. This is a nice area, which I was exploring for geocaches. I probably wouldn't have come here at all, but it was the second part of the "Trees of Curtin" walk from Best Bush, Town and Village Walks in and around the ACT that I had done the first half of ages ago. I am glad I came back for the second half -- to be honest I was pretty bored with the first half (a bike path beside a major road mostly), whereas this is much more like walking around in nature. The terrain is nice, no thistles, and plenty of horses. A nice afternoon walk overall. Now back to reviewing Mitaka specs. [kml: 20150930-1]
I went for my second trail run last night. This one was on much rockier terrain, and I ended up tweaking my right knee. I think that was related to the knee having to stabilize as I ran over uneven rocks. I'll experiment by finding a different less awkward trail to run and seeing what happens I suppose. [kml: 20150929-1]
Steve, Mel, Michael and I went for a walk to Old Joe trig yesterday. I hadn't been to Goorooyarroo at all before, and was quite impressed. The terrain is nice, with some steep bits as you get close to the border (its clear that the border follows the water catchment from a walk around here). Plenty of nice trees, not too many thistles, and good company. A nice morning walk. We bush bashed to the trig straight up the side of the hill, and I think there were gentler (but longer) approaches available -- like for instance how we walked down off the hill following the fence line. That said, the bush bash route wasn't terrible and its probably what I'd do again. I need to come back here and walk this border segment, that looks like fun. There are also heaps of geocaches in this area to collect. [kml: 20150928-1]
I've been asked some questions about a recent change to nova that I am responsible for, and I thought it would be easier to address those in this format than trying to explain what's happening in IRC. That way whenever someone compliments me on possibly the longest unit test name ever written, I can point them here. Let's start with some definitions. What is the difference between a soft reboot and a hard reboot in Nova? The short answer is that a soft reboot gives the operating system running in the instance an opportunity to respond to an ACPI power event gracefully before the rug is pulled out from under the instance, whereas a hard reboot just punches the instance in the face immediately. There is a bit more complexity than that of course, because this is OpenStack. A hard reboot also re-fetches image meta-data, and rebuilds the XML description of the instance that we hand to libvirt. It also re-populates any missing backing files. Finally it ensures that the networking is configured correctly and boots the instance again. In other words, a hard reboot is kind of like an initial instance boot, in that it makes fewer assumptions about…
So, now I trail run apparently. This was a test run for a hydration vest (thanks Steven Hanley for the loaner!). It was fun, but running up hills is evil. [kml: 20150922-1]
I spent the weekend at a Scout camp at Camp Cottermouth. The light on the hills here in the mornings is magic. [kml: 20150919-1]
I feel like I need more detailed maps of Mount Stranger than I currently have in order to layout a possible navex. I there spent a little time this afternoon wandering down the fire trail to mark all the gates in the fence. I need to do a little more of this before its ready for a navex. [kml: 20150916-3]
I've been running for a little while now, but I don't mention it here much. I think I mostly don't mention it because I normally just post photos here, and I don't tend to stop and take happy snaps on my runs. The runs started off pretty modest -- initially I struggled with shin splints after more than a couple of minutes. I've worked through that and a couple of injuries along the way and am consistently doing 5km runs now. That said, my longest runs have been in the last week when I did a 7.5km and an 8.1km. I'm building up to 10km, mostly because its a nice round number. I think ultimately trail running might be the thing for me, I get quite bored running around suburbs over and over again. Its interesting that I come from an aggressively unsporting family, but yet all of my middle aged siblings and I have started running in the last year or two. Its a mid-life crisis thing perhaps? [kml: 20150913-1]
So today was the day long map and compass class with the Canberra Bushwalking Club. I liked this walk a lot. It was a good length at about 15km, and included a few things I'd wanted to do for a while like wander around McQuoids Hill and the northern crest of Urambi hills. Some nice terrain, and red rocks gorge clearly requires further exploration. [kml: 20150912-1]