I really need to extend myself with climbing, not least because Coottha is coming up in less than three weeks. Yesterday’s 49.2k was great (usual 40k route + an 8k loop of South Brisbane/West End including climbing Dornoch Tce), but I need more than that.

This morning I did my usual loop around the ‘burbs, but did a double of Mt Ommaney Dr:

As you can see, it’s a pretty pitiful “mountain”, but it’s the best I’ve got unless I go up Coottha. That’s what I’m planning on doing this weekend, following the way that the Challenge goes, so I should have a semi-reasonable idea of how slow I’ll be. As long as I can get up that short (2.4km) timed part in less than 20 minutes (my previous time for that section) I’ll be very happy.

I was pleased that by the time I got home I’d maintained at least 23km/h (I actually hit 23.00km at the 1 hour mark), and my average + max heart rates were down slightly on my previous ‘burbs ride. More work to do, of course, and I have to cement this early a.m. riding thing into a life habit, so it’s nice to be able to track my performance and see how I’m going so easily.

This evening J mentioned to me that Ada Nicodemou has announced that she’s pregnant. I normally avoid announcements about TV people, but this one is a bit different: Ada and her husband Chris are pregnant through IVF.

I am really glad that she’s included that information in her announcement, because our experience of trying to keep that info quiet was that it was utterly corrosive. The advice we received when we started on the IVF rollercoaster was that if we kept it quiet we’d avoid all those trite comments from people who had no freaking clue about infertility. However, after a few months of treatment it was just too much to hold in. We talked about it non-stop between ourselves, but feeling unable to share that information, the highs and lows, the swings and misses… that made us very sad and very stressed.

Having made the decision to talk about what we were doing with family and friends, it was as if massive weights had been lifted from our shoulders. Failed IVF cycles still hurt like hell, but sharing took the edge off.

Here then is my (possibly) trite and uninvited advice: If you have to go through IVF (for whatever reason), TALK ABOUT IT, and remember that having circles of confidence will help you keep control of your pain receptors.

After a few weeks not doing much on the bike (and once again missing a Saturday a.m. ride due to ESCREAMINGCHILD resulting in terrible sleep), I was determined that today I would do my regular 40km city ride, and do it no slower than the previous time of 1h47m48s. That previous time was one month ago, so I had a bit of work to do.

Starting earlier (0535 vs 0720) made a distinct difference to the temperature, and just trying to keep the same pace overall was a decent way to keep on track. At the 30 minute mark I’d done 11.6km, so I knew I was doing ok. A little disappointed to get to 20.1km (The Ship In) and find that I’d taken 48m18s, but resolved to make it up on the way home.

I managed to get home in 53m3s, for a total of 1h41m21s. The previous ride was 50m12s+57m30s, so I’m really really happy with this morning’s performance.

Here’s the comparison:

... for J’s radiosurgery. $15600. Which, by a weird coincidence, matches the Medicare Benefits Schedule item code.

We’ve got a credit card ready to hit it with, we’ll get a chunk back from Medicare afterwards.

Or we could just go and buy a small car/schmick carbon framed bike/a skiff with go-fast stripes...

Seventeen years ago today J and I decided that we should be a couple. We’ve been together ever since.

[obRant] The hype about Valentine’s Day annoys me greatly, because what I see in the media and popular culture is an emphasis on how you act on one day of the year towards a specific person who you love. Just like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, though slightly less of a Hallmark Holiday since it is an actual Saint’s Day.

Here’s what I try to do instead: every day I try to treat J the way the media and popular culture reckon you should on Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately I’m not very successful at doing so. The flip side of this approach is that (hopefully) I’m not behaving badly towards J most of the time and thinking that a nice Valentine’s Day card/stuffed toy/chocolates/dinner will make up for it. [/obRant]

Finally, some randomness: J and I have been a couple for about half her life, which is also the length of our marriage plus the ages of our kids.

At work we’re going to be transitioning to a new VPN solution pretty soon, one which has a rather obnoxious limitation around reuse of IP addresses. This has a specifically BAD effect on ssh sessions, in that we can’t keep them going when we reconnect.

I’ve been casting around for something that would let me get past this; the conventional solution is to run ‘screen’, which is all well and good except it has no gui capability as far as I can determine.

Enter, therefore, xpra – described by its inventor as screen for X. Just what I was looking for, really.

To build it you need Cython, I didn’t install Cython but just set PYTHONPATH to include it before running xpra’s setup.py:

$ PYTHONPATH=/path/to/cython/dir:$PYTHONPATH python setup.py install --prefix /path/where/I/want/xpra/installed

To run it you need to have Xvfb installed, too.

Once I’d figured out that I needed to add

import os
sys.path.insert(os.path.realpath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "../lib/python")))

AND add a symlink in lib from python to python2.6 (doofus!), I was able to run xpra from wherever, without setting PYTHONPATH first. [For reference, I've added this info to http://xpra.org/trac/ticket/79].

So .. all hail xpra! I startup a session on $usefulhost inside the VPN connection, export my DISPLAY and then whatever gui tools I need will use that X display. On my system at home, I attach to the host:display and then every utility I’ve got running with that display pops up on my local screen.

usefulhost $ ~/bin/xpra start :200
[...]
usefulhost $ DISPLAY=:200 ; export DISPLAY
usefulhost $ filemerge &
usefulhost $ /usr/bin/packagemanager &

mylocalhost $ ~/bin/xpra attach ssh:remotehost:200

Falling off a log isn’t as easy as this.

My ticket (#79) on the xpra trac was closed as INVALID (a status which annoys me, because it fails to reflect sufficient granularity in why a ticket was closed). Boo.

The comment from Antoine was that xpra should be installed system-wide, in which case no funky

sys.path.insert(..)

is required. That’s true, and a great thing indeed. However, if you do not have root on the box(es) you want to run xpra on, you do need to futz around with sys.path, or you need to write a wrapper script which sets up PYTHONPATH for you. This is exactly the situation I found myself in earlier today, when I made xpra available on our network via an installation in my homedir.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, it’s time to turn to the problem of the two shared objects which are part of the distribution. I’d like to make xpra available as a blended (in IPS terms) package. That means we need to have some way of putting

xpra/wait_for_x_server.so

and

wimpiggy/lowlevel/bindings.so

under $MACH. Guess I’ll be learning something about Cython and distutils.

Today’s the day- after J’s taken the kids to swimming lessons, there’ll be time for a cuppa and then it’s off to the Wesley Medical Centre for her Stereotactic Radiosurgery. She’s due in there 40 minutes before the start of the procedure, the procedure itself takes an hour … and then she’s done.

There’ll be annual followup MRIs for at least a few years, and it could take 2 years before we know whether it’s worked or not. At least she won’t have facial nerve paralysis, or loss of hearing in one ear as a result of an invasive procedure.

Um. Well, that was easy. Got J to the clinic a few minutes early at 11:20, went off to Indro with the kids to wander around Dymocks and get some lunch. While we were in Dymocks J rang to ask us to come back earlier so I could be there when the specialist gave his post-op talk. Had a quick lunch then went back to the clinic. After talking with the specialist (followup appointment in 2 weeks) we went back to the car and by 1:10pm we were on the way home.

Boggle.

Here are some pics of the mask that they made last week to keep her still in The Machine:

Photos processed with Darktable using a build from git rather than the 0.9.3 packages I put up last week.