In the last few weeks I’ve gotten more serious about taking part in the Bicycle Queensland Wilson HTM Brisbane to the Gold Coast Cycle Challenge. It’s a 100km jaunt from Southbank to Southport. I figured that I needed to be riding a lot more in order to get my fitness and stamina up to par, so I’ve actually gotten out on the bike and ridden a bit. Father’s Day helped by providing some cross-training (I scooted around Mt Coottha/Gap Creek for an hour or so and really enjoyed myself), but most of my riding has been on the roads.

One of J’s mothers’ group friends (Elissa) is planning to take part as well, so we’ve ridden together on several occasions, hoping to make a regular training partnership. Last Saturday we got to the park under the Story Bridge at Kangaroo Point, for a total of 50km by the time we got back. It was a nice run, but we could have pushed it harder. Today with Tim I went up the back, twisty-windy way on Mt Coottha. Took us (well, me!) aaaages to get up from JC Slaughter Falls to the ABC broadcast compound. I do hope that we’ll be able to make a regular training ride. After all, there’s the Mt Coottha Challengeto train for. Tim did the climb this year (I only did the 35k easy ride) and I want to do the climb next year as well.

One thing I’ve actually been using my phone for is Nokia SportsTracker, which makes use of the accelerometers and GPS receiver in my N95 and mashes that up with Google Maps to show me where I’ve been, how fast I was going and what the altitude was. The web app mentions a heart rate record as well, but I haven’t got a gadget to do that yet.

Anyway … my goal is to be riding 100km every week. Not just until the B-GC100k on 11 October, but continuing. I need the exercise, I need to do it as a way of de-stressing, and heck, I just want to – it’s fun!

Tomorrow Tim and I (and probably Elissa) are going to do the Kangaroo Point trip, my goal is to do it faster than last Saturday. That’ll actually give me a 122km result for the week, which will be very nice indeed.

For those interested in the tech, I’m riding a GT Avalanche 2.0 mountain bike with Specialized Fatboy slicks front and rear at 95psi. While I’d love to get a road bike, right now I’d prefer to spend money on my family. I’ll live.

I’ve been watching the 7pm Project on Channel 10, and I really wanted to send them some feedback on how they can make the show better. Chiefly, GET RID OF THE BLITTERING THAT BRACKETS A VIDEO GRAB.Unfortunately, you have to register with ten.com.au before you can do that. I was going to register, then I read the ten.com.au Terms and Conditions, and the Site Use Policy documents.

No way will I sign up to those Ts and Cs, they’re rancid:

• When filling in the personal details section, age and gender are required.

  No option to provide this later if you want to access an age-specific or restricted section of ten.com.au or an affiliate.

• 6.3 TEN may refuse your registration request for any reason, including if you attempt to associate the same email address with more than one membership (irrespective of whether an existing membership is inactive or has been deleted, locked or suspended).

I’m really pleased to see that Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore‘s ZFS deduplication keynote speech at Kernel Conference Australia gets a mention at The Register. I’d be even more pleased if they sent a representative to attend in person. Maybe next year!

Ten years ago today, J and I were married in front of our family and friends. We’ve gone through highs and lows, the rollercoaster of life, and we’re more deeply in love and together and entwined than we thought possible all those years ago.

J’s mum is staying with us for a few days and has very kindly offered to mind C for us this evening so we can go and have a nice dinner. I just hope we can enjoy ourselves without worrying about our darling girl too much!

One of my facebook friends works for Nokia, and cycles a fair bit. I noticed recently that he’s started using Nokia Sportstracker, and after seeing some examples of what it could do I decided I’d try it too.

For my lunchtime ride today I started a new “workout” and set off on the bike on a quickish circuit around the suburb. Of course, there was a slight impediment to the N95 finding a GPS signal (something to do with heavy clouds…) but when it did lock on, it tracked the route, my speed, then mapped it to the terrain as well.

When I uploaded it to the website and looked at the whole thing, I noticed that they’ve integrated it quite nicely with Google Maps’ terrain feature. There’s also an option for a heart rate monitor record too, but I’m not quite sure how to get that activated. Probably need a Polar unit, I guess.

There’s also an option to upload a list of what music you listened too while on a particular “workout”. Which I’m sure is great, but just feels a little weird to me – I don’t listen to music when I ride.

A feature that I’d love to see is being able to click on the altitude profile, and have that particular point of the workout given a marker on the associated map.

Going to keep using it, for sure. I reckon it’s really cool that I can get all this without having to pay extra for some gadget to attach to my bike.

Now if only VirtualBox would figure out how to attach multi-endpoint usb devices (such as my phone) with OpenSolaris, I’d be really happy.

Two years ago today, a very tired J and I arrived at the front door of our new home in Brisbane, and were delighted to walk into our own home. After so many years of renting it was a fantastic feeling to be able to walk in and know that yes, we could put a hook in the wall if we wanted (and where we wanted), and that all this was ours. (Well, modulo the mortgage!)

Home, sweet home. Love it!

In case you weren’t quite convinced about just how cool, uuuuber, and just plain old fantastic an opportunity Kernel Conference Australia is, then you should consider this. We’ve got one more speaker coming along:

Brendan Gregg, member of the Fishworks team, author of the DTraceToolkit, co-author of Solaris Performance and Tools.

Naturally, he’ll be talking about DTrace and all the serious and crazy (and seriously crazy) things he’s done with it over the years.

Just a short reminder that if you want to come to Kernel Conference Australia at the earlybird price of $195, then you’ve got until the end of this Friday, 12 June, to get your registration happening.

If you’re interested in any of these areas:

• linux kernel crypto services

• ZFS deduplication

• cross-architecture OS and driver porting

• packet filtering and QOS

• TCP/IP protocol security

• bug finding tools for OpenSource Operating Systems

• network virtualisation, or

• how a DB engine can really hurt your system

then Kernel Conference Australia is definitely for you.

Dates: 15 – 17 July, 2009

Venue: Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland

The student price is still $95, too.

For full abstracts please see http://wikis.sun.com/display/KCA2009/KCA2009+Conference+Agenda

For the conference homepage, see http://au.sun.com/sunnews/events/2009/kernel/

And for registration, Go Without Delay To

https://www.conveneit.com/secure/sun/kernel_jul_09/

I look forward to seeing you there.

Today Tim and I celebrated the last public holiday in Queensland before Christmas by cycling up Mt Coottha. It was my first time going up the mountain (glad I’d put my slicks on last night), and boy oh boy did I suck!

Haven’t been out on the bike since the May Day long weekend (when I also rode with Tim, but along the river into town and back), so my lack of fitness really showed going up the first bit past the quarry.

However, what really killed me were my sinuses – dripping taplike and not letting me get enough air in. Had to walk the last 1.5km to the ABC compound, but at least I kept moving.

From there it was a really nice undulation around to the summit proper, and then a bit of speed heading back down.Haven’t gone quite that fast on the bike before, and I was a little nervous, not knowing the turns or the road surface.

I’ll enjoy it a lot more next time we ride it. All up we were gone for 3 hours, going to have to work on shortening that time over the next 6-9 months so that when next year’s Bike Week comes around I can do the Coottha Challenge. A great ride, and a grand day for it.

It’s only one week before the earlybird registration period for Kernel Conference Australia closes.

As a quick reminder, in addition to our excellent keynote speakers Jeff Bonwick, Bill Moore and Max Alt, here are the people who you’ll be able to meet, listen and learn from at KCA:

So what are you waiting for? Hurry up and register!