Laces my undoing

June 4th, 2008

550Off to Sognsvann again tonight for another race round the lake. As you can see, this time Christine was just holding the camera (and Emma) although she did get to run home the long way whilst I put Emma to bed. Knowing about the waves at the start still didn’t help me work out the logic as to how went in each one. I suspect it’s just up to the individual. I ran two laps again but had to stop on both of them to retie one shoelace. With a time just five seconds slower than the previous week I think that probably means I was running faster…

Views over Oslo

June 3rd, 2008

547I’m having a day off running today but it was such a lovely evening, and Christine had a day ticket for train, so I took a ride up to Vettakollen station and then walked the 2km or so up Vettakollen itself. Taking both camera and tripod I then proceeded to while away an hour photographing views over the city. Although it was a bit hazy I couldn’t resist taking a panorama. When I got home I couldn’t find the software I thought we had for stitching the pictures together. Fortunately Autostitch came to the rescue. Initially it didn’t include all of the photos (probably because the overlap was quite small) but tweaking the parameters as per the readme produced the following. See the original size image on flickr for the full effect.

Oslo Panorama from Vettakollen

Marathon training

June 1st, 2008

544On Friday I finally completed my entry for the Nordmarka Skogsmaraton. As with most sporting events, you enter online and then pay via bank transfer. It took me a few attempts to realise that, despite the field being exactly the right length, I shouldn’t include the periods in the account number that was quoted. Anyway, with the entry submitted it was time to put in a bit of training, particularly as the sun was out.

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Feature Pack for Web Services notes

May 30th, 2008

A couple of notes if you have, or are thinking of, embarking on use of the Feature Pack for Web Services, based on a recent client’s experiences. Firstly, make sure you heed the rules on profile augmentation in the InfoCenter. In particular, note that augmentation of a Cell profile is not supported. For Network Deployment you must have a separate deployment manager profile.

Secondly, if you are experiencing sluggish response times, 100% CPU or even hangs when either deploying or accessing applications following augmentation, then consider applying APAR PK58537. Note that the application need not be using any new functionality in order to experience this behaviour and it’s possible that you might not see the particular IOException stated in the problem description. This fix is targeted for inclusion in 6.1.0.17.

Linderudkollen

May 29th, 2008

Our babysitters headed off back home this afternoon so it was Christine’s turn to run at the Nordmarkskarusellen up at Linderudkollen whilst I took Emma out in the back pack. It was a very pleasant evening to be out and about although I picked some rather narrow tracks to try and negotiate with Emma who probably got the odd poke in the side from a pine tree. Christine seems not to have mentioned on her blog that she failed to beat my last place from the previous week. She made the same mistake of taking two controls out of sequence but, unlike me, couldn’t be bothered to correct her error.

Waves at Sognsvann

May 28th, 2008

With Christine’s parents here to babysit, both Christine and I could run at Sognsvann tonight and both decided to run two laps. Having emerged from the toilets just before the off it had completely passed me by that there were a number of start waves and I just joined in at the front. With most competitors racing round just the one lap it was quite difficult pacing myself and, with no-one around me for most of the second lap, I was definitely slowing. When two guys did eventually come past me, there was no chance that I could keep up. I’m assuming in hindsight, that they started in a later wave but rather embarrassingly they did also continue on to do a third lap. The eventual time on the clock was 24:35 which doesn’t sound so bad.

Emma’s first birthday

May 27th, 2008

541It seems like a lifetime ago that Emma was born. Well it was – her lifetime. But that lifetime only reached one year yesterday. With Christine’s parents here we were able to have a bit of birthday tea and, in keeping with Norwegian tradition, flew the Norwegian flag outside our apartment. I’m fairly sure Emma didn’t have a clue what was going on but she loved the attention.

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Cabin fever

May 26th, 2008

535Christine’s parents arrived at the end of the last week and this weekend we all decamped to a hytte that we hired on the coast not far from Fredrikstad. The accommodation was basic (no running water and a compost toilet) but still very comfortable. From what we could understand from the (Danish) owner in his broken English, it is probably hired out for less than a month each year and is used by himself for the rest of the time.

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