Author: H Walker Jones, Esq

A professional programmer with a sordid past involving sysadmin, tech support, and cooking.

Personal Best Walking

I’ve been on a speed-walking binge for the winter, in an effort to get/stay fit and lose a few misbegotten pounds.

I walk Aka Lana Lana nearly nightly, though a little less often during the winter.  No matter how much I coax the dog along, though, dogs will be dogs and our average speed tends towards a reasonable 25+ minutes/mile. So I started going out after dog-walking to get some real speed on.

I started walking, and tracking, at the end of November 2021 with a 28:26 average around the lake – about the same as walking the dog.  Admittedly, I wasn’t pushing too hard at the time, but I wouldn’t have done significantly better if I had.

Just over three months later, and the same walk is now a 14:22 per mile average, or 4.17 mph.

runkeeper screenshot showing 14:22 minute walking mile

Ignore Runkeeper’s “3rd fastest” headline, I’m pretty sure I’ve never walked so fast in a long, long time – and this has been most decidedly walking, not jogging or running mixed in.

4 mph has a certain significance in my psyche, because I grew up thinking that it’s a reasonable walking speed for the untrained, after reading The Long Walk, not a breathing-hard kind of pace.  In retrospect I think Mr. King got that particular detail of the story wrong; I’m not sure you could expect people to last very long at that pace, and maybe 3.5 mph would have been more realistic for walk that should last more than 24 hours.  Then again, I’m the one who might be wrong.

I’ve also dropped a few pounds along the way, but I won’t publish figured on that quite yet.

Linux, Solaris, Windows

Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware

Solaris: Because you don’t need to reboot to add hardware

Windows: Because rebooting is for adding hardware, adding software, regularly scheduled downtime, and should also be done on a daily basis to keep the machine running.

[attribution unknown]

Nature Is Metal

Driving home, down by the lake, we spotted a bald eagle at the water’s edge of the beach, with… something.  We thought it was a fish.

Pull into the parking lot to snap a picture.  Before we could get a camera on the bird, she took off with her lunch in her talons.

Her lunch was a seagull.

We’re not that far from the sea, seagulls like to come hang out on the lake during the winter for some reason.  There were hundreds yesterday, while Megh and I sat and watched them during our lunch.

There were none today.

The Vaquita Project

Beta has taken an interest in the plight of the vaquita, and made a website as part of her school project.  Check out The Vaquita Project.

Canadians

The reason that ill-tempered Canadians don’t exist is that when a Canadian becomes mean they are magically transformed into a Canada goose, and flap off to find a flock.

Can Confirm

90% of driving in/around Boston is going “oh shit, I’m in the wrong lane” and trying to cut over last minute (while everyone else does the same thing in all the other lanes)

– /u/g00ber88

 

It’s the Little Things

Small things make me happy.

I run a local Active Directory domain on my home network with a Samba back-end.¹ Over the past few weeks I’ve been building out a second domain controller, but I didn’t have 100% replication – it replicated AD and DNS, but not DHCP.²

After a short outage yesterday (due to an update) I decided that this had to change.  So I:

  • followed the instructions,
  • realized that the instructions were out of date,
  • figured out the correct procedure,
  • completed my setup, and
  • submitted a revision to the wiki.

It’s a small step, but I’m such a nerd that I’m riding high – one, because I’ve scratched an itch and have redundancy in my domain; and two, that I’ve visibly contributed something useful to open source (small as it may be).

¹ For along time it was powered by a single Raspberry Pi, but keeping that up to date became a struggle because it’s a little too low-powered.  But that’s all another story.

² This isn’t a completely useless situation.  It’s much easier to recover from a domain-controller crash if you still have a standing domain controller.  (A solo-domain-controller recovery is much more complicated recovery.)

Lies, and the lying liars that tell them

There are strangers in your life that you should never lie to:

Your doctor or therapist because they won’t judge you, want to make you healthier, and can only make the best treatment plan with your full cooperation.

Your lawyer because they won’t judge you and can only provide the best legal advice when they know all the facts.

Your dentist and oral hygienist because, regardless of your lies, as soon as you open your filthy mouth they know whether you’ve flossed or not.

Three men step out of a car…

Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car driving down the highway. An officer pulls them over and asks Heisenberg, “Sir, do you know how fast you were going?”

“No, but I can tell you exactly where I am,” Heisenberg replies.

The officer gets suspicious and decides to search the vehicle. Opening the trunk, he discovers a dead cat in a box.

“Do you know there’s a dead cat back here?!” the officer exclaims.

“Well, now I do!” replies Schrödinger.

Getting frustrated, the officer decides to take the three men in for questioning — but Ohm resisted.

Garlic Baked Whitefish

This is a super-easy recipe.  My first time trying I went from pre-heating the oven to dinner on the table in under 30 minutes.

The source recipe calls for tilapia, but it should work with nearly any white fish.  Really there’s no reason it couldn’t work well with darker fish like salmon or tuna, though being thicker you may need to cook longer and flip the fish halfway through, as well as increase the other ingredient amounts.

This pairs well with rice and roasted vegetables.

Garlic-Baked Whitefish

Print Recipe
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 12 minutes
Servings: 4 people
Course: Main Course
Cuisine: American
Ingredients Equipment Method

Ingredients
  

  • 1.5 pounds White fish (Tilapia or similar)
  • 6 tbsp Butter melted
  • 3 cloves Garlic minced
  • 1 tsp Crushed Red Pepper Flakes
  • Juice from 1/2 lemon

Equipment

  • Cast Iron skillet

Method
 

  1. Pre-heat oven to 400° F, with cast-iron pan inside
  2. Mix up the melted butter, lemon juice, garlic, and red pepper flakes
  3. Toss fish into the pre-heated pan and sprinkle on some pepper. You don’t need to grease the pan first, dry is fine, the fish won’t stick.
  4. Pour the butter mixture evenly over the fish
  5. Bake for 12 minutes

Adapted from https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/a19665918/oven-baked-tilapia-recipe/