Where is Darran?

a doozy of a race – time for a shower

Two days until the Canberra Half and I have started packing to leave tomorrow. My packing process is fairly simple. Instead of making a list, I look in all areas of my room and pick out things that I am going to need. I then throw these things into a pile into the center of the room. The next stage is a final sorting process. Truly needed items will be packed and unnecessary items will be put back in their place. As of 6:45, I am in the throw in pile stage.

The attempt to upgrade the site to WordPress 2.6.5, MySQL 5, and PHP5 failed. I was able to fall back to a backup that I made prior to upgrade, but the Travel Log page no longer displays correctly. Fortunately, the data for the Travel Log is safe in the database. After falling back to the backup, I have upgraded to MySQL 5 and PHP5 it appears to be working. Three more days to the Canberra Half.

Don’t know what it is, but I like running in the rain.

Registered for the Canberra Half Iron, booked a ride on Greyhound, and got a place to stay at a hostel in the suburb of Kingston. Taking the 6 AM bus on Saturday from Sydney Central Station. It is a three hour ride compared to about an hour plane ride, but taking the bus removes airport hassles and the hassle of disassembling and reassembling the bike. Registration and bike Check-In is Saturday afternoon. Prior day Check-In reduces the craziness of having everyone bringing and racking their bikes the morning of the race, but prior day “rego” can be a challenge for competitors traveling long distances. The course consists of a swim in the equivalent of what would be Lady Bird Lake in Austin, a flat and quick 3-loop bike course, and a 2-loop half marathon along a lake side park. Sunday after the race, I will rest and recover and Monday morning will get up and take a bike tour of Canberra before heading back to Sydney at 6 PM. My lifeguard manager, Renee, said she will be down there taking pictures on the course and maybe some will find their way here.

Because the lifecasting effort has come to a standstill, I have decided to take a step towards that eventual goal by beginning to lifestream. Lifestreaming is defined by wordspy as “An online record of a person’s daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos.” I was turned on to lifestreaming by Colin Anawaty and here is an example of a developers lifestream. The plan is on integrating the lifestream into the blog via its own tab, but first I need to upgrade the versions of PHP and MySQL that the site is using. After the upgrade, I am thinking of using this plugin.

Header is the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome.