:: seanlangford ::

Started out early; met w/ TD for a 34 miler avs 19.9 nice for this time of year. Then hooked up with the bunch and did another 40. 74 for the day; 4hrs 38mins. Great spring weather; Harrison got into the mud after critters. Lots of paperwork and administriva fillled the remainder of the day.

Rode for an hour this morning on rollers; 15 mins warmup 30 mins at LT in the aero posiition. Trying to mix up my routine and add some higher intensity stuff on top of base. Heard from ST today; havent heard from him for a while. Looking forward to our get together. This weekend hopes to be big with the nice weather. Much action in the next few weeks. Can’t wait for April when the real chaos starts.

Rode the HHRR course today with Chris and Anthony. A good recon of one of my favorite races. Anthony rode really well. A track and field star in his own right; he took to riding like a fish to water and was right there in the mix even over the steepest terrain. The weather was great the first half then turned colder the second half. All and all a great 2.5 hour hillfest. Sadly JH was a planned attendee to the suffering but alas could not make it.

Celebrated the 70th birthday of my great aunt this weekend as a surprise event in Islip, Long Island NY. She was very surprised. She is the matriarch of our extended family and has been a big part of everyone’s lives for my whole life. Was great to see all the people to whom she has been so important celebrating her birthday.

This is pretty amazing news. Finally a robust and complete internet based phone system released open source. This will undoubtedly make serious waves in the telecom industry. For more details check out:

TMCnet and

LinuxElectrons

Thanks for all the kind emails regarding Shea. Here is a photo of how she’s doing. The ’sticker’ on her side is a transdermal ‘pain patch’. You can see the swelling around the joints and incision. Not the happiest of dogs right now.

Using some cool apis the past few days; jdom with xpath extensions. Allows programmatic manipulation of XML documents in java. A good replacement for the clunky XERCES api for many tasks. Not to knock XERCES; its just seems geared more toward being a cross platform interface and less interesed in being a real OO interface. JDOM, if used properly looks like a good way to treat XML as first class Java objects! Neat!

A beautiful ride today. Left the house at 9:30, headed to Topsdield headed north with the group. Was nice to see some folks whom I haven’t seen in a while. The weather lately and the big hours at work have kept me off the bike for the most part in the past couple of weeks. Had enought in me to cruise along for over 5 hours though on the heavy winter bike so thats not too bad. The highlight of the ride was the siighting of a bald eagle in a tree on river street on the merrimack river. How beautiful. Had never seen one in New england before. Supposedly this is the first family of eagles in these parts in over 100 years. Wonder how they got here? Finished off the ride with some hill work w/ TD. The kid is fit.

Our eldest dog shea went in for a second cruciet surgury. She pulled this ligament on Monday night when she slipped on some ice. She had the surgery on Tuesday and is doing well recovering. This is her second such surgery and this one was much less trauamatic on her.. We have to help her walk for the next week or so and then leash walk her for another 5-6 weeks after that (if she runs out after something she could redamage it). This will be interesting once spring rolls around and the little critters start teasing her!

So I finally broke down and installed gentoo on my main server. This super purposed machine handles ssh, cvs, db, web, samba, mail, fileserver, hotbackup, wireless hub, vpn, router, secure imap and much, much more. So migrating all of the data and configs to newer versions in my spare time is a little slow going. Also changing from MySQL to Postgres. Should be much closer after this weekend.