Investigating my own cold / blue fingers.

For easily over a year now I've been getting moments of what can only be described as blue finger nails and slow / white fingers. I think it's along the lines / symptoms of Raynaud's syndrome, eerily similar at least from my non-medical training. I attribute it to poor circulation and a few too many beers, getting older and so on.

I found an interesting article in the searching, it can be read in full here:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1028122&tn=20

I'll take medical advice first as it really is becoming a daily thing for me now, but and mybe afterwards I'll try this too...

To quote the salient part:

Take a look at some of Dr. Murry Hamlet's stuff on cold injury. He was formerly with the U.S. Army's Research Institute of Environmental Medicine.
The problem is not a shell-cor shunt, it's localized. I had a friend visit Dr. Hamlet and tried what is described below. This along with really taking care of his hands, good expensive gloves, preventing them from getting cold at the onset of a climb etc. seemed to work. Seems a like a bit of voodoo, but his results were good. The biggest problem he had was the discipline to follow the plan.

**
"Retrain your arteries**. This technique, developed by Dr. Hamlet, really works. First, make sure the room where you're practicing is at a temperature that is comfortable for you—not too hot and not too cold. Sit for five minutes with your hands in an insulated container filled with hot tap water. Then wrap your hands in a towel and move to a chilly area—the porch or basement, for example. Now, unwrap your hands and dunk them into a second hot-water container for ten minutes. Then go back indoors for another two to five-minute dip. Repeat this routine 3 to 6 times every other day for a total of 50 times. "Our studies showed that after the immersion procedure, hands remained seven degrees warmer when exposed to cool air," says Dr. Hamlet. The results can last two years or longer, he said."

An Evening on Windgather

The sun is getting lower in the sky with each passing week. Today the sky was blue, the clock clicked to 16:00 and my laptop lid closed.  Around 40 minutes later I was tying the laces on my rock boots, at the foot of Windgather rocks.


I'd not been to Windgather in over 5 years, a quick check of the guide showed the routes I won't be doing tonight.  For the next two hours I climbed the routes from left to right, taking time to savour the setting sun.


I ended up soling 30 routes, quite a haul and not what I had set out to do.  I sat as the sun set, it's many months since I'd just climbed and it was fantastic.

Percona MySQL Install on Ubuntu 8.0.4 LTS

I was looking for a install guide / walk through so I could install the Percona Builds of MYSQL on Ubuntu 8.0.4.

In the end I did the following:

Edited sources as per: http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/release:start

apt-get install build-essential

Then I got the deb packages directly, I wanted to be sure of the version.
wget http://www.percona.com/mysql/5.0.87-b20/deb/5.0.2/x86_64/libmysqlclient15-dev_5.0.87-percona-b20_amd64.deb
wget http://www.percona.com/mysql/5.0.87-b20/deb/5.0.2/x86_64/mysql-client-5.0_5.0.87-percona-b20_amd64.deb
wget http://www.percona.com/mysql/5.0.87-b20/deb/5.0.2/x86_64/mysql-common_5.0.87-percona-b20_all.deb
wget http://www.percona.com/mysql/5.0.87-b20/deb/5.0.2/x86_64/mysql-server-5.0_5.0.87-percona-b20_amd64.deb

dpkg -i mysql-common_5.0.87-percona-b20_all.deb
dpkg -i libmysqlclient15-dev_5.0.87-percona-b20_amd64.deb

This threw a dependency error for me.
apt-get -f install

apt-get install libdbi-perl
apt-get install libdbd-mysql-perl

dpkg -i mysql-client-5.0_5.0.87-percona-b20_amd64.deb
dpkg -i mysql-server-5.0_5.0.87-percona-b20_amd64.deb

mysql -u root -p

Enter password: 

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.

Your MySQL connection id is 37

Server version: 5.0.87-b20 (Debian)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> exit

Bye

Breaking the chain

I've just come across something that has actually made me think, yes I'll give that a go. The concept is "don't break the chain". It's aim is to get you in the habit of doing something constructive for you and your skills each day.

I read about it here: http://bit.ly/djKD

So I'm a software engineer, working with Ruby based frameworks and a climber. What can I do that's positive and not breaking the chain?

Climb and develop code is the obvious answer. But in the real world I'll be able to achieve one of those goals each night at best.

I'm going to begin with some realistic aims, the aim is to improve skills. I've spent the last hour looking at Sinatra and implmenting Susy, SASS and HAML. I'll write it up in my next post and this is the first chain crossed out.

Testing email upload

A great day to test email upload.