Running for a reason

It's my last day of vacation today and eager to get outside, I decided to go on an anger run.  My frustration levels lately are high with being stressed out over work, personal life, etc.  All week I have been couped up in the apartment and I just wanted to spend some time alone.  So I hit the road and my first mile I felt great.  The wind was gentle and cool, the sun was just a little warm.  As I got to my half way point I noticed that my shins were super sore, and just aching.  I took a short break, did a little stretching, and allowed my heart rate to lower as it was hitting the high 170's low 180's.  I kept having this burning sensation over my shins and I finally got about 80% of the way through and decided to walk the rest to avoid injury.  Here are my stats:

Mile 1: 8:54

Mile 2: 10:52

Mile 0.27 : 11:15

According to RunKeeper, this was my second fastest mile since 4.18.2010.  My cardio seems to be improving as I have been focusing on running or biking indoors.

A sad goodbye

It's been a difficult week this week. I've been working late hours because my project is due Monday. I was denied vacation time with my boyfriend because of this deadline, so I've been running around crazy to get everything done as I'm going on a huge family vacation next weekend (again without my boyfriend).

Today was especially difficult because I had to take my boyfriend to the airport to go to San Francisco, on a vacation that he initially was very eager for me to go on with him. I couldn't help but cry while saying our goodbyes. It was our first kiss since our new beginning, which was completely bittersweet. I felt a surge of energy, everything from anticipation, to happiness, to sadness, to nervousness, to Technicolor rainbows and butterflies! I hope that his flight goes well, and I really hope he has a successful vacation. All on the same note, I really hope to get the same surge when he gets back, and it's what I long for.

This weekend has now become a weekend soon to be full of public drunken-ness, camping and floating with co-workers. Hopefully it will keep the beau off my mind.

Tonight will be our first night apart, I wonder how I'll sleep. :-/ I wonder how he's going to sleep. I hope well! Till Monday my lover, till Monday.

Training

I'm training for a half-marathon on April 11,2010. I wanted to start training a while ago; however, I pulled a muscle in my foot which put me to a limping status for two weeks. So I'm trying to get back into gear. Tonight I ran 4.76 miles in 57:33. Slow, I know. That does include taking time to wait for traffic. I'm at about 12 minutes per mile. At that pace, I'll finish the half-marathon in 2.6 hours. Ideally I'd like to finish the half between a 10 and 11 minute per mile pace. That's the goal, lets see if I can do it.

VMWare and Windows 7

Trials and tribulations of a software developer. It's somewhat difficult to get your tasks done when you are interrupted by the evil BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death].

A few days ago, out of the blue (no pun intended), the BSOD turned it's ugly head to my new Windows 7 machine, and said to my machine, "I eat PCs like you for breakfast." Omm nomm nomm. So the machine restarts and I go on with life as if nothing happened. So about a week later, the BSOD appeared again. So, as before I just let the machine come back up and I was able to go on with my work. Well yesterday, after I got back from lunch, it happened again...not just once, not just twice; but, THREE times! I talked with one of the IT guys and they modified a setting on my Windows 7 host machine, in which it would put the computer to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. So finally at the end of the day (after the last BSOD, mind you) I decided to call it quits and start fresh tomorrow.

Today is the day, I'm going to start up my machine, I'm going to get my virtual machines running and BAM! I'm gonna get that BSOD and we're gonna call Dell and get this PC issue fixed. Hell no! BSOD didn't want to come out and play. This morning was somewhat productive. I was able to reproduce an odd bug from yesterday morning and got a solution figured out. But, I realized that "it's noon, it's time for lunch!" I lock my computer with my VMs running as I always do and I go to lunch. About an hour later I come back and I noticed that my Windows 7 VM decided to go into standby mode and now I need to resume my VM state. I get it up and running, and get an IM from another co-worker with a link. So, I figure while I have a minute, I'll check out this link; and then, BAM! that BSOD does want to play!

By this point I'm just done, I've had enough. I get the IT guy to ever so kindly listen to my ramblings of why this is jacked up and I explained my steps to reproduce the issue. In my event viewer, I'm getting this error at the point of the BSOD in which I get a critical error from "Microsoft Windows Kernel Power". The IT dude thought that maybe it's the outlet I'm in because we have such freak power incidents; so, I shut down my machine and we plug into an outlet that's on a different wall. I start that puppy up, resume my VM and that annoying blue with the hideous white font stares me straight in the face.

It turns out that my Windows 7 VM was going into "sleep" mode, and the act of resuming that VM state, was causing all of the issues. So we updated the Windows 7 power settings in the VM to "Never" put the machine to sleep. So far, *knock on wood* I have not run into any issues.