Last week I met my extended family in Blowing Rock, North Carolina for a week of vacation in the mountains. It turns out that Blowing Rock is a really nice area and a great place to make a "home base" for attractions near Grandfather Mountain, Boone, and the Blue Ridge Parkway.

We had great views from our mountain rental home:



This is a view of the backyard from the deck:

Even though the 4th of July festivities and fireworks were cancelled due to funding issues here in Gainesville, FL, another Independence Day tradition is still going strong. The 33rd Annual Melon Run (3-miler) is a Florida Track Club event that took place at Albert Ray Massey Westside Park on Monday. The race course is mostly sidewalk and streets, with a half-mile of greenway boardwalk and dirt trail.

I raced barefoot. This was my first barefoot race on (mostly) paved surfaces. Last year I ran the John Holmes 16 mile trail run barefoot but I have not been confident enough to race barefoot on paved surfaces until recently.

I'm still in the "resting" phase of my training after having an entire year of running under my belt. My legs have been telling me that they need a recovery break. Since I knew I wouldn't be racing all-out I decided to run the race barefoot and wear a goofy hat (thanks to my wife for acquiring the appropriate festive holiday attire). My main goal was to run fast but stay within the limits of my bare feet, not pushing so hard that I got blisters, focusing on form and technique. After the race I only had a few hot spots, so I feel like I accomplished my goal.

Here is a picture at the start where I am still wearing the hat:


[Photo copyright: Martin McCrory Photography]


[Photo copyright: Martin McCrory Photography]

The hat only stayed on for about 20 meters. I was wearing a du-rag under the hat which stayed on just fine for the whole race. In retrospect it was very warm to be wearing anything on my head.

This is a picture from the last 100 meters of the race, working hard to maintain form:

Thanks to dailymile I have a very nice graph of my monthly mileage for the 12 months since I started running regularly in 2010.



Training logs are great. It's pretty clear that I was able to boost my mileage after receiving my Altra Instinct running shoes in April. In May I reduced mileage but increased intensity, adding speed sessions to get ready for races.

My last race was the Memorial Day Inaugural Freedom 8k race in Green Cove Springs, FL where I won my age group (age 35-39) with a time of 32:08 (average 6:25 per mile).

I ran into a dependency issue trying to upgrade a particular PHP application to the latest version. Geeklog 1.8.0 requires PHP 5.2 or higher.

The default PHP packages in Centos 5.x are apparently based on the older PHP 5.1 branch. To upgrade php, just remove php and install the specific PHP 5.3 packages:

# yum remove php-common

# yum install php53-common

and any additional php packages needed such as php53-mysql, php53-pdo, ...

A few weeks ago the power supply died in my Shuttle Glamor XPC SN78SH7 HTPC / home server. The small Shuttle came with a 300 Watt power supply and since I have two hard drives and tend to run the server day and night, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to a 500 Watt power supply.

The original 300 Watt PC61 power supply was labeled with the following information:

Shuttle P/N: PPR-PC6100-L000
PC6100L-######### REV.01
MODEL NO: PC61I0002

This is a photo of the dead power supply:



I did my best to locate a cheap replacement, possibly a generic component. I was not able to locate one on the web that I was confident would work with this small case. I found the official Shuttle replacement parts listed in a PDF at the Shuttle web site. Even after I located the part I wanted, there were not many vendors who had the part in stock.

Here is a photo of the official Shuttle PSU replacement part:

Finished the upgrade of Geeklog (the engine that powers this site) to Geeklog 1.8.0.

Geeklog 1.8.0 is available for download from:

http://www.geeklog.net/filemgmt/index.php/1060

I had no troubles, Geeklog 1.8.0 seems to be compatible with the plugins used on this site (Autotags and SocialShare).