Ryan Hall, Josh Cox and Terrence Mahon demonstrate some plyometric exercises that they use to build speed and power:

Artwork by a 6-year-old:

With the upcoming movie release of Tron Legacy, it felt fitting to share this video made by my brother-in-law a few years ago:

I recently gained my first experience with the infamous MegaCli command line configuration utility for LSI-based RAID controllers. This utility apparently also works on re-branded LSI cards from Dell (certain PERC cards) and other vendors.  Our New servers from iXsystems included LSI 9260 MegaRAID adapters. These servers run FreeBSD and LSI makes a binary available for this operating system.  I later noticed that megacli is also in the FreeBSD ports tree, appears to be the same version as what I downloaded from LSI, but I did not test it.  The megacli utility is also available in standard repos for many Linux distributions.

I wanted to verify that the RAID controller would start an automatic rebuild.  I popped out one of the drives and the very loud alarm started screaming.  I waited a little bit and put the drive back in.  The alarm continued and the array did not start rebuilding.  It turns out that the controller has some self-defense against someone mistakenly re-inserting a bad drive so it won't start an automatic rebuild on a drive that was just disconnected and reconnected.  Drives that were previously in an array are marked as "Foreign" if they are reinserted. Replacing a drive with a true spare drive off the shelf triggers an auto-rebuild just fine (unless the adapter's auto-rebuild property has been altered).

I have noticed that the binary I downloaded from the LSI web site is mixed case, whereas the version included in many distrubutions / built from source tends to use all lower-case (megacli).  Be aware of this if you copy/paste commands from below.

So back to the screaming alarm...  

Here is the magic command to silence the alarm:

Disney issues cards to guests who stay at their resorts. One of our cards was issued to an "Unknown Stoner":

After 6 months of running, I am feeling pretty good. I lost 20 pounds and have avoided developing any serious running injuries. I totaled over 400 miles. I finished a half marathon. I have successfully converted my running stride so that I land with a midfoot strike rather than a heel strike. I believe that this conversion has made a huge difference in my long distance running capability.

I am now generally running 15 - 35 miles per week which includes at least one long run if possible (10 - 15 miles). I can only manage to squeeze in 3 or 4 runs per week due to busy family schedules.

Thanks to dailymile, I can show you a nice graph of my weekly mileage totals: