After Christmas I spent some time in Alabama with my two best buddies, Cathy and Kip. We did hiking on Pinhoti Trail in Talladega National Forest and in Cheaha State Park, the highest point in Alabama.





We also did some gravel cycling.

The Lloyd Clarke Sports Race Series is a grand prix of three races:

Turkey Trot 10k 1018
Newnans Lake 15k 2019
Trail of Payne 10k 2019

This is one of the few years where I was actually able to run all three races. This post will be a combo post for the series. Trail of Payne 2019 was the final race and I am pleased with where I am on my comeback to fitness after a pretty tough year.


For the Turkey Trot I decided to wear a turkey costume and have a good time. I finished in 43:41 (avg. 7:02 per mile).



For the Newnans Lake 15k I have no pictures! But I finished in 1:04:15 (avg. 6:54 per mile).

Trail of Payne 10k was enjoyable on a nice cool morning. Finish time was 40:59 (avg. 6:45 per mile) which was good enough to win the overall Master division.


Photo by Cathy Bester


Photo by Cathy Bester

One of the neater trophies I have received:



Race series finishers received a nice pint glass:

2019 was another enjoyable GATE River Run 15k experience.

I rode the Florida Track Club bus to Jacksonville on the morning of the race. This required an early wakeup, but it was nice not having to worry about parking. The bus takes us inside the event grounds, very close to the registration area and post-race festivities. It is nice to just hop on the bus after drinking some free beers. :)

Finish time was 1:03:17 (avg 6:49 min/mi). I earned a Top-10% finisher hat.

Just after Thanksgiving I started my new job as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer for SharpSpring which is located here in Gainesville, Florida.

On my first day they put me at a desk next to the window and I received a nice t-shirt (swag!).



The company just moved to a brand-new office building located in the mixed-use development known as Celebration Pointe.



As a long-time "Linux on the desktop" user, one of my initial challenges has been getting used to MacOS.



I am excited to have plenty of great things to learn. Besides on-the-job training, I am currently working thru a list of Linux Academy training courses. I finished up Docker Deep Dive this past week.

The Advanced Computing and Information Systems Lab where I work recently aquired new hardware to support the storage needs of iDigBio.We operate an open source Ceph cluster to provide object storage for media and datasets. iDigBio was too successful at mobilizing digital media about museum specimens... the original storage cluster is full!

The new hardware is racked and has received the base OS (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). Ceph makes RAID obsolete, but to get the best utility out of the hardware we needed to flash each LSI controller with "IT" firmware. IT in this context means Initiator Target (also known as passthru). Ceph guides suggest IT/JBOD configuration in the storage controllers to maximize performance and to prevent crappy controller caches from interfering with Ceph's own redundancy.

Our servers from Supermicro include the LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS3008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-3 adapter. Each host also contains 11 storage drives at 12TB each (plus an SSD for the boot drive), 16 cores of Xeon Sky Lake processor, a whopping 256 GB of RAM, and 10 gig ethernet plugged into the University of Florida Campus Research Network (CRN).

Here are pictures of myself and Nicholas Rejack doing the firmware updates:


Photo by Grace Hong


Photo by Grace Hong

The new cluster contains over 900TB raw, getting us close to a Petabyte.

I am now working through SaltStack and systemd configurations, working up to the point where we can actually begin migrating objects from the old cluster to the new cluster.

This is going to barely be a race report. I find myself too busy to write very much or very often.

I rode the Florida Track Club bus to Jacksonville on the day of the race which was a great way to travel so early in the morning and not have to worry about parking. The bus parked inside the event grounds, very close to the registration area and post-race festivities.

I was not in top shape for racing, still fighting with some unhappy muscles / tendons here and there, so I planned to go out conservatively to see how I felt. This strategy worked well, I was able to keep my pace consistent throughout the race, push all the way up the Hart bridge and right over the top and have a very strong final mile.

My final time was 1:01:53 (avg. 6:38 per mile) which was good enough to earn a Top 10% finisher hat.

Some pics:


photo credit: marathon-photos.com