I suppose if I can’t write about tech I can write about climbing. Yesterday my partner was sick so she wasn’t up for climbing. I, however, was. So I went to the gym and spent quite some time traversing: 45 minutes then a 10 minute rest, then 30 minutes and a 10-15 minute rest, then a little more traversing then I went home.
I have to say that I really like traversing. It’s completely different than leading or top-roping or even bouldering (all of which seem to get all the glory). Yesterday was my first extended traversing session and I learned a lot: how to lean, how to place hands, how to place feet, creative solutions for hard transitions.
Route setters at my climbing gym take care to provide a path around the bottom 10 feet of the climbing walls for traversing but their primary focus seems to be that of the vertical routes and so the traverser can be left with a difficult move. For instance, yesterday, I had a tricky move just before a corner that I just couldn’t figure out so I tried to heel hook a massive hold so I could match there with my right hand and then make progress. This type of move rarely comes up in the vertical climbing. Sure, heel hooks and matching hands-to-feet isn’t rare but moving horizontally (at my gym, anyways) 40+ feet up is just simply not common. I found the move enjoyable: making the hook worked for me – it probably did NOT look graceful but at this point I don’t really care because my goal was to get past that spot on the wall and into the corner. I’ll worry about cleaning up technique during the next session. My primary goals still are to keep heart rate up and improve endurance.
In any event today I am sore today in new and interesting places. Top-roping and lead climbing just don’t focus on these groups. I look forward to my next session!
So it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything so I thought I’d give an update so that there is something here.
I love my job to death! I work with awesome people and have a lot of cool stuff to do. I’m also climbing three times a week, which doesn’t leave me with a lot of time to code or be at home. When I am home I’m working on a STOMP library for the Arduino Ethernet Shield.
The STOMP library is going to be used in part of a home automation system my partner and I are working on. I say “working on” because she’s just as busy as I am and doesn’t have much time to work on all of the projects she’s got on the go.
So I’m still around and just really busy!
So I’ve been very lax in posting. I’m very busy lately with rock climbing and work and other social things.
I have so many things to talk about like the awesomeness of OS X Server, MCX, LDAP and other nifty things. I haven’t been doing much Ruby development lately since I have other priorities. Reve is moved over to github.
I will no longer be updating svn here at crudvision.com. I want to move Reve to git (at github). I won’t do it if I can fall back to svn, so I’m jumping ship.
Moving to github will also mean I can dump dreamhost as a host and move crudvision.com to my colocated machine to save money each month.
I’m sorry for the complete void in posting. I’ve been very busy with life, work and rock climbing. Yes, that’s right, rock climbing.
In early March I started a new job in Toronto for a gaming company (I’m not really allowed to talk about it much, unfortunately). I’m a sysadmin there and I love it. It’s much better than developing the same web applications over and over. I’m almost ready to resume programming for a hobby now that I don’t do it all day every day for pay.
And the rock climbing. My partner and I started climbing recently. We’ve noticed an unusual number of IT professionals that climb! It’s cool and odd at the same time.
I hope to post more, but the real goal of the post is to say that I’m ditching subversion, trac and intend to use github as the only source of documentation for Reve. (I just hope I can get traffic from github to this blog to pad my ego.)
