My First Sprint Triathlon

I finished at precisely 100 minutes -- five minutes more than I had hoped.  Actually at one point I thought I could finish around 85 minutes but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm talking about the 2012 Upper Main Line Y triathlon consisting of a 450 m. swim, 10 mi. bike ride, and 5 km. run.  I had been thinking about doing this for over a year before I convinced myself I could do it.  I trained for four months prior to the event during which I:

1. Spent $400 fixing up my 40 year-old Schwinn LeTour bike that I did not use.
2. Crashed same bike two weeks before the race and escaped with minor scratches.
3. Felt exhausted and cranky at work most of the time.
4. Lost 5 lbs. while eating unconstrained amounts of food.

I started training at the beginning of 2012 by doing gym triathlons - swim indoors, bike on a spinner, and run on the treadmill.  I never did the full distances but felt confidant I could do 12/32/31 minute splits.  With 10 minutes for both transitions I would finish in 85 minutes and win my age group (based on the previous year's results).  Then I started training outdoors and realized that the 50 m. pool, the hills on both the bike and running course, plus the wind added a real difficulty factor to the endeavor.  Fortunately I realized this before the event and decided to relax and enjoy the event.

Here are my splits as per my Ironman watch.

Swim	13:00
Trans #1	5:27
Bike	44:17
Trans #2	2:38
Run	34:38

It was a perfect day -- temperatures in the 50's to 60's, brilliant sunshine, low humidity.  Because the swim event was in the outdoor 50 m. heated pool, the 300+ participants were divided into groups and each group started only after the previous group completed their swim (every athlete wore a timing chip which was tracked by computer).  This resulted in a nice, peaceful competition of athlete vs. self instead of athlete vs. crowd.

The swim was fun, the bike ride was challenging as I had to walk my bike up the two steepest hills.  The run was dreadful.  After finishing the bike ride I did not want to run 5 meters let alone 5 kilometers.  But following the mantra of "put one foot ahead of the other, now REPEAT" I muddled through the run.

Then it was over.  Later in the afternoon I slept exactly as long as I had competed.  Amazing how things balance out.

Career Moments

You’re Only Doing One-Third of What We Want

This blog entry starts with my six month contract as a computer science teacher in the early 1980s. I had an altruistic impulse to teach, but I wasn’t willing to bet the ranch on it. So even though I was considered a full-time teacher at Penn State Brandywine Campus two days a week, I continued to work part-time at Burroughs three days a week.

The number of students (around 30) in my first class surprised me. I asked one student why an introductory programming class was so popular. He said he thought it was because a computer-programming course was easier than the alternative math course. I immediately grew doubtful of my new career.

During this six month stint I worked about 60 hours per week. I received no help whatsoever from the administration or the staff. In fact when I asked a secretary how much lead time she needed to type materials for me she responded “two weeks. "

I was operating on about two hour lead-time.

At the end of the first semester I ran into the dean who hired me, and the first thing he said was “Bob, you’re only doing one-third of what we want you to do?” I said, “Whaat, please explain?” “Well we expect all of our faculty to excel in teaching, to do research, and to perform community service."

And it’s not like the students themselves were appreciative. I had to deal with them cheating a lot. When I received the their feedback forms after the semester one said: “Monotone voice, change it!”

I went back to systems programming after that.

Do I Have to Answer That Question?

One day at Burroughs I received a phone call from a recruiter. Usually I don’t give these headhunters the time of day, but this one mentioned a startup company. It was either intrigue or boredom but I decided to interview. Then I was hired to write compilers which I had been doing for about six years at Burroughs.

The company was a small startup in Lawrenceville, NJ. The CTO was a charismatic engineer named Robert Knight. The CEO was a wealthy businessman, Charles Lombardo, who provided most of the company’s funding. Somehow, maybe because Lombardo’s wife worked on Wall Street, our tiny company, MultiSolutions Inc., actually went public. Even though they actually did not have a product or a revenue stream.

The product, under development, was an Operating System called S1. The marketing department used the slogan “Unix is a dinosaur, MS-DOS is a toy.” This was in 1984 and it was true that there was an opportunity for a new OS in the marketplace.

To kill any suspense, the OS never caught on. But I did have an interesting experience giving a deposition to an SEC lawyer at the Federal Building in NYC. The cause for this was a disgruntled employee who was fired from MultiSolutions. He decided to call the SEC and tell them that statements in the company’s IPO were false. Statements like we had a Pascal, a Fortran, and a COBOL compiler ready to go.

Well I was responsible for writing the Pascal compiler so I was asked to testify as to my competency in compiler writing. I was represented by a company-provided attorney who previously worked for the SEC. When the SEC lawyer asked his fourth question, my lawyer says “he doesn’t have to answer that.” “Yes, he does,” says the SEC lawyer. “No, he doesn’t” says my lawyer.

This continued for the next few questions and for about 20 minutes. I was perfectly willing to answer the question asked, but my lawyer wouldn’t let me. I was practically getting whiplash looking back and forth between the two lawyers.

My ordeal ended pretty quickly. Later the SEC dropped the charges against MSI.

Why Are They Shooting At Me?

I had a lot of different jobs at Burroughs which became Unisys (MultiSolutions was in the middle of this). At one point I was in the LINC product group. LINC was a rare software success at Unisys coming from the Burroughs side. It was a 4GL and 4GLs were popular right before the computing world when fully client-server.

This was in the early 1990s, which was also a time when CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools were popular. My department was experimenting with CASE tools that could be used to generate design inputs for a LINC system.

The second surprising thing about LINC was that it was developed in Christchurch, New Zealand. I was sent down to Christchurch to demonstrate some of these CASE tools along with Unisys marketing managers.

I was really impressed with the LINC headquarters. It was specially-built, four-story glass-skinned building where it stood out from the drab business buildings on the outskirts of Christchurch.

They showed me a room on the first floor where I could work rehearsing my presentation and demo one last time. Then out of the clear blue, I hear a loud pop and see a round hole punched through window about two feet from where I sat. I ran out of the room, right into a crowd of people who heard this and came to see what had happened.

I heard a female say “well he’s done it again.” I’m thinking “someone shot at the building again?” but when I turned and looked through the window I saw a workman pulling a mowing harrow across a field about 50 yards from the building. This guy was hauling ass so he could finish as quickly as possible. He was also catapulting stones from the field in the process. Apparently he had done this before.

Don’t worry, Bob, they’re really not shooting at you. They're only slinging high velocity stones in your general direction.

Will It Work?

I left Unisys to work at Vanguard. I worked hard to develop marketable skills in order to be able to change jobs in my mid-forties. I earned Microsoft Solutions Developer status right at the time Vanguard decided to abandon OS2 and switch to Windows NT.

As the technical leader of this migration effort I was very busy. I was not a shill for Microsoft products, but I was a supporter. After all, Microsoft was all that I knew.

The first effort was just to port some of the major client server apps to Windows. At the same time some new projects were getting underway including Defined Benefits Front End. This was a C++ project and I basically had nothing to do with it. It was a client server app with data coming from the mainframe. The path to the data involved Sybase (Sybase was a hot product at the time) middleware along with MS Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).

This all sounds rather bland but it put me in the hot seat one day. I was invited to a meeting with many Vanguard principals and my manager at the time. I really didn’t know why I was invited until they started discussing whether ODBC over Sybase middleware was going to work. I finally realized that my manager’s ass was on the line so when he was asked “will it work?” he immediately turned to me and demanded to know “Bob, will it work?”

Remember, I had nothing to do with the project. I also did not know that there was a Sybase consultant (remember I did say that Sybase was hot) running around whispering in manager’s ears “it will not work.”

Since I wanted to exit the room wearing my head I looked my manager in the eye and said, “Yes, it will work.” That’s when I stopped respecting that manager who, incidentally, did not last there nearly as long as I did.

True Tales From IT Land

Before I joined a financial services company I was a systems programmer, but for the last 15 years I've been doing a variety of jobs in what's known as "IT" (Information Technology). During those 15 years some goofy things occurred which I will share with you reader.

The Never Ending Elevation
No, this doesn't have anything to do with an erection lasting longer than four hours. An elevation is the introduction of new software into the production environment. Think of it as software having to get a job following college. Well this particular elevation involved the company's Intranet application with some major new features: single-signon with Windows and personalization of the home page.

Note: These two are interdependent. The single-signon allowed us to identify the user and this permitted the user's preferences to be stored and recalled.

This release had been delayed for several months because the project was dependent on another team to deliver the single-signon solution. When this feature was finally ready we scheduled the elevation to start on Friday evening and finish on Saturday. From the start things did not go well. There were configuration changes that could only be tested in the production environment because it was deemed too costly to replicate the hardware. By Saturday evening it was apparent that the elevation would continue into Sunday.

This was right at the time of my life when I was suffering from severe lower back pain. The stress of a major elevation (BTW I was the Technical Lead responsible for the elevation) was compounding my physical discomfort as I followed the proceedings by an extended conference call.

By Sunday morning we had the configuration right so that the single-signon part was working. Testing of the home page preferences was giving mixed results, however. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. What was particularly strange was that the tests always worked in our test environment.

We finally isolated the problem to the database -- the production database was not behaving like the test database. It was time to get the on-call DBA on the line. This was my job and I spent four hours on the phone with the guy. He couldn't resolve the problem but I couldn't let him go because my boss wasn't going to let us go home until the problem was solved.

Finally the DBA called one of his colleagues and learned that a patch was needed to the production database driver. The patch had been applied everywhere else, but not to production. Finally the patch was applied, and everything worked. The elevation had taken around 40 hours to complete. 40 hours of pure hell.

The Urge to Kill
For some reason as Technical Lead I was expected to know every operational aspect of the Intranet. In other words when there was any operational problem, I had to diagnose it and fix it. The common term for this procedure was to find the "root cause" even if this meant tracking down the cosmic particle that flipped a bit on the memory chip of the server.

Remember I said that our Intranet had single-signon? This means that if you signed on to your Windows computer you did not have to signon to the Intranet application as it already recognized your login. This was no small feat because our Intranet ran on Unix servers with all kinds of crazy network devices in the picture.

For 99.999% of the time the single-signon worked perfectly but there were occasions when out of the clear blue, the home page would present a login form. We had seen this during testing and knew that the cause was some process consuming an unexpected amount of CPU such that the server could not complete the Kerberos protocol within a given number of milliseconds.

Usually this problem wasn't noticed and everything went back to normal. But one day operations noticed it and filed a trouble ticket. I was assigned to resolve the trouble ticket. Now our Intranet involves at least a half dozen servers not to mention specialized network devices. The problem was sporadic and did not follow a pattern. Here's your haystack; have fun finding the needle.

To make matters worse I had to report status via a daily teleconference called the DSR (Daily Status Report). The DSR is designed to improve the overall operations at the firm by the relentless pursuit of "root cause." Actually it's a means to pillory Tech Leads who have no idea why the software occasionally misbehaves.

Anyway, day after day I had to report no progress. Then suddenly someone from operations was on the call and said that he had traced the problem to one of the servers that was used to store employee pictures. He further stated that the problem occurred when a certain script was run by the database group. He arranged for a rep from that area to attend the DSR the next day.

The next day a manager from the database group was on the teleconference and was confronted with the miscreant script. He said "we don't have to run that script." The case was closed without the slightest apology to me or the rest of my team who had spent hours trying to diagnose it.

The Computer is in Control Here

My last tale is one of the most mysterious that I've ever had in almost 40 of computer work. Without going into tremendous detail I'll just say that I made a configuration change in the way one server authenticated to another server using stored credential (username/password) data.

To improve operations I needed to change the credentials the server used. First I tested this on my desktop by running the first server there. The credentials change worked fine.
Next I proceeded to the production environment. To ensure it worked as I made the change I monitored the second server's log file. If the new credentials were rejected it would show immediately in the logs, and I would be forced to back out the change. But the change worked and I could see it working in the log files.

About 30 minutes passed and the next thing I know my colleague tells me that he's seeing authentication errors on the first server. So I go directly to the credentials file that I had changed and see that it had reverted my change and is now using the previous username but no password. This is truly bizarre and marks the first time I have seen the system spontaneously reject a configuration change made by a human.

My Polar Plunge

"This is stupid," I thought. I was standing in my cabin wearing a bathing suit and a thick terry cloth robe with Ocean Nova embroidered on it. Ocean Nova was the cruise ship that had taken me to Port Lockroy (64^o50'S 63^o30'W) in the Antarctic Peninsula. What I thought was stupid was taking the polar plunge into the icy waters just for the right to brag about it later in life.

I walked down to the deck where we usually exit the ship to board the Zodiac boats that had been taking us to the shore for excursions. I found more than a few of my fellow passengers were willing to take the plunge. Plus the staff were prepared to give each plunger a shot of brandy afterwards. "Okay, I'm doing this," I said to myself.

I was the fifth in line. The process consisted of putting on a life vest and tying a pull line to it. The first plunger suited up and then jumped. A cheer went up from the onlookers. Now standing sans bathrobe in approximated 35^o F temperature I start to feel the cold. Plunger No. 2 goes next. A splash followed by a cheer. Same for plunger No. 3. Then while plunger No. 4 was suiting up there was an unexpected "kersplash." The ship's head chef, a real daredevil, had just jumped off the top deck of the ship without life jacket or safety line. "What a jerk," I thought later. "Just think if the guy got injured -- no food for the passengers."



They fished out the chef and it was back to the process. There goes No. 4 and someone points out that the plungers are not looking at the cameraman taking pictures from the Zodiac at water level. "I will not going to disappoint the cameraman," I resolved.




Now it's my turn. The fricking life vest is freezing and my teeth are chattering big-time. I can't wait to get this over with. I look directly at the cameraman and make a silly face. At least that's what I tell people when they see the pictures. I leap.



"Jesus H. Christ it's cold," I tell myself as I sink below the surface. I feel them pulling me right out of the frigid water. I get some water in my mouth and it's salty alright. I'm so eager to get out that I slam my left heel into the gang plank with a force that leaves it hurting for weeks afterwards.


Okay, I survived. I throw down the brandy and it warms me ever so slightly. I'm shivering full throttle now despite the fact that I have the Ocean Nova robe back on. I hurry back to my room feeling warmer the drier I get. I dry off completely, put on clothes, and lie in my bunk knowing that I did it. The battle's over, the war is won.



Facts:
1) 10 minutes in frigid waters is considered life-threatening.
2) Lynne Cox, world champion open-water swimmer, swam 1.2 mi. off the Antarctic Penisula for 25 minutes.

Trip to the End of the World

It's when I travel that I feel most in the hands of God. Today I'm embarking on the longest physical journey of my life. In the next 26 hours I will travel 6,500 miles from Philadelphia, PA to Ushuaia, Argentina on the island of Tierra del Fuego.

I'm on my way to the Antarctic Peninsula. Why Antarctica? It's a place I've always want to visit since I saw the series "The Last Place on Earth" which recounted the race between Amundsen and Scott to be the first humans to the South Pole. Their story was full of hardship and deprivation, victory and the cruelest form of defeat. I appreciated their thirst for adventure and I wanted to see what they saw even it's in the form a comfort-filled expedition on a modern cruise ship.

The trip to Ushuaia consisted of three flights: Philadelphia to Atlanta (2.25 hrs.), Atlanta to Buenos Aires (10 hrs.), Buenos Aires to Ushuaia (3.5 hrs.). When I arrived in Buenos Aires it was morning and I had to wait three hours between flights. I was surprised how warm it was as I walked between terminal buildings. I sunned myself outside the domestic terminal because the terminal lobby was small and noisy.

I had a window seat on the flight to the city that calls itself the southernmost city in the world. As we approached the island I could see distinct waterways that separated the small but rugged mountains that filled the many small islands. These mountains were sporadically covered with snow as if they were decorated by a confectioner. The plane passed directly over the airport which looked like a field strip for small aircraft. But then the plane circled and dropped altitude and I realized that the small strip (Malvinas Argentinas International Airport) was our destination. In a minute we had landed at Ushuaia, my port of call for Antarctica.

At Home and at Work with a Kill-A-Watt

This is a Kill-A-Watt. This is a Kill-A-Watt in action.

It's a specialized device that measures instantaneous energy consumption. I used it at home to measure power consumption from a Verizon set-top box under three conditions: 1) the box "off" 2) the box tuning a channel 3) the box tuning a channel with a 40" LCD TV on. I was surprised that with the box nominally off, it was drawing around 28W of energy. While tuning a channel it fluctuated around 28.5W. Finally with the TV on, the power consumption jumped to around 128W total.

So I called Verizon technical support to find out if I could turn the set-top box off overnight. They recommended not doing that. Why? During the night they occasionally distribute software updates to the unit. If the unit is off during an update, it may not be able to get it later resulting in a support call. Now that's 28W per hour on a 24 x 7 basis. That amounts to 245 KW per year times two since I have two set-top boxes in my house. That amounts to over 6% of my home's energy consumption last year!

I repeated a similar experiment at work attempting to measure my PC's energy consumption under these conditions: 1) the PC "asleep" in the morning with the monitor powered off 2) the PC "asleep" but displaying the login screen 3) the PC and monitor in use. I came up with these numbers: 108W, 175W, 190W.

I was surprised by the results of these experiments. The Verizon policy and the Vanguard policy concerning not powering-off the device were the same. Vanguard's policy revolves around the need to distribute software to PCs. The TIP Green Team, of which I am a member, has been told that Tech Ops is looking into powering off PCs remotely when there are no software distributions scheduled. If only Verizon would do the same for me!

The Four Greatest Mathematicians

"History of Mathematics" was my final course in the master's program. I took it because I thought it would be fun, informative, and perhaps easy. The textbook we used was not the dreadnought A History of Mathematics by Victor Katz, but the sloop Journey Through Genius by William Dunham. Both books emphasize the development of mathematics from the perspective of Western civilization, but let's quickly thank the Arabian scholars who preserved the works of the ancient Greeks from annihilation. It was those Greeks who got the ball rolling with demonstrative mathematics around the sixth century B.C. It was the Arabs in the twelveth century who translated and expounded on the Greeks, and brought their works back to Europe.

During the course I learned the top four mathematicians of all time:

• Archimedes (287 - 212 B.C.)
• Newton (1642 - 1727)
• Euler (1707 -1783)
• Gauss (1777 - 1855)

I have taken the liberty of writing a short obituary for each of these towering figures.

Archimedes was a true self-starter who liked to apply math to everyday problems. At an early age he invented a water pump called the Archimedes screw which is still in use today. He exploited the techniques of "method of exhaustion" and double "reductio ad absurdum" to prove many theorems regarding familiar two and three dimensional figures. In order to save his city Syracuse from ruination by the Romans he devised innovative war machines to repel the overwhelming army.

Newton was perhaps the greatest self-learner the world has ever known. In his early twenties he spent two years in rustic isolation during which he: discovered the generalized binomial theorem; invented differential and integral calculus; recognized the universal gravitation as the key mechanism of the solar system; and developed insights into the nature of light by refracting it through a piece of glass called a prism. Having little interest in publishing his world-shattering findings, he turned his attention to alchemy for almost 40 years, but was persuaded to publish something by Edmund Haley. The result was a physics text called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica which is considered the greatest contribution to science ever made by one man.

Euler was the most prolific publisher of pure and applied mathematics in history. His mathematical contributions ranged over number theory, calculus of variations, graph theory, complex analysis, and differential equations. He applied math to acoustics, engineering, mechanics, astronomy, and optics. The publication of his complete works was started in 1911, and the end is not yet in sight. Originally planned for 72 volumes, the discovery of new works pushed the project to an estimated 100 volumes. In order to aid his work in number theory he memorized the first 100 prime numbers, their squares, their cubes, all the way to their sixth powers. As a child he memorized the entire Aeneid and could recite it flawlessly late in life.

Gauss was a child prodigy who at the age of 17 invented a technique for inscribing a regular 17 sided polygon within a circle. This was a ruler and compass construction that stunned the math world since no one since classical times thought such a construction was possible. For his Phd. thesis he proved the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, but being a perfectionist (more about this later) he improved upon the proof three times in subsequent years. His superlative text on number theory established modular arithmetic as the fundamental tool for its study. He tired of pure mathematics and turned his skills to scientific endeavors. In order to predict the position of the asteroid Ceres, he invented the technique of least squares and error theory in general. He mapped the earth's magnetic field, and along with Weber invented an early form of the telegraph. His perfectionist nature made him reluctant to publish until every detail of proof was beyond criticism. One biographer claimed that his unpublished work would have advanced mathematics by 50 years.

The most shocking thing I learned from this course is that all of the math I learned in high school, college, and graduate school only brought me up to around the year 1900. Seems that the twentieth century and beyond is reserved for Phd. students.