Bryan Hinton's space

  I am finally getting around to posting an entry about our amazing Wasatch Back Ragnar Relay experience from last weekend.   180.5 miles (I think that was the final tally), two vans, 11 people, 28 hours 5 minutes and 59 seconds, lots of sweat, Gatorade, water, Honey Buckets (can you believe that is the name of the company that provides Porta-Potties), and even some fun mixed in with some pain.  It is a testament to the brain's ability to selectively remember that I look back at the experience fondly.  My three legs were 5.1, 3.2, and either 5.2 or 5.6 (can't remember at this point I think it is the former).  For a total of around 13.5 miles.  My legs comprised the shortest segment of the race for any one runner I think (that is in interest of full disclosure - not necessarily something I am proud of).  I ran my first leg at a 9:08 pace and followed that up with an 8:33.  I was extremely pleased with those efforts - they were better or on my par with my best training runs. 

  My third leg was climbing up the road on the southeast side of Jordanelle that runs from Kamas to Heber.  It was brutal for me.  I finished it in with a 10:55 and that included walking which I did at the top of the inclines to give my screaming quads a break.  After that leg I collapsed into the van for over an hour while Sean and Megan finished out the last legs for our van - I was pretty oblivious to what was going on around me.  By the time I had recovered we were done and everyone was ready to eat some real food (the spaghetti Friday night at North Summit High School was good - but it was too late and I was too tired and hurrying to get to bed to truly enjoy it).

Below I linked to a search of Twitter (using something called tweetscan) for the posts that I did while we were running - it has quite a bit of info about how each member of our team did (Noel, Cory, Megan, Sean, Rachelle, and me) as well as how Van 2 (Stacey, Mark, Brian, Neal, and Daniel) did - although Van 2 I just cover overall - not individually.  I also have included a tweetscan search for all Ragnar posts - which catches a few others from other people (as well as some non Ragnar related ones).  Lastly is a link to the first photo album that I put up while we were running our first legs.  More should follow soon.

• http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=Ragnar&u=HintonBR&d=
• http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=Ragnar&
• Ragnar Relay 1 photos

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

  Well we are down to less than 3 days until the start of the Wasatch Back Ragnar Relay race - to be more exact about 66 hours to go.  Our training is much lighter this week - just one more training run to go after today (which will be tomorrow).  Today I hit an 8 1/2 minute mile pace over just under 3 miles - I was happy with it.  It is the fastest I have gone yet.  I don't anticipate averaging that over the Ragnar, but  it was cool to push myself.  My legs are more sore today than they have been for a while.  Sitting all day doesn't help much either!

  One of my first tasks at my new job has been to look at integrating the Exception Handling block and Logging block into our .NET Stack.  We are also exploring using Unity as the Dependency Injection container.

  Things were moving along as I started playing with Unity and the Exception Handling block, but as soon as I tried to simply add logging of the handled Exception - it all blew up in my face.  Fortunately others had discovered the problem as well which was traced back to a bug in the CLR which had previously been reported and marked as fixed in .NET 4.0.  Now I understand that bugs happen and especially when they are bugs in the underlying platform there is only so much to be done.  The Entlib team did provide a code fix that could be applied to the source code and then with a custom compilation of Entlib you could be off and running again.  Well sort of - having a custom version of Entlib introduces other problems when you are talking about using the VS config tool to manage Entlib config.  When deploying this to 30 developers so they can manage Entlib config on their projects it gets to be problematic as the instructions for getting the built-in config tool involves changing solution properties and copying binaries around are not trivial.

  If I were doing something out of the ordinary I would be more willing to pay the price  - but I am trying to do the most basic Unity-EntLib integration here.  I am disappointed that issues with such a common scenario weren't caught before release.  The p&p teams have obviously invested time to make Unity and EntLib play nicely together (ala the Unity extensions that are available out of the box to enable Entlib to work with Unity) - I would have imagined that acceptance testing of any sort would have caught this.  Perhaps the explanation is as simple as the issue repros differently (perhaps JITs differently) on different machines.  Here is hoping that when the fix to the binaries that is hopefully in the works comes out that the team will explain how this happened.  Based on the principles that p&p espouses I know they value quality highly which makes this even more unusual. 

 Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles.  For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss).  For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

   In about a week I will be transitioning from my current team (Data Integration) and role as a Data Warehouse Engineer to what we call the .NET Stack team.  It has been great expanding my Data Warehouse experience - I am more familiar with the Kimball method of designing data warehouses now (and even see a lot of similarities between the Kimball approach to Data Warehousing and the Object-Oriented world that much of the programming world uses).  I won't be sad to leave the ETL tool behind that we use here (Business Objects Data Integrator or DI) though.  For the last couple of months DI and I have been working together with a very loose truce - I promise not to curse it too much if it promises not too crash or do otherwise crazy things.  My co-workers have been great to work with and I will miss sitting with them on a daily basis - a fun group to work with.

  In my new position on the .NET Stack team I will be working on defining, developing, and integrating various technologies and concepts that the .NET development teams working with the different Church departments can use to be more productive, effective, and efficient.  This will allow me to be back involved with Team System/Team Foundation Server like I was at Intel which I am very excited about.  I will also be spending time with WCF, WPF, nHibernate, Entity Framework, LINQ, and a lot of the other .NET technologies out there.  Should be a fun and challenging task - looking forward to it!

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles - for a technical only feed use the following URL - http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss - for a family only feed use the following URL - http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss

E and I headed out yesterday on a daddy daughter date.  We got tickets through the Cougar Club to a BYU baseball game and so we left Noel home to enjoy time alone and we headed down to Provo to watch some baseball.

Miller Park is a nice stadium - it is kind of unique as it has the softball field on one side of the stadium concourse and the baseball stadium on the other.  I taught E about first, second, and third base along with home "base".  We ate hot dogs and enjoyed the game for about an hour and a half or so.  We then headed over to the Marriott Center where our car was parked, put our blanket on the grass, read books, and ate Cheez-Its (sp?) and Twizzlers.  It was a lot of fun.  We did have to make a trip back to Miller Park for E to go to the bathroom.  As we went into the boys bathroom she said, "Dad, this is the boys bathroom."  I informed her that I couldn't go into the girls bathroom and so this was the best we could do.  She responded with, "But Dad it is going to stink!"  Turns out that all the stalls were occupied and rather than wait for them to open up and risk her clamoring loudly as we went in that it stunk we went hunting for another option.  They have a couple of family type bathrooms it turns out and we used one of those so it all turned out good!  It was pretty funny!

Here are a couple of pictures of us chilling on the grass at the Marriott Center.  We finished off our date by stopping by Mark and Stacey's to say hi to E's cousin E.  It was so much fun for E that with 5 minutes on our way home she feel asleep on me!  Seriously it was a great time - I can't wait for us to do it again!