Hunddalshytta to Lossiestua

First ‘serious’ day.

Up early and away to escape the insanity of the full hut. It was another blue sky day, but at 8:30am it was -18 degrees centigrade. Welcome to the arctic circle.

There was a cold headwind to being with which froze my trusty sigg waterbottle solid. Luckily, Helen had some water so it was all good.

We knew that there would be another group following out skin track later in the day. We drew a few pictures in the snow for them. My favourite was the classic immature sketch of male genitalia that I drew.

Thankfully there were a few descents, the first one had an amazing backdrop and was more of a cruise than anything else. I enjoyed finally getting my skins off and the feeling of turning with fat powder skis.

Product Placement

Next, we climbed up to a col. Due to the fatness of the skis it means that the skins are also relatively wide. This means you are able to skin straight up fairly steep slopes. This saves you a lot of time, but with a heavy bag buts a lot of strain on the central system. I was ‘poked’ (as my kiwi friend would say) as I reached the summit. Soaking wet. Time to change my thermal.

Lunch break; Had polarbrøds smeared with children.

Children in a tin

Next, I taught Helen how to rip your skins off without taking your skis off. Something which saves an age at transitions.

We skied down the longest descent of the trip making nice lines in the sun baked snow. Heres a shot of Helen in action.

I managed another cheeky sun baked descent to wee loch later in the day. It was cheeky in that I had to do a 15min skin out as a result when Helen just traversed and beat me by ages. I like descending tho; the feeling of slashing the slope was well worth the tiring skin out.

Arriving at Lossiestua

We arrived at Lossiestua before any of the other groups. Beating the large group by 2.25 hours. Total for the day: 6.25 hours.

The wind is getting up as I write this into my little black book. Buffeting the hut; reminding me of the harsh reality of where we are. I feel lucky that the weather has been so good, so far.

Danny MacAskill has been at it again, this time with the help of Dave Sowerby (bmx legend, I think he did the film ‘lifestyle’ which had a lot of footage of tranent?).

Some of the stuff is mind blowing, and its great to see all the familiar parts of Edinburgh.

Monit in the ubuntu dapper repositories is a bit old. I found the following to work
for me.

  sudo apt-get install libssl-dev build-essential bison flex
  wget http://mmonit.com/monit/dist/old/monit-4.9.tar.gz
  tar xvzf monit-4.9.tar.gz
  cd monit-4.9/
  ./configure && make && sudo make install

I recently went on a Ski Touring trip with Helen. I kept a little diary of the trip so I have decided to put it online as a blog post in case other people are planning a similar trip.

Day 1 – Katterat to Hunddalshytta

We took the train from Abisko Turistasjon to Katterat late morning. Started with very heavy packs and skinned up from the station in brilliant sunshine. Jackets and hats were quickly discarded.

We adopted a travel plan of one hour effort followed by ten minutes rest. This is my standard ‘expedition’ plan as its worked for me before both running and cycling.

After a couple of hours, we caught up a couple who had a little baby in a sledge. The dad was pulling it along, and it seemed content.

A sledge, for babies.

At one point, Daddy decided to ski down a fairly steep slope (35 degrees) with the sledge attached to him. Mummy got quite excited by this as the sledge bouced around which erupted into a mouthful of heated abuse.

It took 3.25 hours to ski into the hytta, arriving relatively early in the day to secure beds. As the day progressed more and more people arrived and the place was properly bursting at the seams when the lights went out.

It was amazing to see the mountains in perfect blue sky. They are truly of the mini alpine category and look like smaller versions of mountains you may see in the swiss and french alps.

(Courtesy: flickr)

I was looking for a way to set the request host when testing an application I am currently working on. It has ‘basecamp-style’ subdomains; I wanted to test these.

Insert the following snippet at the bottom of test_helper.rb to set the host to ‘test.local.host’

  # This is a hack on rails to allow testing of subdomain based systems.
  require 'active_support/test_case'
  module ActionController
    class TestCase < ActiveSupport::TestCase
      def setup_controller_request_and_response
        @controller = self.class.controller_class.new
        @controller.request = @request = TestRequest.new
        @response = TestResponse.new
        @request.host = "test.local.host"
        @controller.params = {}
        @controller.send(:initialize_current_url)
      end
    end
  end

Often in modern web applications there is a frontend and a backend (giggle). Time is often spent making the frontend pretty but the administration areas are often overlooked.

The most inspired blog has a great article which describes free and paid administration interfaces available at the moment.