Basic Target Archery Setup

My oldest son and I are coming to the end of a set of 6 archery lessons with the Victoria Bowmen Club. We have both joined the club so that he can carry on doing lessons in the club's Junior Olympic Program (JOP). Up until now we have both been using basic wood bows that the club provides for lessons but to carry on we must get our own gear. Since my son will grow out of whatever we purchased him now I wanted to balance the cost against getting him a good setup that now hold him back from shooting well.

Unfortunately, there are only two shops (Island Outfitters and Bucky's in Duncan) that sell archery equipment on Vancouver Island and both of those mainly cater to the hunting side of archery instead of the target side. The are two online stores in Canada, The Bow Shop and The Archer's Nook as well as Lancaster Archery in the US. All of these have a good selection of equipment but their prices are kind of high. The best pricing I have found so far is Alternative Sports Services in the UK. Even with the shipping charges it is still cheaper than the North American stores. When I've order stuff from abroad in the past it has always been hit or miss if I got charged customs duty so we will see what happens with this order.

After some looking around on archery sites and forums we came up with the following setup:

KAP T-Rex 23" riser
KAP T-Rex 66in 22# limbs
Cartel Midas Cushion Pressure Button
Cartel K-Sight
Arco Sport Spigarelli Z/T (Zero Tolerance) Rest
2 Cartel Dacron Fast Strings
Cartel Bowstringer
Cartel Dynamic 501 Quiver
Cartel CR-3 Arm Guard

The only thing left to get are some aluminum arrows and a case. Both of these we should be able to get from the local suppliers without any problems.

As for myself, I'm going to wait awhile and try some club members bows out but I'm currently looking at a KAP Winstar II and Winstorm limbs but it depends on how much I want to spend.

Backpacking Trips that I would like to do

I've been finding out about some backpacking trips that I would like to do at some point in the near future.

The North Coast Trail - this is the one I'm most looking forward to. 61 KM around Cape Scott at the north end of Vancouver Island. Various people are describing the NCT as like the West Coast Trail when it first opened. I think it is currently scheduled to be open for hikers in the spring/summer of 2008. I planning on doing this in the spring of summer of 2009.

The John Muir Trail - 211 miles of California ending at the top of the highest peak in the lower 48 states. Yikes! I think I've got a bit of training to do before I'm ready to attempt this one.

The Pacific Crest Trail - The big brother to the John Muir Trail. 2650 miles from the Canadian border down to Mexico. I doubt if I'll ever get a chance to thru-hike it but hopefully I'll be able to do some of the more interesting bits.

The Wonderland Trail - 93 miles around the base of Mount Rainer in Washington State.

BC Leg of the Trans Canada Trail

I would also like to enter (and finish) a MOMAR race

Citrix Secure Gateway Certificates

Just ran into an interesting problem at work. We use the Citrix Secure Gateway (CSG) to allow remote users to access Citrix through the web. This tunnels the Citrix ICA traffic (which is normally on TCP port 1493) through port 443. Our certificate on the IIS server was expiring soon so I had renewed and installed it a couple of weeks back and everything appeared to be working.

Today we started getting calls from users who were getting SSL errors after they had authenticated on the Web Interface page and tried to launch a Citrix session. After quickly verifying that the IIS certificate was indeed the new one and doing an iisreset to no effect I did a quick Google search and discovered that not only do you have to install the certificate on IIS, you also have to configure CSG to use the new certificate.

Planned hikes for 2008

So far I've booked time off work to do the following hikes:

West Coast Trail - May 15th to 22nd.
Juan de Fuca Marine Trail - June 29nd - July 2nd

This is the second time around that I will have attempted both of these trails. I did the WCT when I was 15 with a group organised by the Y. I was a real hoot. We spent a couple of days out at Cape Beale and then did the North half of the WCT. This time I'm doing it solo and will be doing the whole thing. I don't think I'll have time to get out to Cape Beale but I'll see what happens. I'm going in May so I don't have to make a reservation and to beat some of the crowds. The weather may be a bit problematic but I don't mind hiking in the rain.

I also attempted to do the JDFT last summer and got from Mystic Beach to Sombrio Beach but I brought way to much stuff (about 60lbs!) which killed my back and feet. This is what got me into Lightweight Backpacking in the first place as I wanted to finish the JDFT this year but don't want to take that amount of stuff.

I may do another in the summer depending on how things work out, not sure which yet at this point.

VDI for home use?

I've got two boys at home that are constantly fighting over the use of my computer. At the moment they are young enough that they aren't playing games that need lots of computer resources. Mostly, one of them is playing games like Runescape and its Moparscape clones. The other plays some more advanced games like Flight Sim X.

After reading this blog site about building a $200 PC I got to thinking if it would be possible to build a cheap PC for the boys and have one of them use a real PC and the other use a XP virtual machine using some kind of cheap windows terminal to connect. I guess the terminal would be the key thing. If it is too expensive you might as well build another cheap PC.

I'll do some more research and post my findings.

Ultralight Gear list

Here is my light weight gear list for a 7 day pack. My goal was to get a sub 30 lb pack with gear that will keep me comfortable and warm. I'm not happy when I'm on the trail if I'm cold, wet or hungry so I've made some choices that aren't necessarily the lightest but will address these. If you want to see the spreadsheet in fullscreen you can do so by clicking here.

Running ESX Server in VMWare Server

After trying to get this running today, I ran into some problems and did some googling tonight to try and find a solution. I found a thread here and a white paper here that document how to do it using Workstation 6 and Intel processors with the VT extensions. Looks like this is the only way to do it and the PE2650s I've got to play with don't have VT. Oh well, I will have to just keep it the lab setup using 3 or 4 real boxes for now.

Virtual Virtualization lab

I'm doing some preparation for some cross training I'm doing on Friday on VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3. I've used some old servers to create a lab environment consisting of a virtual SAN (using SANMelody) on one to act as an iSCSI target, another server as a VirtualCenter server and two old Dell PE2650s as VMWare ESX 3.5 servers. This works fine for VMotion, DRS, HA and all the other good stuff that VMWare supports but still takes 4 physical boxes, two of which need to be multiprocessor or multicore and have a fair amount of RAM. In a pinch you could get this down to 3 servers if you combined the VC server and the SANMelody server onto one box.

Then I got to thinking, I know people have installed ESX Server as a VM under VMWare Server or GSX Server so would it be possible to create all four machines as VMs on one physical box? This would let me give the two people I am training their own server (the PE2650s) and they could run through the entire setup on their own.

I'm going to have a go myself today and see what happens.

Rain Gear

I think I have most of my lightweight gear selected without too much internal debate over which to choose. But for some reason, I've spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out what type of rain gear to get.

I started off with the Marmot Precip jacket and pants as that seemed a pretty common choice amongst other backpacker's gear lists. At a combined weight of 586 grams it looked to be a good (and cheaper!) choice. I'm now leaning towards the Montbell Peak jacket and pants which have a combined weight of 530 grams but appear to have much better ventilation which will be important since I do most my hiking in spring, summer and fall and being on the west coast of Vancouver Island we get a lot of rain!

I had toyed with the idea of using an umbrella and a wind jacket and pants but I don't think I can make that leap just yet. We get too much rain here which can come out of nowhere for me to put my trust in a flimsy jacket and pants and an umbrella. I'm also not sure how I'd grow the third arm to hold my poles and the umbrella.

If money was no object I'd go for the Integral Designs eVent Rain jacket as this seems to have gotten very good test results, both for ventilation and water repellancy. I don't think I can bring myself to drop close to $500 for jacket and pants for something that will hopefully spend a lot of time in the bottom of the bag.

First Post!

I wanted to create a blog to keep track of various tid bits of information that I come across while researching for projects at work as well as hobbies and interests at home.

Currently, I'm looking into Ultralight Backpacking after an aborted attempt at the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail last summer due to carrying about 25 Kg of gear. My target is to get my "skin out" weight (gear in pack including consumables plus gear worn) under 12 Kg. Once I figure out how to post it,I will put up the gear list that I am currently using or thinking of getting.