Diary of a Madman

My day started on July 18th at about 11:30pm. I had just spent 4 hours sleeping so I would be ok for the hike up the mountain. There are 2 things sure to give you elevation sickness, being too tired and not being hydrated enough. I had gotten a full nights sleep the night before, but my sleep schedule is a bit weird so when 7:30 came and I needed to crash it took me a while to fall asleep, and even after I did fall asleep I had woken up 2-3 times and forced myself back to bed.

1am came and my friend Brian Paone and I made our way to the Naval Base by car. We got there and I freaked because I thought I had forgotten my hiking boots back at his house. I didn’t though they were in his car. I had too much stuff to carry that I just hadn’t grabbed them This was the last of my airhead moments, which there had been a few during the day. I thought for sure he was ready to kill me when I suggested that I may have forgotten them. Luckily that wasn’t the case.

The bus ride left at 2am and from the naval base was 3 hours including a 20 minute pit stop at rest stops on the Tomie express highway just before our exit to head towards the mountain. The bus ride was fairly uneventful, except for the road up to the 5th station, which was awesome because the pavement had been designed to be musical, so on our way up to the fifth station we got a musical treat.

Arrival at the 5th station was greeted by some awesome views of the surrounding valleys and mountains. 5th station is above the 1st cloud layer, so you get to see the surrounding mountain peaks above the clouds. Most people start climbing from the 5th station. So technically when people say they climbed fuji they cheated a little because they started 1/2 way up. Apparently my father-in-law has climbed from the bottom. I could probably do that if I made the hike a multiple day hike.

Both Brian and I started the hike a bit poorly. It was cool at the 5th station so we put on our fleece which was the worst mistake ever because within 15 minutes we had taken them off. The heat from the hike was more than enough to keep me warm until about the 8th station. I had my rain suit on because it had started raining on and off. Fuji starts off with a brisk walk to whole lot of switch backs. To keep rocks in place they have used steal rods and wood planks to create steps. I hadn’t even made it up to the 6th station and I was having back pain. Brian kept trying to get some energy into me, but at 41 and out of shape was having none of it. My lower back was in pain from carrying the pack which I am no accustom too. My thigh muscles burning with pain. I kept moving forward. While we were walking we met one of the others from our tour Christopher who was mega cool. He would walk a couple switch backs and wait for me. If I stopped he would give me a minute and tell me to keep moving. These little goals help keep me going. I am very grateful for that. Brian and he would wait and chat. Eventually when we had gotten to the 8th station he treaded onwards because we were running out of time. Which was totally understandable. Between Chris, Brian and the group of Japanese who were keeping a similar pace as us and chatting it up every station I was able to beat back my desire to call it a day and go back down. Brian was full of energy and was able to keep a faster pace then I. I basically had said if I fall behind leave me I’ll be there when I get there. He went forward and arrive at the summit a bit before me. The last kilometer was the worst though. It was mostly rock formations, no more nice trail, you had to pick you footing and since it had been raining a lot of the rock was very very slippery. Luckily as a kid we use to climb the cliffs near the train tracks so I was familiar with looking for good hand holds and foot holds.

The way down is 100% switch backs, and should be easy, but since my knees and legs were so worn from the hike up, it was almost worse going down then going up. I was in serious pain by the end of the switch backs. The group leader had caught up with us and let us know we were the last 2 on the mountain. He gave me his 2 hiking sticks to use to help with my knees, and we managed to get back to the bus with only 45 minutes left before the bus was ready to leave.

The trip we were on was sponsored by the Navy, so we had a schedule to keep. Starting our hike at 5am we had 7 hours to make it to the summit. We had 5 hours to make it down to the 5th station before the bus left, and it would have left without us. My opinion is they should have given us another 1.5hrs in there total. I made it to the summit in 6.75hrs I had 15 minutes on the summit and then had to start my way down to the bottom.

I am glad I went. I am glad I didn’t chicken out and quit when I could have. This was probably the most challenging thing I have done in my life both physically and mentally. I am glad I was able to experience it. I wish I had taken more photos than the ones posted. After a hot bath a soak in the hot tub at the local public baths I feel much more human. My climbing clothes are washed and hang drying since it can’t be put in the dryer. Tomorrow I will scrub the bottom of my hiking boots and put them back in their box until the next time I decide to do something crazy….

I have a love hate relationship with Symfony. The love started with Symfony 1.0, the hate started with the release of 1.2 Things that were simple and elegant in Symfony 1.0 became monsters in later versions of 1.x. I decided to give another PHP framework a try, but nothing was as elegant as what I had come to enjoy with Symfony 1.0. A few years passed and Symfony 2.0 was released. A total rewrite of Symfony. I decided once again to give it a try. Since then I will admit that I am very happy with the final vision of all the monstrous changes I saw starting back in Symfony 1.1.

One of those changes is that Doctrine is the default ORM. Doctrine is a great ORM, but one that that really irks me is the inability to do something that is native to databases without having to install a bunch of extra extensions. That is simple timestamps. The Symfony documentation itself says to install a symfony bundle to gain this functionality. I say BOOOOOO…. This should be native to Symfony. I should not need a bundle to be able to have a timestamp. Digging around stackoverflow.com I found my answer.

Doctrine has the functionality to give an entity a life cycle callback function. Using 2 of these callbacks attached to a single function in your entity gives you both a created_at and modified_at functionality.

namespace Acme\ProjectBundle\Entity;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\HasLifecycleCallbacks
 * @ORM\Table(name="projects")
 */

class Projects
{
    /**
    * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
     */
    protected $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string")
     */
    protected $name;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="datetime")
     */
    protected $created_at;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="datetime")
     */
    protected $modified_at;

    /**
     * Now we tell doctrine that before we persist or update we call the updatedTimestamps() function.
     *
     * @ORM\PrePersist
     * @ORM\PreUpdate
     */
    public function updatedTimestamps()
    {
        $this->setModifiedAt(new \DateTime(date('Y-m-d H:i:s')));

        if($this->getCreatedAt() == null)
        {
            $this->setCreatedAt(new \DateTime(date('Y-m-d H:i:s')));
        }
    }
}

The Projects entity above has 2 fields that are of type datetime. At the top of the class we tell doctrine that the entity “HasLifecycleCallbacks” in the annotation before the class declaration. This tells doctrine to look for for special annotation relevant to life cycle callback functions. We then have a function “updatedTimestamps()” which in the annotation above has 2 of those life cycle callback annotations. PrePersist and PreUpdate. PrePersist will when first saving the Entity record will set the modified_at field and then see that created_at is null and set the create_at. When the record is modified and updated it will again call the function but this time since created_at is not null it will only update modified_at. This gives you the ability to have timestamps on your data, and is a lot easier than fighting with a Symfony Bundle (which I have tried to get working, but still does not work for me).

I currently live in Japan. Most of my friends are back in the USA. Luckily I have the internet. If not for the Internet I think I’d go stir crazy, plus I have no idea what I’d do for work. Anyway, many of my friends and family back home have the latest iPhones. I too have the latest iPhone here in Japan, and as long as we are connected to local wifi networks it is possible to do video chat with Facetime.

It all started a few weeks ago. My brother wanted to do Facetime, I personally didn’t care. I had tried a couple times to instantiate the call, and gave up. My brother though was adamant about getting it to work.

When making a normal phone call to Japan from the United States you do as follows: 011 + 81 + phone number. Most Japanese phone numbers start with a 0, when calling Japan you remove that leading 0

When making a phone call to the united states from Japan you do as follows: 010 + 1 + phone number (including area code).

Why is this important? Well it is how my brother figured out how to call me. By adding 011 + 81 to the beginning of my phone number in the address book, he was able to initiate a Facetime call.

There is however an easier way which I figured out. In the address book on your phone when you edit the number, you’ll notice it gives you the option to add either +, *, or #. The one we care about is the plug sign.

To call the US it’s simply (plug sign) + 1 + number (including area code). So to dial a facetime user in Massachusetts it would be something like +1(978)555-1212

To call Japan it would be +81 (some long phone number).

It’s that easy. Have fun doing your international video chat. If I ever get an iPod touch I’ll do a tutorial on how to Facetime with that.

Tonight my wife asked me about pilates in the US, and some other thing called gyrotonics. She wanted to try them in the US. The reasoning being she felt that pilates and gyrotonic in Japan were not the same as in the US. She had seen this with ballet in Japan.

I went onto google and searched for gyrotonic and pilates in Boston to find out what the rates were. I went to at least 6 different websites that all had links for ‘rates’. Guess what? No rates! Just a message saying to call the studio for more information.

I don’t understand this? You have a website, the purpose is to get information out to the general public. You give them a teaser link that gets their hopes up about finding rates, and you dash their dreams by giving them a boat load of crap, and forcing them to call you and listen to your sales pitch? WTF? Really? Can we get past this bullshit finally? I am so sick of just wanting to know how much a class or something is. Why on earth can’t they list the price? It’s obnoxious and ignorant. This is the internet age. List your RATES!!!