This year’s Heart of Steel was a step up over last year. The event was broken up into two sections, the morning for open (pro), beginner and youth. The afternoon for intermediate and advanced. This alleviated the wall congestion of 2010 and gave the event a more relaxed atmosphere. 2010 was crazy. Climbers were getting on walls as people were falling off in the crush to get climbs in. This year I got in more than enough climbs and was exhausted by the end of the event. I wish that they had set some boulder problems in the far room because I enjoyed the separate spaces. For next year I would love to see both bouldering areas set and maybe even some stuff on the lower section of the top rope routes. A bunch of great sponsors like EMS, ASA Photographic and Scion of Woburn were there to support the event. I also met some guys from a new magazine focused on northeast climbing called Climberism. What a great idea.

I missed some of the competitors from last year’s Heart of Steel. I was particularly hoping that Sasha DiGuilian would be there after I read she recently ascent a 5.14c, Southern Smoke. She is tearing it up. I also missed the high flying antics of Michael Bautista.

Regardless, this year’s Heart of Steel finals Blew My Mind. The route setting was spectacular both for its creativity and for the number of ways climbs could be accomplished. Watch all the videos and notice how beta varied so much between contestants. This kept the event exciting because you were not watching people make the same moves over and over again. There were monos, hand jams, foot jams, double toe cams, inverted maneuvers, dynos. Sick. So, so sick. There was also a surprise as Boston Rock Gym’s own Daniel Berman qualified for the finals despite competing in the Advanced category. He absolutely crushed it and ended up with more points than the third place Open finisher, Josh Larson. BRG stepped it up and opened their wallet to do the right thing. They had four men in the finals instead of three. Daniel is only fourteen, but he climbs like a man. The crowd loved him. I think he was probably at a pretty big disadvantage because he climbed from two to six while the open competitors climbed from nine to one. This meant he only got two hours of rest before the finals while everyone else got seven hours. Me… I need about two days of rest after climbing.

The women put on a great show and climbed some hard hard stuff. Their routes were left up post comp. The pink route was rated V9 and the yellow route V8+. After climbing (falling off?) them I would agree. There were two huge highlights for me. One was Sasha’s fantastic foot and handwork to get the lower $100. She literally rotates three hundred sixty degrees around a hand/foot jam. The other was Tiff’s dyno on problem one. I was filming and then all of a sudden she just disappeared from the frame. After quickly ruling out teleportation I found her though and caught the rest of her climb.

In the end Vasya handily took home the men’s crown for the third year straight. Someone out there has to show up at the Heart of Steel and give this guy a run for his money because I am starting to feel like he is only competing against himself. The women’s title was a lot more interesting. They tied for the amount of money collected and so would split the prize pot. However, at this year’s competition there was an option to buy another try for $20. Most of the competitors turned this down because let’s face it, after six minutes of giving it 110% twenty bucks probably isn’t going to get you any further unless it also bought you ten minutes of rest. But Tiff was in a special situation. Because they were in a dead tie if she could get any money off the wall she wouldn’t have to split the pot. However, if she failed to get any money off the wall then Sasha would get the whole pot. Drama! In the end she chose to play it safe (or smart), by splitting the pot. Imagining how tired she must have been… I can’t blame her.

So recently for work I had to work with some data in a Microsoft Access database. I imported this into SQL Server using the Microsoft Management Studio because the tools made my life easy. However my dev environment was already setup for php and I didn’t really feel like setting up an environment for ASP just to create some simple web pages for myself. I also wanted to avoid having to convert my db’s from Access to SQL Server and then import to MySQL. The answer is Microsoft’s opensource driver for PHP. This article will get you up and running in no time.

1. Start by downloading Microsofts PHP Driver
2. Extract it to a directory on your computer.
3. Open a page that calls phpinfo() and look for the following information:
   • Version – 5.3 or 5.2 for example
   • Compiler – VC6 or VC9
   • Thread Safety – enabled or disabled
4. Find the dll that in your extracted folder that matches the above information. For example sqlsrv_5.3_ts_vc6.dll would be for Version 5.3, Thread Safe Enabled and compiled in VC6.
5. Copy the .dll into your php ext directory. For a WAMP installation this would typically be in c:\wamp\bin\php\phpversion\ext
6. Enable the dll by either editing your php.ini file or from the WAMP taskbar icon
   • Click the taskbar icon -> restart all services  - the dll will show up in your extensions list
   • Click the taskbar icon again -> PHP -> PHP Extensions -> check php_sqlsrv_5.3_ts_vc6
   • Revisit your phpinfo() page and you should no have a section called sqlsrv
7. Finally you just need to code up a page to grab some information from your sql database

$serverName = "(local)";
$connectionOptions = array("Database"=>"yoursqldb");

$conn = sqlsrv_connect( $serverName, $connectionOptions);

if( $conn === false )  { die( FormatErrors( sqlsrv_errors() ) ); } //terminate on failed connection

	$tsql = "SELECT TOP 100 [yourcolumn] FROM [yoursqldb]";
	$getRows = sqlsrv_query( $conn, $tsql);
	if ( $getRows === false) { die( FormatErrors( sqlsrv_errors() ) ); }

        //for each row output each column value
	while( $row = sqlsrv_fetch_array( $getRows, SQLSRV_FETCH_ASSOC)) {
		foreach ( $row as $key => $value ) {
			echo $value."<br />";
		}
	}

/* Free the statement and connection resources. */
sqlsrv_free_stmt( $getRows );
sqlsrv_close( $conn );

For the uninitiated a water cooled computer is one that substitutes a radiator, water pump and a cooling block to replace the fans in your computer. This allows you to run your computer faster than spec. My first water cooled system was a Frankenstein of parts. For a radiator I used the heater core from a car at the junkyard, I bought a pump at the aquarium store, ordered a copper cpu block online and hooked everything together with tubes and fittings from the Home Depot plumbing aisle. To power the affair I dismantled an old PSU and stuffed it into my case.

I was no expert and combining water, electricity and knowing just enough to get yourself into trouble… I got myself into trouble. The thing about PSU’s is that they contain high energy capacitors that can discharge very quickly. So you need to be careful to not touch them and kill yourself – which has happened before. In hindsight having a hacked up PSU in my case was not the greatest of ideas. One night while trying to force something or another into the case I was greeted with a flash of light, a billow of smoke and the lights going out through the entire house. From downstairs I could hear my roommate Mike calling up… “Tom?!”

Needless to say I lived and after dealing with leaks, cutting my case up with a dremel, and tweaking my computer to the fastest speed possible I finally had a working system. It was a lot of effort and I loved that computer. I ran blacklight sensitive automotive radiator fluid through it and would use it to host music at parties. I enjoyed people walking into my room and exclaiming – “What is that?!” Most of all I enjoyed the process of building something unique and seeing it work. These days you can just order up a water cooling kit and hook it up in fifteen minutes, but in those days it took blood and sweat.