Jeremy's Musings

Woo!

Tue, 13 May 2008 20:58:38 GMT

And with that, a couple of huge weights are lifted off my shoulder. Let's recap or those playing along at home...

My Product Design project was finished up, presented and had a bow tied on it last Friday
Fedora 9 was released this morning
My final paper for Technology Strategy was just submitted

Just one class tomorrow and I have a few weeks of "just" work before summer classes start up. It looks like I'm taking Systems Engineering and System Dynamics over the summer. Hopefully with the two classes, the workload won't be too high so that I can manage to get in plenty of riding ;-) Of course, if I bike on the days I come into the office like I did today, that'll help substantially with my overall mileage.

Time for a spring century

Mon, 12 May 2008 02:12:20 GMT

As some/many of you know, May is National Bike Month and this coming week is Bike Week. Earlier in the week, one of the guys I ride with started circulating the idea of doing an 80-100 mile ride this weekend. After some discussion, Sunday was decided on as the more likely day and then it was circulated to a wider group. I was still a little on the fence about doing it, but managed to wake up and get out the door on time and headed down to the shop. There ended up being ten of us to start out, which was a pretty good number I thought. We started off at a good clip, averaging about 19 mph for the first 30-35 miles. At this point, four people needed to turn off due to time pressures and the climbing really started. The six of us left continued on and took our next stop in Sterling as there were some people needing water at that point. The stop ended up being a smidge longer than my legs wanted and then we headed off towards Princeton and the climb. I actually have to say that the summit wasn't actually as bad as I was expecting -- even with a 12-25, it was very doable. The way back had a few dodgy sections of road, but overall wasn't bad. I dropped off on a hill around mile 78 due to some cramping, but Emily was still behind me, so I waited up for her and we headed back largely straight up 62. After Concord Center, I noticed that the time was getting on the late side for me to get back by when I said I would, so I pushed a bit up Rt 2A to make it back in time.

Map of the route

Elevation profile

Overall distance was about 101 miles and the riding time was just over 6 hours for an average speed of 16.4 mph. Not bad given the mountain in the middle and the headwind heading back. And about 7000 feet of climbing. Overall, a nice early spring century and also some good climbing. And a nice way to start out bike week, even if I might be a little sore in the morning.

PDD Final Presentations

Sat, 10 May 2008 05:32:26 GMT

Tonight, we had the final presentations for Product Design and Development. Over the course of the class, we were to start out by looking at a few markets to uncover the needs of users, narrow in on a market and a product concept and go all the way to building a prototype and a business plan. As I think I've previously noted, I very intentionally did not go after working on a software product to avoid falling into the trap of doing product development the way that I always do -- instead, I used it as an opportunity to work within a different subject area and you know, do some learning :-)

With the final presentations, we were to all do a 10 minute presentation of our product concept with everything from information on the user needs, a prototype and our business plan. We also had a mini-tradeshow with tables for demo'ing our products as well as anything else that we wanted to do within the space of half a six foot table. Along with this was a contest amongst the products -- each team was judged by the faculty and a set of additional judges to pick the "best" of the products presented.

With 18 teams, this made for a relatively long evening. But it was amazing to see what all of the teams managed to pull together in the short space of semester. Some of the products had seemed very unlikely from earlier presentations on their concepts, but they were able to pull them together.

My team worked on a product for the tea drinker and I did the first half of the presentation. And, at the end of the night, our product was chosen as the best one. Which is pretty awesome. After the presentations and tear-down, a bunch of us headed to Tommy Doyle's. And now, it's time for bed.

Not dead yet!

Tue, 06 May 2008 03:45:48 GMT

Just really, really busy. Between the end of the semester and chugging towards the Fedora 9 release, haven't had a chance to write much. Highlights in bulleted form...

Birthday was good. Had some people over for a game night and I think everyone had a pretty good time
Prototype for our product in PDD is finished and it looks really nice. It's cool to have an idea and then see it realized in a physical form. Something you don't really get in the software world
Tech Strategy continues to be good... I want to write up summaries of some of the classes, but just haven't gotten there. Maybe I'll do a whirlwind pass through them late next week
Summer schedule is out... I think I'm going to take Systems Engineering and System Dynamics this summer, leaving the finance/accounting and supply chain classes for next summer
Fall schedule is also out... pretty much have to take System Architecture and Systems Project Management then. But also have room for at least one other class, just need to decide what. On the plus side, lots of good options to choose from
Fedora 9 is shaping up quite nicely -- only the last minute "oh no!" types of things cropping up now. Feeling a little bit more confident today about getting the release out "on time"
Big presentation for PDD on Friday, big paper for Tech Strategy the first of next week... lots to do, not a lot of time
Warm enough that I'm not letting rain stop me from biking... realized that I didn't take the T to class at all during April. I did let the rain stop me from racing, though
Just another week and a half and things get a lot better...

Busy, busy, week

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:05:35 GMT

As really seems to be the norm, this week is also falling into the nice and busy category.

Had the ERBA quiz on Wednesday and didn't think it was bad at all -- fair in terms of what was asked and if you paid attention to the review session, you had a very good idea of what was coming. Tech Strategy I felt less prepared for than I typically do just because I hadn't had much time to really read and digest the case. We were looking at Adobe and while I had familiarity with a lot of the events covered, that familiarity just didn't run as deeply as some of the other things we've covered. PDD was a pretty interesting class too, even with a guest lecturer -- the speaker was the professor's husband who has a lot of experience in coming up with product ideas and selling them either to companies or through a company he's working for at the time. His experience had largely been in children's toys, but it was still pretty fascinating to hear the stories he had as well as some of the processes and lessons learned.

Then, we had the first SDM Connect event of the year. Unlike the ones I attended last year, this one was a bit more formal -- we brought in a few people from a private investment group who were actively recruiting to get someone new to join their firm. But instead of a more information conversation, it was tilted more towards being a presentation. Which isn't bad, but lots of slides with lots of words aren't my proverbial cup of tea ;-) We had a good turnout, though, which is good as hopefully it will help to ensure that we can bring in more people effectively through the rest of the year.

Today was a day at the office, but the morning started off with my alarm not having been set. Managed to get up just in time to get ready and make the bus, though, so it wasn't an entire bust. Then, I had been planning on looking at some blockers and also sitting down to do a review of pytrainer since the package got submitted. Of course, I had failed to remember that the materials for prep'ing for the office move were present now, and so instead, I spent the day doing that. My cube is now pretty empty looking as everything is instead in boxes. So, now I've shifted things and hopefully I'll get to what I wanted to from today tomorrow.

After coming home, I headed down to the bike shop for our monthly social event where I hung out and just chatted with people. It sounds like we're going to have a good showing for the race at Blue Hills in a little over a week, so hopefully that will work out well. Also, before I headed down there, Kara gave me my birthday present even though I had said she didn't really need to get me anything. She got me the Garmin Edge 305 which I've been wanting for a while but trying not to buy for myself. It should be pretty sweet for keeping better track of my riding and helping to improve my training. The next trick will be getting it to work nicely in Fedora and seeing if I can figure out what some of the web-based apps are looking for in terms of data so that we can have good support for them ;-)

Long Weekend, Cars, Bikes, and then Catching Up

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:55:11 GMT

Since it was a long weekend from classes, I decided to take yesterday off of work and turn it into a long weekend in general which turned out to be a pretty good thing overall. After spending the day at the office on Friday where I successfully threw out a lot of crap from my desk in preparation for the office move, I came home and then we headed out to dinner with a friend of Kara's. Dinner was good, although for some reason, I couldn't fully get into enjoying it.

Saturday, woke up in the morning and started the day off right with a nice long bike ride. Lots of people were out and a fair number of stronger riders within the group made for a good and spirited ride. Got in about 50 miles and felt like my legs were feeling okay after a few days of not. Then some time at Starbucks and a quick stop at the shop and then headed home. Kara and I then headed out to look a little more at cars since hers has been showing some signs of its age. Then, dinner with friends and eventually home to pack up what I needed to have for the race on Sunday.

Sunday was pretty much consumed by the race and not much else between travel time, food, etc. A good time was (I think at least) had by all. See my last post for the details around it.

Yesterday ended up turning into car day. After doing some additional preparation, we headed out again. And a few hours later, we had signed a chunk of paperwork to purchase a new Prius. Okay, that makes it sound like it was a spur of the moment thing, but really, it was the result of a while worth of looking into our options. The hatchback will be good for when I need/want to carry a bike and it's just me or just me and a passenger and it's also practical from other perspectives. Going for the nav system may not quite have been "practical", but it's at least fun ;) It's definitely the car to appeal to geeks. After all of that, we came home, had dinner and did some cleaning up around the house. Later in the evening, we finally got around to watching Juno which was fun.

Today, it was back to the grind of school and work. Although to be fair, I did start out Earth Day with a few of my classmates doing a loop up the bike path and back. Was good to get to show some more people what's out and about and the weather really is getting to be perfect. After that was diving back into the piles and piles of mail and bugs awaiting me. Made pretty good progress plowing through them, though. Also studied a bit for the ERBA quiz tomorrow and did some work for Tech Strategy. I'm pretty glad that tomorrow is the last day of ERBA as having one class less should help a bit for my sanity which is good as the continued march towards the Fedora 9 release isn't helping it any ;-) So maybe it'll balance out. Hopefully information on the summer class schedule will get sent in the next few days as I'd really like to figure out what my plan is for the summer.

But now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go relax and then try to get to bed a little early.

Myles Standish State Park Road Race

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:22:16 GMT

I headed down to Plymouth today to take part in the Myles Standish State Park Road Race as my first race of the season following up on racing last fall in Jamestown, RI. Kara and I picked up Kate and John on our way down to help keep things a bit more exciting. A stop at Starbucks in West Medford and we were on our way. Made reasonable time on the way down, though the park was a bit further from the highway than we expected so we didn't get there as early as I would have liked.

Took my bike off the rack and managed to have my first slight mis-step of the day. In the process of pulling the bike off, I somehow managed to snap the plastic for my speed sensor -- oh well, I can go by feel mostly. Then, I went to top off the tires and the valve of the rear tube blew out. Not the way I wanted to start things out. Changed the tube out without any problems. I do think that I'm done with the Conti tubes, though -- this makes two of them that I've had valve related problems with. Between this and getting down a little late, I ended up not having as much time as I really kind of wanted for warming up. Did a quick warm-up around the parking lot just to mostly make sure everything was feeling good with the bike and with my legs. Then, we started staging. Where we sat on the line for the better part of 20 minutes. Which would have been great for getting warmed up.

In the Cat 5 under 35 field, there were about 25 people. From Quad, there was myself and Kenton. Given that we're both relatively new, we had a pretty simple plan for the race -- "try to stay with the pack, if we fall off, try to work together". As we started off, the pack got going at a pretty good clip, especially considering some of the potholes and upheavals in the pavement. But we managed to stick with the pack for a couple of miles. And then, someone decided to pick things up even more. I was pretty much at my limit and ended up falling back a bit as did a number of other people including Kenton. Of those that had fallen off, there were about five of us and at first, we did an okay job of working together, although everyone did pulls that were too long. As we got through the first lap (~ 5.25 miles), two of the five fell off the back including Kenton. I stuck on the wheels in front of me, though, and the three of us kept going for another lap or so. Then, one of the guys took off leaving just myself and one other guy. This was pretty much my "pack" until the last two miles when another two guys caught up to us and helped to get us energized again. Coming across to the finish, I managed to pull out the tiny bit I had left to keep from being passed by both of the two who had caught us.

I ended up in 18th with a time of 1:00:06 which I was pretty happy with for a course that totaled somewhere between 20 and 21 miles. And I managed to both have fun and learn some things for future races. Things to keep in mind for the future, even if they're a little obvious

Leave more time for warming up. Yeah, I had to deal with some unfortunate bits, but leave time for those. My legs hurt for too much of the first lap of the circuit because I hadn't had a good warm up.
Try to stay together better to work as a team better. And alternately (or better, in addition), try to get better cooperation with whoever else has fallen off the back. The latter sort of worked, but there was some lack of understanding on working together (I had a nice wheel, the guy I was riding with kept not drafting)
If you lose the pack, it's really hard to catch back up. I didn't see them again.
Come up with a more consistent training schedule so that I can be stronger and more consistent in a race.
Racing is fun!

Kara took a lot of good pictures of the race as well -- link to come later once they're up. We then stuck around for the women's race (since Kate was in it) and thus also watched the 3 and 4 men's races. Kate probably had the best day of the Quadies coming in 6th in the women's race, which had 11 riders. The Quad riders in the Cat 4 race also were looking good. All in all, a good showing for Quad and a fun day for me. Now to figure out what race I'm going to do next...

Late night hacking is oh such fun...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:22:35 GMT

Got on a bit of a roll tonight on fixing up some bugs from the Fedora 9 blocker list and so kept going. Haven't had a good productive late night hack sesssion in a while and it felt pretty good. Most of them were little things, but it's always the little bits of polish at the end that help to make a release good. I'm finally starting to feel better about the release as the bugs seem to be on the right trajectory at last and things are shoring up. *knock on wood*

Hopefully a post about today's Tech Strategy discussion (about Danger) tomorrow as it was pretty interesting. But now, bed.

Strategic Engineering

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:35:25 GMT

Had an interesting presentation in today's thesis seminar. The speaker was Professor Olivier de Weck, who has a background in aerospace (fighter jets to be more specific). He talked a little about his background, but recently, his work has been on what he's termed 'strategic engineering' which is basically about designing your system so that you can adapt to future changes with a minimum of pain. In this, you can break it down even more into two pieces. The first is "Design for Changeability" -- this is something that is often done in the software world when you do things like design an API by taking into account how you might want to expand it in the future and also ensuring that you have a way of tracking those changes. The other piece is "Design for Commonality" -- and this is a large part of what the whole Fedora spins process is about as well as the variation within the RHEL product family. Basically, each provides the basic building blocks upon which you build more things on top of.

Then, in contrast to many of the other speakers for thesis seminar, he did a pretty in-depth look at one of the SDM theses which he worked with. The subject of the thesis was change propagation in complex systems -- basically, they were looking at change requests over the life of a product and doing some analysis of grouping and where some of the loci of change were. This was really interesting to see as the application was far different from that of software and yet a lot of the patterns which I have anecdotally noticed from years of dealing with bugzilla emerged through their analysis of the data. From the initial work here, there's definitely a lot more which could be done and in a lot of ways, there's mounds of data that could easily be mined from various open source projects.

Very very interesting stuff and even if I don't end up going in one of these directions for my thesis, I think I need to spend some time reading the research that's been done previously.

Clearly nearing release time

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:24:11 GMT

We're clearly getting closer to time for a release. Lots of things breaking, tensions rising and the like. On the plus side, we're getting a lot fixed. On the downside, there are still a few scary things outstanding :-/

Monday, Monday, Monday!

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:21:53 GMT

Another busy Monday. Today was a little weird with Tech Strategy being directly after than ERBA rather than after lunch. Was a good class, although less interesting than last week's look at Apple. I just felt less engaged by looking at some of Polaroid's mistakes than some of the other cases that we've looked at. I'm not sure if that's because I spent less time preparing for the class (due to the previously mentioned "trying to do less work over the weekend") or if it was the specifics or what, but it just didn't grab me as much.

The afternoon was consumed between trying to pay attention to the rel-eng meeting (and largely failing), doing the ERBA problem set that's due on Wednesday and a quick check-in with the faculty for PDD. Then a quick stop to look at panniers at the bike shop on the way home and it was time to dig into the piles of mail, bugzilla and work for the day. Mostly spent the time looking at some really bizarre bugs but finally tracked them down and got some fixes. Hopefully can continue to knock things out over the next few days to help solidify Fedora 9 as much as possible. Unfortunately, getting tablet PCs to work out of the box just didn't happen in time, although I have a good solid start and should be able to finish getting it working for Fedora 10. And it's always good to have a nice list of things to do for the next release before the current one is out the door ;-)

Weekend

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:56:03 GMT

Decided to try to take some time this weekend for myself and not work as much as I have been on the weekends. Have been feeling a little bit less than fully charged, so figured it was worth it to get back up to my normal level. So since the weather looked like it was going to be disgusting on Saturday, we took the day for running some errands and some other things that had been being put off for a while. Of course, this meant that there was some really nice weather and I missed out on a good day for biking :-/ C'est la vie.

Yesterday, went ahead and went out even though the weather wasn't entirely ideal. Got in a good 45 mile ride, although for some reason, I seemed to be losing people at every turn. Was a little bit weird, but lots of people just had time commitments I think. Had a good little core group, though, and we rode pretty hard with little in the way of stopping. The latter being a bit part of what I'm trying to do more of this season -- stopping less. Although the Quad ride is good, there's way too many long stops. So, trying to stop less and thus get in extra miles and have it be a better workout.

After the ride, I headed up to Tufts to help marshall for the Beanpot Classic Crit. Stood on corner 3 for about 3 hours during the collegiate women's A race, collegiate men's A race and the cat 3/4 race. There were some good things going on but the marshalling part lacked some excitement. Apparently I needed to be on one of the other corners for it to be exciting :-) Was still good to do, though. Then, dinner at Za which was very good -- macaroni and cheese on a pizza sounds wrong, but it tastes oh so right. We'll have to go back for sure.

So yeah, pretty good weekend and I've been feeling a bit better and more productive today as a result.

Manic Mondays

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:12:41 GMT

This half of the semester, it seems like my Mondays are incredibly busy and jam-packed with things needing to be done. Aside from just classes (which take up a fair bit of time), it seems like there's also always something that needs to be finished up for either Tech Strategy or PDD during my lunch "break" which I had been spending doing more work-related things. Then, after class are the ever-present ERBA problem sets which are due on Wednesday. On the plus side, by spending the time on them on Monday late afternoon and evening, I don't have to work on them on Tuesday. But it does lead to me feeling a little frantic on Mondays. Especially as I then go home and spend whatever is left of the evening catching up with email and bugzilla and also trying to fix various things.

Oh well, I think there's only one more week like this one so it should be getting better. And Tuesday is good for catching my breath again.

Weekend Riding

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:43:21 GMT

Saturday morning woke up to a drizzly and overcast morning with wet roads. But, didn't let that stop me and got ready and headed down to the shop for the Quad ride. All told, there were only six of us that decided to go out between the weather and the earlier start. But we ended up doing a pretty good ride. Out to Carlisle and back with a trip up Strawberry Hill. Was a pretty solid ride and after only a little bit of rain, the ride turned a lot nicer. And the new wheels performed quite well. Then, came home, took a nap and then we went and ran a few errands to round out the evening.

Sunday morning woke up again to more overcast skies and a little bit cooler temperatures. But undeterred, I headed down to the shop again for the Quad ride. There was a significantly larger group for the day and after some warming up, there was definitely an attempt to try to get the legs moving. After the North Bridge in Concord, we were left entirely with a group of stronger riders and then sort of ended up having that group split in two at various points. Rode pretty hard through Strawberry Hill, Curve Street, down through Great Brook and around the rest of the loop. Came home and instead of a nap, got to dive into getting all of the homework I needed to get done for the weekend :-)

All told for the weekend, got in ninety miles of pretty good riding. It felt good to do some longer rides and also to push them a little bit harder than I've been doing the past while. I'm currently looking at doing at least a few races for the season, so it's time to be pushing a bit and also trying to make my riding a bit more structured. But, still want to have fun doing so. Also, I'm planning on doing the Seacoast Safari again as it was a fun ride last year with a nice route.

Ghost bugs

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:04:41 GMT

Feel like I spent pretty much the entire day just chasing down ghosts. Things that have been reported fleetingly but weren't reproducible. Luckily, was able to reproduce one or two of them so it wasn't entirely frustration. The ones I was able to reproduce were because davej came into the office and brought his eeePC, so I was able to reproduce one or two things that have been reported on the box and actually track down the cause. Of course, the bugs that he had noticed and reported disappeared into the wind when I tried to look at them. Blargh. Very very frustrating.

And interestingly on a related note -- after using the eee, I'm actually pretty non-interested in them. Sure, the form factor is nice. But the keyboard is absolutely impossible to use. And after using it for a little bit, I don't even see how it would be that practical for just a travel device for things like mail, etc. The Nokia tablets seem better suited to it and even smaller. Maybe it's just the trying to squish a standard Fedora user experience onto the screen and if apps that were better suited were being used, it would make more sense to me. But, since lots of other people care, hopefully the few remaining little install niggles for them will be worked out in the next couple of days so that the process of using Fedora 9 on one can be pretty straight-forward.

Over the hump...

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:48:28 GMT

Unfortunately, the not feeling well persisted beyond Sunday. Woke up on Monday and forced myself to head in for class anyway. It was the first day of Tech Strategy and I didn't really want to miss it -- definitely the right call to make. The class is very intense, but interesting. The class is run case style, so plenty of opportunities to chime in and get some different viewpoints. Monday's class was specifically around E-Ink and some of what they faced in their early days. Was interesting to learn some of that history. Also, the class is one of those that is going to be incredibly helpful in building up a way of thinking about things that's consistent and not just arbitrary.

Monday also had a pretty good guest lecture in PDD -- we had a guy in from one of the local (video) game companies come in and talk about the design of games. It was an interesting talk from the "well, video games are cool" angle as well as some of the parallels that the game studios have to what we see sometimes. They've gone from pretty small teams to much larger ones and are struggling with some of the questions of how to keep effective communication
It was pretty cool and interesting on some level to see how they struggle with a lot of the same issues of scheduling and releases and also, some of the approaches that are starting to be taken to address that in their world.

Yesterday, I decided not to go in for the thesis seminar and instead spent the day working from my couch. Overall, pretty productive just going through and working on some of the bugs that need fixing for Fedora 9. Nothing ground breaking or that interesting, though. It's to the point where most of what needs doing is just kind of the dredge cleanups. But still, more testing needed! And then file bugs. And thus give us more to do ;-)

Later in the day, I headed down to the bike shop to pick up my bike as I had left it there for a tune-up on Sunday. While I was there, I went ahead and made the plunge to pick up some nice wheels. Looking forward to the weekend when I can really give them a good spin. Although it's temping to bike into the office tomorrow on the Merlin rather than taking the bus.

Today, woke up and was feeling pretty much entirely better. So biked in to Cambridge and was in class a good chunk of the day again. Tech Strategy was again interesting, today looking at Lexar. One thing that's becoming very obvious to me is that it's tough to look back at these case studies and try to analyze the decisions which were made and talk about what should or shouldn't have been done while at the same time trying to avoid having your ideas colored by what has come since. In this case, the question of Lexar branching out from their "digital film" products (CF cards and the like) and into USB sticks really doesn't necessarily seem like it would have been a good idea only knowing what they knew -- the USB stick wasn't a given and realistically, the main reason they've become as practical as they have is the drastic drop in the prices of flash due to increased demand. Which has been driven quite heavily by Apple and the iPod. It definitely gives me a bit to chew on and think about.

April Fool's Reminder

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:21:39 GMT

Note: Don't believe anything you read today on the internet.

Events for the week

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 02:01:53 GMT

Oh, and this presentation at Luis's old gig looks like it should be pretty interesting. Might have to try to head down that way on Friday.

Weekend

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:49:15 GMT

Overall had a pretty good weekend, at least until today. Decided on Friday that the weather was a little bit iffy and so I'd just work from home. Also, we had been considering going to see a movie and figured it'd be easier if we weren't going after I got home from the office via the bus. Although I got some good work done, we didn't end up going to see a movie :-) Instead, we just grabbed dinner and headed home since Kara wasn't feeling well.

Yesterday morning, woke up and headed out on the Quad ride. Through a little bit of convincing, managed to convince a significant number of people to head out to Carlisle letting us get about 40 miles in. Afterwards, Kara and I went out to run some errands and then headed over to Dave Malcolm's (... he without a blog, thus who should have one :-) for a game night. A good time was had by all, especially while playing Betrayal (which, note to self: need to get a copy of)

Today, I woke up feeling like my head had been run over by a mack truck :-/ Congested, headache, throat ache... the works. Thus, I've spent most of the day on the couch, although I have done some things like catching up with bugzilla, mail and the like as well as doing the reading I need to do for tomorrow's class. Although I had aspirations to take a look at my problem set that's due on Wednesday, I think at this point, that's going to get put off until tomorrow or Tuesday. And the rest of the evening is going to consist of some orange juice, some Tylenol and some mindless TV watching.

Hack, hack, hack, hack

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:55:06 GMT

Fedora 9 Beta was released earlier in the week and I've been spending my "Spring Break" buried in code and trying to make sure everything is working well. Way too much to fix, way too little time. It's just been one of these weeks where it feels like everything I touch is broken somehow which is a little less than fun.

Back to it, though...

Good article about Slipstream

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:48:44 GMT

I don't know if there's anyone who reads this that's actually interested in competitive cycling, but there's a really good article up on ESPN about the Slipstream/Chipotle team and their experiences at the Tour of California a couple of weeks ago. Shows the incredible measures being gone to by the team to help ensure that their riders remain clean and competitive which is something that no other sport can really claim. Read it here.

Seen on Podium Cafe, which is good reading for anyone interested in the world of competitive cycling

Weekend's End

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 02:17:29 GMT

And another weekend draws to a close. Much like the esteemed Mr. Frields, I stepped back from both work and class stuff for the weekend to just generally have a lazy, relaxing and enjoyable time. Friday, as I guessed, was largely spent lazing around. I slept in a bit, cleaned my bike, we picked up a couple of things at the Home Depot. The big achievement for the day was going out for a 30-ish mile ride with Kate after she got off from work. Just a short loop out to Concord/Carlisle and back. Was a good workout, though, given the amount of wind... sometimes, that cyclist you see in the middle of the lane isn't there because they're trying to take the lane; instead, the wind has put them there.

Saturday was a day of going out and being cultured. At least, sort of. Kara and I had made plans to go see Avenue Q and ended up going with pam and spot. The play was, as expected, quite funny although definitely somewhat ... less than proper :-) Hence the "sort of" for being cultured. The Colonial Theater in Boston, though, is very very cool from an architectural perspective, it was built in 1900 and there's just a lot of neat and intricate woodwork and other things. Our seats were nosebleed, but you could see everything perfectly well. A good time was had by all and we got home and mostly just vegetated for the rest of the evening.

Today was a riding day again and I got up and headed out and did a 45 mile loop to Westford and back. We rode pretty hard and I'm starting to feel my legs and my form coming back. While I'm noticing it a little tonight, through the ride I felt strong even up to the very end and was pushing myself pretty hard at that point. Still need to decide if I'm going to make a real effort at racing this season or not -- on the one hand, it could be fun. On the other, I'm not sure if I really have the time. But even if I don't go all out with racing, I think I'll at least try to do a few. Do another road race or two to see how I do and also probably should try out a crit, although I doubt that's really my racing strength.

This week, it's all work all the time. Or at least, lots of work lots of the time. Will still probably try to have some downtime in the evenings since it is technically spring break and Fedora 9 beta is done.

Spring break is here

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:47:38 GMT

A busy, busy week is now behind me and I get some small measure of relaxation. Spring break is here at last. Of course, I have to work next week instead of having the week entirely off, but it should still be quite a bit less hectic. And today just happens to be a holiday for work and I have no classes. So if you don't see me online much today (or over the weekend in general), don't be surprised.

But this was a pretty good week really. Was a little bummed by the weather last weekend leading to me not really getting any riding in, but so it goes. The first part of the week, I took one of the Sloan SIP workshops titled "Leadership Under Fire: Managing Hostility". This was an interactive session where we got to look into some techniques for dealing with a hostile audience as well as getting to practice them. Which also meant we got to practice being a hostile audience, although I don't think that was the real intent :-) It was actually very, very helpful and hopefully I'll be able to actually have some of what was learned sink in rather so that I can use it in the future when in such situations.

Also related to classes, my Product Design and Development group has now narrowed things down to an explicit product concept as opposed to just having a few floating around. We think that it's pretty cool and the people that we've talked with about it also think so. Stay tuned for more information on this as things move onward.

For von Hippel's innovation class, I finished up the second paper last night and now am completely done with that class. Overall, quite enjoyable. I would have liked to have been able to dive a bit deeper into some of the things we talked about rather than remaining at the high level, but part of that is due to the fact that I have a fair bit of familiarity with the subject matter already. For the second half of the semester, I'll instead be taking Tech Strategy which is looking like it is going to be an amazing class, although with a fair bit of work. But I'm still looking forward to that starting up.

Outside of classes, there's been the big push over the past couple of weeks to finish up the beta for Fedora 9. We've now finally done so and it's on its way to the mirrors now. That means that we can sit back and really start adding the polish and final bugfixing to help make Fedora 9 as good as possible. I encourage everyone to at least download the beta live image and try it out on your hardware and file bugs if things don't work. And even more importantly, if you can help fix things, contribute patches :-)

But today is not going to be about any of those things. Today is about relaxing. I think I'm going to take the time to really clean my bikes good, play some video games, maybe waste some time down at the bike shop and just generally unwind.

Lou Gerstner

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:26:54 GMT

Yesterday morning, Lou Gerstner came to speak to SDM for a bit. Prior to the session we received a copy of his book that we were asked to read so that we could ask good questions. Unlike a lot of the cohort, I grabbed some time for reading it (hooray for bus time even if i'd rather be riding). The book was quite good and gave a good account of how he managed to go in and transform IBM. Some of the most interesting thoughts were about the culture of IBM and how that is really the entire game but also that changing culture is not easy. Rather than having him stand up and give us a canned speech, he instead took questions and gave us very honest answers - he seemed like an extremely straight shooter in that respect.

The question (or answer really) that struck me the most was one about IBM's handling of the pc in the 80s. While he wasn't there at the time, he definitely seemed to think it was a bit of a missed oppurtunity. More interesting still was his opinion on how open standards continue to win out over proprietary ones and that he sees this happening in software as well, although it may take another 40 years to be fully realized. He also made some thinly veiled comments against a certain monopolistic software company ;).

All in all a very interesting session... I probably should have taken some notes to have more to write about, but so it goes.

Weekend

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:37:02 GMT

Had a pretty good weekend and even managed to get in a little bit of relaxing (which I'll pay for later, but I needed it). Friday night after meeting with my PDD group, I headed towards home and we got dinner with some friends. Mmmm, thai food. Also sat around for a while just chatting. Then headed our separate ways and Kara and I headed home and played a bit of Rock Band.

Saturday was monsoon day and also the day that Kara and I were going to observe as our anniversary, given our busy school schedules. So we ran some errands, worked on some homework together and then ordered dinner in and watched a rented movie. It was just the low key sort of evening that we both needed.

Yesterday, woke up early and headed out with the Quad folks for a ride in the wind. While windy, it was good to get out again as it'd been way too many weeks since I'd ridden with the group. And similarly, too long since I'd ridden the Merlin. Thus, a very enjoyable ride -- only about 35 miles, but that's okay for March. Eventually headed home (after length stops at Starbucks and the shop), tried to work a little and then headed into school to meet with my PDD group again. Which ends up meaning that my total milage for the day was like 50. I think the last time I did a 50 mile day was November, so this morning, my legs were wondering why I was pushing them again as I rode in to school.

But a very good weekend. And now a busy week ahead. It's the SDM business trip, so lots of people on campus and lots of activities, etc. Also, have to finish up my two papers for von Hippel's class, do an ERBA problem set and get ready for the ERBA quiz next week. Oh, and finalize our selection of a product concept for PDD for next week. And on top of that, there's also the Fedora freeze. So, yeah... busy, sporadic availability and seeing just how much can be gotten done over the next 100 hours or so ;-)