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| 2008-05-13 23:05 |
| Bike Week, Two Days In |
| Public |
| cycling |
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As previously mentioned, this week is Bike Week and so I'm pushing myself to only travel by bike for the week for going to school/work rather than availing myself of some of the other options. Plus, it's spring and the office isn't that far, so biking in to work gets me some good extra miles.
Yesterday was supposed to be cool and rainy, but the weather forecasters were wrong and the day ended up being just cool and windy. Biked to school per normal, no real oddities. Legs were a little sore from Sunday's ride, but I took it easy and just tried to lightly spin which worked out well.
Today ended up being significantly warmer than I expected, so I ended up peeling off some clothes on my way out to the office. I also happened to be behind a guy on the bike path who had both of the pannier bags that I've been considering (the Arkel Bug and the Arkel Commuter). This was convenient as I was able to get some real opinions and based on that, I think I'm going to go with the Commuter.
My way home ended up being a bit more interesting... I passed a few Quad riders on 225 as I was heading back but only noticed as I was flying past them spinning for all I could (ahhh, the fixie on downhills :). They did eventually catch me with a "don't you hate having to race to catch up to a commuter on a single speed" and I rode with them for a ways. Fell off as they sped down Lowell Rd and I continued on. Happened upon someone on the other side of Concord Center with a mechanical and stopped to try to help them. Finally made it home as it was getting dark and then ended up helping my next door neighbor, who needed to borrow a pump so that he can bike to work tomorrow.
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| 2008-05-11 22:10 |
| Time for a spring century |
| Public |
| cycling |
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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.
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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...
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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 ;-)
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| 2008-04-22 22:54 |
| Long Weekend, Cars, Bikes, and then Catching Up |
| Public |
 tired |
| cycling, fedora, life, sdm |
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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.
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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...
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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.
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| 2008-04-08 14:42 |
| Weekend Riding |
| Public |
| cycling |
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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.
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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.
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| 2008-03-24 18:48 |
| Good article about Slipstream |
| Public |
| cycling |
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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
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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 ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 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.
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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.
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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 ;-)
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| 2008-03-04 08:54 |
| Visibility |
| Public |
| cycling |
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On my ride home last night, I had a cyclist mention the brightness of my lights and then at a later stop light, I had a passenger in the car next to me roll down their window and ask about the lights I use. While the first time I've had someone in a car ask or say anything, I get comments from other cyclists and pedestrians semi-regularly. Which, on the one hand, is good. It means that the light setup I'm using is very visible. On the other hand, it means that many other cyclists are less visible. Good lights make a huge difference both for seeing and being seen.
Oh, and for reference, my normal lighting strategy includes the following lights:
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The month started out with the beginning of spring classes. A month in and I think i've got a good feel for the amount of work required for them. With 36 credits, its a pretty sizable amount but doable. It helps that for PDD I have a pretty awesome group. Building a product is going to take some time, though. ERBA is matching my expectations pretty well although the class drags at times with some of the questions. The idea of broadening it to also include some game theory types of things is interesting and probably compelling to be considered. Professor von Hippel's class is, as he said on the first day of class, fun. I probably should get started on the papers for it this weekend, though. The discussions and ideas are quite good and incredibly relevant in open source where its easy for lead users to contribute and help innovate.
On the work front, its been a balancing act. I've had to let a few things slide a little, but I still think I've gotten some cool work done for Fedora 9. There's also been a large chunk of time taken by a non-Fedora project.
Outside of those, its been a crappy month for riding. The weather has alternated between pouring rain, snow/ice and super cold. Even my commuting has been a lot less. I'm optimistic that things will get back to a more normal level in March. The fact that I didn't sign up for the March T pass will impact that too :). And hopefully the weekends will be nice for getting in some longer rides on the Merlin too. But given the weather (okay, and a few other reasons ;), I did pick up a PS3 and Rock Band. The PS3 actually is pretty nice from a hardware point of view and some of the games look impressive. And Rock Band is as much fun as its made out to be ;)
But now, back to work...
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| 2008-02-04 17:53 |
| A sad day for cycling |
| Public |
| cycling |
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Today is a pretty sad day for the cycling world. Sheldon Brown, perhaps the best known name online for cycling advocacy as well as a wealth of technical knowledge, passed away last night after an unexpected heart attack. I've definitely used the information on his site on a number of occasions after learning of it very soon after starting to bike (again) a few years ago.
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| 2008-01-10 03:08 |
| And done |
| Public |
| tired |
| cycling, sdm |
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And it's done. Or at least, as done as it's going to be. In the morning, we just need to install new batteries and do a quick check to ensure that everything is still running well and that nothing spontaneously combusted overnight. Then, the competition will tell the tale.
On a perhaps interesting (and only vaguely related) note, the difference in traffic on the streets between say midnight and 3 am is striking. I think I passed a total of ten cars biking home. The lights all worked in my favor, too. This made it one of my fastest trips home yet.
Now, for sleep.
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| 2007-12-30 22:35 |
| 2007 Cycling Comes to an End |
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| cycling |
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Finally today was a day where it wasn't raining or snowing or anything along those lines and so I managed to get out for a good ride with the Quad folks this morning. The roads were mostly clear, although some places were wet from yesterday's rain and there were still a few ice patches. Still, all in all, things weren't bad at all. Went up to Concord and then to Fern's in Carlisle and then back home the way we came. About 35 miles at 17 mph which is okay for the end of December in 35 degree weather after a few weeks of barely riding at all. And I really was needing to get a good ride in.
And given that the snow has already started again for tonight's storm (estimated 4-8 inches overnight), I suspect that will be it for riding for the year. That brings the total up to somewhere between 4200 and 4300 miles as opposed to last year's roughly 1800. ( And now for some stats and facts that are likely to be boring to anyone other than me... )
Given that I'm not sure how much riding I'll have time to do in 2008 with the additional constraint of school, I think that I'm only going to try for 4000-5000 miles again. With the increased amount of commuting miles, I think that it should still be pretty achievable. I'm currently only planning to do one charity ride this year but I may also try a few more races. In any case, I'm pretty happy with my 2007 cycling year and am looking forward to an equally good 2008.
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Good weekend overall. Went to see the play Brendan Friday night. It was pretty good. The theater that it was performed in was really nice... new and smaller, which made being able to see not even close to a problem. It was also nice afterwards when we were walking to get dinner as I could look at Google Maps on my phone to ensure we were walking in the right direction.
Saturday, I woke up and decided against going for a ride. Instead, spent a little bit of time poking at some non-Fedora work stuff. Went and ran some errands then came home. Played a bit of Guitar Hero while Kara worked on a paper for class. Decided to take it easy in the evening so just ordered pizza and watched some episodes of Dexter and a few other things which had been building up on the Tivo.
Yesterday, woke up and did ride. Did about 40 miles and the weather was definitely the nicer of the two days. Although maybe a tiny bit colder it was a lot less windy making for a more pleasant ride. Not a lot of people out, though -- we only had at most 20 people. But I guess that's the norm as it gets colder.
Today has thus far been spent getting a handle on some backlogged bugs and preparing an update for some bugs which people have found with pirut in the first little bit of Fedora 8 being in the wild. Also, responding to some of the feedback on the post of a major refactoring of livecd-creator. Unfortunately, the latter has seen less feedback than I would have liked, but not less than I realistically expected. Infrastructure tools are something that people just want to work -- how they work is less of a concern. But the idea is to start having an API beneath livecd-creator that can be used by other tools and also a move towards hopefully sharing more code with anaconda.
Over the rest of the week, I'm hoping to get a little further both with the livecd bits as well as the filesystem resizing code for anaconda. It's a short week, though, so not sure if I'll actually be that successful.
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| 2007-11-13 23:00 |
| Fedora 8: Billions and Billions Served |
| Public |
| cycling, fedora |
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Had a pretty relaxing weekend to decompress from the Fedora 8 release. Got in some good riding even though the temperature has dropped a bit (highs of the lower 40s). Had missed going out on both days of the weekend due to weather the past few weeks, so it was nice to get back to that. And there was a good group out for riding both days. Saturday evening, went fake (candlepin) bowling with some people for Kara's birthday and then headed back to our place where we played various things on the Wii. Oh, I also made some reasonable progress in Guitar Hero over the weekend :)
Monday was spent catching up with mail and bug traffic since I didn't look at it much over the weekend. Mail was a bit busy between discussions of improvements to codeina and some discussion of directions to go with the distribution source control. The former unfortunately spiraled a bit out of control and into meta issues rather than more concretely looking at how to integrate with the packaging system and making it so that users in other parts of the world can have an easy drop in way to get the codecs from their third party repo of choice.
The source management discussion was a little better and there definitely seems to be a growing agreement that a DSCM has advantages. Unfortunately getting people looking at the bigger workflow issues is hard. I think that's partly because there is a large gap between contributors who are developers on the upstream code and want to have an easier time merging patches, rebasing, etc vs those who package and are pretty happy with the upstream archives. I think we currently very much optimize for the latter case. This isn't bad though; we just need to look at ways to have more infrastructure to set up and maintain a more source centric repo while making it easy to move changes back and forth between representations. I bet quilt, stgit, etc will help.
Other than reading through those discussions, I spent the afternoon looking at the inevitable F8 bugs that slipped in. A hang during depsolving and a hand on some types of updates are the big ones and fixes for both are in hand. Still need to fix a problem with kmod updates and also a segv on installs related to pcmcia, but overall, things look pretty good. The problems occur at points where we haven't deleted what's on the disk and that are pretty doable for fixing with updates.
Today I spent working some more on the little project I'm hoping to push for Fedora 9. I've been a little tight-lipped, because I didn't want to raise any hopes, but at this point, I'm pretty comfortable saying that we should have partition and filesystem resizing support in the installer for Fedora 9. Thus far, I've just got mostly prototype code, but it's working pretty well, so it's just a matter of cleaning up a few of the hacks and then spending some time on the UI. Well, and lots and lots of testing. This will be a feature that it will be good to finally land as its been requested for a long, long time. It's just that we now have taken care of the various things which made it impractical to do in the past. Screenshots soon, code to be commited before too long as well.
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hungry
relaxed