Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh, still in Virginia! My trip was originally extended from Monday to Thursday. I was up all night Wednesday night tearing down our old cage and doing some work so there’d be no reason to extend my trip again. Maintenance work went sideways this morning, so here I am leaving Friday. All I can do is step aside and be amused at the situation. I’ll believe it when I’m at AUS, hunting for my truck in the parking lot. I don’t care about staying another night, I just have to get out of the damn datacenter to where there’s sun, warmth, and quiet.
Still in Virginia
Jun 8th, 2006 by bwann
11 days of Virginia
May 28th, 2006 by bwann
Here I am in Ashburn, Virginia. I’ve been here for eleven days now, since May 17, for work. If all goes to plan, I should be flying back in eight more days. It’s been a hard week, with some very long exhausting hours. I finally caught up on my sleep over the past couple of days and feel a lot better now. I’ve spent all day in the hotel catching up on Lost and being lazy in general. That’s an odd thing to say, since I’ve spent all last week in a datacenter, rarely seeing daylight. But at the hotel, there’s no constant loud noise of fans and air handlers, I’m not on a schedule, not lifting boxes around, and not on my feet.
Yesterday we wandered into downtown DC for a few hours and wandered around the mall. The Air & Space Museum was closed as soon as we go there, but we got in some time at the National Museum of Natural History. I need to come out to spend a weekend at the mall and check out all the buildings. It was a great day for wandering, nice weather. I didn’t expect we’d be going to DC, so I didn’t bring my cameras with me.
I hate iTerm
May 14th, 2006 by bwann
iTerm sucks. I’ve had it with it, I’ve switched back to Terminal.app. I think the whole reason I switched to begin with was because iTerm did transparency support. I spend all my time with my head buried in terminal windows and it’s handy to see what’s behind the window. Terminal.app has since added that feature. I have no use for tabs or bookmarks, I always have multiple terminal windows open anyways because I want to see both at the same time. Neither seem to handle foreign character sets very well when I’m using UTF-8.
With iTerm, I’ve been fighting with some text click-and-drag “feature” that always bites me in the ass by doing things with text that I’m not expecting. I don’t know what triggers it, and it seems there is no way to turn it off either. I’ll go to highlight some text to copy, then some green icon appears next to it, and it tries to drag a huge chunk of text with it. I have to be careful where I release, or I’ll dump it back into my command prompt, irc, or some other window. The last straw was when I copied and pasted an email from a unix system via iTerm into a web form. The bloody app copied all the whitespace over too, resulting in a horribly wrapped post and missing new line feeds.
Armadillo Hill Country Classic 2006
May 13th, 2006 by bwann
Today was the Armadillo Hill Country classic. This was by far the hardest ride I’ve ever done. Being in Hill Country, it was 107 miles of rolling hills. The wind kept shifting all day, essentially we were in a headwind on every leg of the route which took a lot out of me. While I didn’t finish, I at least got in my 100 miles.
I had bought some tri shorts to wear on the ride which are similar to cycling shorts except they’re shorter, have less padding, and are intended to swim/cycle/run in. At first I didn’t miss the padding, but riding on some rough roads bounced me around and really pounded my tail-end. I wish I had used the Chamois Butt’r before I left. By mile 40 either the lack of padding stopped burning and hurting or I stopped caring.
Speed wise, I did a great deal of passing people. After the 78/105 mile routes diverged, it got pretty lonely on the route. I rode in a pack for a while, but somewhere they disappeared. As usual, I wasn’t able to keep up with the cute blonde tri girls for too long.
When I got to mile 50 or so, I was in a lot of pain all over. The constant rolling hills/inclines and headwind was taking a toll. My leg muscles were shredded, I was coughing, and I didn’t have much energy. Had a SAG wagon been there, I probably would’ve rode back. I popped 400mg of ibuprophen, within several minutes all the pain went away and I felt alive again. I pushed on through the headwind, declining SAG rides.
My feel good stint ended around mile 90. I was sapped of energy and the pain was coming back. I was starting to feel hot with the 95 degree heat and humidity cooking me. I kept dousing myself with water which helped. I was determined to at least get in my 100 miles. The final rest stop before Liberty Hill was right at 100 miles. I waited there and had a SAG bring me in. I just didn’t have the energy to go the extra seven miles not knowing if it would be into a headwind or climbing. I was around the last 10-15 riders to be swept up, and had been out riding for 8.5 hours. That figures to be over 5,000 calories burned.
All the SAGs were helpful and always checking on us. All the rest stops had a great amount of different food; sandwiches, chips, pickles, Pringles, trail mix, bananas, oranges. Pringles, pickles, Ruffles, Fritos are wonderful riding food!
I came home and promptly jumped in a ice bath. Shocking at first, afterwards my legs felt tingly and nice. I didn’t dehydrate myself this time, I only lost a couple of pounds. Now I’m craving a big sloppy cheeseburger, queso and chips.
Film is hard
May 12th, 2006 by bwann
I’ve been slacking again. I finally got two rolls of film processed and scanned today. They’ve been in my cameras since New Year’s Eve. I should’ve taken many more but for whatever reason I didn’t. I can’t figure out how I took a crooked picture in Seattle, I was using a tripod at the time.
After sick
May 8th, 2006 by bwann
Tonight was the first time I ran after being sick. It felt like my lungs were coated with concrete, I couldn’t get a good deep solid breath. I’ve been chugging expectorant, I’m hoping this stuff plus running will break up and open my lungs back up. This weekend is the ACA Hill Country Classic. I’m looking forward to it, I’ve already done a century this year plus all my running so maybe this one won’t tear me up like last year’s did.
Century waypoints
May 5th, 2006 by bwann
I took my GPS receiver along for the ride yesterday. Route waypoints:
- Start N 30 12.898′ W 97 41.775′
- 7.9 mi N 30 08.393 W 97 39.821, stop for hour while FD puts out brush fire around highway
- ~20 mi N 30 01.583 W 97 32.548
- ~30 mi N 29 57.624 W 97 27.087, C-store before turning off to FM 20
- ~38 mi N 29 51.190 W 97 31.518, C-store before turning off to FM 713, last stop for water
- ~50 mile turnaround N 29 48.451′ W 97 18.934′, Jeddo, TX — totally 4″ away from Austin
Horribly Hilly Hundreds
May 4th, 2006 by bwann
I snagged this off of Chris’ site, Horribly Hilly Hundreds. 200 kilometers (124 miles) of hellish hills, totalling around 10,000 feet of ascension. Totally sick, I love it. I might just have to box up my bike and travel up north for this sucker. I suspect this would be way worse than doing the Mansfield dam loop twice. Although now that I think about it, I’m not going to be around for much of May and this thing is in the middle of June. Not much time to be radically ramping up weight to leg presses and squats.
1st time in Virginia
Apr 30th, 2006 by bwann
I returned from Virginia yesterday and am almost over my cold. Descending in the plane wasn’t painful, but my head felt like it had a lot of pressure built up on it. I went through almost an entire roll of toilet paper to blow my nose. It and my lips were so chapped it was painful to even eat food.
The whole Dulles/Ashburn/Sterling/Herndon area is weird. It feels like it’s barren land with nothing there except roads to take you to other roads. You’re driving along, “oh there’s AOL”, four miles later of nothing but trees, “oh there’s verizon”, four miles later, “oh there’s IAD”. I wasn’t quite ready for the 44 F mornings and 70 F daytime highs, since it’s been hitting the 100s here in Austin.
I’ve never been to an Equinix facility before. This one was really nice for a datacenter, or even a business. It was also much, much bigger than I expected (it’s about 500 x 200 feet in size). It’s in a big warehouse, all the cable runs and piping around 8-10 feet off the floor, with another 10-20 feet to the roof. I’m curious to see what the facility looks like from above all the cages. The place is kept dark except for the area you’re working in, so it was cool to see rows and rows of blinky lights on computers. I’m glad they spruced the place up with colors, to keep it from being an incredibly dull grey and white datacenter.
The other facility was bought by Equinix and “Equinix-ized” according to our implementation manager. The customer area wasn’t nearly as posh as the other, and what’s up with the glass tube mantraps? Inside the colo, it was the same as the other, just cooler. Somebody had a cage of a couple thousand 1 U servers which was awesome as hell. Approaching the cage, you could hear the roar of the huge array of fans. Some cabinets had a different type of servers with more fans, so as you’d walk past, the roaring would get louder with a higher pitch. It sounded like you were at a race track with cars zipping by.
Another thing about the facilities, there’s rarely any interaction with the staff. The times you do see them, you’ve gotta have a ticket opened. It’s sort of odd, there’s nobody around you can ask a question to, except maybe the security guard to ask where something is at; everything else is emailed in.
Working on site seemed to make time drag. I put in 13+16+6 hour days and it felt like I got nothing done. I was in a mad rush on Saturday to wrap things up and leave for the airport by 2. I took a direct flight back to Austin and caught up on a bit of sleep.
Nyquil hates me
Apr 26th, 2006 by bwann
I had an incredibly horrible Nyquil trip last night. It was so weird I don’t know if I can describe it. Pretty much every 15 minutes I woke up having to blow my nose. I didn’t really sleep, every time I’d close my eyes I’d have all these recursive visuals of boxes and bars. I tried to think of something, anything else and it didn’t work. Anytime I got out of the covers I got so cold. By 6 AM I guess my sinuses were pretty well drained, I stopped having to blow my nose. Maybe that’s good I got it all out, but I’m totally exhausted this morning. By 7 AM I was so tired of laying in bed and got up. I hope I catch up on sleep on the plane.
