complich8′s journal

Ok, so I went basically the same ~2.5 mile neighborhood circuit I rode yesterday, with minor modifications (a right turn instead of a left at the bottom of the hill, and a straight shot up mannakee). About 75 degrees out, beautiful clear sky. I’m a little more comfortable with being on the bike and a little more comfortable with the handling and balance today, a lot less wobbling and skating across lanes and such, and I’ve got a better feel for the braking profile of the bike with me on it.

I had four stops and one walking section, which is about the same as I did yesterday. Stop at the corner of mannakee and carr, then again around the corner of nelson and crocus to catch my breath and prepare for the big hills. Third stop was at the bottom of the hill at nelson and college parkway, and the last one was when I realized halfway up that I wasn’t ready to go up the hill to my house without walking. On the second stop, more than halfway done, I drank almost the entire water bottle I brought with me. This is going to be a long road.

So here’s my current goals, in order of term:
(1) get more comfortable with up and down-shifting in-flight.
(2) find someplace that’s much more relatively flat to ride
(3) do that 2.5 mile neighborhood circuit without stops (given the hills, this is actually pretty challenging).
(4) rockville millennium trail circuit (~12 miles)
(5) 20 miles

My real goal is to achieve at least the first 4 by the end of 2009. I’ve got half a year to ramp up and do it… and realistically probably more like now until october-ish… so probably 5 months?

Nice thing is with a circuit this short, after the tiredness and thirst go away I’ve only got a little residual soreness, which doesn’t really impair me all that much the rest of the day…

Ok, so this is sort of reverse chronological order, but that’s fine…

So the first thing’s first. I just got a bike. It’s a Surly CrossCheck, 62cm frame (biggest they make). Shimano Tiagra/Deore components. Some crazy ultra-heavy-duty BMX downhill pedals. I’d been shopping for a bike for a couple months and ended up looking at that one.

Picked it up from a place called Silver Cycles down in Silver Spring, about 12 miles out by highway. Nice folks, helpful, but it’s a fairly small shop so they don’t have huge amounts of stuff in stock.

For the whole setup (bike, pedals, computer, helmet, brake interruptor levers, helmet, pump, supplies, lights, and a car carrier) I think I dropped about $1400… ’cause grabbing a $300 walmart bike would probably not work too well for someone of my stature.

Well, after about two and a half weeks to get it all there and all together, I finally went and got the bike early this afternoon. And today’s ride stats go something like this: time spent on the bike so far: about 30 minutes. Distance covered: 2.5 miles. Distance walked of that: less than 1/4 mile. Lessons learned: my neighborhood is a freaking BRUTAL place to ride a bike. I mean, I left my front door and hopped on the bike and despite spending time on the brakes I was doing like 28mph by the bottom of my street. Which, when you haven’t really been on a bike in a decade and have never gone that fast on a bike, is a little terrifying, I gotta admit. And then the sinking realization that one way or the other you’re going to have to get back up that hill … just to keep going at all. Yeah, that’s pretty rough.

Anyway, so I guess that starts the bikeblogging phase. 2.5 miles in my neighborhood, 30 minutes, coughing up a lung and damned near puking afterwards. I could barely make it back down the stairs when I got back into my house. My legs feel like they’re going to fall off. Last time I was on a scale was yesterday night, which put me at 358 (bearing in mind a peak of 365). Gonna track that stuff a bit more closely…

On to other news. The week before memorial day weekend (actually right around the same time I first went to the bike shop and started asking in earnest about that bike), work took me out to Seattle to visit a major airline headquartered there. That install went smoother than expected, and gave me some free time. Also, my good friend and former college roommate Pat lives out there, and so I got to catch up with him and meet his wife. Good times were had by all… with minor entries in the “drinking and debauchery” columns and some good food. Ate at a place called Salty’s (the Redondo beach location, which is apparently the one where you can only see the water and not the Seattle skyline), had some phenomenal cedar-planked salmon. Also ate at an organic place on Mercer Island where Pat lives that was pretty good. It’s especially hilarious using the outdoor dining area in front of an organic restaurant on an island in the Seattle area that’s only really accessible by car as a backdrop for a good conversation about the organic and locally-grown food movement versus the Green Revolution and industrial farming… just saying.

Anyway, Seattle was cool… definitely more of a walker’s city than a driver’s, if you’re looking at downtown anyway. Also more of a daytime city I think … there weren’t many people out at night, but we could find more than a place like Phoenix.

Also, the update I neglected before: a month before that we went to Louisville for work to do another node refresh. Also fairly smooth, having your shit together definitely helps these things! We ate at two places right across the Ohio river: a place called Buck Head’s that my dad recommended and an Italian place right next door to it. Neither was phenomenal, but both were pretty dang respectable. We also checked out this fossil bed by the Ohio river that was cool, and just generally chilled out there.

On a related note, I’m finding myself absolutely fascinated by rivers, lately. They’re pretty insane. Think about it!

Anyway, so that’s the update… pics are on the gallery.

So I didn’t think I’d be going back to Texas for a while, but apparently like half of our participant airlines live in some part of Texas or another. Which I guess makes sense, given the huge amounts of open, flat space with relatively light hurricane profiles, mild winters, and being in about the middle of the country…

So this trip, we went to Houston. Having seen Dallas before, I’m somewhat compelled to make direct comparisons. Both Houston and Dallas are absurdly sprawled-out. There’s literally miles of open space between anything and anything else… having access to a car is NOT optional in Texas.

Houston seems a little “greener” than Dallas, from what I was seeing. At least, it seemed like it was home to a little bit more foliage and a little less sandy soil, but overall I’m guessing it’s probably not a whole lot different climate-wise.

In downtown Houston, we got dinner at this place called Cabo, which was apparently like 2 blocks from the hotel Kennedy stayed in the night before he was killed, or something like that. Cabo itself had pretty excellent food, looked like they specialized in tex-mex style seafood, but the service was pretty crap all around.

Downtown Houston is fairly nice, with an interesting trolley/light rail system that serves a decent chunk of the city, and a couple of interesting sights, but there’s a lot of one-way street action, and a lot of weird signage and weird traffic rules near the trolley. We didn’t get to see a whole lot of the sights or wander around at all, because right when we finished dinner it started absolutely POURING. By the time we got back to the hotel we were under a tornado watch, that progressed to a warning by the mid evening.

We also went north, still in what I think is considered Houston, but was really just sprawled out suburban space north of the airport. Caught a restaurant called Pappasito’s, which apparently has locations all over Texas, and one north of Atlanta. Excellent food, great Fajitas especially. Everyone was pretty happy with it… so yeah, highly recommended. Service was good too.

On the airports front, Houston International Airport is nicer than DFW for aesthetics, but not as stylized as Phoenix Sky Harbor or as airy as Dulles. The layout’s a bit odd, and the security line sucked more than Dulles security, but it was ok.

Atlanta International Airport blows, though. It’s basically a long linear building with all the different terminal areas in a straight line, front and back of the building, with the runways and taxiways all on one side of it. So when you land, you end up taxiing for like 20 minutes to get to your gate, it seems like. The decor isn’t as bad as DFW, but isn’t particularly inviting either.

For the flight info, we did two hops both times. Dulles to Atlanta, we rode a Canadair CRJ-900, which is relatively tiny, a 2-2 layout with a total of about 60 seats. Seats were on the smaller side at 17.5 width 31 pitch, but the middle arm flips up, getting an inch or two extra if your seatmate’s not also a large person like me. The Atlanta->Houston jump was an MD88, which is a bit larger but the seating frankly blows (17 inch width, 30 inch pitch). I got moved to an empty row to get some extra space, but was between the engines and couldn’t see out the windows as a result.

The trip back, both hops were on MD90′s, which are basically MD88′s with the layout reversed. Same deal on the seating: it blows, but can be alleviated a bit by flipping up the armrests. No legroom for someone my size, but probably fine for someone smaller. The MD90 had the added bonus of tv screens that flip down from above the seats, and I guess you can catch the audio for them from your armrest, but I didn’t really care to.

The return trip, both our original flight and the connection were delayed pretty heavily by the same weather system that prevented us from exploring or doing interesting stuff, and by the replacement of a malfunctioning sensor, so I got to spend a LOT of time waiting around in both IAH and ATL. Wasn’t particularly fun, let me just say.

The install itself went decently. Not too great, but not too terrible either. We were pulling out old equipment and putting in new stuff, but even though it was a square-hole netapp rack, the depth was set too shallow to use the Dell rapid rails. We worked around it with cage nuts and rack-mountable shelves and some netapp custom rails for the storage arrays, and arrived at a better end than we did back in Phoenix, but … there’s always something, you know? Also, a Netapp standard rack is slightly too shallow to comfortably accommodate dell poweredge 1950′s with infiniband cables sticking out the back, unless you put the curved front door on the back or leave it open.

I tell you, there’s always something.

So after some hemming and hawing about whether or not to go to the inauguration, But in the end, some urging by friends and the fading symptoms of the cold I’ve fought for the last week, I opted to go ahead and go.

And I gotta say, it was NUTS. Just insane numbers of people there. There were seriously MILLIONS of people there. I’m hearing just under 2 million people, official count.

My roommates decided to tag along when I told them I was going. We all ended up leaving the house a little before 8 am, took the bus to the nearest metro station. There were maybe 80 people in Rockville station waiting to buy farecards and stuff.

We walked right by that crowd, ’cause all three of us are locals with smarttrip cards. Yay locals! We felt superior.

Got on the train, and all but the last two cars were packed. By the time we got off the train a dozen or so stops later, that train was also completely packed.

Well, we carried on down, walked maybe 2 or 3 miles in a seemingly endless crowd of people all going the same place as us. It was absolutely nuts. We filled in the mall, and found someplace to stand near the bathroom building just east of the Washington monument. So like … a mile out from the action, but a couple hundred feet from the nearest jumbo-tron. And then there was an hour or so of watching random footage from Sunday’s concert before the program started.

And lemme tell ya, it was ASS cold… and not one person complained about it within earshot. Now, I grant you there were only like 20,000 people that I could hear, but …. you know, that’s still something, ’cause it was pretty bitter out there.

Entertainingly, the audio lagged about 5 seconds behind the video for pretty much all of the proceedings… so that was sort of odd.

Anyway, we waited, watched, listened…. took craptons of pictures, and had a generally good time. And of course got to see the live stream of pretty much everything. Laughed at the chief justice going off script. Laughed at the booing every time we saw Bush without Obama by his side, and the confused ambiguity when they were together: “Do we applaud Obama, or boo Bush?” Enjoyed Aretha and the absurdly all-star quartet and all the military musicians. Honestly, you’d have a better experience watching it at home (verified: tivo’d nbc’s coverage… better view, more context, warmer, but a lot less crowd energy), but it was really cool to know that what we were seeing was just under a mile east of us on the other side of a seemingly endless and remarkably friendly and well-behaved crowd. You know, other than the sort of classless booing and whatnot.

Well, after Obama’s speech and the hilarious benediction we made our way back off the mall and out with just absurd numbers of people, squeezed onto a train and left, mainly because it was really really cold. But also pretty fun.

If you want to see what we were seeing, well … I took just shy of 180 pics, which are on my gallery and also on my facebook profile. They’re pretty much unedited and chronologically numbered, so … if you’re interested, check them out!

Off to work and back to normal tomorrow… it’s a whole new day…

Everyone else is doing 2008 retrospectives, so I might as well too, right?

The most salient thing about last year is that it to me marked a sort of real liberation. In 2007, I graduated, moved to the DC area and started a “real job” with CACI in downtown arlington, but I wasn’t really making enough to buy a car, and I was spending entirely too much time commuting on the subway (about 1:10 door to door if there weren’t problems on the trains), not to mention the job was unfulfilling, with a couple of micromanagers staring over my shoulder constantly and no sense of empowerment to change things that needed to be changed. All in all, caci was paying the rent, but it wasn’t fun, or exciting, or good… everything about it sucked really… but it got me out here.

In early 2008, around the first week in February, I got a phone call from the staffing company I was hired through, saying that they’d cancelled my contract and wouldn’t be offering me a job. I was shocked and worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep doing what I do, because it was my first “real” position out on my own… so that night I sort of sat around in shock. The next day I updated my resume and re-posted it on monster, and by the end of the week I started getting preliminary calls from other HR companies that wanted to interview me, and by the middle of march I’d accumulated competing job offers from a place in Germantown, a place in the Reagan building in downtown DC, a place in Silver Spring, a contractor at the Naval Surface Warfare Center around Cabin John, and Mitre in Mclean. It was exciting, because I had 5 solid offers for at least 10 grand a year more than I was making at CACI. Can’t really complain about that, ya?

I took the job that seemed like it was in the best environment (which didn’t start me at the most money, mind you), and started there in the tail end of March as a contractor on a 3-month contract. In June, they offered me a permanent position, and I’ve been there ever since. It’s like the diametric opposite of the environment at CACI — I’m empowered, I’m valued, I’m generally respected and left to do my own thing with little or no supervision, and I actually feel useful and fulfilled.

The other thing about the Mitre job is that the pay increase meant I could afford to buy myself a car (mainly because I needed to get to the place, and it’d be like 3 hours commuting by train and bus). So I joined the world of people with mobility, got myself a 2008 Nissan Altima 2.5 SL with a couple of nice packages on top of it, and haven’t regretted that decision either. It’s nice, it’s comfortable, it’s responsive and it’s got pretty decent fuel economy. And most importantly, I can fit in it comfortably, which sets it in a very exclusive class of vehicles — when I went on my search for cars, I only found maybe 8 that I could reasonably drive, and only 4 of them were comfortable.

Having the car means having freedom to go places I couldn’t go before, and do things that weren’t in my reach before. I could go to stores and buy more than I could carry without depending on my roommates. I could go to fast food places that were longer than walking distance away. Little conveniences that having a set of wheels affords you… you know?

Of course, having the car also meant trimming about a mile and a half of walking from my daily routine (walking to/from the bus stops and whatnot), and I’ve been struggling mostly unsuccessfully to force myself to add something back into the mix to counteract that. On the other hand, the fact that I’m not eating at chipotle for lunch and pizza for dinner every day has probably moderated that a bit — even if I’m still eating fast food more often than not.

My financial situation is looking up, too. In 2007, my student loans started at about a 24k balance. In 2008, I paid them down to under 20. In 2007, I had a little remaining credit balance. In 2008, my credit cards are clear and I’ve got several grand in savings. In 2007, I had no retirement fund. In ’08, I’ve got a couple grand in my 403(b).

Health-wise, I’m not sure where I stand. I exercised more on a daily basis in 2007, sort of by mandate of my living conditions — for the whole of 2007, I had no car and was walking to work, to classes, to restaurants. On the other hand, for the latter half of it at least I ate a bit worse than I do now. I had a scale that I thought was weighing me accurately, but the battery was apparently low, so I don’t know how accurate it was. I’d been relying on that from early 2006 up until graduation, and I don’t know how long, but for a long time it had been misreporting my weight. In Jan 2008 I got a nice medical grade mechanical scale and was dismayed to find that the scale I’d been using had been under-reporting my weight by like 15%. Since then I’ve been tracking, but not recording. So here, for the record, my weight this morning is 357 lbs. That’s entirely more than I want to weigh, but I’ve been fluctuating between 350 and 360 for all of 2008. I’d look and feel better in the 300 neighborhood, so this year that’s what I’m shooting for. And that means activities and exercise.

In 2008, I had no “active” activities. In 2009, that’s gotta change. I’m going to have to start deliberately exercising. Have to find outdoor things to do. Have to make that a part of my daily life again, somehow. That’s the looking forward thing. I made a lot of important changes in 2008. That’s the most important change I’ve got to make in 2009. Everything else, I just need to keep doing what I’m doing: save money, pay off debts, buy things I want to buy. But that one thing still needs change.