Travel
The Phoenix trip, day two
Up bright and early, breakfast here at the hotel of scrambled eggs, bacon, salsa, orange juice and an english muffin. Hop in the Caliber and zoom off the 3 miles or so to work. Snap a picture of one of the few bumps on the horizon. It’s so bizarre seeing such an UTTERLY flat landscape with the random high peak jutting up from the desert like a broken tooth. From the air at night, these were black holes in the web of city lights. Apparently Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the States.
Got to work and found two coworkers who are sick. One of whom is integral to the project we’re doing this weekend. He ended up going home early today in an attempt to get some rest and try to spur a faster recovery. He didn’t look happy. The other guy also went home early. I’ve been washing my hands with Monk-like fastidiousness today. And, I’ve been conscious of NOT touching my face, and being generally paranoid about getting sick because of these guys.
This is the machine we’re focusing most of our work on. Both directly and indirectly. It holds a LOT of data. Unfortunately, we’re decommissioning the old server and have to copy all the data from it to the new machine. We’re talking roughly a terabyte of data. How much is a terabyte of data? According to this page, it’s “all the X-ray films in a large technological hospital OR 50,000 trees made into paper and printed.” It’s taking about an hour to copy 12 to 15 gigabytes of data. At that rate, it’ll take three and a half days. Not good. We’re hoping it’ll pick up. So my boss took the first shift. I’m taking the second shift starting around 4am, and we’ll see how things go.
John Ceceri, ultra-cycling event coordinator extraordinare, e-mailed me and gave me good news and bad news. The bad news is that the first big ride of the season, which was scheduled for this Sunday, is canceled due to the weather. The good news is that it’s rescheduled for next weekend. This ride is the first in a series of brevets, a 200km ride. The next brevet will be 300km, then 400km, then 600km. One each month. I was disappointed in missing the first ride because of work. However, you may have noticed I haven’t posted any stories about rides in a while. How very observant of you. No rides since December 31st. I’m thinking I should get back in the saddle either Wednesday or Thursday this coming week and see how the legs feel after nearly three months of running. I’m cautiously optimistic that I haven’t lost too much cycling conditioning–and that the running has maintained my cardio-vascular conditioning pretty well. We’ll see.
I heard the snows have started in earnest back home. Sorry I’m missing it guys.
Here are a handful of pictures from today.
The Phoenix Trip, the flight out
It’s late. It was a long day. About all I can do is prune through the 80-some digital pics and come up with a smattering of marginally good ones. Pretty much the only one I really like is the one entitled “My Next Wallpaper.” And maybe the one labeled “Contrails.”
More photos.
The flight
The flight was pleasant and even though it claimed to be a direct flight, I did have a stop in Baltimore. I didn’t have to get up though… just sat and read while a new crowd of cattle people herded into their seats for Phoenix. After Phoenix, the plane continued to Burbank, CA.
I stashed several bags of crunchy snacks and trail mix in my carry on bag. That kept me going until I got to the destination whereupon I had… more crunchy snacks.
The rental car fiasco
Ok. My bad. I should have reserved one a couple days ago. I didn’t, so I walked from rental agency to rental agency looking in vain for one that wasn’t sold out. Another businessman was in my predicament and we were hunting together. Finally Advantage had some cars still in the lot and I picked one up there. Then there was another flyer I recognized, a friendly army brat, he was almost in the same situation. Even though he reserved a car, they were going to charge him $300 MORE on top of what he was quoted when he checked online! He was pretty pissed and left that rental agency–ended up behind me in line at Advantage. He was driving to Tucson, much further than I would be driving. When I got to the counter, the lady said they had such and such, and blah de blah, and also a Dodge Charger. I looked over my shoulder and said “You want the Charger?” He said, “At this point I’d take a Geo Metro, but sure!” So I took a Dodge Caliber (yay) and let him have the Charger.
The hotel
Pretty nice digs. Separate living room, separate kitchen, king size pilllow-top bed. Free wireless internet in each room… excellent. I could get used to this.
Huh, I thought I was tired. I guess not enough to drone on about day one of the big business trip. Tomorrow starts the process of testing what we’ll be doing over the weekend. Dismantling Novell from our corporate network. Stuff will break. People will get upset. It’s all good, he said sarcastically.
