Category: Revelation

Working Again!

I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I’ve held back because

  1. It doesn’t feel completely real in some ways and
  2. I’m under NDA and don’t want to say too much

It’s a Java job, working with Nutch, Lucene and Solr. It’s a one person start-up, and the owner has expectations that she’ll need a Chief Technical Officer soon, so this contract I’m doing is sort of an audition for the CTO job. She has an existing code base that she paid a consulting company to write, but she has a long list of things she needs done to it, and I’m making my own list as I go along. (Unit tests and fixing the things FindBugs finds tops my list, but so is fixing the horribly manual deployment process.) The current contract is fixed price, but I should be able to do it quickly enough to make it a decent hourly wage. I’m currently working on my own at home, but she’s going to have a two person office in a week or so at a local technology incubator. I told her that as long as it has wifi, a big whiteboard and access to a fridge, I’d be happy. As an added bonus, the technology incubator is pretty close to where Vicki works, so we’ll be able to meet for lunch or go to the gym together.

Because I’m working on my own, but expecting to work with others in the future, the first thing I did with her existing source code was to put it into “git”. (Maybe it’s because git isn’t as obtrusive as something like ClearCase where you have to check things out, I haven’t found any decent Eclipse plug-ins for git.) As well as learning git, nutch, lucene and solr (not to mention the technologies they depend on, like Hadoop), I’m also learning a bit about making a build environment in ant.

All in all, it’s fun and interesting work, and whether the company fizzles out or grows to a hundred employees, it’s going to be a great learning and growth opportunity for me. And hell, even if it sucked as much as my last job (which it doesn’t) it would be better than unemployment.

Team Practice last night

Last night the team went out on the lake to do a light interval workout. Dan called it his “pre-race” workout. Last week, Jason Quagliata told me that he didn’t think I was getting my paddle in enough at the catch, so I brought my video camera along. I also wanted to try out my new bright green paddle tape job, and my new little doo-dad for the camelbak hose to keep it where I can reach it without pausing in my paddling.

As you can see from this video, the bright green looks good (and it feels good too), my doo-dad was pretty much a failure, and I aimed the camera too high for me to really see my catch. Oh well.
[youtube YbzNN5G3mTM Training on Lake Ontario]
Oh, and I’m still not opening my left hand very well on the forward push. And is it just my imagination, or am I paddling at a lower angle during the fast parts?

Wednesday Night TT

Kind of late posting this. Oh well.
Wednesday Night TTThe air felt like soup. A thunderstorm had swept through a few hours earlier, but it must have been an air-mass thunderstorm rather than a frontal storm because we had neither cool air nor winds afterwards. The rain kept the number of participants down, but on the plus side the bay was flat and the creek was high. Still, I wasn’t expecting a personal best because of the humidity.

I started out pretty fast, maintaining a speed better than 6.5 mph for the first two minutes. My split time was 9.33 minutes, which is my fastest yet. I was worried that a fast split would mean a big fade for the second half, but it wasn’t bad. I kept my speed up well to the turn, but had a lousy turn – I’m not sure what I did wrong, but the flat spot on the speed graph is longer and lower than usual. Downstream was really fast. I even managed to put in a bit of a sprint at the finish. My second half was 9.57, which isn’t my slowest or my fastest, leading to a total time of 18.90, a new personal record by 0.05 minutes. Nothing too mind blowing, but unexpected and satisfying. Paul D, who claims that he doesn’t care about our “rivalry” but always seems to be checking up on my time, had a bad night and finished behind me for the first time in a number of weeks, at 18.93. However he has the perfect excuse because he participated in a killer race the weekend before.

Looooong Paddle today

14 Miles on the Genesee River
14 Miles on the Genesee River
Today Mike and I met early at the Genesee Waterway Center. I didn’t have a firm plan in mind, other than to go long and slow. Well, Mike’s plan was similar, except for the slow part. Last time I did a long paddle here (30 May 2009), I went upstream at about 4.5 mph and downstream at about 6.7 mph. Mike is a much faster paddler than me, so he started off at about 6.3 mph and invited me to grab his wake and ride it. I grabbed it and held on as best I could, although I had to ask him to slow down a touch. My heart rate was pretty constant at around 140-145, as opposed to the 126 from that time. Mike asked me to pull for 5 minutes at the 20 minute point, the 40 minute point, the 50 minute point and again at the 60 minute point. That let the speed drop and my heart rate rise, but the good part was that when Mike said he was ready to come to the front again, I could stop paddling and grab my water tube and suck down a couple of gulps.

I was expecting another 10 mile paddle, since that’s how far we go when we go around the bay. So when we went through the 5 mile point on the way up, I figured “ok, I’m good for 12 miles”. Then he went through 6 miles. That’s when I spoke up, and he said he was planning on turning around at the 7 mile point. “Oh oh”, I thought. On that previous paddle, I’d only gone up 4.5 miles, so I got to see some of the river I’d never seen before. But I could feel the fatigue creeping in, and it was getting hard to keep right on his stern.

On the way down, I tried to paddle beside Mike, but once again his speed was too much for me. He was going around 7.0 mph, and I had to grab his wake once again. I noticed that we hit the 9.77 mile mark in 1:36, which is the time it had taken me at the Armond Bassett race to do 9.83 miles. Since my average pulse at the race was much higher, I have to assume that if I’d paced myself better in the race I could have done much better. Nearing the 11 mile point, which is about where the Armond Bassett race turned around (because the race started out by going 2 miles downstream, then 5 miles upstream, then 3 down) I could see two paddlers approaching. I realized pretty soon it was Jim Mallory and Jason Quagliata, two of the best paddlers in the area, if not the country. They turned while we were still a few hundred metres away, and started heading downstream much faster than us. They weren’t working hard, and you could see them pausing frequently to talk to each other, but they were still leaving us in the dust.

The last three miles saw me making a series of deals with myself. “Come on, just keep this pace for another mile, and if I have to, I’ll take a short rest”. “I’ve already gone further than I’ve ever gone before. so there would be no shame if I blew up now, but I’ll just keep going as long as I can”. Actually, some of the deals were pretty similar to the ones I made myself on these same three miles when I came here last August and I’d done 6 miles in 1:27. (Wow, 6 miles in 1:27 versus 14 miles in 2:13 – what a difference a year makes.) My heart rate monitor shows that my heart rate was going steadily up in that last three miles, which is partly due to the heat, but also fatigue. But at the end, I even managed a bit of a sprint – just call me Mark Cavendish.

Afterwards, Mike and I came back to my house and watched the excellent Mt Ventoux stage of the Tour de France. My lovely, talented and far too giving wife Vicki brought us bagels, cream cheese, lox and strawberries just to make it perfect. Man, Lance Armstrong still has it, doesn’t he?