Road Trips and Hike Reports

Wrapping up in DC.  I tried a very elegant bakery near the hotel, Tette Bakery.  Although it isn’t setup physically at all like a Panera Bread, it’s really a very fancy Panera Bread in terms of menu and food.  My sausage breakfast sandwich had (by request0 a beautiful soft cooked egg which Panera no longer offers but was let down by a hard crunchy half green tomato slice that shouldn’t have been put on there. I attended my last conference session here.  It was really fun actually because the presenter was irreverent and charismatic.  Certainly the only presentation that had more than the most forced chuckle of humor.  I stopped back at the hotel (late checkout appreciated so I didn’t have to use bellman to watch my bags this morning) and get ready to head out. It’s been an amazing 3 days in DC. Great weather, clean enjoyable city experiences, nice people interactions overall.  For a big East Coast city, visits don’t get much better than this for me. ...

Our morning started at the Starbucks in the hotel lobby.  Brian and I end up at Startbucks MAYBE 4 times a year since neither of us drink coffee at all and basically not tea either.  That said, I’ve always liked their food offerings just fine and I thought a break from bagels would be appropriate today. The conference was the same format as yesterday, keynote in the morning then 1 break-out then lunch and more break-outs.  I only had 2 things I wanted to attend today and 1 was very good the other was just ok.  Lunch today was a build your own taco bowl and it was more flavorful and interesting than yesterday’s cold sandwich bar. I was back at the hotel about 4 pm and decided that, despite my original plans, I would go ahead and do laundry before getting home.  I ended up changing clothes a little more often than I thought I would so doing laundry now lets me have a nicer shirt for tomorrow (instead of a t-shirt) and my jeans will be fresh instead of less fresh f...

I was ready to go in the morning, recharged after a fun but long day Tuesday.  We went to the same bagel shop as the day before and my manager tried the New Jersey staple of the Pork Roll sandwich and I had the same for the 2nd day in a row.  It’s rare to fine pork roll at all outside the NYC metro area and even rarer to find some place that gets all the details right with salt, pepper and ketchup.  Pearl’s is a very cute bagel place and they even have nice outdoor seating like a little bistro or something.  Very unusual for a small shop. As soon as we went up the escalator into the main hall, it was apparent that this was not as modest a gathering as I might have imagined.  There seemed to be a ton of people milling around.  We attended one early break-out session before the keynote session started.  The keynote probably serves mentally, though not officially, as the start of the conference.  That first break-out was ok but I didn’t really get m...

To say that Rochester’s airport is calm at 4:15 am on a Tuesday in May is kind of understating it.  I was able to walk directly up to the American Airlines ticketing line and speak to somebody about completing my check-in which, for whatever reason, I couldn’t complete online yesterday.  I was also able to score a first class upgrade for 44 dollars.  Checking a bag was 35 anyway and with first class that’s included so it’s really a 9 dollars upgrade.  If I get ANY extra sleep from my bigger seat it’s worth it. Yesterday was not a relaxing day at all.  I started my workday early, trying to remember as many little fiddly things as I could wrap up before my travels.  I had a staff meeting at 11, a cat nail trim appointment at 2 pm and several household chores as well as packing to get done.  My dad is unfortunately having some problems with his laptop connecting to the internet which I was unable to solve.  It was a frustrating 94 minute call trying ...

I'm writing this on day 3 of the 4 days we are in Albany.  If anything exciting happens tonight I can revise this as needed. We've been to Albany just a few times before and only once before on an overnight stay downtown.  Thankfully, we're enjoying our visit more this time than in the past.  When we stayed before (just as a sleepover stop on the way home from Vermont) everything seemed dirty and old and we had a really disappointing expensive meal that left us unsatisfied. This trip started on Friday after a shortened work day.  I dropped Brian off at work in the morning, headed into Rochester to replace a part on a server and do some other tasks at our factory and then headed home to finish trip prep.  We were on the road by about 3:30 pm and the drive to Albany was super easy and seemed shorter than we remembered.  We checked into our room at the Hilton Albany. I chose a room at the end of the shorter of the 2 hallways in the hotel.  This turned out...

What a week this has been.  At work I’ve been one of the more vocal team members advocating for a cautious and measured journey into the cloud hosted future.  For over a year it has been a rollercoaster of hearing that we were probably going to do a huge forklift style cloud migration then a few weeks later hearing we’d just stay at our current awful managed provider and then a few weeks later that we would probably buy and host our own server farm.  This decision cycle repeated a number of times and I did my best to be as  blasé  as I could be about it since it seemed like the process would go on forever. Then, with surprising rapidity, the decision was made and a lot of money spent buying our own equipment which we are going to operate out of a Las Vegas based datacenter that the West coast half of the pre-merger company has been using for a few years. This week was the week when the parts finally all shipped (there were a lot of delays from HP) and the trip t...

I needed to wake up early today but I ended up waking up at 4 am instead of the 5:30 am I had hoped for.  I felt rested and ready so I just got up and rolled with it.  I was out of the hotel a little after 5 am and experienced no slowdowns or heavy traffic at all on I-5 and the CA-73 toll road.  That took me somwhere in the Irvine area and by that time my trip was half done and I was ready for breakfast.  I had a really good bagel then found a hike that was nearby.  I had a few hours of extra time to make it to LAX but I couldn't be sure just how long I was safe for since LA traffic is very unrpredictable and even returning the rental car and getting to the terminal could be a 40 minute ordeal if my arrival experience was any indication. The Weir Canyon trail I did a short stiff walk on was gorgeous.  Absolutely jaw dropping nearly 360 degree secenic views and lots of ups and downs.  I Face Time called Brian to show him the views and enjoyed my time th...

 As it happens occasionally my life sometimes whip saws from one extreme to the other. After a full year with no travel for work and only about 6 days in the office even, this week was 12 hours a day of co-workers, mostly from New Jersey.  It was really fun and we ate *so* well but also *so* much. My trip to LAX didn't go well, partly because I shouldn't have chosen LAX as my airport.  Flying from Rochester isn't easy and most of the time it comes down to either having more than 1 stop on the way or leaving ROC at 5:30 am.  Plus there are fare rules for work travel so not every possible flight is possible for me. I looked at numerous possibilities including the obvious of flying into San Diego but flying to SD was about 1200 dollars round trip at least.  I was really tickled to find a round trip itinerary that didn't require any early departures but it was from LAX.  The funny this is I really thought I booked from Orange County including when I checked in ...

This hike was part of my 4 nights in Southern California for work.  This trail isn’t one I’d heard of but it seems like it should be famous.  This is a very narrow slot canyon that leads up through some sandstone hills and has great views of some estuaries and the Pacific Ocean.  I went with some coworkers and it was an impressive after work leg stretcher.  I’d never been in a slot canyon so narrow or steep.  For a short hike it packed a lot of everything.

Best moments or accomplishments: Landing at Haneda, getting a Suica card and taking the monorail into town.  The weather was wonderful, windows were open and it seemed so welcoming. Spending time with Yukie and seeing the Tokyo office Getting all the major work tasks done according to the schedule I very spontaneously came up with on my first minutes in the Tokyo office Being able to drive here surprisingly without stress Toughest moments or situations: Jet lag.  My body really hasn't adjusted even a full week later.  I'm waking up too early and going to bed too early. Being alone.  Not only am I physically alone, even messaging people in the US isn't really doable during much of the day. The time zone difference is just very tough to work with especially for East Coast US communications.  A lot of the things I find fascinating wouldn't be interesting to others and there are benefits to not having to negotiate every activity etc.  but the poignancy of thing...

Tonight I took another bath at the public bath and did laundry.  I bought some wine and a plate of spaghetti with seaweed from a convenience store.  The store person microwaved my meal for me (without me asking) and it was a pretty handy light meal to eat in my room. At the Tokyo hotel the washers and dryers were separate stacked units.  Here at the Sendai Almont, they place all-in-one washer/dryer units in the changing rooms for the baths.  In both cases, 110-volt clothes dryers are really disappointing if you are used to 240 V or gas dryers.  With this all-in-one washer I had to choose up front if I wanted short wash, short wash and short dry or long wash and long dry (larger loads) or dry only/  I did the long wash and dry and it took 2 hours but my very modest load (1 pair of jeans, 1 polo shirt, 1 t-shirt and maybe 2 pairs of socks and underwear) were super wet at the end.  So I went back down and did the 30 minute dry only cycle.  And the je...