Chris Dwan

Tag: travel

  • Travels

    Tomorrow morning, I’m off to College Station Texas. Gonna re-build a compute cluster for the nice folks there. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to work in with the Judo club at the same time.

    Friday, I return, and Saturday I get a brief day at home. Perhaps – perhaps, I say, I’ll do laundry.

    Sunday I fly to Richmond and spend a day with my dad. Then it’s off to Hampton Roads, VA for some more cluster fun. While there, I hope to drop back in with Hybrid Academy.

    Looking up judo clubs and gyms on the road is so very much healthier than looking up microbreweries. Oddly enough, it’s also the easiest way I’ve ever found to make friends.

  • Travel

    Dear travel industry:

    If I go to Kayak.com and ask to get from “any airport near Boston, including Manchester and Providence” to “any airport near College Station, TX, including Houston and Austin”, during any three day window in a particular week, I really expect to have at least one nonstop option. Of all the things that can screw up your travel plans, connecting flights are the worst. One more chance for *either* plane to screw up the timing, or *any* ground crew to lose luggage. Plus, that hour in the airport is really three wasted hours landing, debarking, embarking, and taking off again.

    The original query (BOS -> College Station, this day through that day) was laughable. I had two 17+ hour trips, each of which had multiple stops. They offered to get me from here at noon, to there at 10am the next morning.

    Seriously? New England doesn’t go directly to Texas?

    –UPDATE–

    Correction – the major airlines do not. Jetblue and Southwest both provide options.

  • My day at work

    All my travel plans worked out great. Saw sacredangle‘s junior guitar recital, which was stunningly awesome, and got to hang out with the whole extended fam as well. Conversations were happening in at least three languages at the after party. I felt privileged to be there.

    Late in the evening, justkidding_nr shared some of her compositions, including “Don’t Fuck Around When you Choose a Major,” and “Stop Playing With Your Wii”. Pure genius.

    Afterwards, I drove to Richmond with my dad and secured a rental car for the run to Norfolk. I had been unaware until that point that Hertz rents the Jeep Wrangler. It’s a vaguely MASH looking cloth-top. Somewhat fun to drive, I guess technically it’s a convertible, and not at all what I was expecting. Wheee!

    Since I had a little extra time, I drove out and went across the 17 mile long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I dig bridges. This one was super awesome, since it also includes TWO underwater tunnels.

    On the way in to work this morning, I drove UNDER a pair of jets doing touch and go landings. It’s days like this that make me really love what I do and where I do it.

  • Test

    I passed. Got the certificate and everything. The only mishap was my own dumb fault, when I got kicked in the fingers. If I had, for example, been making a fist like they tell you on day one, I wouldn’t have four kinda-sorta-jammed fingers now. All things considered, a small price to pay.

    Also lots of joy on the shins. Shin bruises are totally fair though, because whatever you’ve got, you know the other guy has too.

    Then, as I was settling into a well deserved dinner, around 5:30, Southwest Airlines called to tell me that my 7:30pm flight was delayed to 11:30. However, if I could make it to the 5:45 flight, that one was delayed until 6:30 and I had a space on it.

    I abandoned the dinner and hauled ass. I made it, and am now posting from the gate, watching the “A” group board.

    Who is the fastest? I am the fastest!

  • Pictures from New Mexico

    redmed went ahead and made a nice photo album from our travels in New Mexico. It’s here.

  • Vacation!

    Back on the “not irritating my friends with my political views” theme, the vacation is going awesome.

    We explored two of the natural wonders of the world on two consecutive days – Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. Each of them left me with a deep and heartfelt appreciation for the National Park Service, as well as the foresight of the government in protecting those spots. Looked at as a pure capitalist, white sands is nothing more than about 5,000,000 dump trucks full of pre-purified gypsum. It’s like an unemployed pile of raw materials … just laying there doing nothing! I’m very glad that, once upon a time, we had a government that was able to see beyond the immediate commercial value of the raw materials.

    In other news, the irritating cough is still with me. I think this marks week 3 or 4 of the irritating, “top of the lungs, with occasional mucus,” cough. redmed has suggested a TB test, in the spirit of justkidding_nr

    Yesterday saw us wandering around El Paso and Juarez. I had never walked across an international border before.

  • Travels

    Last night, while on our way to dinner in the lovely town of Tucumcari, we happened upon a practice of the rodeo team at the local college. They were roping calves … and I gained a new appreciation for rodeo. Seriously. Right where the rubber meets the road, those sporting events are based on real farm and ranching skills. Those kids could ride! Plus, the coach (once we got him talking) was seriously cool! The guy has been flown all over the world as part of the USA rodeo team.

    Today, we visited Roswell, NM. Site of strange goings-on about 60 years ago. Some kinda flying thing crashed into a field, a rancher brought a chunk of it to the sheriff, and there ensued some frantic military ass-covering. Somehow this led to a whole town devoted to the sale of alien themed kitsch. Go figure.

    I want to believe in aliens. Seriously, I do: The world would be so much cooler and more surreal if we were being observed and occasionally prodded by little green men. Sadly, the Roswell Alien Museum didn’t strengthen that belief at all. It’s a relatively level headed presentation of a bunch of facts and observations that lead me to think that (a) yes, certainly, the government covered something up. Duh. (b) There’s no real reason to assume it had to be extraterrestrial. Ditto with most of the other observations.

    I plan to spend tomorrow (Ash Wednesday) in the underworld, at Carlsbad Caverns.

  • Tucumcari

    Greetings from Tucumcari, NM. We have friends from residency out here. They have 18 acres, 8 horses, three buildings (a house, a barn, and a scary shed). I am beginning to feel confident that they cannot find me here. In any event, we’ll be able to see them coming from a long way off.

    To answer judovich, it’s an iPhone, provided by The Company. My job rules.

    We visited the Acoma Pueblo yesterday. It’s a spiritual spot rivaled only by Maccu Piccu in my experience. The thought that came through loud and clear was “religions come and go, but this place has been sacred to all of them.” The difference between the two is that the Spanish finished their work of cultural annihilation in Peru … while the Acoma still maintain a shred of their culture.

    I need to record more of those thoughts, but we’re going to go ride the ponies now. OMG! Ponies!

  • Bethesda

    Color me surprised, Bethesda doesn’t suck nearly as much as I remember it sucking! There’s a Rock Bottom brewery around the corner from my hotel, plus six or seven really yummy smelling Thai and Vietnamese restaurants. Plus, the streets are populated with semi-drunken 30-year-old fratboys. This means that it’s totally safe out there, as long as I present a less appealing target for molestation than a drunken fratboy. I had the Barley Wine, which was remarkably similar to the one I made. Stopped at one, lest I become one of the herd. Also, crabcakes. Can’t come to MD and fail to get the crabcakes.

    Class today was fun. My colleague taught, and he’s entertaining. He kept saying things like “fundamentally, computers are boring unless they’re doing something cool for someone smart” and “grid computing is mostly hysterical lies backed up by misleading press releases.” I hope to be so inspiring for my bit tomorrow.

    Excitement is in the air: I ordered two beer kits (plus a new bottling wand and a new capper to replace the ones that finally crapped out). We’re making cherry stout and the “tongue splitter” west coast ale. After the kits arrive (supposedly the 9th, according to UPS) all are welcome to a day of wort boiling debauchery!

    As part of my “not really a resolution, but it seems like a good idea to try to stay in good shape” for the new years, I busted out the Navy Seals Workout DVD. I have fallen far. I had that damn thing well in hand. Now I struggled to even get through each section doing some of the exercises from each set, much less keep up. I am, to put it lightly, quite sore.

    I will return to peak form. I’m not going to get in shape only to let it slip away. Dogs of maniacal working out, to me!

    Oh yeah, looks like I get to be an author again, provided that I can slap about 40 pages of well intentioned but poorly worded text into a presentable form in the next week. Hooray for collaborators who see that I can write and that I know the topic and are all like “this is way behind schedule, wanna fix it and be my co-author?”

  • On the road again.

    At the airport, headed to Bethesda, MD for a two day training gig. This should be fun, since I actually get to work with one of my colleagues. He will teach a one day course on the cluster queuing system, and then I get to teach my “intro to The Software” session. Audience of eight, with one guy from Apple auditing. We plan to sit in and support each other, which will be relaxing. I love teaching, especially in small and highly interactive formats. Interestingly, this is one of the first times that I’ll be working directly with anyone else from my company. We tend to work alone … and I don’t think that this guy has ever actually seen me teach.

    Of course, this makes three business trips in as many weeks … which is tiring but sustainable. Business is psycho-good, and it looks like we’ll be back to “travel as much as you want to” for the next couple of months.